Those who say things like that are usually referencing something like the concept of no-self in meditation. Not necessarily that personality doesn’t exist, but that there isn’t an atomic “you” that exists in your head, driving all your actions.
Before posting on LW I asked Grok that question and it suggested variants like that behaviour is situation based or that personality is measured externals instead of some fundamental internals or that personality is reductionist emergent phenomena of neural activity or that eg Big Five are correlations instead of causal mechanism or “no self” that there are just transient mental states instead of permanent self.
After reading that I concluded that Grok has no idea what lesswrong memetics is and went here to write a post. Because all of that seemed blatantly obvious not from bayesian but just from scientific or even common sense perspective.
The closest sensible idea I think may be referred as “self is not real” is that if you try get coherent agencies from humans they will not tend to neatly cluster as 1 brain → 1 agency, 1 agency → 1 brain.
But it feels like other people didn’t referred to that.
Also maybe they meant that you can have multiple selves like HJPEV with no central one and generate new on a whim. Or even that most of people actually do that, just subconsciously, while communicating with different people (which will actually align with eg morphology of Russian translate of “personality”—“личность” which has same root as face/mask/appearance)
And yet all that feels like not a clear explanation. Also people said about it like about some giant insight and in difference with Sorting Pebbles it feels like I am not getting it fully instead of not getting it at all, so probably I indeed don’t get something instead of just getting it fully in advance.
The “no self” is a Buddhist dogma; you won’t get a clear explanation for a bottom line that was written millennia ago. At best, you will get vague analogies to cherry-picked parts of modern science.
I miss the old times when LessWrong was an explicitly atheist website, and we looked skeptically at all dogma. Turns out, Christianity is an outgroup, Buddhism is a fargroup. (You can read more of my “old man yelling at a cloud” here; see the most upvoted comments and despair.) These days, the kids in the Bay Area do what the kids in the Bay Area always did: drugs, meditation, and free love… sorry, I meant: modafinil, meditation, and polyamory… and they call it rationality, and pretend that it’s something new that their generation invented.
The idea is that personality or self or whatever you want to call it, is composed of smaller parts. (Shocking news: you are not an elementary particle!) Which should be like “duh, obviously” for anyone familiar with materialism and reductionism. Or, you can keep pointing at it as a proof that Buddha was right about everything.
How much that actually changes anything about e.g. the stability of the Big Five personality traits, that is a different question. Things composed of smaller parts can still be both stable and unstable on the scale of decades. But such empirical questions are a concern of lesser minds.
(I am afraid that it will turn into people just saying what they have in mind instead of replying… Even more than now. But I can’t write down all of inference, so...)
I more thought that “no self” should be about something literal like “your personality in years changes so much that you 5 years later are more like some other human than you 5 years ago”. But if people on lw (not just some LLM) continue to point out only to Buddhism than… Maybe I forgot how often people like to say something in way of “shocking news! There is no time, time is just an illusion, Barbur proved it” while the same would say “shock! There are no protons, they were illusion of quarks prestidigitation”. Though I am still puzzled why people at all tend to think that if something is not ontologically basic that it’s just illusion, I don’t think I had this problem even before sequences.
Idea that agency of a person is combined from lesser agencies of parts of mind instead of eg booting up after adding one final component to general system looks very plausible to me. Though I am not even sure that it is what was meant by people, not just something I project into.
And also I don’t see where are you coming from with your views on Buddhism & LW. I don’t know what should mean “clearly atheistic”, wasn’t EY in the beginning talking about his Taoism inspirations? What is different now? People started to believe supernatural? For me it’s clear what were skeptical about those people who say “meditation works” (short metaphor would be “expected LSD, found modafinil/nicotine/meth”).
I don’t have much data, and I know that memory & introspection are unreliable, but it seems to me that I have essentially the same personality as I had 35 years ago.
There are changes that in my opinion necessarily come with age. I have learned a lot. I became cynical. I feel more secure now that I am an adult, have my own income & savings, have a family & friends, so I care less about opinions of others.
But the following things remain the same:
I prefer to know the truth, rather than hear a nice story,
I am picky about people I spend time with, and I prefer to be alone rather than in company of people I don’t click with,
I am willing to make a sacrifice if it helps other people more than it hurts me (I just don’t trust anymore that others would reciprocate),
I am interested in math and computers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about various topics,
I try to be nice to people, I am not really assertive, and prefer to avoid people I don’t like.
That seems like “personality” to me, maybe I missed something substantial, but quite likely that thing also didn’t change. Similarly, I see people around me making the same mistakes decade later, etc., which makes me conclude that personality doesn’t change much on the deep level, the observed changes are mostly about circumstances and specific skills.
What is different now? People started to believe supernatural?
It’s more privileging a hypothesis because some cool people you hang out with believe it for religious reasons. Why are there so many articles on LW about the power of meditation, and so few about the power of prayer or religious belief?
Sure, there are some things that don’t change. But how to ensure that it isn’t just survival bias? And if I will try for example to look into my traits which I considered important at a time, then it looks like most of them changed in my case.
