I haven't downvoted this because it's already at -7 and that seems low enough, but: to my mind the (closely related) two worst things about this article are (1) that it says almost nothing -- "How to read reality accurately? Just practice the accurate reading of what's going on." and (2) that the great majority of it is taken up with rhetoric: rah-rah, truth is good, self-deceit is bad, yay for being right, boo to being wrong. The only part of the content that isn't obvious to more or less the entire human race is the observation that people are often irrational and don't check their models of the world carefully against reality. For sure, there's an audience that needs to hear that, but I doubt it overlaps much with people reading the discussion section of Less Wrong.
Yeah, okay, you're right.
I didn't really get too familiar with this site before posting that. Thanks for the slap on the face.
Do you know any articles that take this deeper?
I thought this was a decent, if unexceptional, statement of the principle that anyone interested in reality should learn to pay attention to reality. But then I looked up your blogs and found that you're one of those people pushing the idea that "there is no self". All this talk about paying attention is just a step towards the real goal here - to pass on the perspective that "There is no me. There isn't a you either."
When I read statements like that, sometimes l feel like punching the author in the face. Or I feel like I need to vomit out what they have written. I want to say that this is a lie whose magnitude is unbelievable. But that would be going too far; this isn't a lie in the sense of a cynical statement whose author doesn't believe it. It's just a mistake. But something about it strikes me as amazingly pernicious. It's like a recipe for being unable to think correctly; the ultimate wrong assumption.
Earlier today I happened to visit the blog of LW contributor "Grognor"; and found a recent post by him called "You Do Not Exist". So I left a comment there too, berating this attitude. But I also remarked that contemporary assertions of the belief that there is no self tend to come in two forms, a "Buddhist" form and a "reductionist" form. The reductionists deny that there is a self because they believe in an atomistic universe and there are no "selves" in a place like that, just atoms. The neo-Buddhists take a Humean, phenomenological approach, and say, where is this self, show it to me, it's not there; there are experiences, but no "self" experiencing them.
Grognor is clearly in the reductionist camp, though he does also appeal to experimental evidence that people have false beliefs about themselves and their psychological causality. You are just as clearly in what I call the neo-Buddhist camp, though neo-Buddhist deniers of the self will sometimes assert a basic materialist perspective by saying e.g. there's no person there, just a body and a brain and a world, or something of that nature. So there is some crossover. Nonetheless, the two forms of anti-self-ism have distinct origins: reductionism comes from science and from a drive to see reality as it is, neo-Buddhism from a drive to end suffering. Psychological suffering (as opposed to sensory pain) is supposed to derive from attachment to the existence of the nonexistent self - that is the usual premise.
I understand why the reductionists deny selves - they are just trying to live the implications of their ontological beliefs, and scientific culture shows many other examples in which ontologically inconvenient aspects of experienced reality are denied, in order to preserve the belief that one's favorite scientific ontology is the whole truth about reality. The motivation of neo-Buddhists is more exotic to me - if they aren't clinging to a particular scientific doctrine, why on earth would they deny their own existence? But I think it must come back to the promised payoff, an end to personal suffering. It can be painful to not get what you want, and life is all about not getting what you want. Believing that you are not really there is somehow instrumental in weakening desire, and hence in attenuating the suffering that comes from desire denied by reality.
The critique of reductionist denial of self has two fronts. One may question it phenomenologically, and one may attempt to show that the scientific ontology which appears to be inconsistent with the existence of a self need not be the last word. Similarly, I would attack the neo-Buddhist denial of self on two fronts: I would challenge the argument that the self is nowhere to be seen or that it is possible to make sense of experience without an experiencer, and I would also call in question the very desirability of the psychological payoff that apparently supplies the appeal of the neo-Buddhist outlook.
I've often written on this site, without much success, against the various denials of reality motivated by adherence to a particular scientific ontology, and about alternative physical ontologies friendlier to the existence of a self. Articulating the exact positive phenomenological basis of belief in a self is also hard. On your blog, for example, you say that what seems to be a sense of self is actually a sense that an intention is at work. This is an attack on the notion of self from within the universe of psychological concepts. In strict physicalism, there is no such thing as an "intention". On the other hand, it is an everyday concept in "folk psychology", the informal understanding of everything mental that most of us share; but in that universe, every intention is someone's intention, it's always associated with a person. By saying that there can be an intention without a self or a person, you are ripping the concept of intention out of its original context and attempting to do without that context.
