A view to the gallery of my mind

For a few months this fall, I was part of a poly triad which ultimately didn’t work out… but the moments when it did work, worked. So well in fact, that I suspect that any relationship with only two people involved will from now on feel somehow lacking to me, no matter how good otherwise.

There were two of us guys involved with one gal, with the guys starting out as strangers to each other. Still, from the start it was clear that everyone wanted everybody to be happy, and was going to act accordingly.

To me, at the best moments, we felt like family. Not just two men who happened to both have a relationship with the same woman, but a cohesive unit doing its best that everyone in it (as well as the kid from a previous relationship) would be as well off as possible. Thinking back to it, I recall moments like:

• all three brainstorming and looking up stuff about how to make the kid sleep better at night, or to be more willing to sit still while riding a bus
• one of us reading a book aloud to the two others, all three cuddling together
• everyone spending several hours carrying some fresh wood together
• all three sitting together and discussing some conflicts that had come up between two of them, with the third one offering a more neutral outside perspective and acting as a general calming force

It’s hard to describe, but I feel like there was a very strong sense in which there being three of us brought a sense of extra stability to the relationship. If someone was upset or doing badly, nobody needed to feel like they alone had the primary burden of helping that person out. Whoever needed support, there were two other people to shoulder the effort of providing it. And nobody would hesitate to provide it, if only they were in a shape where they could.

While it ultimately didn’t work out, that feeling of being a tight-knit family, with a sense of “one for all, all for one”… I’m going to miss that, in any relationship that doesn’t have it. You can get the sense of mutual support with just a single couple, of course; but things like that sense of “we’re both in love with the same person so we’re going to work together to make her happy; and we know that she cares about us both and will be the happiest if both of us are happy, so we’ll also do our best to help each other out whenever we can”… that I don’t think you can really get without having a triad.

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.

Unlike the other kids in my neighborhood, who went to the Finnish-speaking elementary school right near our suburban home, I went to a Swedish-speaking school much closer to the inner city. Because of this, my mom would come pick me up from school, and sometimes we would go do things in town, since we were already nearby.

At one point we developed a habit of making a video rental store the first stop after school. We’d return whatever we had rented the last time, and I’d get to pick one thing to rent next. The store had a whole rack devoted to NES games, and there was a time when I was systematically going through their whole collection, seeking to play everything that seemed interesting. But at times I would also look at their VHS collection, and that was how I first found Star Wars.

I don’t have a recollection of what it was to see any of the Star Wars movies for the very first time. But I do have various recollections of how they influenced my life, afterwards.

—

For many years, there was “Sotala Force”, an imaginary space army in a setting of make believe that combined elements of Star Wars and Star Trek. I was, of course, its galaxy-famous leader, with some of my friends at the time holding top positions in it. It controlled maybe one third of the galaxy, and its largest enemy was something very loosely patterned after the Galactic Empire, which held maybe four tenths of the galaxy.

The leader of the enemy army, called (Finns, don’t laugh too much now) Kiero McLiero, took on many traits from Emperor Palpatine. These included the ability, taken from the Dark Empire comics, to keep escaping death by always resurrecting in a new body, meaning that our secret missions attacking his bases could end in climactic end battles where we’d kill him, over and over again. Naturally, me and my friends were Jedi Knights and Masters, using a combination of the Force, lightsabers, and whatever other weapons we happened to have, to carry out our noble missions.

—

There was a girl in elementary school who I sometimes hung out with, and who I had a huge and hopelessly unrequited crush on. Among other shared interests like Lord of the Rings, we were both fans of Star Wars, and would sometimes discuss it. I only remember some fragments of those discussions: an agreement that Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were superior movies to A New Hope; both having heard of the Tales of the Jedi comics but neither having managed to find them anywhere; a shared feeling of superiority and indignation towards everyone who was making such a blown-out-of-proportions fuss about Jar-Jar Binks in the Phantom Menace, given that Lucas had clearly said that he was aiming these new movies at children.

The third last memory I have of seeing her, was at a trip to a beach we had at the end of 9th grade; I’d brought a toy dual-bladed lightsaber, while she’d brought a single-bladed one. There were many duels on that beach.

The very last memory that I have of seeing her, after we’d gone on to different schools, was when we ran across each other in the premiere of the Revenge of the Sith, three years later. We chatted a bit about the movie, what had happened to us in the intervening years, and then went our separate ways again.

—

For a kid interested in computer games in 1990s Finland, Pelit (“Games”) was The magazine to read. Another magazine that was of interest, also having computer games but mostly covering more general PC issues, was MikroBitti. Of these, both occasionally discussed a fascinating-sounding thing, table-top role-playing games, with MikroBitti running a regular column that discussed them. They sounded totally awesome and I wanted to get one. I asked my dad if I could have an RPG, and he was willing to buy one, if only I told him what they looked like and where they might be found. This was the part that left me stumped.

Until one day I found a store that… I don’t remember what exactly it sold. It might have been an explicit gaming store or it might only have had games as one part of its collection. And I have absolutely no memory of how I found it. But one way or the other, there it was, including the star prize: a Star Wars role-playing game (the West End Games one, second edition).

For some reason that I have forgotten, I didn’t actually get the core rules at first. The first thing that I got was a supplement, Heroes & Rogues, which had a large collection of different character templates depicting all kinds of Rebel, Imperial, and neutral characters, as well as an extended “how to make a realistic character” section. The book was in English, but thanks to my extensive NES gaming experience, I could read it pretty well at that point. Sometime later, I got the actual core rules.

I’m not sure if I started playing right away; I have the recollection that I might have spent a considerable while just buying various supplements for the sake of reading them, before we started actually playing. “We” in this case was me and one friend of mine, because we didn’t have anyone else to play with. This resulted in creative non-standard campaigns, in which we both had several characters (in addition to me also being the game master) who we played simultaneously. Those games lasted until we found the local university’s RPG club (which also admitted non-university students; I think I was 13 the first time I showed up). After finding it, we transitioned to more ordinary campaigns and those weird two-player mishmashes ended. They were fun while they lasted, though.

