Vladimir_Nesov comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong

259 Post author: Yvain 28 April 2009 10:00PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 April 2009 05:16:26PM 0 points [-]

I guess it's the same for everyone, the state where you are so inside a puzzle that the rest of the world gets pushed to the background. Visual imagination is a primary working tool, but that's form, not the causal structure of what gets represented by it, which is the thing that ought to be universal, a level below the obvious levers, even if implemented on the same substrate.

Comment author: pjeby 29 April 2009 05:48:33PM 0 points [-]

I guess it's the same for everyone, the state where you are so inside a puzzle that the rest of the world gets pushed to the background. Visual imagination is a primary working tool, but that's form, not the causal structure of what gets represented by it, which is the thing that ought to be universal, a level below the obvious levers, even if implemented on the same substrate.

Okay, I guess now it's my turn to have no idea WTF you are talking about. ;-)

Reading between the lines, it sort of sounds like you're talking about visual imagery that's associated, up close, or both, where you "push the rest of the world to the background". In NLP, that'd be a change in the "distance" submodality... which it occurs to me I've never tried. I've played with changing the volume of the song, but not the position of it. I'll have to remember that one.

Whether that actually relates in any way to what you just said, I don't know, but it's interesting anyway. ;-)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 April 2009 06:01:13PM 0 points [-]

Nothing about position, I used 'background' as a metaphor for something not being attended to. For example, if I indulge myself with thinking too seriously while commuting to work, I'm more likely to make a cached turn along the way that happens to be contextually incorrect, or to miss my station, or to run into someone.

Comment author: pjeby 29 April 2009 06:18:40PM 0 points [-]

Nothing about position, I used 'background' as a metaphor for something not being attended to.

I understand that; the question was how you made that distinction. Taking your language literally, you said you "pushed" those things to the background. One observation of NLP is that quite often (though not always), people describe their mental processing quite literally, even though their language is "metaphorical".

NLP also observes that if you take those descriptions literally and then perform the same "metaphorical" steps in your own mind, you can often more-or-less reproduce the subjective experience of the other person.

So when I read what you said, I realized that there are times when I more or less literally "push things to the background", but that I had never done so with a song in my head. So it seems worth trying, whether it actually has anything to do with how you push things to the background.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 April 2009 06:31:30PM 0 points [-]

Well, the metaphor encompassed that word as well, so "pushing" literally is an incorrect way to put it, more like displacing, as the new object of attention gets almost all of it, other things become less attended to, just because attention is a limited resource.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 06 August 2011 02:24:58PM 0 points [-]

So there's no kinesthetic aspect to the experience?