(I wrote a comment and it disappeared. Hopefully it doesn’t show up along with this one)
How is Val’s first response to Ben not satisfactory?
But here are a few things that it’s done for me:
Things like your personal bubble will not be invisible by default. Your personal bubble is real and just there despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “just being a thing your brain injects into your map”. Looking will give you handles and sensors relevant to all sorts of different parts of you, like those handles and sensors relevant to controlling your personal bubble, feeling your personal bubble, and seeing and feeling other people’s personal bubbles. Without it, you might be stuck in a theory that doesn’t account for your personal bubble and it remains hidden, or it calls your personal bubble unreal and makes it hard to look at. As another example, the energy flows of feng shui are a perceptual primitive related to good movement and flows of attention.
There is a philosophical line of thougth originating on lesswrong which comes up with a certain notion of what reality is. Looking will allow you to notice that the use of the word “real” in accordance to this notion of real is very different from the original use of the word real. Looking will allow you to see what is actually going on in this new meaning of real, and see how it has gone off the rails. Looking will allow you to find your way back to the original meaning and keep you grounded in coming to a reflective understanding of the nature of realness so that you don’t go off the rails again. And that’s why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is just a model, mistaken, and is both subordinate and at odds with the fact that you have always already been in the world, and this fact is necessarily a precondition to your doing philosophy.
You will see how “you are a brain” is wrong and “you are a product of your brain” is a model with extremely narrow and context specific use. You will notice the same about “everything is made of atoms.” These models are way overrated and overrepresented in this and similar communities, and are by no means fundamental to anything but the practice of certain scientific disciplines.
How is Val’s first response to Ben not what you are looking for?
For some actual cake, here’s what it can give you, based on my experience of what it has given me:
An example: there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality. Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word. It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on, what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is, and see how that conversation went off the rails. It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grounded, rather than being stuck in a pragmatist metaphysical nihilism. And this is why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is mistaken, just a model, and subordinate to the fact that you already always have been in the world and this is necessarily a precondition of your doing philosophy.
You will see that “you are your brain” is false and “you are a product of your brain” is an extremely narrow model that is useful in only a very constrained context. You will see how “everything is made of atoms” is a similarly very narrow model. These models are both way overrated in their use, very overrepresented in communities like this, and very not fundamental.
Things like your personal bubble, which is real and just there, despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “being just something that your brain injects into your map”, will not be invisible by default. You will gain handles on many fundamental parts of you that were previously hidden behind a theory that doesn’t account for them or calls them unreal.