—

After the original gaming store where I’d been buying my Star Wars supplements closed, I eventually found another. And it didn’t only have Star Wars RPG supplements! It also had Star Wars novels that were in English, which had never been translated into Finnish!

Obviously, I had to buy them and read them.

So it came to be that the first novel that I read in English was X-Wing: Wedge’s Gamble, telling the story of the Rebellion’s (or, as it was known by that time, the New Republic’s) struggle to capture Coruscant some years after the events in Return of the Jedi. I remember that this was sometime in yläaste (“upper elementary school”), so I was around 13-15 years old. An actual novel was a considerably bigger challenge for my English-reading skills than RPG supplements were, so there was a lot of stuff in the novel that I didn’t quite get. But still, I finished it, and then went on to buy and read the rest of the novels in the X-Wing series.

—

The Force Awakens, Disney’s new Star Wars film, comes out today. Star Wars has previously been a part of many notable things in my life. It shaped the make believe setting that I spent several years playing in, it was one of the things I had in common with the first girl I ever had a crush on, its officially licensed role-playing game was the first one that I ever played, and one of its licensed novels was the first novel that I ever read in English.

Today it coincides with another major life event. The Finnish university system is different from the one in many other countries in that, for a long while, we didn’t have any such thing as a Bachelor’s degree. You were admitted to study for five years, and then at the end, you would graduate with a Master’s degree. Reforms carried out in 2005, intended to make Finnish higher education more compatible with the systems in other countries, introduced the concept of a Bachelor’s degree as an intermediary step that you needed to do in between. But upon being admitted to university, you would still be given the right to do both degrees, and people still don’t consider a person to have really graduated before they have their Master’s.

I was admitted to university back in 2006. For various reasons, my studies have taken longer than the recommended time, which would have had me graduating with my Master’s in 2011. But late, as they say, is better than never: today’s my official graduation day for my MSc degree. There will be a small ceremony at the main university building, after which I will celebrate by going to see what my old friends Luke, Leia and Han are up to these days.

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.

Two of the biggest mistakes that I used to make that made me a poor conversationalist:

1. Thinking too much about what I was going to say next. If another person is speaking, don’t think about anything else, where “anything else” includes your next words. Instead, just focus on what they’re saying, and the next thing to say will come to mind naturally. If it doesn’t, a brief silence before you say something is not the end of the world. Let your mind wander until it comes up with something.

2. Asking myself questions like “is X interesting / relevant / intelligent-sounding enough to say here”, and trying to figure out whether the thing on my mind was relevant to the purpose of the conversation. Some conversations have an explicit purpose, but most don’t. They’re just the participants saying whatever random thing comes to their mind as a result of what the other person last said. Obviously you’ll want to put a bit of effort to screening off any potentially offensive or inappropriate comments, but for the most part you’re better off just saying whatever random thing comes to your mind.

Relatedly, I suspect that these kinds of tendencies are what make introverts experience social fatigue. Social fatigue seems [in some people’s anecdotal experience; don’t have any studies to back me up here] to be associated with mental inhibition: the more you have to spend mental resources on holding yourself back, the more exhausted you will be afterwards. My experience suggests that if you can reduce the amount of filters on what you say, then this reduces mental inhibition, and correspondingly reduces the extent to which socializing causes you fatigue.

Peter McCluskey reports of a similar experience; other people mention varying degrees of agreement or disagreement.

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.

2014 was one of the best and worst years of my life.

It started with the worst: in the first three months or so, my girlfriend and I broke up, the part-time job I was doing started feeling unmotivating, and I realized I didn’t have the energy to both do the job and work on my thesis at the same time. Romance, work, studies: three major spheres of my life, all crashing down around the same time.

I mostly recovered from the breakup and put my thesis on a temporary hold, but work continued to be unmotivating. In the summer I went to see a psychiatrist, and was prescribed antidepressants. Thus started the better part of the year, as I realized that I’d been suffering from a mild depression for years without knowing it. The meds went a long way towards fixing that, and everything started looking brighter. There were still down periods, but even they were better than the down periods I was having before the meds.

Of the concrete things that happened, there are so many things I could cover.

I’ve definitely been becoming a lot more social and extroverted during the year. In April there was the first Less Wrong European Community Weekend in Berlin, which was a lot of fun by itself, and also led to me becoming close friends with several people. In November I attended the Center for Applied Rationality’s workshop in England, which led to me starting my own rationality workshops here in Finland, and also crafting a local, more tightly-knit community of people who would support each other in making each other’s lives awesome. The workshop also caused me to finally start organizing regular “come and hang out with me in a bar” evenings like I’d been intending to do for the last half a year. Also made and strengthened several other friendships in unrelated ways.

A large part of the boosts also came from the antidepressants, as well as reading several books which helped me considerably level up my social skills. The Charisma Myth was the first one, then followed by Non-Violent Communication which not only helped me resolve conflicts I’d been having with others but also make my own emotions clearer. In the last few days I’ve started reading Crucial Conversations, which has a lot of similarities with Non-Violent Communication but also covers many things which NVC didn’t.

I continued working on some academic papers on the side, kind of as a hobby. At the beginning of the year, “The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions” by Stuart Armstrong, Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh, and me was published in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Around the end of the year, I had a paper accepted to an AAAI workshop on AI and ethics, and Physica Scripta formally published my and Roman Yampolskiy’s paper from 2013 that we’d only had up as a technical report so far. Google Scholar reports that there were 15 citations to my different papers in 2014, up from the 9 citations that I got in 2013.

On the topic of hobbies, I had for a long time liked the idea of game mastering role-playing games, but in practice rarely had the time or energy to do the necessary preparation for them. Now I finally managed to get into different RPGs which were designed to only require minimal advance preparation, and turned out to be a lot more fun to run than the old-style games. (E.g. different move engine games starting from Apocalypse World, and games like J Matias Kivikangas’s Here Be Dragons, which I unfortunately still haven’t gotten a chance to run. Soon!)

On a front that’s harder to describe, I started a large-scale restructuring of how I thought about ethics and morality. In a sense, I had ended up with a kind of an externalized sense of morality, which caused me a lot of guilt and stress. I started making a transition towards a more internalized morality, which had helped a lot.

