Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.
What I would say is that untrained people don't sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word "can" you're claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we're careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they "can't" turns out to be false.
The difference between "trying to try" and "trying on the object level" can be the difference between struggling for months and succeeding in seconds.
I do not understand what you mean with "There can be though, if that's what you want". Do you mean "It's possible to will/train yourself to have a coherent self"?
Something like that, yeah.
Like, you might want to go get Chinese food but not spend your money. Your desires for Chinese food and money are tugging you in different directions rather than in one coherent direction. But it's possible to make up your mind and coherently want to pay for the Chinese food or else not want to eat it. You have to recognize that you can't have the food without paying the money, and figure out which of your new options you prefer.
Do this enough, and you become relatively more coherent.
When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.
Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn't that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?
The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between "I want to focus on my breath" and "I am not focusing on my breath".
Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through "really wanting to" [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you're probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you're currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I'm looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people's claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don't actually desire.
There's no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let's say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you're making here.
One is that they'd be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace "focus on the breath" with "lift 500kg", the answer to "Why aren't you already lifting it, if that's what you want?" is partly that you just can't. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift -- but there'd be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn't at all look like "just not interested in lifting this weight". I do think you're physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it's worth noting this requirement because failing because "can't" is different than failing because "don't wanna, so not really trying".
Another is that "offering a lot of money" is enough to make them really want to do it. There's no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think "should" motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you'll get stronger results -- the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall's 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think "Yeah yeah, he's just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music" -- until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears -- and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was "lifting a car off of [his] kids". It's not that he "couldn't" lift 500kg in the gym, it's that it wasn't worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don't get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they'll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said "Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he's a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it". Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.
How?
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of "I should do this, but I'm struggling to get myself to do it", you notice that you don't want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you're asking for.
What happens if you don't lift 500kg? You don't get people saying "he broke a record"? Yeah, I guess that's okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?
What happens if you don't sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not "come up with rationalizations that sound plausible", but moves you?
It's easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.
Some time ago, I realized that the perspective "I want to focus on the breath" is self-defeating. [...] The problem with "I should focus on the breath" is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving.
It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.
"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here.
You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren't you already drawn to your breath, if that's what you want to focus on?
Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they're there is enough. If it's not, then "I want to focus on the breath" is empirically shown to be false -- so now you have a question of why you're trying to force yourself to do a thing you don't want to do.
The lack of "self language" when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I'm telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I'll just eat or not eat. It's not that there's never any such thing as a "self" that has enough coherence to become a useful model, it's that when you're saying "I want to focus on my breath" and then choosing not to, there's clearly no coherent self wanting to focus on those sensations.
There can be though, if that's what you want.
Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human "understanding" as well!
"Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up" is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.
Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can't "understand" something, I find it quite amusing that they're almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.
My "c'mon guys" here is not "c'mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming." It's more like "look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on 'object level work' that doesn't really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?".
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is "do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?")
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the "c'mon guys" thing, yet I don't do my own separate "rationality practice".
For me, it's basically the same reason why I don't spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I'm not against weight lifting in principle, and I've done a decent amount of it. It's just that when I have a choice between "exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles" and "exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway", the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it "two birds with one stone", it also streamlines the process of making sure you're training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn't always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn't have good feedback, or you're not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn't whether you're doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you're reflecting on your thinking in areas where there's real feedback, and you're noticing that feedback. I do think there's a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there's an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.
1) Yes and no, depending on what you mean by "real thing".
The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a giant tome of scientific knowledge on "hypnosis"; none of which suggests that it's not real. Hypnotists really can do seemingly wild shit that most people cannot do. Most hypnotherapists like to say "It's not mind control like Hollywood depicts", but even that is only partially true. The lawyer Michael Fine used hypnosis to sexually assault his clients and give them amnesia for it, and he is in prison now only because he was dumb enough about it that his victims were able to notice that they were missing memory and that things didn't add up. I've talked to victims of more clever hypnotists who haven't gotten caught.
At the same time, there's a reason hypnotists tend to write book with subtitles like "there's no such thing as hypnosis". I'd argue that it's more accurate to say "there's no such thing as not-hypnosis", but neither really conveys an accurate understanding. The bottom line is that hypnosis isn't what it appears to be, because "not hypnosis" isn't what it appears to be, and once you get familiar with how to do hypnosis and see all the gray area between the black and white, the term kinda loses meaning. Competent hypnotists have a strong tendency to drop all the formalisms, and the most competent have a tendency to stop seeing what they do as "hypnosis" -- at least, in my judge of competence as someone who also doesn't see what I do as "hypnosis".
