The “attempted telekinesis” examples above are all examples of pointless behaviors -- the kinds of behaviors a person is better off removing.  I’d like to take a moment, now, to distinguish pointless cases of “attempted telekinesis” (where a person tries to change the world just by repeatedly stressing out about it) from their useful cousins.

Here’s a useful cousin:

The other morning, I was lying in bed, again.  Thinking that maybe I should get up.  But feeling like bed was warm and getting up would be a little hard.  

And then I thought about breakfast.  I pictured it: nice, fried eggs; a sliced fresh tomato; a steaming cup of tea.  I pictured biting into the eggs, with the runny yolk on my tongue.  And suddenly, without any need of prompting from conscious-me, my body was in motion -- up and heading toward the eggs.  (Perhaps, from the perspective of the submodule of my brain that did the "wishing for eggs" manuever, wishing had in fact made it so!  It wished, and my body responded: telekinetic success.)

As in the above "pointless" cases, my system 1 brain had a thing that it wanted, and visualized a picture of the desired end-state.  But in the breakfast example, that visualization was useful.  The imagined flying laptop had just filled my head with repeated wishing.  The imagined vanishing munching noises had just filled my head with repeated aggravation.  The imagined "being a better writer" state had only distracted me from writing.  But the imagined experience of eating breakfast... pulled my system 1 into actually obtaining breakfast.

Similarly, when I imagine Archimedes in the classic bathtub story, I imagine him obsessing a bit about how to measure the crown's density.  "How can I measure it?  How can I measure it?" his brain might repeat... a little like repeating "Get my laptop to whoosh toward me!".  Obsessing on problems at CFAR certainly seems to help me notice potential solutions.

So, what's the take-away?  When is it useful to try to wish the world into a different state?  What distinguishes the kinds of "attempted telekinesis" that one might like to remove, from the kinds that fetch you breakfast or give you insights into the king's crown?  

This matter seems to me to be a bit complicated, but also seems quite important -- if you get it wrong, you either stay unnecessarily distracted and ineffective (like me in the lead-up to CFAR's first workshop), or you end up a sort of parody of pop Buddhism, sitting there being placid about your problems instead of harnessing your drives to solve them.

In practice, I tend to distinguish between useful and useless attempted telekinesis based on task type and emotional tone.  (Improvements/kibbitzes appreciated.)

Task type:

Type 1: Problems that System 1 can solve by itself:

Examples: Making breakfast; causing someone to know you care about them.

Suggested response:  This sort of wishing is healthy, and may prompt actions that make a lot more sense than those system 2 would plan (e.g., your nonverbals as you apologize are likely to be far better if you viscerally care about your interlocutor).  Leave system 1 be.

Type 2: Problems that are worth solving, but that need help from System 2:

Examples:  “There’s nothing good to eat” (situation: you notice that several times, over the last hour, you’ve gone to the fridge, opened it, stared inside, closed it... and then opened it again a few minutes later -- as though to see if something good has magically materialized into the closed fridge); Feeling 'stuck' at one's job (or in a relationship); Not having enough money. (The distinguishing feature here is that system 1 has been looping on the problem for a while to no effect, and that system 2 has not yet taken a good look at the problem.)

Suggested response:  Raise the problem to conscious attention; then, try to figure out what is bothering system 1; finally, decide what to do about it.  As you do this, parts of the wishing will naturally shift from the general problem ("Somehow make work less stuck-feeling") to the specific strategy you've chosen ("Figure out how to renegotiate with my manager").[4]

Type 3: “Problems” that should be given up on:

Examples:  “Make the munching noises go away” (in a case where you’ve decided not to); “Make San Franciscans be better drivers”;  “Let me vanish into the floor.”  (The distinguishing feature here is simply that these are "problems" that, on reflection, you do not wish to take action on.)

