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nickernst comments on Understanding vipassana meditation - Less Wrong
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The number of people diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression is pretty huge. I would suggest that these problems are strongly correlated with a tendency to assign affect to thought processes, as you say. But I disagree with the generality of your statement that we veer toward the positive (when affect is the main guide). If you write a follow-up post, I'd request that you spend some time on the negative (aversion) as well as the positive feedback loops.
I'm also confused by your notion of Mindspace (it sounds very Mysterious). I'm not asking you to parametrize the human mind of course ;-) But more detail would probably make this or the follow-up a more valuable post.
I didn't mean to place more emphasis on positive than negative affect. I describe them together here:
I also included links to "Avoiding your belief's real weak points" and "Ugh fields". I hinted that these may be manifestations of negative feedback loops.
That last part makes it seem like you understood the concept. Can you express your confusion more precisely?
Glad to have that clarified and pointed out :-)
As for the Mindspace business, I think other readers (particularly Academian) have addressed what had me confused. I was unsure of how literally to take the concept, and if more literally, what we take to be coordinates and what we take to be fields over the space. By "gradient" I assume you're treating affect as a scalar field over this space. But you also called it a coordinate, and suggested that other coordinates also affect this field. Fine, we can talk about the the "influence" of a coordinate on a field (which is a function of those coordinates, affect being a very strong one) and thus use the two interchangeably if the field permits. But then, where's the feedback? You need another equation in this picture, something that locally changes the coordinate system itself. But what does that even mean? And when we only know one coordinate?
But maaaybe I'm taking this a bit too literally.