2) Yes and no. I've gotten some interesting results using "self hypnosis". One that stands out is using self hypnosis to "be comfortable" when I was seasick on a rocking boat one night. It worked, and I got comfortable -- only to feel myself about to vomit anyway. Careful what you wish for.
The hard part isn't "Can hypnosis be used to get my brain to believe X", it's what's true? What's worth doing? Are things going well, relative to the relevant expectations? The more you try to bullshit yourself, the more you'll a) have unintended effects if you succeed, or b) foresee this and find it hard to get yourself to do self hypnosis. The more you see clearly what the right answer is, the less you'll need hypnosis in the first place. The real value in learning hypnosis is as a proof of concept that allows you to see when you're BSing yourself so you can stop that.
Due to the counter-intuitiveness and subtleties here, it's hard to give a less cryptic short answer. I'm actually finishing up a ~20 post 65k word sequence on essentially this exact question. It's about what I've learned about psychology and rationality as a result of picking up hypnosis in 2010. It will give concrete and actionable answers to what you're looking for here, as well as the underlying justification. I have a draft done and basically waiting for a proof reader to make it through, then I'll start posting.
There are several complications in the example you give, and I'm not sure which are intentional.
Let's start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you've been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.
In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to nuke the whole earth, you center it on the bad guy and ignore the kid. If the terrorist will at most kill that one kid if you don't kill him now, then you maximize expected value by biasing your distribution so that hitting the kid requires you to be further down the tail, and the ratio of terrorist/hostage hit goes up as the chance of a hit goes down. If the kid certainly dies if you miss, also dies if you hit him, and is only spared if you hit the terrorist, then you're back to ignoring the kid and centering the distribution on the terrorist -- even if you're more likely to hit the kid than the terrorist.
In the scenario you describe, you don't actually have the situation so well characterized. You'd be forced to lob bullets at a twenty degree inclination, without being able to use sights or see your target -- among many other large uncertainties. In that case it's not that you have a well known distribution and unknown result of the next draw. You don't know what the distribution is. You don't know what the meta distribution the distribution is being drawn from.
Statements like "more likely" are all relative to a model which you presuppose has some validity in context. What's the model, and where do you think you're getting the validity to say it? Even if the simulation God paused the game and spoke to you saying "I'll run the experiment a billion times, and we'll see if the kid gets hit more often", you'd have no idea how to set up that experiment because you don't know what you're controlling for.
I'd guess that you're asking about something in between, but I'm not sure which unknowns are intentional.
No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than "it doesn't always happen" and yours sure don't seem limited to "it doesn't never happen".
Here's the motivating question for this whole essay:
You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it
and here's part of your conclusion
At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.
You're talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what's going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don't deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you're seeking to explain.
To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I'm calling preference inversion.
I don't disagree with this.
My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don't know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I'm using the term "intrinsic preferences" to refer to whatever's left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.
It's this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you're talking about what generally happens, not what "sometimes" happens, and I don't think "intrinsic preferences" is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don't think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don't think "external vs intrinsic" can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as "external" cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he's not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I'd agree with him. Does that make it "not a preference inversion"? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that's not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people -- and that's starting to sound like "just reality". Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like "just reality" and "internal". But it's external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I'd revert to my "intrinsic preferences"?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. "I prefer to continue existing" or something), so the concept of "intrinsic preferences" for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn't fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We're constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the "intrinsic vs external" binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences -- and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you've noticed, there isn't always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as "intrinsic" or "externally pressured", or as "valid" or "invalid". There's just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person "believing in" and regretting not living by their "beliefs", is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between "nonmarital sex is always bad" and "nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems".
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don't know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex -- and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they're embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look "intrinsic", if I'm willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people's belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn't just theoretical. This is a thing I've actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it'd help
Agreed in full
This is what I'm talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It's not just "here's an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation", it's that it completely changes your meditation.
You notice that your third person "I should focus on the breath" is missing the point, and redirect to the first person perspective of "Sensations of breath are arising", but in doing so you no longer even have a claim to the relevance of the breath. So now you have an experience of attending to sensation of breath for no reason, because of fairly handwavy third person reasons.
I'm pointing out that you can use meditation as practice for bringing more conscious awareness to your everyday life by bringing more conscious awareness to your practice of meditation itself. It's a very different experience when you know in first person why what you're attending to is the most interesting thing at the moment, and in third person knowing that you're right to think this is what's worth attending to.
That doesn't mean you "give in" to first person perspectives and give up awareness of your third person perspective, just that you don't give in to third person ideas either and give up or attempt to disconnect your first person perspective. It's practicing being aware of both, and noticing when your behaviors don't make sense according to your own perspectives.