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Here's a mind dump. I don't have a lot of time right now, but here goes.
Err... I'm not scared?
Than examine it.
No. I decided not to do that.
Why?
Hmm... what have I said on that subject...
Okay, sure that makes sense, but what if the wall is merely a creation of fear?
Okay, do I have any fear of changing away from Theism.
I want to say no...
But I have to say yes because I feel fear.
What is the fear of?
Potentials:
- Fear of losing a belief
- Fear of social implications
- Fear of the unknown
- Fear of judgement/punishment
- Fear of being wrong
- Fear of admitting mistakes
Let's go down the list: Fear of losing a belief.
I don't fear losing a belief.
A belief or any belief?
Mmm... most beliefs? I don't know.
Can I think of a belief I would fear losing?
Can I think of a belief I don't fear losing?
Sure, that's easy.
Than name it.
Uh... I guess I need a list of beliefs...
- My name is my name
- 2 + 2 = 4
- The show tonight will be a success
- I am getting more rational
The first two have no fear.
The third has more emotional attachment, but I don't fear losing that belief. I'd rather the show tonight be a success, but losing that belief doesn't scare me.
The last... well, it's true or not. I would rather lose that belief if it were incorrect so I could change what I needed to become more rational. So no, I don't fear losing it.
Is it more accurate to say that I fear keeping it when I shouldn't?
Yes.
Is this a good fear?
Yes, in as much as fear can ever be good.
Can I think of a more valid fear?
We are getting off subject.
Okay. Do I fear losing Theism?
Which part?
All of it.
Uh... I don't see how that can happen as of yet.
So? It doesn't matter if you can imagine it. Does it scare you?
This wasn't the original question:
Okay. But this answer matters.
Why?
Because it eliminates a potential cause for being scared of critically examining it.
Okay, what are the other causes?
- Fear of losing Theism
- Time wasted on other things
- Fear of confirming Theism and dealing with the social consequences
- Preemptive rejection of Rationality and/or Reality
Okay. So do I fear losing Theism?
I don't know.
You don't know or you don't want to know?
Well, what would be the point in not wanting to know?
- Meta-belief
- Belief in belief
- Convenient ignorance
(Ooh, Convenient Ignorance may be a good subject for a top-level post...)
Okay... so do I believe in my belief of Theism?
Sure, in the sense that I believe I believe in Theism.
Is that the same thing?
Err... no, I guess not.
So, do I believe in my belief?
What is the definition again?
Okay, no, I do believe Theism.
Do you believe in your belief of Theism?
I don't think so, since I don't begrudge others their disbelief.
You match the description: "It is good and virtuous and beneficial to believe God exists."
Only in the sense that if it is true it is good to believe.
So if it wasn't true, you wouldn't want to believe?
Correct.
So go find out if it is true.
Yeah, okay, show me how.
Critically examine it.
I can't.
Why not?
There is a wall. That belief isn't accessible through critical examination.
If it were, would you examine it?
I don't know.
You don't know, or you don't want to know?
What difference does it make if I can't examine it anyway?
Because you may be able to examine it and you are lying to yourself about not being able to.
Oh.
And that's all the time I have. I'll try to add more tomorrow. If there is a better place to do this or people would rather me post a summary I am more than willing to comply.
EDIT: Part 2. (It isn't as interesting.)
I find this self-dialog very interesting; in certain aspects it resembles the sort of self-dialog I teach people to use to throw off more mundane fears and mental/emotional blocks, outdated moral injunctions, etc.
There are a few places in what you're doing where a more focused approach would be helpful, though. For example, I would define an outcome and a test procedure: what are you attempting to change, and how will you know if you changed it? This alone will help you trim distractions a bit.
Also, generally speaking, the key to getting rid of an irrational belief is to clearly identify the past negative consequences associated with disbelief in that belief. Your expectations of what will happen in the future are usually either an irrelevant speculative extrapolation by your logical mind, or a simple projection from emotional memory... And it's the latter category that's relevant, as long as you focus on identifying the "near", sensory memory of the events your future prediction is based on.
In particular, you are looking for memories involving the loss of either personal status/significance, the loss of connective bonding, the loss of perceived safety, or the loss of available novelty/stimulation, (with these latter two being far less common), associated with either you or someone else failing to believe (or act upon) the belief in question.
The neurological phenomenon known as "reconsolidation" explains why access to the original memory is useful; it's simplest to remove an emotional attachment to a thought or belief by reinterpreting the original memory that triggers the emotions, rather than to build elaborate reroutings of thought "downstream" of the source.
