NancyLebovitz comments on Beware of Other-Optimizing - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 01:58AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 10 April 2009 05:02:47PM *  9 points [-]

The #1 most important thing in doing virtually any self-help technique worthy of the name is being able to pay attention to your unconscious, automatic responses, without adding voluntary thought or anosognosiac explanations on top of them. And in my experience, it's the hardest thing to learn to do on your own; and as far as I can tell, nobody (not even me) has made a systematic attempt to teach it.

Actually, I think people have made systematic attempts to teach it. Those attempts were named 'Zen', and promptly drowned in a sea of mysticism and bullshit that also called itself Zen. A few years back, I was in a group where we did the 'sitting' meditation that you often see given to novices: sit still, focus on your breathing, and blank your mind for awhile. I observed that it was comfortable and calming, and thought that was the point. Then I read Crowley on Religious Experience, linked from Less Wrong, which said that you're supposed to maintain a posture so rigidly that it becomes progressively more uncomfortable until you break. Then I read something you wrote, about observing your own reactions, and I was enlightened: the purpose is to put your mind in a baseline state so that you can observe all the things which pull you away from it, and learn how to deal with them. (First acknowledge, then suppress them.)

Today, I made another connection and found a way to test whether you have this ability: songs stuck in your head. Sometimes songs that we hear repeatedly stay in our mind, and intrude on our thoughts. Suppose you recognize that you have a song stuck in your head, and consciously decide that you don't want it there. Does that decision have any effect? How long does it take before you stop thinking of that song, and if it resurfaces, how long does it last? Songs have built-in timing (you can count notes), so these things are relatively easy to measure. Now suppose you consciously decide that Politics is the Mind Killer, so you won't think about politics except in particular circumstances. If you later find yourself thinking about abortion or gun control, and your conscious mind declares "politics is the mind killer, I will stop thinking about this", does it work? I believe that these are the same skill, and that meditation, if done properly, builds that skill.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 26 March 2011 10:30:48PM 0 points [-]

Focusing is another system which teaches the ability to pay useful attention to internal states.

The central premise is that people who are good at therapy are able to notice confusing non-verbal mental states and stay with the states long enough to put them into words.