Now as we enter 2015, a lot about my future is unclear. I’m intending to finally graduate with my MSc around summer, and I’m uncertain of what I will do after that. I’ve actually been feeling sufficiently extroverted as to start pondering whether I would actually prefer some kind of a career that involved being social and interacting with lots of different people on a daily basis, as opposed to the more introverted, technical kinds of careers that I’d been mostly thinking of before.

In any case, I feel that I’m now leveling up much faster than I was before, and am becoming far better positioned to tackle different challenges in life. Hopefully things will go well.

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.

I just got home from a four-day rationality workshop in England that was organized by the Center For Applied Rationality (CFAR). It covered a lot of content, but if I had to choose a single theme that united most of it, it was listening to your emotions.

That might sound like a weird focus for a rationality workshop, but cognitive science has shown that the intuitive and emotional part of the mind (”System 1”) is both in charge of most of our behavior, and also carries out a great deal of valuable information-processing of its own (it’s great at pattern-matching, for example). Much of the workshop material was aimed at helping people reach a greater harmony between their System 1 and their verbal, logical System 2. Many of people’s motivational troubles come from the goals of their two systems being somehow at odds with each other, and we were taught to have our two systems have a better dialogue with each other, harmonizing their desires and making it easier for information to cross from one system to the other and back.

To give a more concrete example, there was the technique of goal factoring. You take a behavior that you often do but aren’t sure why, or which you feel might be wasted time. Suppose that you spend a lot of time answering e-mails that aren’t actually very important. You start by asking yourself: what’s good about this activity, that makes me do it? Then you try to listen to your feelings in response to that question, and write down what you perceive. Maybe you conclude that it makes you feel productive, and it gives you a break from tasks that require more energy to do.

Next you look at the things that you came up with, and consider whether there’s a better way to accomplish them. There are two possible outcomes here. Either you conclude that the behavior is an important and valuable one after all, meaning that you can now be more motivated to do it. Alternatively, you find that there would be better ways of accomplishing all the goals that the behavior was aiming for. Maybe taking a walk would make for a better break, and answering more urgent e-mails would provide more value. If you were previously using two hours per day on the unimportant e-mails, possibly you could now achieve more in terms of both relaxation and actual productivity by spending an hour on a walk and an hour on the important e-mails.

At this point, you consider your new plan, and again ask yourself: does this feel right? Is this motivating? Are there any slight pangs of regret about giving up my old behavior? If you still don’t want to shift your behavior, chances are that you still have some motive for doing this thing that you have missed, and the feelings of productivity and relaxation aren’t quite enough to cover it. In that case, go back to the step of listing motives.

Or, if you feel happy and content about the new direction that you’ve chosen, victory!

Notice how this technique is all about moving information from one system to another. System 2 notices that you’re doing something but it isn’t sure why that is, so it asks System 1 for the reasons. System 1 answers, ”here’s what I’m trying to do for us, what do you think?” Then System 2 does what it’s best at, taking an analytic approach and possibly coming up with better ways of achieving the different motives. Then it gives that alternative approach back to System 1 and asks, would this work? Would this give us everything that we want? If System 1 says no, System 2 gets back to work, and the dialogue continues until both are happy.

Again, I emphasize the collaborative aspect between the two systems. They’re allies working for common goals, not enemies. Too many people tend towards one of two extremes: either thinking that their emotions are stupid and something to suppress, or completely disdaining the use of logical analysis. Both extremes miss out on the strengths of the system that is neglected, and make it unlikely for the person to get everything that they want.

As I was heading back from the workshop, I considered doing something that I noticed feeling uncomfortable about. Previous meditation experience had already made me more likely to just attend to the discomfort rather than trying to push it away, but inspired by the workshop, I went a bit further. I took the discomfort, considered what my System 1 might be trying to warn me about, and concluded that it might be better to err on the side of caution this time around. Finally – and this wasn’t a thing from the workshop, it was something I invited on the spot – I summoned a feeling of gratitude and thanked my System 1 for having been alert and giving me the information. That might have been a little overblown, since neither system should actually be sentient by itself, but it still felt like a good mindset to cultivate.

Although it was never mentioned in the workshop, what comes to mind is the concept of wu-wei from Chinese philosophy, a state of ”effortless doing” where all of your desires are perfectly aligned and everything comes naturally. In the ideal form, you never need to force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, or to expend willpower on an unpleasant task. Either you want to do something and do, or don’t want to do it, and don’t.

A large number of the workshop’s classes – goal factoring, aversion factoring and calibration, urge propagation, comfort zone expansion, inner simulation, making hard decisions, Hamming questions, againstness – were aimed at more or less this. Find out what System 1 wants, find out what System 2 wants, dialogue, aim for a harmonious state between the two. Then there were a smaller number of other classes that might be summarized as being about problem-solving in general.

The classes about the different techniques were interspersed with ”debugging sessions” of various kinds. In the beginning of the workshop, we listed different bugs in our lives – anything about our lives that we weren’t happy with, with the suggested example bugs being things like ”every time I talk to so-and-so I end up in an argument”, ”I think that I ‘should’ do something but don’t really want to”, and ”I’m working on my dissertation and everything is going fine – but when people ask me why I’m doing a PhD, I have a hard time remembering why I wanted to”. After we’d had a class or a few, we’d apply the techniques we’d learned to solving those bugs, either individually, in pairs, or small groups with a staff member or volunteer TA assisting us. Then a few more classes on techniques and more debugging, classes and debugging, and so on.

The debugging sessions were interesting. Often when you ask someone for help on something, they will answer with direct object-level suggestions – if your problem is that you’re underweight and you would like to gain some weight, try this or that. Here, the staff and TAs would eventually get to the object-level advice as well, but first they would ask – why don’t you want to be underweight? Okay, you say that you’re not completely sure but based on the other things that you said, here’s a stupid and quite certainly wrong theory of what your underlying reasons for it might be, how does that theory feel like? Okay, you said that it’s mostly on the right track, so now tell me what’s wrong with it? If you feel that gaining weight would make you more attractive, do you feel that this is the most effective way of achieving that?