It looks for me that preferences (even as they feel on emotional level, not just appear in behaviour) are vastly influenced my your capabilities. Eg I really hated reading and really liked computers when I was 9, and now it changed because I read better and easier and because I now can use my mind instead of computer. So I strongly suspect that if you will drop on somebody +50 iq points he will suddenly start to like math (previously I was skeptical about EY’s claims that increasing intelligence will lead to sudden changes in preferences, but now I totally believe it). Or eg I didn’t like emotional and interpersonal moments in fiction, but now I suddenly like them because I understand them so much better. And the question “do I prefer to know awful truth or be happy” doesn’t even make sense to me now since I can disentangle those mentally.
In some sense it looks obvious, but yet I totally wouldn’t expect these things to change, they didn’t look like having these concrete slots for circumstances variation or even more, things that changed felt like internal for those mental preferences. And even more again, they changed because of change in cognitive circumstances, not environmental.
And maybe I had more malleable personality than usual. I never had a unified place for storing my personality info and was extremely prone to decoupling, so different behaviour modes inside of my brain totally could just check consistency against themselves.
And maybe I spent much more time than usual person to introspect and notice behavioral differences.
And maybe I was affected here by the fact that I looked through my memory to find my forming childhood events and reflect on them and update with all my current cognitive skills.
Anyway, personality now looks for me much less stable. It looks like you can shift personality to almost any state by changing capabilities. Just people usually have mild preferences to not do that, to improve eg their first best math and not second best languages. Or if to put it another way, personality usually looks not changed because it’s traits tend to on average have the same average as previously, not because traits are stable.
I still don’t get what are you talking about. Religious belief isn’t discussed because it is something that can be be destroyed by truth? And meditation isn’t? There could be said something about power of “всенощное бдение” from Christianity, but sleep deprivation seems to much, much more likely to have huge harmful effects than meditation?
I don’t know what is communication problem, but it certainly doesn’t go right. Or probably, multiple problems. Because… Complaining to Grok is like complaining to a parrot… And after not getting clear answer from it I guess that it’s just too niche/original topic to be Grok being able to process it at all. And that are not complaints, it’s a list of what I don’t think could be plausible meanings of what I have seen on lesswrong. In a historical context. With explanation of why I don’t consider those plausible for LW. And you didn’t say initially that it’s what you think, not what eg you have seen. And I not at all fond of the fact that you are commanding me what I “should” do.
That phrase has never been used on LessWrong as far as Google can tell.
Maybe I was unclear, it’s highlighted by quotes fuzzy example, not a citation. I meant eg things what is said there: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me?commentId=RLzuLn3wZkgidQPyC
And I have seen a lot of different phrases in general resemblance of that
Those who say things like that are usually referencing something like the concept of no-self in meditation. Not necessarily that personality doesn’t exist, but that there isn’t an atomic “you” that exists in your head, driving all your actions.
Before posting on LW I asked Grok that question and it suggested variants like that behaviour is situation based or that personality is measured externals instead of some fundamental internals or that personality is reductionist emergent phenomena of neural activity or that eg Big Five are correlations instead of causal mechanism or “no self” that there are just transient mental states instead of permanent self.
After reading that I concluded that Grok has no idea what lesswrong memetics is and went here to write a post. Because all of that seemed blatantly obvious not from bayesian but just from scientific or even common sense perspective.
The closest sensible idea I think may be referred as “self is not real” is that if you try get coherent agencies from humans they will not tend to neatly cluster as 1 brain → 1 agency, 1 agency → 1 brain.
But it feels like other people didn’t referred to that.
Also maybe they meant that you can have multiple selves like HJPEV with no central one and generate new on a whim. Or even that most of people actually do that, just subconsciously, while communicating with different people (which will actually align with eg morphology of Russian translate of “personality”—“личность” which has same root as face/mask/appearance)
And yet all that feels like not a clear explanation. Also people said about it like about some giant insight and in difference with Sorting Pebbles it feels like I am not getting it fully instead of not getting it at all, so probably I indeed don’t get something instead of just getting it fully in advance.
The “no self” is a Buddhist dogma; you won’t get a clear explanation for a bottom line that was written millennia ago. At best, you will get vague analogies to cherry-picked parts of modern science.
I miss the old times when LessWrong was an explicitly atheist website, and we looked skeptically at all dogma. Turns out, Christianity is an outgroup, Buddhism is a fargroup. (You can read more of my “old man yelling at a cloud” here; see the most upvoted comments and despair.) These days, the kids in the Bay Area do what the kids in the Bay Area always did: drugs, meditation, and free love… sorry, I meant: modafinil, meditation, and polyamory… and they call it rationality, and pretend that it’s something new that their generation invented.
The idea is that personality or self or whatever you want to call it, is composed of smaller parts. (Shocking news: you are not an elementary particle!) Which should be like “duh, obviously” for anyone familiar with materialism and reductionism. Or, you can keep pointing at it as a proof that Buddha was right about everything.
How much that actually changes anything about e.g. the stability of the Big Five personality traits, that is a different question. Things composed of smaller parts can still be both stable and unstable on the scale of decades. But such empirical questions are a concern of lesser minds.
