Self-empathy as a source of "willpower"

This.

More specifically, this is what various gurus mean when they talk about integrating parts, accessing the shadow side, taming your inner enemies, and many other metaphorical terms.

It's also what I mean when I say that akrasia equals conflict, and that attempting to overpower conflicts doesn't work; that you have to actually surface your true desires and objections in order to resolve them.

First comment on this thing. I've lurked for a few months now. :)

I appreciate what super power you're trying to unveil here and I'd like to contribute a few thoughts from my own experience. I'll try to offer a more robust mechanism for coercing your own behavior: Your memory. I think you touched on it when you gave the example of smelling, touching, and staring at the cake followed by throwing it away. You stopped there, however, not citing what about that ritual coerces future behavior. Memory is what makes that happen.

Memory of how good the cake tastes is what makes you want more of it in the first place. Similarly the memory of rejecting the cake and surviving, especially memories of rejecting the cake and recognizing the rewards (perhaps even because you reward yourself) will coerce your opinion towards rejecting it again in the future. If you can give yourself positive memories about self-denial you will be able to access self-denial again in the future with greater ease. The more positive memories you have with an activity, the easier it is to repeat that activity.

This is what I've noticed in myself anyway. The studies continue..

This sounds good in theory. But in my experience, WorthIt-Bob doesn't usually argue rationally.

He acknowledges the existence of rational arguments of not fulfilling the wish in question (be it eating a cake, delaying work, whatever). He just doesn't care about these rational arguments.

An internal dialogue, as I've had it (slightly paraphrased, of course): NWI-Bob feels the wish to delay work arise. Thought: I acknowledge that delaying work right now would be more fun than not delaying work, but the deadline of the project I'm working on is approaching and if I delay my work now, I will have problems meeting this deadline. Therefor, I should work now and do some leisure activity later on. WI-Bob: Yeah, these arguments are pretty good, and I know it will be bad. However, that lies in the future, and I want to have fun right now. NWI-Bob: That's not a very smart approach. Just continuing to work for 2 more hours will make me happy, and you will achieve happiness in the free time afterwards. WI-Bob: Yes, that sure is an intelligent idea, but I still want to have fun right now.

The dialogue continues in the same vein. Most of the time, it ends with NWI-Bob making a last argument, and WI-Bob not responding because he just doesn't have any arguments besides "I want that right now." However, despite his lack of response, his will often perseveres.

For this to work, you need self-awareness. I actually think it must happen (it's probably the only solution) if you're both trying to sustain a difficult effort, and maintain a fair model of reality (both of your own feelings and your position in the world).

People who are already practicing some self-awareness techniques (e.g. Vipassana meditation) would be foolish to not leverage them in the way Academian describes. For everyone else, it would at least make sense to try this approach when you have a strong feeling of inner conflict; where the internal dissenting voices are weak, you can just proceed in the usual way.

This sort of model of how to work with your own psychology seems to have taken off in the rationality community. I certainly rely on it. But I don't actually have strong evidence one way or the other about if this is the best way to do things.

I'm curious, does anyone have either 1) the history of the uptake of these IFS-style models or 2) specific evidence about the effectiveness of this model over others (such as CBT-style "train better more effective TAPs")?

Nietzsche's view of "free will" comes to mind. He suggested that the mind is in reality a complex of different wills and tendencies, and the wills are in conflict as to who should be in charge at any given time, since each will wants to dominate the entire mind completely. When we manage to organise the various wills into a consistent hierarchy, we experience a feeling of being in control of ourselves, regardless of which will came out on top in the hierarchy - we identify with that particular will. This is what he suggests that it really means to have free will, a freedom of inner conflict.

I really like this framework, and I'm going try to make intentional use of it when evaluating decisions. An issue to consider though:

Probable-Future-You is a decided-upon mental construct of Current-You. I'm not saying what Aharon said, that Current-You won't argue rationally. Rather, there may be no argument; Current-You is less likely to conjure up the correct Future-You to begin with!

The necessary fuel to turn that tiny note of discord into a clear mental state is as ninjacolin said, memory. WI-Bob's brain is busy pretending NWI-Bob doesn't exist. If there's a tiny feeling of discord though (memory leak), WI-Bob can pause for a moment, take the outside view, and construct NWI-Bob, reasoning abstractly that NWI-Bob might be the most representative Future-Bob. Then WI-Bob can run an emotional simulation of being NWI-Bob, looking back with regret.

And really, the committee should consist of several future selves. If there's a decision worth considering, then there is more than one outcome to consider. You need to simulate NWI-Bob after each decision. That's the full argument the subagent constructs can make.

Getting that initial discord, being able to quickly leap to the outside view's conclusion, and being able to run simulations fast enough probably takes a bit of preparation. If Monday-you might have to make a decision that Tuesday-you will regret, Sunday-you should make the decision. But since Sunday can't entirely (since Monday is a weak day), Sunday should use rehearse, making use of the privileged weekend read-write access to memory. Otherwise, Bob might start or finish this deliberation while taking his last bite of cake.

