if 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 have 👏 gnosis 👏 of 👏 phenomenological 👏 insight 👏 then 👏 everything 👏 you 👏 say 👏 about 👏 it 👏 should 👏 be 👏 qualified 👏 as 👏 hearsay 👏 or 👏 inference
herschel
Karma: 78
So part of the point is that “real” is phenomenologically very similar to “salient”, and maybe actually the same. I’m sort of on the far end in this respect but this extended usage is actually relatively common in meditation circles I’m in. I maybe could emphasize this point more...
FWIW I think a lot of “somatic stuff” that’s around is either poor quality or comes with very poor pedagogy. In my model there are also subtle and (even for many teachers) commonly illegible prerequisites. Also filtration processes on students and schools, people writing books, etc.
Thanks, I appreciate you writing this, and I appreciate you sharing about this in public. I’m somewhat excited to see how this conversation might develop more centrally in rat discourse. I think there’s currently some major incommunicable cruxes surrounding these questions, and I’ve had a lot of conversations about this domain with people who are squarely rats, but mostly auxiliary to rat discourse in a way that’s frustrating.
I have some critiques:
I think this is a plausible contour of how things might go for people who started out relatively healthy, who experience a substantial disturbance and then work to return to something about as stable as their previous configuration. I don’t think this is a good point of reference for people who began this process quite disturbed and have been so for quite a while.
Indeed, you refer to people trying to address a morass of confusing and illegible motivational/emotional/etc issues, whose situations I don’t think are described well by this sort of story. I currently have the most weight on Mark Lippmann’s work in this domain, over any other framework, traditional or modern. (Warning: I don’t actually recommend his writing to almost anyone, unfortunately.)
There’s some very important questions around how or why people are apparently getting stuck on this emotions/trauma stuff, and whether they should actually be regarded as stuck. This also trades off sharply depending on whether they’re doing vital work otherwise: I hold people working on x-risk in an almost unique category in this respect, where to me even if they might seem to have tons of un-worked-out stuff, I lean towards preferring they continue their work rather than investing hard in healing.
My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.
Lastly, and I think you’re not much to blame for this either:
It’s not clear to me how we should be having these conversations in public. I’m pretty frustrated by a bunch of “Works On My Machine™” posts about this topic all over the internet (and just as well in print), and I’m pretty confused how these conversations should even work, especially in our discourse.
There’s some problematic epistemological questions relating to claims about phenomenology and psychology, and I don’t think that the existing literatures (modern western psychology, or any of the traditional contemplative schools) have resolved them. For that matter, the techniques and models from the existing literatures mostly aren’t great either, so I’m hardly saying something like “there are established models, please go read these textbooks and stop posting quack physics.”
Just to nip any confusion in the bud (since this came up a couple weeks ago): My name is Herschel, I am not the author of the OP. I spent two years at the Monastic Academy, and have been around the rationalist community since ~2017. [edited to remove the author’s legal name, at their request]
Apparently there’s been some confusion, I’m Herschel (I’m leaving out my last name so I’m not trivially googled), the author of this comment is a different person [I’ve removed their name for their privacy]. I was a resident for two years at MAPLE but I haven’t written anything about it publicly, besides a couple brief things on my facebook account.
This, please.
Yeah, I’m working towards that. Cheap examples would be like, hard sciences have made certain kinds of assumptions (reductionism, primacy of formal models etc) which have been extremely generative. There are lots of locally extremely helpful reifications, certainly various kinds of optimization criteria are very useful to generate strategies etc. A big part of my point is these should sort of always be taken as provisional.
“Focus” is the best among these but isn’t great. In most cases I think a lot of reifications are upstream of specific models, or generate them or something. Like, reification is the process (implicitly) of choosing weights for tradeoff calculations, but more generally for salience or priority etc. Maybe an ok example would be like, in economics we start trying to construct measures on the basis of which to determine etc etc., and even before these get goodharted we’ve already tried to collapse the complexity of the domain into a small number of factors to think about. We might even have destroyed a number of other important dimensions in this representation. This happens in some sense before rest of the model is constructed.
This may just be sloppiness on my part. I usually mean something like, “a idea, as held by a person, which that person has reified.” Compare to eg. “a loved one” or something like that.