First, since no one has come out and said it yet, maybe it’s just me but this post was kind of whiny. Maybe everyone else here is more in-tune with you (or living in your reality distortion field), but the writing felt like you were secretly trying to make yourself out to be a martyr, fishing for sympathy. Based on my knowledge of you from past interactions and your other writings I doubt this to be the case, but none the less it’s the sense I got from your writing.
Second, I, too, have been through a similar experience. When I was younger, maybe around the age of 11 or 12, I can remember being able to step back from myself and see what I thought at the time was often the pointlessness of my own and others actions. I’d say to myself “Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do it and I don’t know why I’m doing it.” At this point I wasn’t fully reflective, but was stepping back, looking in, and getting confused.
Over the next several years I worked to eliminate those things from myself which confused me. Initially I fought to remove anger and succeeded brilliantly so that to this day I still cannot get angry: frustrated and annoyed are as much as I can muster. Next it was other things, like “useless” emotions such as impatience and fear, and troublesome patterns of behavior, especially my OCD behavior patterns. Back then I blindly kept things like love, friendship, and sexual desire, having never been confused by them in the same way I was by anger, and tried to maintain things like a reluctance to change, foolishly believing that since adults didn’t seem to change their minds very often or very far that this was a desirable state.
Shortly after I joined the sl4 mailing list, I experienced a breakthrough reading CFAI section 2 and woke up to myself. The best way I know to describe what happened to me was that I saw the territory for the first time and realized that all my life I had only been starring at maps. Not that I would have said that back then, but it was the watershed moment in my life when everything changed. I was no longer blind to certain emotions and behaviors, and for the first time I had the ability to reflect on essentially anything I wanted to within myself, up to the physical limitations of my brain.
A year or two later I started looking into the literature of cognitive science and came across a book that described the inner narrative all non-zombies experience as the result of part of the way the brain functions. Essentially it said that the brain functions like a machine, and around X milliseconds after your brain does something you experience it when a part of your brain processes signals coming to it from the rest of your brain into memories. This completed the opening of myself to reflection.
A couple years later, after having finally gotten on medication for my OCD and finding myself able to pull out all the junk from my brain that I could (although I still didn’t know that much about heuristics and biases at that time, so I thought I was doing a lot better than I actually was), I started dating the girl who eventually became my wife. Up to this time my mental cleaning had gone on unopposed and, although I had gotten rid of a lot of what had been myself, I never felt like I was gone and needed to rebuild myself. In fact, I liked being empty! But then sometime after our first anniversary my then girlfriend started to express frustration, anger, and other emotions I hadn’t known had been inside her. As it turned out, my emptiness was causing her pain. So I rebuilt myself to not be so empty so that I could better love her, although it’s something I still struggle with, such as to not make jokes about things that most people take seriously, but that I have a hard time taking seriously because I distance myself through reflection.
That’s where I stand today, partially rebuilt, not entirely human.
Interesting discussion.
Eli,
First, since no one has come out and said it yet, maybe it’s just me but this post was kind of whiny. Maybe everyone else here is more in-tune with you (or living in your reality distortion field), but the writing felt like you were secretly trying to make yourself out to be a martyr, fishing for sympathy. Based on my knowledge of you from past interactions and your other writings I doubt this to be the case, but none the less it’s the sense I got from your writing.
Second, I, too, have been through a similar experience. When I was younger, maybe around the age of 11 or 12, I can remember being able to step back from myself and see what I thought at the time was often the pointlessness of my own and others actions. I’d say to myself “Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do it and I don’t know why I’m doing it.” At this point I wasn’t fully reflective, but was stepping back, looking in, and getting confused.
Over the next several years I worked to eliminate those things from myself which confused me. Initially I fought to remove anger and succeeded brilliantly so that to this day I still cannot get angry: frustrated and annoyed are as much as I can muster. Next it was other things, like “useless” emotions such as impatience and fear, and troublesome patterns of behavior, especially my OCD behavior patterns. Back then I blindly kept things like love, friendship, and sexual desire, having never been confused by them in the same way I was by anger, and tried to maintain things like a reluctance to change, foolishly believing that since adults didn’t seem to change their minds very often or very far that this was a desirable state.
Shortly after I joined the sl4 mailing list, I experienced a breakthrough reading CFAI section 2 and woke up to myself. The best way I know to describe what happened to me was that I saw the territory for the first time and realized that all my life I had only been starring at maps. Not that I would have said that back then, but it was the watershed moment in my life when everything changed. I was no longer blind to certain emotions and behaviors, and for the first time I had the ability to reflect on essentially anything I wanted to within myself, up to the physical limitations of my brain.
A year or two later I started looking into the literature of cognitive science and came across a book that described the inner narrative all non-zombies experience as the result of part of the way the brain functions. Essentially it said that the brain functions like a machine, and around X milliseconds after your brain does something you experience it when a part of your brain processes signals coming to it from the rest of your brain into memories. This completed the opening of myself to reflection.
A couple years later, after having finally gotten on medication for my OCD and finding myself able to pull out all the junk from my brain that I could (although I still didn’t know that much about heuristics and biases at that time, so I thought I was doing a lot better than I actually was), I started dating the girl who eventually became my wife. Up to this time my mental cleaning had gone on unopposed and, although I had gotten rid of a lot of what had been myself, I never felt like I was gone and needed to rebuild myself. In fact, I liked being empty! But then sometime after our first anniversary my then girlfriend started to express frustration, anger, and other emotions I hadn’t known had been inside her. As it turned out, my emptiness was causing her pain. So I rebuilt myself to not be so empty so that I could better love her, although it’s something I still struggle with, such as to not make jokes about things that most people take seriously, but that I have a hard time taking seriously because I distance myself through reflection.
That’s where I stand today, partially rebuilt, not entirely human.