Only after you and the facilitator had reached some kind of consensus of why you thought that something was a bug, and made sure that the problem you were discussing was actually the best way to address to reasons, would it be time for the more direct advice.

At first, I had felt that I didn’t have very many bugs to address, and that I had mostly gotten reasonable advice for them that I might try. But then the workshop continued, and there were more debugging sessions, and I had to keep coming up with bugs. And then, under the gentle poking of others, I started finding the underlying, deep-seated problems, and some things that had been motivating my actions for the last several months without me always fully realizing it. At the end, when I looked at my initial list of bugs that I’d come up with in the beginning, most of the first items on the list looked hopelessly shallow compared to the later ones.

Often in life you feel that your problems are silly, and that you are affected by small stupid things that ”shouldn’t” be a problem. There was none of that at the workshop: it was tacitly acknowledged that being unreasonably hindered by ”stupid” problems is just something that brains tend to do.  Valentine, one of the staff members, gave a powerful speech about ”alienated birthrights” – things that all human beings should be capable of engaging in and enjoying, but which have been taken from people because they have internalized beliefs and identities that say things like ”I cannot do that” or ”I am bad at that”. Things like singing, dancing, athletics, mathematics, romantic relationships, actually understanding the world, heroism, tackling challenging problems. To use his analogy, we might not be good at these things at first, and may have to grow into them and master them the way that a toddler grows to master her body. And like a toddler who’s taking her early steps, we may flail around and look silly when we first start doing them, but these are capacities that – barring any actual disabilities – are a part of our birthright as human beings, which anyone can ultimately learn to master.

Then there were the people, and the general atmosphere of the workshop. People were intelligent, open, and motivated to work on their problems, help each other, and grow as human beings. After a long, cognitively and emotionally exhausting day at the workshop, people would then shift to entertainment ranging from wrestling to telling funny stories of their lives to Magic: the Gathering. (The game of ”bunny” was an actual scheduled event on the official agenda.) And just plain talk with each other, in a supportive, non-judgemental atmosphere. It was the people and the atmosphere that made me the most reluctant to leave, and I miss them already.

Would I recommend CFAR’s workshops to others? Although my above description may sound rather gushingly positive, my answer still needs to be a qualified ”mmmaybe”. The full price tag is quite hefty, though financial aid is available and I personally got a very substantial scholarship, with the agreement that I would pay it at a later time when I could actually afford it.

Still, the biggest question is, will the changes from the workshop stick? I feel like I have gained a valuable new perspective on emotions, a number of useful techniques, made new friends, strengthened my belief that I can do the things that I really set my mind on, and refined the ways by which I think of the world and any problems that I might have – but aside for the new friends, all of that will be worthless if it fades away in a week. If it does, I would have to judge even my steeply discounted price as ”not worth it”. That said, the workshops do have a money-back guarantee if you’re unhappy with the results, so if it really feels like it wasn’t worth it, I can simply choose to not pay. And if all the new things do end up sticking, it might still turn out that it would have been worth paying even the full, non-discounted price.

CFAR does have a few ways by which they try to make the things stick. There will be Skype follow-ups with their staff, for talking about how things have been going since the workshop. There is a mailing list for workshop alumni, and the occasional events, though the physical events are very US-centric (and in particular, San Francisco Bay Area-centric).

The techniques that we were taught are still all more or less experimental, and are being constantly refined and revised according to people’s experiences. I have already been thinking of a new skill that I had been playing with for a while before the workshop, and which has a bit of that ”CFAR feel” – I will aim to have it written up soon and sent to the others, and maybe it will eventually make its way to the curriculum of a future workshop. That should help keep me engaged as well.

We shall see. Until then, as they say in CFAR – to victory!

Originally published at Kaj Sotala. You can comment here or there.

For those curious, basically all of my meditation has been tranquility meditation.

Friday, March 9th. 30 minutes. Attempted to meditate while lying on my back, figuring that I wouldn't fall asleep since I'd just had my morning caffeine. Not very successful. I was maybe a little too relaxed, my thoughts wandered and I had difficulties feeling my breath in order to concentrate on it.

Sunday, March 11th. 20 minutes. Attempted to meditate in the morning, noticed that I was basically just falling asleep, then took a cold shower and tried again. Felt nice, though not particularly exciting.

Monday, March 12th. 50 minutes. I had the timer on 30 minutes, but I just ignored it at first. Somebody had recommended drinking green tea about half an hour before meditating, so I gave it a try. I only had bagged tea at hand, but I put two bags in the same cup to get a stronger effect.

Something happened, though I am not sure what it was. I ended up concentrating on various feelings of pain and bidding them welcome - not in a masochistic way, but rather in such a way where I genuinely welcomed pain and didn't consider it something that would cause suffering in the first place. I dug up memories of various situations where I'd been embarassed or ashamed, and each such memory seemed to make the state of concentration deeper. It felt nice.

From this point on, each of my meditation sessions has been preceded by a cup of green tea, made using 2-4 tea bags.

Tuesday, March 13th. 60 minutes. I sat meditating with my fingers crossed, and at one point relatively early on I freaked out as my fingers started feeling incorporal. They also felt like they were drifting to be inside each other. Then the frightened surprise pulled me out of that state, and although I tried to reach it again, I could not.

Wednesday, March 14th. ~45 minutes. I started gradually losing feeling in my fingers and feet, after which the numbness spread to the rest of my body. Only my head and part of my chest (where I was too conscious of my breathing) retained feeling. Then at some point I realized that although large parts of my body were without feeling, I still remained aware of where the borders of my body parts were. After I realized this, feeling pretty quickly returned to them.

After that, the lack of feeling came and went for the rest of my meditation session. There were moments when I noticed, noted, and let go of feelings whose existence I hadn't even realized before. I started to get a small inkling of what the complete cessation of sensation that's said to come with the deepest meditative states might be like. I became aware of having a sense of time, a feeling of presence in my own head, and a feeling of moving my attention around. I attempted to focus on those to make them vanish as well, but was for now unable to do so.

