Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action
Next in sequence: Highlights and Shadows

Inspecting thoughts is easier and more accurate if they aren't in your head.  Look at them in another form from the outside, like they belonged to someone else.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the fourth story from Seven Shiny Stories.

One problem with introspection is that the conclusions you draw about your thoughts are themselves thoughts.  Thoughts, of course, can change or disappear before you can extract information about yourself from them.  If a flash of unreasonable anger crosses my mind, this might stick around long enough to make me lash out, but then vanish before I discover how unreasonable it was.  If thoughts weren't slippery like this, luminosity wouldn't be much of a project.  So of course, if you're serious about luminosity, you need a way to pin down your thoughts into a concrete format that will hold still.

You have to pry your thoughts out of your brain.

Writing is the obvious way to do this - for me, anyway.  You don't have to publicize what you extract, so it doesn't have to be aesthetic or skillful, just serviceable for your own reference.  The key is to get it down in a form that you can look at without having to continue to introspect.  Whether this means sketching or scribing or singing, dump your brain out into the environment and have a peek.  It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else.  Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light
Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action!

Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other.  These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories.

The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately.

A stands for "affect".  Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind.  It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad".  You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces.  If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this.  For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention.

B stands for "behavior".  Behavior here means what you actually do.  Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information.  This is critical.  Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps.  This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate.  Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards.  You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior.  Trust the law of averages.

C stands for "circumstance".  This is what's going on around you (what time is it?  what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you?  where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?).  It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering?  are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?)  Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior.  If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity.  And while we often have some trouble distinguishing between various physical ailments, there are strong pressures on our species to be able to tell when we're hungry or in pain.  Don't neglect circumstance when performing correlative exercises just because it doesn't seem as "the contents of your skull"-y.  SAD should be evidence enough that our environments can profoundly influence our feelings.  And wouldn't it be weird, after all, if you felt and acted just the same while ballroom dancing, and while setting the timer on your microwave oven to reheat soup, and while crouching on the floor after having been taken hostage at the bank?

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue
Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity

You can start from psych studies, personality tests, and feedback from people you know when you're learning about yourself.  Then you can throw out the stuff that sounds off, keep what sounds good, and move on.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the first story from Seven Shiny Stories.

Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition?

Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with.  If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are.  ("I'm splendid and brilliant!  The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!")  Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case.

The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox.  There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record.  For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself.  I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road.  Should I call 911?  I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!").  Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychological finding ever.  They don't even align perfectly with each other.  But - controlling for some huge, obvious factors, like if you have a mental illness - it's a good place to start.

Previously in sequence/sequence index: Living Luminously
Next in sequence: Let There Be Light

Luminosity is fun, useful to others, and important in self-improvement.  You should learn about it with this sequence.

Luminosity?  Pah!  Who needs it?

It's a legitimate question.  The typical human gets through life with astonishingly little introspection, much less careful, accurate introspection.  Our models of ourselves are sometimes even worse than our models of each other - we have more data, but also more biases loading up our reflection with noise.  Most of the time, most people act on their emotions and beliefs directly, without the interposition of self-aware deliberation.  And this doesn't usually seem to get anyone maimed or killed - when was the last time a gravestone read "Here Lies Our Dear Taylor, Who Might Be Alive Today With More Internal Clarity About The Nature Of Memory Retrieval"?  Nonsense.  If Taylor needs to remember something, it'll present itself, or not, and if there's a chronic problem with the latter then Taylor can export memories to the environment.  Figuring out how the memories are stored in the first place and tweaking that is not high on the to-do list.

Still, I think it's worth investing considerable time and effort into improving your luminosity.  I submit three reasons why this is so.

It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful.  Accordingly, there follow some such stories.

1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I advise harvesting priors about yourself from outside feedback)

Maria likes compliments.  She loves compliments.  And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out.  It's starting to annoy people.  Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks.  It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things.  Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this.  So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her.  Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person.  Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally.  Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs.

2. Widgets (an idea from The ABC's of Luminosity, in which I explain the value of correlating affect, behavior, and circumstance)

Tony's performance at work is suffering.  Not every day, but most days, he's too drained and distracted to perform the tasks that go into making widgets.  He's in serious danger of falling behind his widget quota and needs to figure out why.  Having just read a fascinating and brilliantly written post on Less Wrong about luminosity, he decides to keep track of where he is and what he's doing when he does and doesn't feel the drainedness.  After a week, he's got a fairly robust correlation: he feels worst on days when he doesn't eat breakfast, which reliably occurs when he's stayed up too late, hit the snooze button four times, and had to dash out the door.  Awkwardly enough, having been distracted all day tends to make him work more slowly at making widgets, which makes him less physically exhausted by the time he gets home and enables him to stay up later.  To deal with that, he starts going for long runs on days when his work hasn't been very tiring, and pops melatonin; he easily drops off to sleep when his head hits the pillow at a reasonable hour, gets sounder sleep, scarfs down a bowl of Cheerios, and arrives at the widget factory energized and focused.

The following posts may be useful background material:  Sorting Out Sticky Brains; Mental Crystallography; Generalizing From One Example

I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did.  (He referred to "being in a position to know" rather than actually knowing, and in his definition, he doesn't quite restrict himself to mental states and events.)  The original ordinary-language sense of "luminous" means "emitting light, especially self-generated light; easily comprehended; clear", which should put the titles into context.

Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness.  A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have.  It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory - anything that might happen or be stored in your brain.  What's going on in your head?  What you come up with when you ponder that question - assuming, nontrivially, that you are accurate - is what's luminous to you.  Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard for a lot of people to tell.  Even if they can identify the occurrence of individual mental events, they have tremendous difficulty modeling their cognition over time, explaining why it unfolds as it does, or observing ways in which it's changed.  With sufficient luminosity, you can inspect your own experiences, opinions, and stored thoughts.  You can watch them interact, and discern patterns in how they do that.  This lets you predict what you'll think - and in turn, what you'll do - in the future under various possible circumstances.