This analysis at least exposes what's at work behind the bland assertion that what one senses is only an intention and not a self as such. But it still doesn't say what is the phenomenologically and epistemologically correct approach to the existence of the self. Is the principal evidence for the self to be seen in the "unity of experience" - a reflective perception that the instantaneously perceived world is perceived as a single gestalt ("apperception") - the existence of this gestalt then being interpreted as an aspect of the existence of a self that perceives? Or is there sometimes a direct awareness that there is a perceiver and not just a perceived world? Such a direct sense isn't always present, but I do believe it's present sometimes... It's the knowledge that I still can't give a crisp and rigorous phenomenological rebuttal to the purveyors of no-self which accounts for some of the venom of my reaction to them - they're out there and I can't just efficiently shoot them down as they peddle their sophistries and superficial phenomenological analyses; I can only complain mightily and hope that I thereby keep a few people in touch with the hard-to-pin-down-in-words, yet plain-as-day, knowledge of their own existence as perceivers and as agents.
How about the supposed benefits of no longer believing that you exist? There is some genuine freedom to be obtained, not by believing that you don't exist, but by questioning attachments which may form a part of your "identity" in the broad sense. But this is mostly a matter of being attached to a belief or a desire. You can let go of something like that without espousing the ostentatious and metaphysically perverse line that "I don't exist". Similarly, it is possible to obtain philosophical distance from the disappointments of life just by being less self-involved; you shouldn't have to completely erase yourself from the ledger of Being in order to do that.
I would also take the critique further and question the general desirability of detaching oneself from beliefs and desires in favor of going with the flow. If a person is interested in exceptional achievement, this is certainly the last thing they should do; you should abandon a desire only if you have a way of transcending it for something more important, not just because abandoning it will lead to a life of greater ease or of happy indifference; that's my advice, not for everyone, but for people who think they have a destiny to catch. For someone like that, it's important to cultivate an identity, a sense of who you are, consistent with the purpose you have set yourself, because the more distinctive and original that purpose is, the less reinforcement the external world will provide you in pursuing it. So the reinforcement has to come from within, which is why it becomes important to remind yourself that part of who you are is "the person trying to achieve X". See Celia Green's writing on psychological "centralisation" for more on this topic.
I find that the best argument against a "self" is that it's simply unnecessary for any reductionist theory: it doesn't add any explanatory power, and seems mostly like a folk-psychological construct that Occam's Razor cuts away neatly, and afterwards our models are much clearer. I take it that you disagree?
Can we taboo 'self'? I think I might be working with an incorrect model of what it is, exactly, that you are asserting.
I'm finding it difficult, without positing the existence of myself, to explain some of my observations. For example: all of them.
Part of the difficulty with tabooing "self" is that tabooing it would require replacing it with a clear definition, but I'm not sure that the concept is coherent enough to have a clear definition. Also, different people mean different things by it.
Anyway, the point isn't that you wouldn't exist as a physical entity. You certainly do. Some possible meanings of the no-self claim are:
No-self as the lack of a homunculus: there's no self in the sense of a unitary "master controller" in the brain that would be active all the time. Rather there are just a variety of modules, with some set of them being active at one time, another set of them at another. E.g. Kurzban & Aktipis in Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-Ish?:
What if there were no unitary self to be “interested,” “deceived,” “regarded,” “evaluated,” “enhanced,” “verified,” “protected,” “affirmed,” “controlled,” or even “esteemed”? If there were no such self, what should we do with theories such as those that make reference to self-affirmation (Steele, 1988), self-evaluation (Tesser, 1988), or self-verification (Swann, 1983, 1985)? If there is no singular “self” that is meaningful in the context of theories that use this term, it might be time to rethink the areas of inquiry these theories address (Kurzban & Aktipis, 2006; Rorty, 1996; Tesser, 2001; see also Katzko, 2003, for a recent discussion).
