I took the whole thing! That's two years in a row.

There are certain lies that I tell over and over again, where I'm 99% sure lying is the morally correct answer. Stereotypical example: my patient is lying in a lake of poop, or is ringing the call bell for the third time in 15 minutes to tell me that they're thirsty or in pain or need a kleenex, and they're embarrassed and upset because they're sure I must be frustrated and mad that they're making me do so much work. "Of course I don't mind," I've said over and over again. "This doesn't bother me. I've got plenty of time. I just want you to be comfortable, that's my job." When it's 4 am and I desperately want to go on break and eat something, none of these things are true. But it's my job, and I want to want to do it, so the fact that sometimes I desperately don't want to do it is kind of moot. But the last thing a patient in the ICU needs to hear from their nurse is "yes, I'm pissed that you shat in the bed again because I was about to go on break and now I can't and I'm hungry and cranky." I keep that to myself.

...Other than that, I generally don't lie to friends, although I do lie by omission, especially when it comes to my irrational feelings of frustration or irritation with things they do. I'm generally not bothered by being very open with people about i.e. my relationships or other personal things, so I'm confused when other people want to lie or conceal information about these sorts of things. I actually have a really hard time keeping up with other people's systems of lying; when you're friends with two people who both have specific lists of things they don't want you to ever tell the other person, it gets complicated. (For almost a year my best friend was dating a man without telling her ex-husband, and I was seeing her ex-husband every time I went to play with my godson, and I had to remember to lie about a whole bunch of random things like "what did you and my ex-wife do on Saturday?" I respected that it was her choice whether or not to tell him, but I still found this really, really irritating.)

Furthermore, I imagine that this can backfire reaaaly hard: if you manage to develop a strong revulsion for unproductive activities but still can't force yourself to stop browsing reddit (or whatever your vice) then you run a big risk of hitting a willpower-draining death spiral.

That's basically what happened to me: I taught myself to feel guilty whenever I was relaxing and not working, but just the fact that I was feeling guilty about not-working didn't make me any more motivated to actually work. So I would repeatedly get into situations where absolutely nothing felt like worth doing, so I accomplished basically nothing and felt miserable for the whole day. Cue an extended burnout that took me several years to properly recover from.

Oddly, it feels like one key part of my recovery has been to train myself to feel as unguilty as possible about any recreational activity. That way, if I really need a break I can take one, but if I'm on a break I can also honestly ask myself whether my break has gone on long enough and whether I'd want to resume doing something more productive now. Though I'm sure if that's quite right either - it's more like I'm more able to trust that my motivation to do something relaxing will naturally fade after a while, to be replaced with a motivation to be productive again, without me necessarily even needing to watch myself. And of course, since I don't need to actively watch myself, the relaxation may happen faster since I can focus on it more fully. (Of course, sometimes it does take longer, and the key is to be completely fine with that possibility, too.)

The main mechanism here seems to be that guilt not only blocks the relaxation, it also creates negative associations around the productive things - the productivity becomes that nasty uncomfortable reason why you don't get to do fun things, and you flinch away from even thinking about the productive tasks, since thinking about them makes you feel more guilty about not already doing them. Which in turn blocks you from developing a natural motivation to do them.

So if someone did go by this mindhacking route, they should be very careful to avoid developing guilt. The guest who had developed a dislike for fritos didn't dislike them because eating them made her feel guilty: she disliked them because she had started noticing features in them that she felt were repulsive. Also, I suspect that "actively pay attention to the features in productive tasks that are desirable" is just as important an component as noticing the displeasing things in non-productive tasks. If we assume the opportunity cost model of willpower, then your motivation to do something is proportional to the difference in estimated value between that thing and the second most highly ranked thing, implying that increasing the perceived value of the productive things can be even more efficient than decreasing the value of other things. (Guilt in this model would act as a negative modifier to the values.)

Also closely related posts: Pain and gain motivation, It's okay to be (at least a little) irrational.

Here is the paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

Two points of relevance that I see are:

If we care about the nature of morphisms of computations only because of some computations being people, the question is fundamentally what our concept of people refers to, and if it can refer to anything at all.

If we view isomorphic as a kind of extension of our naïve view of equals, we can ask what the appropriate generalisation is when we discover that equals does not correspond to reality and we need a new ontology as in the linked paper.

Let's start small. Since we are talking about algorithms (better yet, about programs of a universal Turing machine), what about if two programs can match the same input on the same output?
Would that suffice as a definition of isomorphism, even if they have wildly different resource usages (including time)?

Here is a post on a related question. As I said there, this paper is relevant.

(homeo?)morphic?

You probably mean homomorphism, unless you really mean a continuous (in some sense) invertible transformation between the two programs.

Anyway, the definition of homomorphism is a "structure-preserving map", so you need to figure out what "structure of consciousness" even means.

To start small, you might want to define the term "structure" for some simple algorithm. For example, do two different programs outputting first 10 natural numbers have the same structure? What if one prints it and the other uses TTS? Does it matter what language the numbers are in? What about two programs, one printing first ten numbers and the other second ten numbers? Can you come up with more examples?

Grothendieck's mind was indeed extremely strange. The levels of abstraction upon abstraction he achieved in algebraic geometry boggles the mind.

But I don't think you can really make meaningful comparisons between thought processes based on self-reporting. One complication is that different fields of mathematics work differently in this regard. In things like statistics, analysis, and geometry, you rely heavily on examples. In things like algebra, examples can indeed be cumbersome and hindering, because the point of algebra is to simplify things to symbol manipulation. Of course, it might also be the case that people with more abstract-type thinking are naturally drawn to algebra.

It would be useful to look at the 'information content' of storing examples vs. storing symbolic representations, and see how that compares across different mathematical subjects.

Can you provide some more background? What is a morphism of computations?