MrHen comments on The Meditation on Curiosity - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2007 12:26AM

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Comment author: MrHen 02 February 2010 04:40:43AM 1 point [-]

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).

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...

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.

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.

Comment author: pjeby 02 February 2010 05:06:32AM 5 points [-]

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.

I was just giving an example. The key questions are:

  1. What is the trigger stimulus? and
  2. What is the repeatable, observable reaction you wish to change?

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.

But the more I think about it the more I think that this is just semantics.

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).

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