I also felt really good and happy for the rest of the day.

Thursday, March 15th. 20 minutes of meditation, bathroom break, 40 minutes of meditation. At the end of the second meditation session, I got a clear feeling of something happening, but I don't know what it was. After it had happened, I got a sense of this session's leassons had now been learned. It told me that I could stop meditating now, since I wasn't going to learn anything more before the next time. My concentration seemed to grow considerably more shallow at the same time.

Whether that feeling actually meant anything or whether it was just a trick of my brain is an interesting question. I'm presuming that it was just a random feeling: to use a computer metaphor, meditation practice seems to be about exploiting some accidential glitch in the brain which likely never played an actual evolutionary role. Given that, whatever subconscious system produced that "this lesson is now over" sensation is probably just as clueless about what was going than the rest of me was.

This turned out to be a "let's practice meditation / concentration all the time, everywhere" day. Pretty much no matter where I went or what I did, I used the opportunity to do concentration practice and dismiss unwanted thoughts or feelings. When waiting for a bus, for instance, I picked the feeling of impatience and pretty much just got rid of it. I started thinking that if somebody could learn to do this reliably and for any feeling / emotion, it would let them have complete control over their own mind, only suffering from the fears and dislikes that they wanted to suffer from. I don't know whether that's actually possible, but the possibility is exciting to think about.

Friday, March 16th. 20 minutes, break, 40 minutes. Nothing particularly exciting happened on this day.

Saturday, March 17th. 60 minutes. At one point, I noticed that my meditative state was failing to deepen because I was clearly waiting for it to deepen, and the feeling of expectation messed things up. I then tried to rid myself of the expectation, and I was kinda successful, though through an unexpected route: by visualizing and looping in my head the Sean Den Förste Banan video. (Yes, you may point and laugh at me now.) As I did so, I felt my concentration clearly deepen.

After a while of doing that, I switched to counting numbers. Suddenly I realized that I was not experiencing them as raw numbers, but as my age. For instance, when I visualized in my head the number 15, I also saw images of myself when I was 15. As I got past my current age, the images grew more abstract. As I approached age 100 I felt/saw myself get older, but then apparently radical life extension was invented and my body stopped getting frail. Past age 100, there was a feeling of having lived for a long time and having seen everything, and of living in a drastically different world than pretty much anyone who wasn't as old. I think I died, presumably in an accident, around age 180 or so, but I kept counting until I reached 300. "While I was dead" I think there was a feeling of stillness and a lack of motion, possibly combined with a sense of things continuing to happen all around me.

Eventually I concluded that nothing more was happening and started exploring impermanence by studying the various sensations of my body and trying to break them into smaller and smaller components. Most of it I did to the sensations from my feet. Soon my feet started feeling odd, as I had no idea of whether my muscles were relaxed or tense - they felt like they could have been both.

Monday, March 19th. 65 minutes. Mildly altered states of consciousness, nothing particularly special. Again, I noticed that I was expecting something interesting to happen, and that expectation prevented me from just being a neutral observer of my own mind. I tried to get rid of the feeling of expectation, but then I realized that this too implied an expectation of change - trying to will something gone involves expecting that it will be gone. So then I tried to just let go of it without specificially trying to let go of it. (Yeah, I can't explain it any better than that.) Not too good at that yet - I think I might have had momentary successes, but each time they caused an "oh, I did it, something's happening now" feeling which ruined it. I'll just have to keep practicing.

Since last Wednesday, meditation has frequently led to me losing feeling in my fingers and feet, but I haven't experienced the almost-whole-body lack of feeling again.

I've finally been achieving some progress in meditation, so I figured I'd give you a report and also write things down so that I won't forget.

About a month or two ago, an iRL friend of mine found Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and started doing meditation practice. Since he had done things involving concentration practice before, he made rapid progress. Inspired by his practices and partially because I'd so quickly lost my position as being the superior meditation guru of us two, I too started making attempts at meditation again.

On a Monday maybe three weeks ago, I realized that something had clicked. You know that thing when you try to learn a skill, spend a long time being bad at it, and then suddenly one morning you wake up and realize that you're suddenly good at it? That happened to me and my concentration ability: concentrating on just one thing felt easier in an almost qualitative way, and was far less frustrating.

I reached the first samatha jhana the following day, the first time since my only previous jhana experience last summer. I put myself in the first jhana several times afterwards (including once while walking next to a noisy road), and also tried doing some noting practice. Suddenly I was using almost all available opportunities to do concentration practice, like when I was preparing a sandwich snack. I also thought about the Three Characteristics a lot.

On Friday that week, I woke up in the morning and turned on the lights. The first thing that I happened to look at was the back of my hand (which I'd just used to turn the lights on), and I was startled to realize that I was seeing in it far more details than I'd done before. When I looked around me, I could see details of things jumping out at me in a way they hadn't done before. While looking at a fantasy map on my wall, I noticed the names of the different regions for pretty much the first time - previously I'd only looked at the "big picture view" of the map. Things also looked sharper somehow, as if I'd just gotten stronger glasses.

I expect that if I'd done meditation practice at this time, the effect might have become permanent. As it was, I didn't have the chance as I had promised to go see a friend. By the time I got back home, six hours later, my perception had gradually faded back to normal.

For some reason, this caused a longer interruption to my practice. Getting to the first jhana felt more difficult, and I lost my inclination to keep doing concentration practices all the time. This might have had something to do with the fact that the noting practices had made it more difficult to really try to solidify any emotion, since I'd just been trying to think of them as impermanent. For a while, I was basically unable to meditate while at home, though for some reason I noticed that getting to a very light first jhana was still possible if I was walking outside. Sitting still at home, though, not much luck.

Then a while later, I decided to try out tranquility meditation. The first time, recalling a time when I'd felt happy and using the way I had felt as my concentration focus, felt quite nice, and I think I got to the first jhana. Unlike my previous jhanas, it was almost entirely lacking the irritation of needing to constantly maintain the feeling.

