You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue

From the introductory post:

I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer.

Based on this idea, could you write some kind of luminosity diagnostic? It seems like people would be more likely to want to change if they knew what they're missing (I know I would).

tl;dr: Why study yourself? Because

1. You're interesting because you're complicated and you're you.
2. You can convincingly ask people to adjust how they deal with you to your peculiarities.
3. You can learn how to improve yourself and thus accomplish your goals.

Fair summary?

Would you say that improved self awareness can help you accomplish your goals directly, without the self-modification discussed in reason #3? Something like: learn more about what makes you happy, then do that stuff. This seems like a bigger payoff than #2 to me, worthy of inclusion in any sales pitch for self-study.

You appear to be claiming that introspection is: a good route to self-knowledge / better understanding ones mental processes; an effective way to develop a more accurate model of your own behaviour and a good (possibly the best?) source of information to guide effective attempts at self improvement or self modification.

These are all highly controversial claims in psychology and the balance of evidence I've seen leads me to conclude that it is likely that introspection is not a good route to self-knowledge and that it is a poor basis for attempts at self improvement. I've seen a compelling case made that the best way to understand ones own behaviour is to attempt to observe yourself 'from the outside' rather than relying on introspection - you will form a more accurate model attempting to ignore data that derives from introspection and instead judging yourself the way you would judge others based on externally visible actions.

Will you be addressing the standard criticisms of introspection as a source of knowledge as part of this sequence or are you assuming it for the purposes of this sequence? I'm interested to see how the sequence unfolds but I'm concerned that you don't seem to be addressing the controversial status of introspection as a valid source of knowledge.

I like this post, but it feels like it's missing something to motivate the clever title. You didn't seem to identify a "grue" (presumably, some horrible consequence from not being luminous), which doesn't seem terribly difficult to do in this case. Perhaps it doesn't belong in this post, but surely the title demands one.

Also, is "luminous" a modifier for beliefs, people, or both? Should there be two different words? Did I miss that discussion along the way?

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

It's a funny, though in retrospect unsurprising, coincidence that you're using a light-related metaphor. For a while, I was intending to write about "phenomenal transparency", especially as used by Thomas Metzinger. He quotes an early paper by the philosopher G.E. Moore, who spoke of the fact that while we can see e.g. the color blue, we cannot see what it is that makes it blue.

And in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent - we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something, but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized.

Metzinger notes that the most philosophers now use "transparency" to mean that the "content properties" of our mental states are available for introspection, but not their "vehicle properties". However, he finds this definition unsatisfactory and offers his own:

Transparency in this sense is a property of active mental representations already satisfying the minimally sufficient constraints for conscious experience to occur. [...] The second defining characteristic postulates that what makes them transparent is attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages for introspection. [...] What is attention? In short, attention is a form of nonconceptual metarepresentation operating on certain parts of the currently active, internal model of reality. It "highlights" these parts, because it is a process of subsymbolic resource allocation. The earlier the processing stages, the more aspects of the internal construction process leading to the final, explicit and disambiguated phenomenal content that are available for introspective attention, the more will the system be able to recognize these phenomenal states as internal, self-generated constructs. Full transparency means full attentional unavailability of earlier processing stages. Degrees of opacity comes as degrees of attentional availability.

Definition 2 For any phenomenal state, the degree of phenomenal transparency is inversely proportional to the introspective degree of attentional availability of earlier processing stages.

In other words, the processes in our mind that we are unable to perceive, we take as givens. Were we able to perceive e.g. the way our visual cortex constructed images, or the way our cognitive subsystems constructed beliefs, we'd realize them to be constructions and not take them so easily for granted.

I've been meaning to write more about this, but have never gotten around it.

I find that introspecting tends to makes me feel bad, because I don't feel as though I am the way I "should" be - but I don't really want to be the way I feel obligated to be. So I try very hard not to think about it, because when I'm not thinking about it, I'm not experiencing any distress.

Since in general I have to analyze my actions to even see my emotions, I'd like to know how to become more luminous just to increase my shared vocabulary with people.

Ecclesiastes 2:14

The wise man's eyes are in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.

I always interpreted "eyes in his head" as introspection; the literal meaning is obviously redundant.

Suppose you're extremely powerful. Then the only self-knowledge you need is about what most pleases you. If it turns out that additional self-knowledge is what pleases you, great.

Suppose you're extremely weak. You can barely stay alive; self-knowledge is useful when it can help you stay healthy, and useless when it merely spends glucose without any material reward.

Between those extremes, it seems like increased self-knowledge might be pleasing or empowering (depending on the specific individual+circumstances). But I think that when it's actively sought, it's hard to sift the truth from the confabulation.

I've always been interested in knowing and improving my habits and tendencies. It seems like what I'm passively aware of shows just a small portion of my present brain state, and whatever more I can actively trace is disappointingly little.

The reason I perform introspection is because I like closing doors. Every question I've answered to a satisfactory degree is a closed door, and the more I close, the more complete everything seems. Questions about the self and other complex topics in first order philosophy are particularly interesting, and great fun to pursue.

I'm rather happy with my Zs and omegas, but some of my dear ones aren't.

I expect that this sequence will allow me to give them more educated suggestions about how to fix themselves up, but based on past experience, they will most likely nod in agreement, yet go on using the dysfunctional coping method they've been using for years. This expected lack of result will, of course, not prevent me from eagerly awaiting the next instalment of your sequence.

I think luminosity is very important as making conscious and self aware decisions instead of simply responding to external stimuli mindlessly is what seperates humans from being a very complex robot. The more conscious we are the better decisions we can make as we can analyze our thought processes and eliminate biases and emotional flaws in our thinking. In my opinion, consciousness and rationality are directly proportional in humans. In short, any human who wants to become a more rational thinker would be well advised to take steps to increase their consciousness or luminosity if you want to call it that. That is certainly what I am trying to do. Great series by the way.

Great airport metaphor.

Sounds promising - I like the conceit.