Are you the rider or the elephant?

I think the elephant/rider analogy gets the mental imagery backwards, and advocate thinking in terms of monkey(s1)/deliberator(s2) instead. It's system 1 that provides the motive force and actually does things; system 2 is a procedure implemented by system 1 (if system 1 feels like it).

The discussion of identity feels off to me. The monkey identifies as the monkey (so much as it identifies with anything), the deliberator identifies as the deliberator (so much as it identifies with anything). You seem to be talking about some third thing that gets to choose which of the two it wants to identify as; I'm skeptical. I expect the actual difference between you and other rationalists isn't mostly about identity. (At a minimum, to make sense of it in my model I need to round it to something other than identification.)

When making decisions, by default the deliberator chooses what it wants and the monkey chooses what it wants, and so we have two optimization processes working slightly at cross-purposes. I think this gives rise to hypocrisy (see this post, Robin's book) that was evolutionarily adaptive, but that today we can get a Pareto improvement by adopting a better compromise between the two.

I don't think elephant-to-elephant communication is at odds with other people's riders identifying with their riders. I think people are more skeptical when the claim is that the rider can't even understand the nature of what is to be communicated, since they have the (I believe correct) view that the rider is a universal understander-of-things in some strong sense.

Despite originally liking the metaphor, I think the elephant/rider dichotomy has been showing cracks recently. I think a better metaphor for the mind would be something like a large unruly troop of clever monkeys with one bigger, more talkative monkey who is loosely in charge. Call it King Louie and the Apes.

First, it’s increasingly clear that System 1 is best understood as a parallel cluster of neural submodules. A swarm of a congress or a crowd feels much more accurate than ... a large slow animal.

Next, I think one loquacious monkey trying to convince fifty other monkeys to steal fire feels much more like the internal experience of trying to decide to do something that you’re ambivalent about.

There’s still the issue that you tend to think that you are King Louie and the monkeys are your wild but potentially useful minions. No, you are the whole troop, Louie plus monkeys, and if you ignore this fact, be amazed at how quickly the monkeys that you’re not paying attention to manage to ransack your ambitious jungle schemes the minute you turn your back on them.

I really do think that the elephant/rider fast/slow System 1/System 2 “dichotomy” is just neither useful nor correct. Or, calling it a dichotomy leads to unhelpful assumptions. System 2 relies on System 1 processes for every microsecond of its activity -- in a sense, System 1 provides thoughts, concepts, plans and assessments and System 2 buffers them and coordinates them in a single conscious workspace. By what algorithm does System 2 do this? By ”unconscious, implicit, fast“ algorithms and heuristics provided by System 1. Where else would they come from?

And, since it’s not a post from me if it doesn’t explicitly mention meditation, the complete lack of anything that’s actually “in charge” becomes apparent after relatively little time spent watching your own thoughts objectively.

Elephant-free decision making and rider-free communication both sound like hippie dreams to me.

I disagree with the premise of this post.

When you think of your mind as divided into your [stuff] and your [other stuff],

But I don’t.

So perhaps the better question would be: “Do you think of your mind as divided into …?” (And for me, the answer is “No.”)

When I see people who both do think of their minds in this way, and then also choose to identify with the latter “part” / “aspect” / etc., I am indeed “deeply suspicious”—largely because that seems to me to be a) inventing a distinction that doesn’t exist (or, slightly more accurately, taking an interesting fact about how our minds work and reifying it into some sort of strongly-believed ontology), apparently for the purpose of b) having very strange ideas about oneself. (Needless to say, I look askance at both (a) and (b), separately and especially together.)

So, by way of accepting the invitation for discussion, let me ask:

I’ll out myself: I identify mostly with my elephant, and think of my rider as at best a helpful advisor for my elephant.

1. Why?
2. Just as importantly, what on earth does this mean in not-metaphorical language?

I'd strongly reccomend reading a book called "The Master and his Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist. It won numerous science awards not only for it's description of the two hemispheres of the brain but of their import and significance.