My next attempts at tranquility meditation fared worse. Using feelings of happiness as an object became harder, because for whatever reason, I suddenly had difficulties recalling my feelings on occasions when I'd felt happy, or indeed recalling any occasions when I'd been happy in the first place. And there was again the thing about having difficulty solidifying anything, feeling included.

So after some days, I decided to use the breath as an object instead. Now, there had been *one* lasting effect from that one Friday: I had briefly done some meditation on the way to my friend, and thought that I could see faint lights even with my eyes closed. And those lights had began to show up on later meditation sessions, as well. They don't seem to be *entirely* hallucinatory, since they are clearly stronger when I'm meditating somewhere well-lit, but I have also seen a much weaker form of them when when meditating in total darkness.

So this time around, I was doing tranquility meditation with the breath as an object, and I began to really notice the lights. Mostly I seem to sort of see them from the corner of my (closed) eyes, and if I try to focus my attention to them I'm not sure if I'm actually seeing any light at all. Now however, there were times that they got strong enough to persist when focused on, and I could follow them as they moved about in my visual field. They also seemed to work as feedback - when I e.g. focused on a feeling of tension and tried to let it go, the lights got considerably stronger. In general, they seemed to intensify whenever I was doing "the right thing".

I seemed to get quite strongly into... something, not entirely sure what. Some sort of jhana, I suppose. There was a feeling of movement, and my body seemed to grow heavy and slightly numb, with all sensation in the region around my head, where the lights were and where I'd also been focusing on some tension. Something seemed to be happening, but I wasn't sure of what.

When I emerged from meditation, I had an odd feeling, pretty close to how MCTB describes the first vipassana jhana, Knowledge of Mind and Body. I also seemed able to visualize things more vividly. I meditated two more times that day, though I didn't get an equally strong experience from those occasions, and I think my mental state actually faded back towards normality during them. On the third time I also got rather drowsy (I guess I hadn't slept enough that night), and ended up feeling drowsy for the rest of the day, unable to get much done. By evening I was feeling rather normal again.

That was yesterday. This morning I started with some more meditation, which went roughly the same, though again my experience wasn't nearly as strong and I didn't seem to get as deeply into it. Part of this was probably that I couldn't decide how to act regarding the lights: should I treat them as feedback but essentially ignore them, e.g. keep doing the things that made them stronger but not particularly focus on them? Or should I try to gradually shift from using my breath as a focus to using them as a focus? Or should I do neither, just treating them as yet another observation to be noticed and then let go? I think I instinctively did whatever the "right" thing was before, but I can't remember what that was.

I also made a tentative observation that I might be able to reverse the causality with the lights: e.g. usually when I'd let go of a thought, the lights would get stronger. On a few times, I tried instead making the lights stronger, thereby letting go of the thought. I'm not really sure if it worked, though, since on most occasions the thought still seemed to be there when my attention "got back" from the lights.

When I stopped meditating today, I again had a slight Mind and Body-ish feeling, but it was much weaker and also faded much quicker than on the first time.

One of the many things that I've learned from theferrett is that I don't have to believe in my emotions.

Here's an example of what I mean. Last night, I was suffering from insomnia. As frequently happens when I do, I got frustrated and started worrying about everything. It did not take long before this proceeded into severe self-doubt issues: will I ever amount to anything, will any of my projects actually succeed, et cetera. I was quickly - as usual - becoming convinced that the answer was no, and I should just stop being ambitious and settle for some safe but boring lifepath while I still had the chance.

Now, previously I'd only thought of two options in this kind of a situation:

A) Get rid of the thoughts by distracting myself or finding something that will cheer me up and get me out of that mood.
B) Fail to get out of the mood, keep thinking these thoughts.

For some reason, it had never occurred to me that there could also exist a third option:

C) Keep feeling miserable, but stop thinking those thoughts.

So that's what I did. I thought, "I'm feeling miserable because I can't sleep and I'm frustrated, but that has nothing to do with whether my projects and ambitions will be successful or not. My current emotions convey me no information about that topic. So it's pointless to doubt myself because of these emotions." (Not in so many words, but that was the general idea.)

So I stopped thinking those thoughts. And while I still felt generally miserable, the thoughts stopped making me feel even worse.

Previously I had thought that emotions and thoughts were connected in such a way that in some kinds of bad moods, you had no choice but to think negative thoughts. Now it appears that this isn't the case. Is this something that everyone but me knew already, or is it something that should be talked about a lot more?

Cross-posted: G+, FB.

I previously characterized Michael Vassar's theory on suffering as follows: "Pain is not suffering. Pain is just an attention signal. Suffering is when one neural system tells you to pay attention, and another says it doesn't want the state of the world to be like this." While not too far off the mark, it turns out this wasn't what he actually said. Instead, he said that suffering is a conflict between two (or more) attention-allocation mechanisms in the brain.

I have been successful at using this different framing to reduce the amount of suffering I feel. The method goes like this. First, I notice that I'm experiencing something that could be called suffering. Next, I ask, what kind of an attention-allocational conflict is going on? I consider the answer, attend to the conflict, resolve it, and then I no longer suffer.

An example is probably in order, so here goes. Last Friday, there was a Helsinki Less Wrong meetup with Patri Friedman present. I had organized the meetup, and wanted to go. Unfortunately, I already had other obligations for that day, ones I couldn't back out from. One evening, I felt considerable frustration over this.

Noticing my frustration, I asked: what attention-allocational conflict is this? It quickly become obvious that two systems were fighting it out:

* The Meet-Up System was trying to convey the message: ”Hey, this is a rare opportunity to network with a smart, high-status individual and discuss his ideas with other smart people. You really should attend.”
* The Prior Obligation System responded with the message: ”You've already previously agreed to go somewhere else. You know it'll be fun, and besides, several people are expecting you to go. Not going bears an unacceptable social cost, not to mention screwing over the other people's plans.”

Now, I wouldn't have needed to consciously reflect on the messages to be aware of them. It was hard to not be aware of them: it felt like my consciousness was in a constant crossfire, with both systems bombarding it with their respective messages.