Here we propose that the ontology of the self is deeply connected to the issue of the extent to which the mind is modular, consisting of a large number of functionally specialized information-processing devices, each of which processes only a narrow, delimited set of inputs (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006; Coltheart, 1999; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Sperber, 1994). Modular architectures result in systems that are potentially computationally isolated from one another. This makes statements about “the” self problematic—what, precisely, is the referent (Leary, 2004a)?
See also TEDxYouth@Manchester 2011 - Julian Baggini - Is There A Real You? for a related view.
No-self as the lack of continuity: the teletransportation thought experiment is possibly the best illustration. Suppose that your brain and body are scanned into a computer with perfect resolution and detail (presume, for the sake of argument, that this would be possible). Your original brain and body are then destroyed, with a duplicate being manufactured somewhere else. Were you transported to some other location, or was the original you murdered with a copy manufactured in its place?
The "no-self" view says that if all of your data was perfectly copied and the replica is indeed perfect, then there's no meaningful way by which you can claim to be different than the "original", and have no reason not to consent to the operation. The "self view" would say that you should never consent to such an operation, because you get murdered in it, and although an identical copy of you does get constructed, it isn't you but merely a perfect copy of you. The "no-self" view mutters under its breath that the "self view" seems to be postulating some kind of an intangible soul or something.
The "no-self" view might also claim that even now, the you who is reading these words is a different person than the one who hadn't yet started reading this comment. Very similar, yes, but your brain now isn't in the exact same state as it was before: it has changed, and therefore become another person. Even if the teletransporter did kill you, that doesn't matter, since you get killed and reborn all the time anyway.
The phenomenological no-self. We generally think that experiences are experienced by some specific person. If you could choose between your loved one or a total stranger experiencing some amount of suffering, and your choice would have no other consequences, then all else being even, you would probably prefer that it was somebody else than your loved one who had to suffer. Though maybe if you knew that the stranger had already suffered a lot in their life, you might decide to spare them the suffering, because they'd had enough of it already.
The "no-self as the lack of continuity" view might say that this choice is meaningless, because neither your lover nor the stranger are continuous people - even if the stranger had already suffered a lot, that suffering had been experienced by a huge number of other people, not the one who will suffer the consequences of this decision. But even if your lover wasn't a single person, but a collection of many closely related ones, you might still choose to care about that collection of closely related people not suffering, in which case the "no-self as a lack of continuity" view wouldn't be relevant for your decision.
The phenomenological no-self view, however, takes things one step further, and asks what it even means for something to be experienced "by" someone. Yes, an experience is clearly the result of some kind of information-processing happening within an organism, and that information-processing is (in a functional and a physical sense) happening within some particular organism. But what about the phenomenological experience, the qualia of sensory experience - what does it mean that that's experienced by someone? It would seem to imply that there is a specific observer who observes, for example, sensations of pain. But what, exactly, is that observer? The simplest answer is that there isn't one - sensory experiences aren't experienced by anyone in particular, they just happen. Ken Wilber, in No Boundary:
Begin with the sense of hearing. Close your eyes and attend to the actual process of hearing. Notice all the odd sounds floating around—birds singing, cars rumbling, crickets chirping, kids laughing, TV blaring. But with all those sounds, notice that there is one thing which you cannot hear, no matter how carefully you attend to every sound. You cannot hear the hearer. That is, in addition to those sounds, you cannot hear a hearer of those sounds.
You cannot hear a hearer because there isn’t one. What you have been taught to call a "hearer" is actually just the experience of hearing itself, and you don’t hear hearing. In reality, there is just a stream of sounds, and that stream is not split into a subject and an object. There is no boundary here.
If you let the sensation of being a "hearer" inside the skull dissolve into hearing itself, you might find your "self" merging with the entire world of "outside sounds." As one Zen Master exclaimed upon his enlightenment, "When I heard the temple hell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just the ringing." It was through such an experiment that Avalokiteshvara is said to have gained his enlightenment, for in giving awareness to the process of hearing, he realized that there was no separate self, no hearer, apart from the stream of hearing itself. When you try to hear the subjective hearer, all you find are objective sounds. And that means that you do not hear sounds, you are those sounds. The hearer is every sound which is heard. It is not a separate entity which stands back and hears hearing.