He has a quick TED talk that serves as a short intro as well.

I know all models are wrong, and some are useful. But in every day life, I find myself thinking of my brain in two parts that are roughly A) my beam of attention and B) my everything else. This doesn't seem to be totally captured by the other divisions and metaphors mentioned. Both A and B feel like *me*.

My attention (A) feels a lot like a beam of light that can be narrow, wide, dim, or even off. My everything else seems to include my subconscious, the answers that pop into my head without effort, the habits I execute by rote, internal dialogue that chatters away even when I'm not particularly paying attention to it, desires, emotions, and much more.

B churns away whether A is on, off, paying attention to B, or looking in some other random direction. But overall, my decisions and quality of life seem to be better when I use A as much as I possibly can, and when I spend a big chunk of A's time studying what B is doing.

[I updated this comment to add the rest of this.]

The behavior of scrolling through the internet late at night, and the thoughts that I should probably stop and go to bed, both feel to me like they’re in the same general category. The behavior and the inner dialogue both appear, bubbled up from the mysterious machinery of my brain (B) and presented to my awareness (A) on a platter. (I know awareness is also generated in the same machinery and that it isn’t ultimately an unsolvable mystery how the brain works. I’m only describing how my experience feels.)

Directing my attention seems to be the extent to which any meta level of control is introduced to the picture.

In the above example of scrolling when I have thoughts I should be sleeping, I ultimately decide to go to bed right away if I really focus my attention on how worn down my eyes and body feel and notice how muddy my thoughts are compared to when I’m well rested. For extra ammo, I can focus on how whatever craving is driving the scrolling doesn’t seem to be diminishing from moment to moment and has no hope of being satisfied.

I also identify more with the elephant, which I (probably unhelpfully) think of as the one that 'actually does maths and physics', in the sense of gaining insights into problems and building intuitive understanding.

I (also probably unhelpfully) think of the rider as a more of a sort of dull bean counter who verifies the steps in my reasoning are correct afterwards, and ruins my fun for some of my wilder flights of fancy.

I'm slowly learning to like the rider more - it's doing more than I give it credit for.

Probably some of the issue is trying to fit everything into these two categories. I think Sarah Constantin has convinced me that there are at least three things in the world - flow states, formal step-by-step reasoning and insight. I've been unthinkingly lumping flow state in with insight as the good stuff, and leaving the rider with just formal verification. Someone else might lump insight differently.

I associate myself with the unconscious-self more and more (note: an unconscious-self is bigger than an elephant-self because some modules in a brain are deliberate & analytical, but not directly available to the verbal/conscious rider; I very much agree with @moridinamael's comment above).

Conscious-self seems more like press secretary for more hard-working unconscious-self, who is in charge of most of the decision-making. But, ugh, everyone experienced how «conscious ruled unconscious» (≈ will-power). I think the role of conscious-self in «the use of willpower» is to communicate from long-term modules to short-term modules of unconscious-self.

«Inner Game of Tennis» contains some recommendations on how to augment communication between the modules. I also found TDT-mindset helpful to tell early-evolved modules what later-evolved modules think is worth doing.

For whatever it’s worth, I do not think this has been a crux for me in either of the last two recent discussions, though I wonder whether your model of me suggests that I might be modeling myself badly here.

A better image for the conscious/unconscious divide is one I heard from Iain McGhilchrist who describes a large stage that is in darkness, and a small spotlight. The spotlight can move about and bring a small portion into light and detail.

This image tells us that it's all one thing. When we communicate with each other, we may feel like we are two little riders talking to each other, which on one level we are, but of course we are also transferring a lot of information unconsciously. 

It's easy to feel scared and ignore the fact that most of the stage is dark. But I think the correct way to view our riders is as a servant who can do some simple tasks, but should ultimately get out of the way - and never think that they are running the show. 

Do you think this elephant to elephant communication is a similar thing to what Valentine was talking about in Kensho?

Not directly related to topic, but I was interested: does this identification of oneself with either rider or elephant, somehow correlates to MBTI personality types?