But there's an important insight here, one which I originally picked up from PJ Eby. If a mental subsystem is trying to tell you something important, then it will persist in doing so until it's properly acknowledged. Trying to push away the message means it has not been properly addressed and acknowledged, meaning the subsystem has to continue repeating it.

Imagine you were in the wilderness, and knew that if you weren't back in your village by dark you probably wouldn't make it. Now suppose a part of your brain was telling you that you had to turn back now, or otherwise you'd still be out when it got dark. What would happen if you just decided that the thought was uncomfortable, successfully pushed it away, and kept on walking? You'd be dead, that's what.

You wouldn't want to build a nuclear reactor that allowed its operators to just override and ignore warnings saying that their current course of action will lead to a core meltdown. You also wouldn't want to build a brain that could just successfully ignore critical messages without properly addressing them, basically for the same reason.

So I addressed the messages. I considered them and noted that they both had merit, but that honoring the prior obligation was more important in this situation. Having done that, the frustration mostly went away.

Another example: this is the second time I'm writing this post. The last time, I tried to save it when I'd gotten to roughly this point, only to have my computer crash. Obviously, I was frustrated. Then I remembered to apply the very technique I was writing about.

The Crash Message: You just lost a bunch of work! You should undo the crash to make it come back!
The Realistic Message: You were writing that in Notepad, which has no auto-save feature, and the computer crashed just as you were about to save the thing. There's no saved copy anywhere. Undoing the crash is impossible: you just have to write it again.

Attending to the conflict, I noted that the realistic message had it right, and the frustration went away.

It's interesting to note that it probably doesn't matter whether my analysis of the sources of the conflict is 100% accurate. I've previously used some rather flimsy evpsych just-so stories to explain the reasons for my conflicts, and they've worked fine. What's probably happening is that the attention-allocation mechanisms are too simple to actually understand the analysis I apply to the issues they bring up. If they were that smart, they could handle the issue on their own. Instead, they just flag the issue as something that higher-level thought processes should attend to. The lower-level processes are just serving as messengers: it's not their task to evaluate whether the verdict reached by the higher processes was right or wrong.

But at the same time, you can't cheat yourself. You really do have to resolve the issue, or otherwise it will come back. For instance, suppose you didn't have a job and were worried about getting one before you ran out of money. This isn't an issue where you can just say, ”oh, the system telling me I should get a job soon is right”, and then do nothing. Genuinely committing to do something does help; pretending to commit to something and then forgetting about it does not. Likewise, you can't say that "this isn't really an issue" if you know it is an issue.

Still, my experience so far seems to suggest that this framework can be used to reduce any kind of suffering. To some extent, it seems to even work on physical pain and discomfort. While simply acknowledging physical pain doesn't make it go away, making a conscious decision to be curious about the pain seems to help. Instead of flinching away from the pain and trying to avoid it, I ask myself, ”what does this experience of pain feel like?” and direct my attention towards it. This usually at least diminishes the suffering, and sometimes makes it go away if the pain was mild enough.

An important, related caveat: don't make the mistake of thinking that you could use this to replace all of your leisure with work, or anything like that. Mental fatigue will still happen. Subjectively experienced fatigue is a persistent signal to take a break which cannot be resolved other than by actually taking a break. Your brain still needs rest and relaxation. Also, if you have multiple commitments and are not sure that you can handle them all, then that will be a constant source of stress regardless. You're better off using something like Getting Things Done to handle that.

So far I have described what I call the ”content-focused” way to apply the framework. It involves mentally attending to the content of the conflicts and resolving them, and is often very useful. But as we already saw with the example of physical pain, not all conflicts are so easily resolved. A ”non-content-focused” approach – a set of techniques that are intended to work regardless of the content of the conflict in question – may prove even more powerful. I'll cover it in a separate post, though the example of dealing with physical pain is already getting into non-content-focused territory.

I'm unsure of exactly how long I have been using this particular framework, as I've been experimenting with a number of related content- and non-content-focused methods since February. But I believe that I consciously and explicitly started thinking of suffering as ”conflict between attention-allocation mechanisms” and began applying it to everything maybe two or three weeks ago. So far, either the content- or non-content-focused method has always seemed to at least alleviate suffering: the main problem has been in remembering to use it.

I've gone through a variety of theories about the self and continuity of consciousness. Here they are.

1: The self as something arbitrary. Essentially the view I held at the time of writing this post from 2007. I thought that there is no inherent reason to think that the consciousness that now inhabits my brain will be the same one as the one inhabiting my brain tomorrow. Our minds and bodies change all the time: what's the thing that makes the me of today the same as the me of 20 years ago? Certainly one can come up with all sorts of definitions, but from a scientific point of view they're all unnecessary. One simply doesn't need to postulate a specific consciousness, a soul of sorts, in order to explain human behavior or thought. Noting that our memories create an illusion of continuity, and that this illusion is useful for maintaining useful things such as the self-preservation instinct, is more than enough as an explanation.

A thought experiment in philosophy asks: if you stepped into a Star Trek-style transporter, that disassembled you into your component parts and reassembled you somewhere else (possibly from different raw materials), would it still be you or would you it be killing you and creating a copy of you? Another: if the neurons in your brain would be gradually replaced with ones running in a computer, and the original brain was then shut down, would it still be you? Yet another: if you had been translated into software, and then fifteen copies of that mindfile were made and run, would they all be you?

To all of these questions, "the self as something arbitrary" replies: there's no inherent reason why they wouldn't be you. The difference between them would be less than that between you now, and you tomorrow. Of course, for psychological reasons, it is necessary for us to still believe to some degree that we're still the same person tomorrow as we are today. For this purpose, we're free to use pretty much any criteria we prefer: it's not like one of them would be wrong. One such criteria, suggested by Derek Parfit, is Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity (overlapping chains of strong connectedness). This works fine for most purposes.

In practice, while I had this view, I tended to forget about the whole thing a lot. The illusion is built into us quite strongly, and the intellectual understanding of it is easy to forget.