Suggested response:  Find a way to let system 1 know that solving this problem isn't worth the cost, or that keeping this problem on your internal "worry/fume about" list is quite unlikely to have positive effects.  For example, you might:

• Make a plan for what it would actually take to cause San Franciscans to be better drivers.  Estimate the total amount of work involved.  Ask your emotional brain if it would, in fact, like you to carry out this plan.
• Visualize a stressed-out/fuming/worrying you getting cut off in traffic.  Now visualize a calm you getting cut off in traffic.  See if you expect to see anything good happen in the stressed-out case that doesn't happen in the calm case. (Be open to the fact that the answer might be "yes".)[5]
• Notice, in detail, what system 1 is upset about.  Acknowledge that, yes, you may be late to your work meeting because of the traffic.  And that, indeed, your personal driving habits are different from those of the driver who cut you off.  And that someday a driver like that may in fact kill you via aggression or carelessness -- it isn't likely, but it's possible, and the lifetime risk of death by traffic accident is distinctly nonzero.  Once you've noticed all the painful things, check again to see whether it's worth taking some sort of constructive action on some of them.  System 1 may trust your policy decision more now that you've looked at all the downsides (and may be more willing, therefore, to stop trying to will the drivers into a different state).[6]

Type 5: Problems that System 2 needs "shower-thoughts" help with:

Examples: Archimedes' problem measuring the king's crown; "My relationship with Fred is broken, and I can't figure out what to do about it"; "How the heck can I solve that math riddle?"  (The distinguishing feature here is that both: (1) the problem has already been raised to conscious attention at some point (and system 2 failed to instantly solve it); and (2) the problem is a worthy use of your shower-thoughts -- either for what it'll accomplish directly, or for the improvement it may give to your pattern of thought.))

Suggested response:  This sort of wishing is healthy.  Leave system 1 be.

Emotional tone:

Wishes often seem to me to have emotional tones.  Some tones are simple desire (“Breakfast... mmm....”).  Others have an overlayed hopelessness or bitter resignation about them (“I just always have to put up with how everyone else is incompetent”); others, still, have a tone (at least in me) of hammed-up flailing, self-pity, or desire for outside help -- as though if I just feel helpless enough, somehow a grown-up will come to the rescue ("Make the workshop crisis not be in this state... Make the workshop crisis not be in this state...").

It seems to me that it's worth installing an "alert" that sounds, in your head, whenever it hears either the hopeless/bitter/resigned tone, or the flailing/save-me tone.  Both are often signs of buggy "attempted telekinesis" situations that are worth conscious debugging (a la the schema above).  And the emotional tones can be easier to automatically flag.

 

---

[1]  A book called "Bonds that make us free" played a substantial role in prompting these thoughts and was extremely helpful to me.  It's written from a Christian worldview, but if you're up for navigating a foreign expository style and sorting out for yourself which parts to keep, and if in addition you are interested in vanishing social shame or other forms of loopy thoughts, I'd recommend it.

[2] Thanks to Alicorn for making the cartoon.

[3]  Other than, you know, to repeatedly visualize my thought patterns whooshing into the new state that I now wished them to be in?  ;) 

[4]  The book "Focusing" by Eugene Gendlin teaches one useful way to do this.  If you decide to check it out, I'd strongly recommend the audiobook over the paper book, as it is abridged and far clearer.

[5] For example, perhaps, if you remain stressed out, perhaps your boss will see how much you suffered in your attempt to be on time to work and will deduce that you care about timeliness.  (If you notice some good effect coming from the stress that doesn't come from the calm, you might want to look for an alternative way to cause the effect.  For example, you might update your heuristics to decrease the chances of future lateness; plan to explain this to your boss and to offer a 1-sided $100 bet against this ever happening again; and then drive with your mind free to focus fully on interesting problems.)

[6] More generally, when setting out to convince system 1 that X is true, it is best to be honestly curious as to whether X might in fact be false, and whether system 1 may have some good reason for suspecting this.  It is much the same as when attempting to convince another human.  Saying "Hey, look, you're wrong and stupid and so your proposed office policy is really bad" is usually not very persuasive; saying "huh; I'm confused; the office policy looks to me as though it'll cost a lot of hours to little effect, but you usually have good reasons for things; maybe you could tell me why you think it's plausible?" is often a better way to persuade; one wishes to do the same thing for system 1.