Once you've identified the specific memory you're using to form your emotional/intuitive judgment (creating the fear), you can use further questioning to cast doubt on your original interpretation of events, consider other possible interpretations, wonder whether the situation is different, etc... and in the process, this sets up alternative lines of thought linked from the original memory, allowing you to have a different emotional probability distribution, so to speak.
I'm being necessarily terse here, as I know of at least two whole books that have been written on minor variations of this basic process: "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie, and "Recreating Your Life" by Morty Lefkoe, each proposing a different sequence and set of questions, but essentially following the same general process I've just described. I've also done workshops on my own set of variations, with slightly different scopes of applicability than either of their methods.
Either book, however, is quite good with respect to having lots of example dialogues to show how to apply their processes in practice, and either one would, I think be helpful in focusing your approach to this, or any other attempt to change an emotional belief or judgment.
Agreed. I posted Easy Predictors as an attempt to get input from the community about easy to test predictor beliefs but didn't get much of a response. I am keeping track of smaller things that have easy turnaround times to see if it is possible to do this sort of thing informally.
This does not apply to outcomes of belief creation, however. Is there a good way to test things like that? Or am I misinterpreting your suggestion? Or... ?
The rest of your comment is interesting to me because it directly focuses on the prediction of trauma due to dropping Theism (and related subjects). I hadn't really thought about the details of the fallout beyond key trouble spots. Is this a fair two-sentence reduction of your suggestions?
Am I close?
Mr. Hen, I'm going to break custom and say something that may be regarded as poisoning the well. It's my conclusion that P.J. Eby is more or less a quack trying to drum up support for his psychological services, and that (in such an important matter as this) you shouldn't be trying to understand his jargon, let alone trying to take his advice.
His persistent trumpeting of perceptual control theory, which couples grandiose claims of precision with a complete lack of experimental support, is telling, and it's not the only red flag I've seen...
I am still willing to at least listen and dialog with pjeby, but I find it interesting that this comment is at +3 so quickly. Thank you for the warning (and concern). It does have an impact. (The karma swing helped.)
Right, that's why I recommended two books written by other people. You have brilliantly exposed my clever scheme:
I should note, now that the parent is at -1, that my vote does not represent disapproval of well poisoning, just disagreement in this instance. Pjeby's practical advice seems well founded to me and I believe it will benefit those willing to receive it.
I probably agree with you when it comes to the rigid use of PCT models and of his custom jargon. I find PJ's practical experience more useful than his abstract theorizing. I would not vote except, as you say, the matter is important. Even more so when someone's reputation is at stake.
I mean that if you're going to go digging around your head to change something, it would be best to have a criterion by which you can judge whether or not you've succeeded. Otherwise, you can rummage around in there forever. ;-)
An example criterion in this case might be "Thinking about not believing in God no longer causes an emotional reaction, as evidenced by my physical response to a specific thought about that."
Defining a test in this way -- i.e., observing whether your (repeatable) physical reaction to a thought has changed -- allows you to determine whether any particular approach has succeeded or failed. I suggested the two books I did because I have found it relatively easy to produce such repeatable, testable results with their techniques, once I got the hang of paying attention to my sensory responses to the questions asked, and ignoring my logical/abstract ones. (Since changing one's logical beliefs isn't the hard part.)
No, what I'm saying is that your projection is based on some specific, sensory experience(s) you had, like for example your parents speaking disparagingly about atheists, or other non-followers of your parents' belief system. At some point, to feel threatened by being outcast, you had to learn who the outgroups were, and this learning is primarily experiential/emotional, rather than intellectual, and happens on a level that bypassed critical thought (e.g. because of your age, or because of the degree of emotion in the situation).
Identifying this experience and processing it through critical thought, weakens the emotional response triggered by the thought, then gives you the ability to think rationally about the subject again... thereby leading to potential solutions. Right now, the fear response paralyzes your critical and creative thinking, making it very hard to see what solutions may be in front of you.
IOW, your prediction of trauma comes from a past trauma -- our brains don't come with a built-in prior probability distribution for what beliefs will cause people to like or not like us. ;-) If you want to switch off the fear, you have to change the prediction, which means changing the probability data in your memory... which means accessing and reinterpreting the original sensory experience data.
In order to find this information, you focus on the sensory portion of your prediction, prior to verbalization. That is, when you ask, "What bad thing is going to happen?" refrain from verbalizing and pay attention to the images, feelings, and general impressions that arise. Then, let your mind drift back to when you first saw/felt/experienced something like that.