The same is true of the process of seeing. [...] The more I try to see the seer, the more its absence begins to puzzle me. For years it seemed perfectly natural to assume that I was the seer which saw sights. But the moment I go in search of the seer, I find no trace of it. In fact, if I persist in trying to see the seer, all I find are things which are seen. This simply means that I, the "seer," do not see sights—rather I, the "seer," am identical to all those sights now present. The so-called seer is nothing other than everything which is seen. If I look at a tree, there is not one experience called "tree" and another experience called "seeing the tree." There is just the single experience of seeing-thetree. I do not see this seeing any more than I smell smelling or taste tasting.
It seems that whenever we look for a self apart from experience, it vanishes into experience. [...] As you are now thinking about this, can you also find a thinker who is thinking about this?
That is, is there a thinker who thinks the thought, "I am confused," or is there just the thought, "I am confused"? Surely there is just the present thought, because if there were also a thinker of the thought, would you then think about the thinker who is thinking the thought? It seems obvious that what we mistakenly believe to be a thinker is really nothing other than the stream of present thoughts.
Thus, when the present thought was "I am confused," you were not at the same time aware of a thinker who was thinking, "I am confused." There was just the present thought alone—"I am confused." When you then looked for the thinker of that thought, all you found was another present thought, namely "I am thinking I am confused." Never did you find a thinker apart from the present thought, which is only to say that the two are identical. (More.)
(I subscribe to all of these no-self views.)
Kaj_Sotala
My reading of the meaning of "no-self" is quite like yours. Personally I came to these conclusions through the phenomenological frame you summarize here. A phenomenological understanding of the phenomena described by the term "no-self" is crucial in getting to the true meaning of that term, in my opinion. The mediated understanding we can glean through conversation on this topic, though valuable, does not really get us closer to the meaning of that phrase. This is probably due to the structure of our language and it's assumption of a self/actor, that has and does things. I don't really think it's possible to grasp the concept outside of phenomenological investigation.
I'd like to add also something you braced with the "lack of continuity" of self. Lack of essential nature to self. When we consider all the things we think of as constituting "self" as relative phenomena devoid of essential nature, the argument for self is harder to buttress.
(Posting this as a separate comment, since adding it to my other one would make it too long)
Note that in each case, the "no-self" view is really more of an antiprediction than a prediction - it only says that some postulated "self" (either in the form of a central controller, some mysterious immaterial essence that you have but a copy of you doesn't have, or some observer entity that is separate from what is observed) doesn't exist, because we have no reason to presume that it exists. People tend to assume a self by default, and ask for evidence for why one wouldn't exist, but to do so is to privilege the hypothesis. A supporter of a "self view" should provide some coherent definition of a self first, and then some evidence for postulating one in the first place.
I think I was able to understand the first two, but the third one just seems to be asserting (unconvincingly: why should a hearer, if it exists, be able to hear itself?) that we are all p-zombies. I'm pretty damn sure that I, as a conscious, introspective, qualia-having, thinking entity, exist, and that is because I have an awareness of myself, and I do not accept that things that don't exist could have properties such as 'awareness of self'.
I obviously and definitely exist, because nonexistent entities can't do the things that I do.
To assert that we are p-zombies was not the intention. You could shoot a p-zombie without causing any suffering, but you will certainly (even under the third theory) cause suffering if you shoot somebody.
Let me try to condense the third one into a few short sentences, and see if that helps convey the underlying intuition better: "Brains implement cognitive algorithms, which upon being run, produce qualia. But these qualia are not observed by any particular person - to the extent that they can be said to be observed in the first place, they 'observe themselves' and then vanish."
To elaborate a little on that: if a qualia was observed by somebody, that implies that that person would experience the qualia of observing a qualia. And since qualias were presumed to be observed by someone, somebody would then have to observe the qualia of observing a qualia of observing a qualia... leading to an infinite regress. The only way (it seems to me) for that regress to bottom out is by positing that qualia aren't observed by anyone - they just are.
That makes a bit more sense, but I still disagree. We don't have any problems with infinite regresses elsewhere that require such drastic denials of our own existence. I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on. But we don't feel compelled to say "actually the thinking is happening without anything doing it" to rectify this. The infinite regress doesn't seem to cause any problems, and in that case it's an actual infinite regress occurring in my brain, not just a semantic infinite regress occurring in our definitions of 'qualia'.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
experience[experience[redness]] = experience[redness]
I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on.
