I’ve been talking to some friends in philosophy for some time in what they describe as in the realm of post-rationality. Based on my reading of what post-rationality among ex-rationalists/rationalist-adjacents doesn’t match what my friends have been talking about, so I guess they mean it in the sense that what they’re pursuing seems thematically typical of what techniques rationalists tend to pursue after they feel they’re not getting new value out of applying or re-applying mindsets typical of the rationality community. One feature that seems common among post-rationalist techniques is people find ways of reframing their perception that feel personally very meaningful in ways difficult to put into words, and are hard to find examples of in the territory. A hard part of that is the commonest type of example for such is specific and uncommon experiences, but people don’t know how to spot that in the territory until they’ve experienced it themselves.
Anyway, some of what I’ve experienced feels like I’m at least beginning to know how to Look. I haven’t read the philosophy which try to capture what Looking is, as I’ve mostly tried things passed along to me by friends who have, and have tried introspection by myself. It seems learning how to Look is related to:
phenomenology, in particular learning to notice things you hadn’t noticed before, i.e., noticing existing parts of your own experience you weren’t previously paying attention to.
focusing
altered states of consciousness
This is particularly vexing in the case of kenshō because enlightenment isn’t an insight. I claim it’s not a matter of inferential distance. It’s more like bothering to notice what you already know. When the moment of seeing struck me, I fell over laughing and basically didn’t stop laughing for two days, because it was so incredibly stunningly obvious. There isn’t something to learn: it’s already always here.
This certainly feels similar to my observation of my friend Daniel’s relation of what he’s called “the phenomenological ontology” to others. People take for granted the lenses they’re always looking at the world through to the point they don’t notice the lenses and when you ask them to look at things directly without the lenses, i.e., preconceptions, they’re unable to.
In the last couple years, I feel like I’ve shifted how I think so the the below statement resonates with me more than it would’ve in the past. For example, reading this now, I don’t find anything wrong with this; it doesn’t at all feel wrong; I have no urge welling inside me to push back against it.
Here’s one way I used to try to convey part of the “it” from my kenshō:
“I’m okay. You’re okay. Everything is fundamentally okay. Whatever happens, it will be fine and good. Even our worry and pain is okay. There is something deeply sad about someone dying… and their death is okay. Obliteration of humanity would be tragic, but the universe will go on, and it’s okay.”
However, I don’t know what to do with this info. My object-level goals seem to still be to prevent the conventionally bad things in the world despite however much they may be in another sense okay. I know some rationalists and effective altruists struggle with anxiety thinking about such things. A practical benefit of feeling in sync with the above statement is that doesn’t happen for me anymore. But other than that upon self-reflection I can’t identify a reason I’d act differently. Switching between ontologies doesn’t produce results that what I do should be different. After reading your post, I’m noticing perhaps the point is to change how I do things. It seems recalling what our goals are in the moment by Looking would be effective in not switching out the pursuit of a goal for an unendorsed behaviour and not noticing.
But ultimately that the differences don’t seem substantial enough is why I’m not making an effort to Look more often. If I can’t discern how or why to apply the induction of different mental state, I’m left with a feeling of “what’s the point?”. I’m at a loss of where to go from here. Do you have any suggestions for next actions I could pursue?
Ontology shifts don’t get you immediate gains (other than a few feelings of epiphany as you recompress things more efficiently). The gains come when you are able to perform more complex maneuvers in the re-ontologized domain because what were formerly thoughts that were expensive to think are now primitives out of which you can build more complex data structures. Notice the similarity between psychological development models and the kuhnian scientific paradigm model.
I’ve been talking to some friends in philosophy for some time in what they describe as in the realm of post-rationality. Based on my reading of what post-rationality among ex-rationalists/rationalist-adjacents doesn’t match what my friends have been talking about, so I guess they mean it in the sense that what they’re pursuing seems thematically typical of what techniques rationalists tend to pursue after they feel they’re not getting new value out of applying or re-applying mindsets typical of the rationality community. One feature that seems common among post-rationalist techniques is people find ways of reframing their perception that feel personally very meaningful in ways difficult to put into words, and are hard to find examples of in the territory. A hard part of that is the commonest type of example for such is specific and uncommon experiences, but people don’t know how to spot that in the territory until they’ve experienced it themselves.
Anyway, some of what I’ve experienced feels like I’m at least beginning to know how to Look. I haven’t read the philosophy which try to capture what Looking is, as I’ve mostly tried things passed along to me by friends who have, and have tried introspection by myself. It seems learning how to Look is related to:
phenomenology, in particular learning to notice things you hadn’t noticed before, i.e., noticing existing parts of your own experience you weren’t previously paying attention to.
focusing
altered states of consciousness
This certainly feels similar to my observation of my friend Daniel’s relation of what he’s called “the phenomenological ontology” to others. People take for granted the lenses they’re always looking at the world through to the point they don’t notice the lenses and when you ask them to look at things directly without the lenses, i.e., preconceptions, they’re unable to.
In the last couple years, I feel like I’ve shifted how I think so the the below statement resonates with me more than it would’ve in the past. For example, reading this now, I don’t find anything wrong with this; it doesn’t at all feel wrong; I have no urge welling inside me to push back against it.
However, I don’t know what to do with this info. My object-level goals seem to still be to prevent the conventionally bad things in the world despite however much they may be in another sense okay. I know some rationalists and effective altruists struggle with anxiety thinking about such things. A practical benefit of feeling in sync with the above statement is that doesn’t happen for me anymore. But other than that upon self-reflection I can’t identify a reason I’d act differently. Switching between ontologies doesn’t produce results that what I do should be different. After reading your post, I’m noticing perhaps the point is to change how I do things. It seems recalling what our goals are in the moment by Looking would be effective in not switching out the pursuit of a goal for an unendorsed behaviour and not noticing.
But ultimately that the differences don’t seem substantial enough is why I’m not making an effort to Look more often. If I can’t discern how or why to apply the induction of different mental state, I’m left with a feeling of “what’s the point?”. I’m at a loss of where to go from here. Do you have any suggestions for next actions I could pursue?
Ontology shifts don’t get you immediate gains (other than a few feelings of epiphany as you recompress things more efficiently). The gains come when you are able to perform more complex maneuvers in the re-ontologized domain because what were formerly thoughts that were expensive to think are now primitives out of which you can build more complex data structures. Notice the similarity between psychological development models and the kuhnian scientific paradigm model.