A recent personal example: I discovered yesterday that the reason I never gave my software projects a "1.0" version is because I was afraid to declare anything "finished" or "complete"... but the specific reason, was that when I did chores as a kid, or cleaned my room, my mother found faults and yelled at me. Emotionally, I learned that as long as someone else could possibly find a way to improve it, I was not allowed to call it "finished", or I would be shamed (status reduction).
Until I uncovered this specific way in which I came by my emotional response, all my conscious efforts to overcome this bad habit were without effect. The emotion biased my conscious thoughts in such a way that I really and truly sincerely believed that my projects were not "finished"... because the definition I was unconsciously using for "finished" didn't allow me to be the one who declared them so.
But having specifically identified the source of this learning, it was trivial to drop the emotional response that drove the behavior... and immediately after doing so, I realized that there were a wide variety of other areas in my life affected by this bias, that I hadn't noticed before.
Most psychological discussion of fears tends to focus on the abstract level, i.e. obviously I was afraid to declare things finished, for "fear of criticism". But that abstract knowledge is almost entirely useless for actually changing the feelings, and therefore removing the bias. Mostly, what such abstract knowledge does is sometimes allow people to spend a lifetime trying to work around or compensate for their feeling-driven biases, rather than actually changing them.
And that's why I urge you to focus on specific sensory experience information in your dialoging, and treat all abstract, logical, or verbally sophisticated thoughts that arise in response to your questions as being lies, rumor, and distraction. If your logical abstract thoughts were actually in charge of your feelings, you'd already be done. Save 'em till the bias has been repaired.
Btw, the Iowa Gambling Task is an example of a related kind of unconscious learning that I'm talking about here. In it, people learn to feel fear about choosing cards from a certain deck, long before their conscious mind notices or accounts for the numerical probabilities involved. Then, their conscious minds often make up explanations which have little if any connection to the "irrational" (but accurate) feeling of fear.
So if you seem to irrationally fear something, it's an indication that your subconscious picked up on raw probability data. And this raw probability data can't be overrided by reasoning unless you integrate the reasoning with the specific experiences, so that a different interpretation is applied.
For example, suppose there's someone who always looks away from you and leaves the room when you enter. You begin to think that person doesn't like you... and then you hear they actually have a crush on you. You have the same sensory data, but a different interpretation, and your felt-response to the same thoughts is now different. Voila... memory reconsolidation, and your thoughts are now biased in a different, happier way. ;-)
Okay, that makes sense. My initial reaction is that the fear has less to do with people's reactions to me and more the amount of change in the actions I take. Their responses to these new actions is more severe than their expected actions as a result of my dropping Theism.
But the more I think about it the more I think that this is just semantics. I'll give your suggestion a shot and see what happens. I am not expecting much but we'll see. The main criticism that I have at this point is that my "fears" are essentially predictions of behavior. I do not consider them irrational fears...
Ah, okay, this part relates to the trigger of dealing with the initial reaction to the questions being asked.
My personal solutions for this style of fear (which is separate from the fear of future social reactions, which I can understand may not have been obvious) is the same as my pattern of behavior relating to pain tolerance. It goes away if I focus on it just the right way.
By the end of the week I expect to be able to return to the topic without any overt hinderances. I take this to mean the fear is gone or I am so completely self-deluded that the magic question no longer means the same thing as it did when it was first asked. I prefer to think it is the former.
I was just giving an example. The key questions are:
In what you said above, the trigger is "thinking about what I'd do if I were not a theist", and you are using the word "fear" to describe the automatic reaction.
I'm saying that you should precisely identify what you mean by "fear" - does your pulse race? Palms sweat? Do you clench your teeth, feel like you're curling into a ball, what? There are many possible physical autonomic reactions to the emotion of fear... which one are you doing automatically, without conscious intent, every time you contemplate "what I'd do if I were not a theist"?
This will serve as your test - a control condition against which any attempted change can be benchmarked. You will know you have arrived at a successful conclusion to your endeavor when the physiological reaction is extinguished - i.e., it will cease to bias your conscious thought.
I consider this a litmus test for any psychological change technique: if it can't make an immediate change (by which I mean abrupt, rather than gradual) in a previously persistent automatic response to a thought, it's not worth much, IMO.
Focus on what the stimulus and response are, and that will keep you from wandering into semantic questions... which operate in the verbal "far" mind, not the nonverbal "near" mind that you're trying to tap into and fix.