But that's not an actual infinite regress - you can go up however many levels you like, but it's still a finite number.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
I'm not sure how your "the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself" is different from my "a qualia observes itself".
I'm not sure how your "the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself" is different from my "a qualia observes itself".
The difference, I think, is that there is an observer having the qualia, rather than just a qualia happening by itself without a qualia-haver to have it.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
Agreed - I'm not even sure whether we actually disagree or are just using different terminology.
Upvoted, not because I agree with you, but because it was an interesting text to read. More enjoyable that the original article, which feels like reductionist applause lights. (Although the original article is not that bad, just that its good parts are already better described on LW, so it brings no new value.)
Seems to me that you accuse "neo-Buddhists" of motivated cognition: they profess that there is no self, because they were promised such belief leads to end of suffering. Maybe they are experimentally right about this consequence, but just because some belief makes one happy that does not mean the belief reflects the world correctly. On the other hand, saying that "if a person is interested in exceptional achievement, this is the last thing they should do" is motivated cognition too. Again, even if you are experimentally right that such belief leads to (higher probability of) exceptional achievement, it does not mean that it reflects the world correctly. Seems to me that both of you are basicly saying "state of mind X leads to outcome Y"... and as far as I know, you may both be right (belief of no-self leads to more tranquility, and belief of self leads to more achievement), and still this is somehow irrelevant to the question what is the nature of the "self".
Saying "there is no self" can mean a few different things, so let's try to make the meaning more specific.
First, there is no elementary particle called "self". At the bottom level of the universe, there are atoms, or more precisely amplitudes of quantum configurations, and everything else is built from them, including my brain, my body, or the computer I'm using to write these words. What consequences do I expect? Even if I say "there is no spoon (as an elementary particle)", it does not mean that I can bend the spoon using only my mind, or anything like this. The spoon exists on the same level of reality as I do. I could bend it using my hands. I anticipate that the spoon can be modified or destroyed; depending on material it may corrode or dissolve in acid. I anticipate that if I ever learn the history of the spoon, it will show that the spoon was made, not that it existed since the Big Bang. How about the "self"? Similarly, however it is constructed at the lower levels, on this level it appeared at some time, and it can be destroyed.
Second, human mind consists of parts that are sometimes in conflict with each other. This could be used as a further evidence that it is not an elementary particle, but this argument is on a different level of reality: not a particle level, but psychological level. What consequences do I expect? Internal conflicts, akrasia, compartmentalization, and other symptoms of internal disunity.
On the other hand, saying "there is a self" can mean that a person has a shared history with themselves across the time, so we can expect memories, long-term goals, similar reactions to similar stimuli, and other kinds of similarities. A self-aware human will extend their survival instinct to this continuity; they will not only avoid death and pain today, but will also try to avoid tomorrow's death or pain, though not with the same intensity, because their models of tomorrow are imperfect.
Is there another meaning, another set of anticipated consequences, to saying "there is a self" or "there is no self"?
that's my advice, not for everyone, but for people who think they have a destiny to catch.
That seems like an odd way to put it.
Oughtn't it be your advice for people who have, as you put it, "a destiny to catch," whether they think they do or not?
And rephrasing it in terms of achievement seems even more odd.
What would you say to someone who gives up attending to their identity as "the person trying to achieve X" and instead focuses their attention on increasing the odds of X occurring, without reference to who achieves X?
Oughtn't it be your advice for people who have, as you put it, "a destiny to catch," whether they think they do or not? [and] What would you say to someone who gives up attending to their identity as "the person trying to achieve X" and instead focuses their attention on increasing the odds of X occurring, without reference to who achieves X?