One way of making your point is that akrasia is a special case of the Hazing Problem (which, in turn, is similar if not isomorphic to counterfactual mugging), where you define yourself at different timeslices to be different people, and decide whether you want to favor your current self by "hazing" a future self.

(As you might expect, Drescher makes this analogy in Good and Real, though I don't think he uses the term "akrasia".)

That is, if you regard it as optimal to give in to your akrasia, that is evidence that you will in the future, and have done so in the past -- and you would prefer that past selves had not done so.

Edit: Interestingly enough, right after I read that part of Drescher, I read the first installment of the Se7en graphic novel, which is about the "gluttony sinner", who fails to lose weight because he uses that very same dynamically inconsistent reasoning!

I think you're making this a little more complicated than necessary. Akrasia (ie, dynamic inconsistency) is a result of one self being unduly influenced by immediate consequences. Like Bob overweighting the deliciousness of the cake and underweighting the health consequences when the deliciousness is staring him in the face. The multiple selves don't need to discuss and compromise -- the cake-captivated self is just wrong and the self deciding from a distance is right (or, you know, less wrong). So the saner self should use a commitment device to tie the hands of the recalcitrant future self. I just wrote an article arguing this -- http://messymatters.com/akrasia -- based on a previous LessWrong post, http://lesswrong.com/lw/am/how_a_pathological_procrastinor_can_lose_weight/ .

So in a sense I agree, the two selves need to interact. Just that I think that interaction should take exactly one form: a commitment device whereby the current self constrains the future self.

Under this model what would you consider Leechblock to be? Sabotage? An attack?

Great advice. Thanks. :)

I'm talking about self-empathy here, which is opposite to self-sympathy: relating to emotions of yours that you are not immediately feeling

This is an important concept. It's kind of weird, as this isn't really new to me, but you phrasing it like that somehow made what's going on much clearer to me. Thank you.

Thanks for your post, this technique sounds very useful, as does your description of willpower as dynamic consistency but my personal experience is that I've basically always been able to feel "willpower" or something close to it and in fact have a hard time imagining such an existence.

The only reason I can relate to this claim is that sometimes my state of mind is such that willpower use is barely noticable, and perhaps only because in my default state it is very noticable, so I know what to look for: where forward is my default impetus and all I have to do is steer, or fan the fires.

Off the top of my head, labelled via word association, I might call some of these states (there are probably more and there is some overlap) executing, dueling, drunk, writing and fatalism. writing, dueling, drunk and executing are all distinct. There's some overlap.

But these are specific states of mind that are not my default. My default state is rest. In this state it very clearly and unambiguously takes what I'll call willpower to do things. And the more willpowerey I'm feeling, the better I'm able to do anything.

The point of which is that I'd be suspicious of your claim to have never experienced "willpower" if I hadn't put on various thinking hats which also feel a lot like that. I suspect your default thinking hat is one where willpower may be relatively unnoticable, irrelevant, or even non-existant (if your mind is sufficiently different than mine) and that you're underappreciating how different minds are.

*NOT IRL DUELING. DUELING IN A COMPUTER GAME.

See also: City of Lights

Pretending to be multiple agents is a useful way to represent your psychology and uncover hidden complexities.

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

What is the benefit of thinking in terms of sub-agents instead of cognitive processes?

In some of the relevant situations I've observed, I might describe the conflict more naturally as being between two mental processes. Here's an example. I usually eat lunch around noon and thus often think of eating lunch around noon. The other day I woke up later than usual and ate breakfast later than I normally do. When noon rolled around I still felt an urge to eat lunch even though I wasn't hungry. My goal-oriented reasoning process (focused on why I should be eating lunch) was butting heads with my eat-lunch-because-it's-noon heuristic.

Thinking in terms of sub-agents may be a useful way to cluster mental processes and model them as a group, and perhaps leverage our capacity for social reasoning. Are there situations where we should think in terms of individual mental processes and their structure? What heuristics can we use to switch effectively between these perspectives?

I think part of the problem with resolving dynamic inconsistencies is it is human nature to reward bad behavior more than good. Consider as an analogy how the medical systems in most developed countries handle pathological behaviors. Suppose you went to your doctor and told them you ate a low calorie healthy diet, exercised regularly, practiced safe sex and had a good handle on your stress. As a result you were pretty healthy. Your reward from your doctor and your medical insurance company would be NOTHING.

Now suppose you smoked heavily so had COPD, ate like a pig and never exercised so were obese, already had HIV and assorted other sexually transmitted diseases and refused to work due to being stressed out. Society couldn't throw money at you fast enough. You'd get loads of attention from doctors and nurses, a welfare check, support groups eager to have you as a member, free time off, free housing, you name it. As a bonus if anyone made the mistake of asking you to do SOMETHING to show a sense of responsibility you could give any number of excuses for doing nothing.

Being a lazy freeloader is the logical choice in any society that rewards it. Likewise with our various selves the pathological versions are generally rewarded more than the healthy versions. Until and unless we change this we won't have much "willpower" since it really is most logical to be pathological.