This is one of those "simple, but not easy" things... not because it isn't easy to do, but because it's hard to stop doing the verbal overshadowing part.
We all get so used to following our object-level thoughts, running in the emotionally-biased grooves laid down by our feeling-level systems, that the idea of ignoring the abstract thoughts to look at the grooves themselves seems utterly weird, foreign, and uncomfortable. It is, I find, the most difficult part of mindhacking to teach.
But once you get used to the idea that you simply cannot trust the output of your verbal mind while you're trying to debug your pre-verbal biases, it gets easier. During the early stages though, it's easy to be thinking in your verbal mind that you're not thinking in your verbal mind, simply because you're telling yourself that you're not... which in hindsight should be a really obvious clue that you're doing it wrong. ;-)
Bear in mind that your unconcious mind does not require complex verbalizations (above simple if-then noun-verb constructs) to represent its thought processes. If you are trying to describe something that can't be reduced to "(sensory experience X) is followed by (sensory experience Y)", you are using the wrong part of your brain - i.e., not the one that actually contains the fear (or other emotional response).
The brain doesn't need past trauma in this instance. Our brains do come with a built-in prior probability distribution for what will happen when you become an apostate, rejecting the beliefs of the tribe in which you were raised.
Ahem. We are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers. Our brains come with a moral mechanism that's been shaped by that probability distribution, but they don't come with that specific prediction built in at an object level.
Instead, we simply learn what behaviors cause shaming, denunciation, etc., and this then triggers all the conscious shame/guilt/etc., as well as the idealizing, moralizing, punishing others, and punishing of non-punishers... with all of these actions being more highly-motivated in cases where the behavior is desirable to the individual involved.
Professing or failing to profess certain beliefs is just one minor case of "behavior" that can be regulated by this mechanism. I have not observed anything that suggests there is a mechanism specific to religious beliefs or even beliefs per se, distinct from other kinds of behavior. There is litle difference between an injunction to say some belief is true or good, and an injunction to always say thank you, or to never brag about yourself. (Or my recently discovered injunction not to say something is finished!)
All of these are just examples of verbal behavior that can regulated by the same mechanism. (In any case, MrHen has already pointed out that the fear is less about him stating new beliefs, than it would be about acting on them.)
Anyway, it seems to me that we have only one "moral injunction" apparatus that is applied generically, and the feelings that it generates do not contain any information about being kicked out of the tribe or failure to mate, etc. Instead, the memory of a shaming event is itself the bad prediction or negative reinforcer. Adaptation execution FTW, or more like FTL in this case at least.
That isn't the issue here. Yes, adaptation execution, Woohoo!! Obviously the probability distribution for expected consequences isn't built in to the amygdala.
I nevertheless assert that the universal human aversion to changing our fundamental signalling beliefs is more than just Mommy Issues filtered through PCT. Human instinctive responses are sophisticated and a whole lot of them are built in, no shaming required. We're scared of spiders, snakes and apostasy. They're adaptations right there in the DNA.
Er, research please. Everything I've seen shows that even monkeys have to learn to fear snakes and spiders - it has to be triggered by observing other monkeys being afraid of them first.
Occam's razor says you're more likely to be wrong than I am: a general purpose mechanism for conditioning verbal behavior is more than sufficient to produce the results we observe, especially if you consider internal verbal thinking a form of verbal behavior -- which it pretty plainly is.
For example, this provides a simpler mechanism for "belief in belief", than your proposal of a distinct mechanism. It allows us to "believe" - i.e. consistently say we believe (even to ourselves on the inside), when in fact we don't.
[edited to delete unfair rhetoric of my own]
FWIW I said nothing about PCT, nor did I say that a parent had to be the one delivering the shame. If your own personal bias about me is such that you can't avoid engaging in this type of rhetorics, perhaps you should consider giving yourself some cooling off time before you reply.
Proslepsis!
Now now, you can't have points for that twice!
Oops. I actually intended to delete that, because I felt it was the same sort of unfair rhetoric as I was accusing wedrifid of. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I was quoting Steven Pinker but my copy is an audio book so I can't give you the specific references to the study he mentions. A simple google search brings up plenty of references. (Google gives popularised summaries. Follow the links provided therein to find the actual research.)
Your claim mentions 'everything you have seen'. Given that contradictory reports are so freely available and your confidence in the model your are asserting I would have expected you to have a somewhat more broad exposure to the relevant science.
Skinner had a similar 'simple' theory. But he was wrong. Not wrong because the mechanisms he described weren't important parts of human psychology but wrong because he asserted them to the exclusion of all else.