This was advice for people who want to do something exceptional with their lives, have some idea of what it is, and who receive little or no external reinforcement for that aspiration. In such a situation, it becomes entirely up to you to avoid internal and external distraction, and to provide motivation... I suppose you could say all this to a person who you believe to "have a destiny", but that's not what I had in mind. As for the second question, if assisting the accomplishment of X is the most important thing you have to do, then it would make sense to "centralise" on that.
put more simply many people have looked at this stuff so very deeply and critically and accumulated so much debate and literature and paradigms - some people will know a fair bit about what philosophers, sociologists of science, anthropologists, psychologists, scientists etc etc have said, written and argued in this area. it's complex stuff. it doesn't lend itself well to a pseudo-intellectual platitude format.
trying to think of nice ways to say what i want to say. for me i'm afraid this is glaringly full of holes - misunderstanding about the nature of the brain, of knowledge and ways of knowing, of the way we organisation information let alone getting into the more anthropological side of what we actually see - literally how our conditioning literally even effects 'what' we see.
it reads like teeny pop psych trying to sound like science or spirituality whilst not having enough knowledge or maturity/experience to do so and whilst massively underestimating one's audience.
IF you are genuinely interested in this stuff i would recommend learning about comparative epistemologies - go through all the phases and ideas about how we 'know', what is truth etc and have a grasp of what eons of very clever people at different points in history have had to say about it. i'd also recommend some anthropology.
this is just really full of holes, sorry.
Hey all - I typed this out to help me understand, well... how to understand things:
Mental clarity is the ability to read reality accurately.
I don't mean being able to look at the complete objective picture of an event, as you don't have any direct access to that. I'm talking about the ability to read the data presented by your subjective experience: thoughs, sights, sounds, etc. Once you get a clear picture of what that data is, you can then go on and use it to build or falsify your ideas about the world.
This post will focus on the "getting a clear picture" part.
I use the word "read" because it's no different than reading from a book, or from these words. When you read a book, you are actually curious as to what the words are saying. You wouldn't read anything into it that's not there, which would be counterproductive to your understanding.
You just look at the words plainly, and through this your mind automatically recognizes and presents the patterns: the meaning of the sentences, their relation to the topic, the visual imagery associated with them, all of that. If you want to know a truth about reality, just look at it and read what's there.
Want to know what the weather's like? Look outside - read what's going on.
Want to know if the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice versa? Look at the movement of the planets, read what they're doing, see which theory fits better.
Want to check if your beliefs about the world are correct? Take one, read the reality that the belief tries to correspond to, and see how well they compare.
This is the root of all science and all epiphanies.
But if it's so simple and obvious, why am I talking about it?
It's not something that we as a species often do. For trivial matters, sure, for science too, but not for our strongly-held opinions. Not for the beliefs and positions that shape our self-image, make us feel good/comfortable, or get us approval. Not for our political opinions, religious ideas, moral judgements, and little white lies.
If you were utterly convinced that your wife was faithful, moreso, if you liked to think of her in that way, and your friend came along and said she was cheating on you, you'd be reluctant to read reality and check if that's true. Doing this would challenge your comfort and throw you into an unknown world with some potentially massive changes. It would be much more comforting to rationalize why she still might be faithful, than to take one easy look at the true information. It would also more damaging.
Delusion is reading into reality things which aren't there. Telling yourself that everything's fine when it obviously isn't, for example. It's the equivalent of looking at a book about vampires and jumping to the conclusion that it's about wizards.
Sounds insane. You do it all the time. You'll catch yourself if you're willing to read the book of your own thoughts: flowing through your head, in plain view, is a whole mess of opinions and ideas of people, places, and positions you've never even encountered. Crikey!
That mess is incredibly dangerous to have. Being a host to unchecked or false beliefs about the world is like having a faulty map of a terrain: you're bound to get lost or fall off a cliff. Reading the terrain and re-drawing the map accordingly is the only way to accurately know where you're going. Having an accurate map is the only way to achieve your goals.
So you want to develop mental clarity? Be less confused, or more successful? Have a better understanding of the world, the structure of reality, or the accuracy of your ideas?
Just practice the accurate reading of what's going on. Surrender the content of your beliefs to the data gathered by your reading of reality. It's that simple.
It can also be scary, especially when it comes to challenging your "personal" beliefs. It's well worth the fear, however, as a life built on truth won't crumble like one built on fiction.
Truth doesn't crumble.
Stay true.
Further reading:
Stepvhen from Burning true on truth vs. fantasy.
Kevin from Truth Strike on why this skill is important to develop.