2: The self as lack of personal boundaries. Upon reading Ken Wilber's No Boundary, I realized the following. Suppose that I choose to reject any criteria creating a relation between the me of now and the me of tomorrow, seeing them all as arbitrary. It follows that all consciousness-moments are separate beings. But symmetrically, one can take this to imply that all consciousness-moments are the same being. In other words: there is only one consciousness which experiences everything, instantiated in a wide variety of information-processing systems.

This point of view also gains support from noting that to a large degree, our behavior is determined by our environment. The people you hang around with have an immense impact on what you do and what you are. I might define myself using the word "student", which signifies a certain role within society - studying at a university ran by other people, from books written by others, my studies funded by money which the state gets by taxing my country's inhabitants. Or I might say that a defining aspect of myself is that I want to help avert existential risk. This is so because I happened to encounter writings about it at an appropriate point in my life, and it is a motivation which is constantly reinforced by being in contact with like-minded folks. On the other hand, it is a drive which is also constantly weakened by the lures of hedonism and affiliating with people who don't think such things are truly that important.

I'm only exaggarating a little if I say that basically everything in our personality is defined by our environment, and particularly the people within our environment. Change the environment I'm in, and you quite literally change what I am. Certainly I have lots of relatively stable personality traits that affect my behavior, but my environment defines the meaning those traits take. If I change my environment, I'll also change my own behavior. Looked at in this light, the self/non-self boundary becomes rather arbitrary and somewhat meaningless.

So now I was presuming that there was only one consciousness, instantiated in every possible body. All of these bodies and instantiations, taken together, make up a vast system that is me. I (in the sense of the specific brain-body now writing this) am part of the system in the same way that individual cells are parts of my body, or individual subprocesses in my brain are parts of my psyche. My personal accomplishments or my personal pride don't really matter that much: what matters is how I contribute to the overall system, and whether parts of the system are harmonious or conflicted between each other. Doing things like befriending new people means forging new connections between parts of myself. Learning to know people better means strengthening such connections.

Thinking like this felt good, and it worked for a while. But I had difficulty keeping up that line of thought. Again, the illusion of separateness is built strongly into us. On an intellectual level, I could easily think of myself as part of a vast system, with only a loose boundary between me and not-me. But since each brain can only access memories of being itself, and is strongly biased towards thinking itself separate, this was hard to really believe in on an emotional level. Frequently, I found myself thinking of myself as separate again.

3: The self as how the algorithm feels from the inside. The next step came when I realized that the notion of a consciousness experiencing things is an unnecessary element as well. Instead of saying that there are lots of different consciousnesses, or one consciousness instantiated in a lot of bodies, we can just note that we don't really need to presume any specific entity which observes various sensations. Instead, there are only the sensations themselves. A "consciousness" is simply a collection of sensations that are being observed within an organism at a specific time.

Putting this another way: there are a variety of processes running within our brains. As a side-effect of their functioning, they produce a stream of sensations (qualia, to use the technical term). There is no observer which observes or experiences these qualia: they simply occur. To the extent that there can be said to be an observer or a watcher, each sensation observes itself and then ceases to exist.

Of necessity, all of the qualia-producing algorithms we know of are located within information-processing systems which have a memory and are in some way capable of reporting that they have subjective experiences. Humans can verbalize or otherwise communicate being in pain; dogs can likewise behave in ways that sufficiently resemble our is-in-pain behaviors that we presume them to have qualia. As an animal's resemblance to a human grows smaller, we become more unsure of whether they have qualia. In principle, my computer could also have qualia, but if so it would have no way of reporting it, and I would have no way of knowing it. Because an entity needs to be able to somehow communicate having qualia in order for us to know about it, we've mistakenly began thinking that all qualia must by nature be observed by a consciousness. But the qualia observe themselves, which is enough. There is no Cartesian Theater, but rather something like multiple drafts.

So there is no "me" in the continuity of consciousness sense, nor is there any unified consciousness which experiences everything. Instead there are only ephemeral sensations, which vanish as soon as they've come to existence (though if eternalism is right, every moment may exist forever, and there may be an infinite number of copies of each "unique" sensation if multiverses are real). This may seem like a very unsettling theory from a psychological point of view, as it would seem like it'd make it harder to e.g. care about the next day. While both "the self as something arbitrary" and "the self as a lack of personal boundaries" allowed one to construct a definition of self extending in time - even if one acknowledged to be arbitrary - this view makes that rather impossible.

And at first, it was rather unsettling. After a while, however, I managed to come to grips with it. The important point to note is that even if there is continuity of consciousness, the concept of "me" still makes sense. It's simply referring to the information-processing system in which all of these algorithms are running. I can still meaningfully talk about my experience or about making plans. I'm simply referring to the experiences which will be produced by the algorithms running within this brain, and the plans which that brain will make. And there is no reason why I shouldn't feel pleasure from anticipation of future experiences, if those are good experiences to have.

I desire to reduce the number of negative qualia in the world and increase the number of positive ones. Positive qualia are correlated with positive feedback within the information-processing system; negative qualia, with negative feedback. In other words, the system/organism will tend to repeat the things it felt good about, as it gets wired to repeat those behaviors. (Though one should note here that the circuits for "wanting" and "liking" are actually different.) It is good for me to feel good about doing and behaving in ways which will make me more likely to achieve these goals. It is good for me to feel pleasure from the anticipation of doing good things, for this will cause me to actually do them. It is also good for me to feel happy: not only does feeling happy instead of unhappy make me more capable of doing things, it also directly serves my goal of increasing the amount of positive qualia in the world. This line of thought seems like a very successful way of fitting together utilitarianism and virtue ethics, the process of which I began a year ago and which has considerably contributed to my increased happiness of late.

Again, this is easy to think about on an intellectual level, but we're wired to think differently. I've been having more success consistently training myself to think like this than I had with the previous theories, however. Of course, I still frequently forget, but I'm making progress. Various meditation traditions seem to be aimed at helping grok something like this at an emotional level, and I'm dedicating an hour a day to meditation practice aimed at following the progression described in this book. I haven't really gotten any results so far, though.

I was going to also write more about the nature of suffering and how these shifts in thought have helped me become happier and suffer less. However, looking at how long this post got, I think I'll do that in a separate post.