I believe you can make testable behavior changes and your work with clients impresses me. I also believe you could change people to be less afraid of, for example, heights. Nevertheless, I would not necessarily believe your report on how these anxieties came into being. People can be afraid of heights even if they didn't make a habit of falling off cliffs in their childhood.
I have a strong bias for you PJ, in all but your tendency to be quite rigidly minded when it comes to forcing reality into your simple models. I allow myself to vocally reject the parts of your comments that I disagree with because that way I will not be dismissed as a fan boy when I speak in your defense. You aren't, for example, a quack and your advice, experience and willingness to share it are invaluable. I also, for what it is worth, find PCT to be a useful way of describing the dynamics of human behavior much of the time.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see where it says we're all automatically afraid of snakes. I have seen research that monkeys have an inbuilt ability to learn to fear snakes, but the mechanism has to be switched on via learning, and my understanding is that humans are the same way... unless you are arguing that individual variations in fear of snakes is purely determined by genetics.
[Edit to add: one of the first papers you linked to includes this quote: "For studies of captive primates, King did not find consistent evidence of snake fear." And the second page goes on to describe the very "they have to learn to fear snakes" research that I previously spoke of.]
I think perhaps we are miscommunicating: I do not deny that primate brains contain snake detectors. I do deny that said detectors are unaffected by learning: humans and monkeys can and do learn which snakes to fear, or not fear.
We seem to be miscommunicating again. What mechanism is it that you think I am asserting "to the exclusion of all else"? The model I personally use contains several mechanisms, and the moral injunctions aspect I spoke of here is only one such mechanism. It is certainly not the only relevant mechanism in human behavior, even in the relatively narrow field of applicability where I use it.
I don't do classical phobia work, actually, so I wouldn't have a valid opinon on that one, one way or the other. ;-)
It's certainly true that, In order to reach scientific standards, I would need to find a way to double-blindly substitute a placebo version of childhood memories for the real thing in order to prove that it's the modification of the memory that makes it work. (I have occasionally tested single-blind placebo substitutions on other things, but not this, as I have no idea what I could substitute.)
Mainly, what I do to test alternative hypotheses regarding a change technique is to see what parts of it I can remove, without affecting the results. Whatever's left, I assume has some meaning. (Side note: most published descriptions of actually-working self-help techniques contain superfluous steps, that, when removed, tend to make each technique sound like a mere minor variation on one of a handful of major themes... which I expect to correspond to mechanisms in the brain.)
In the instant discussion of moral injunctions, examining the memory of the learning or imprint experience appears to be indispensable, and therefore I conclude (hypothesize, if you prefer) that these memories are an integral part of the process of formation of moral injunction-regulated behavior.
FWIW, I do not claim universal applicability of my models outside their target domain. However, within that target domain, most discussions here tend to have only vaporous speculation weighing against many, many tests and observations. When someone proposes a speculative and more complex model than one I am already using, I want to see what their model can predict that mine cannot, or vice versa.
If you have a more parsimonious model for "belief in belief" than simple moral injunctions regarding spoken behavior, I'd love to see it. But since "belief in belief" cleanly falls out as a side effect of my model, I don't see a reason to go looking for a more complicated, special-purpose belief module, just because there could be one. Should I encounter a client who needs a belief-in-belief fixed, and find that my existing model can't fix it, then I will have reason to go looking for an updated model.
Now, when I do see a more parsimonious model here than one I'm already using, I adopt it wholeheartedly. For all that people seem to frame me as having brought PCT to Lesswrong.com, the reverse is actually true:
lesswrong is where I heard about PCT in the first place!
And I adopted it because it fit very neatly into my existing model... it was as though my model was a graph with lots of edges, but no nodes, and PCT gave me a paradigm for what I should expect "nodes" to look like. (And incorporating it into my model also subsequently allowed me to discover a new kind of "edge" that I hadn't spotted previously.)
So actually, I don't consider PCT to be a comprehensive model in itself either, because it lacks the "edges" that my own model contains!
Which makes it a bit frustrating any time anyone acts as though I 1) brought PCT to LW, and 2) think it's a cure-all or even a remotely complete model of human behavior... it's just better than its competitors, such as the aforementioned Skinnerian model you mentioned.
Great. I would appreciate it, though, if you not use boo lights like "mommy issues" and "PCT" (which sadly, seems to have become one around these parts), especially when the first is a denigratory caricature and the second not even relevant. (Moral injunctions are an "edge" in my own model, not a "node" from PCT.)