(I am afraid that it will turn into people just saying what they have in mind instead of replying… Even more than now. But I can’t write down all of inference, so...)
I more thought that “no self” should be about something literal like “your personality in years changes so much that you 5 years later are more like some other human than you 5 years ago”. But if people on lw (not just some LLM) continue to point out only to Buddhism than… Maybe I forgot how often people like to say something in way of “shocking news! There is no time, time is just an illusion, Barbur proved it” while the same would say “shock! There are no protons, they were illusion of quarks prestidigitation”. Though I am still puzzled why people at all tend to think that if something is not ontologically basic that it’s just illusion, I don’t think I had this problem even before sequences.
Idea that agency of a person is combined from lesser agencies of parts of mind instead of eg booting up after adding one final component to general system looks very plausible to me. Though I am not even sure that it is what was meant by people, not just something I project into.
And also I don’t see where are you coming from with your views on Buddhism & LW. I don’t know what should mean “clearly atheistic”, wasn’t EY in the beginning talking about his Taoism inspirations? What is different now? People started to believe supernatural? For me it’s clear what were skeptical about those people who say “meditation works” (short metaphor would be “expected LSD, found modafinil/nicotine/meth”).
I don’t have much data, and I know that memory & introspection are unreliable, but it seems to me that I have essentially the same personality as I had 35 years ago.
There are changes that in my opinion necessarily come with age. I have learned a lot. I became cynical. I feel more secure now that I am an adult, have my own income & savings, have a family & friends, so I care less about opinions of others.
But the following things remain the same:
I prefer to know the truth, rather than hear a nice story,
I am picky about people I spend time with, and I prefer to be alone rather than in company of people I don’t click with,
I am willing to make a sacrifice if it helps other people more than it hurts me (I just don’t trust anymore that others would reciprocate),
I am interested in math and computers,
I spend a lot of time thinking about various topics,
I try to be nice to people, I am not really assertive, and prefer to avoid people I don’t like.
That seems like “personality” to me, maybe I missed something substantial, but quite likely that thing also didn’t change. Similarly, I see people around me making the same mistakes decade later, etc., which makes me conclude that personality doesn’t change much on the deep level, the observed changes are mostly about circumstances and specific skills.
It’s more privileging a hypothesis because some cool people you hang out with believe it for religious reasons. Why are there so many articles on LW about the power of meditation, and so few about the power of prayer or religious belief?
Sure, there are some things that don’t change. But how to ensure that it isn’t just survival bias? And if I will try for example to look into my traits which I considered important at a time, then it looks like most of them changed in my case.
It looks for me that preferences (even as they feel on emotional level, not just appear in behaviour) are vastly influenced my your capabilities. Eg I really hated reading and really liked computers when I was 9, and now it changed because I read better and easier and because I now can use my mind instead of computer. So I strongly suspect that if you will drop on somebody +50 iq points he will suddenly start to like math (previously I was skeptical about EY’s claims that increasing intelligence will lead to sudden changes in preferences, but now I totally believe it). Or eg I didn’t like emotional and interpersonal moments in fiction, but now I suddenly like them because I understand them so much better. And the question “do I prefer to know awful truth or be happy” doesn’t even make sense to me now since I can disentangle those mentally.
In some sense it looks obvious, but yet I totally wouldn’t expect these things to change, they didn’t look like having these concrete slots for circumstances variation or even more, things that changed felt like internal for those mental preferences. And even more again, they changed because of change in cognitive circumstances, not environmental.
And maybe I had more malleable personality than usual. I never had a unified place for storing my personality info and was extremely prone to decoupling, so different behaviour modes inside of my brain totally could just check consistency against themselves.
And maybe I spent much more time than usual person to introspect and notice behavioral differences.
And maybe I was affected here by the fact that I looked through my memory to find my forming childhood events and reflect on them and update with all my current cognitive skills.
Anyway, personality now looks for me much less stable. It looks like you can shift personality to almost any state by changing capabilities. Just people usually have mild preferences to not do that, to improve eg their first best math and not second best languages. Or if to put it another way, personality usually looks not changed because it’s traits tend to on average have the same average as previously, not because traits are stable.
I still don’t get what are you talking about. Religious belief isn’t discussed because it is something that can be be destroyed by truth? And meditation isn’t? There could be said something about power of “всенощное бдение” from Christianity, but sleep deprivation seems to much, much more likely to have huge harmful effects than meditation?
I just told you what I think is typically meant by this, and I am not grok, so you should take your complaints about what Grok says up with Grok.
I don’t know what is communication problem, but it certainly doesn’t go right. Or probably, multiple problems. Because… Complaining to Grok is like complaining to a parrot… And after not getting clear answer from it I guess that it’s just too niche/original topic to be Grok being able to process it at all. And that are not complaints, it’s a list of what I don’t think could be plausible meanings of what I have seen on lesswrong. In a historical context. With explanation of why I don’t consider those plausible for LW. And you didn’t say initially that it’s what you think, not what eg you have seen. And I not at all fond of the fact that you are commanding me what I “should” do.