Collection (Part 6 of "The Sense Of Physical Necessity")

post by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) · 2024-03-14T21:37:00.160Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

    Lustrous Tangles
    The Noticing Timeline
      You are bringing a big pot of cold water to a boil to cook some potatoes. To do it using the least amount of energy, you should... 
  The Point Of Naturalism
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This is the sixth post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism [? · GW]. This one demos phase three: Collection [? · GW]. There's some reflection on naturalism itself at the end. For context on this sequence, see the intro post [LW · GW]. Reminder that this is meant as reference material.
 

Once I’d accessed phenomenological details of a fulcrum experience from my first POU loops, the collection phase of this study began. I stopped thinking in terms of “closeness to the issue”, or any other conceptual pointer, and started watching for the cluster of raw sensations I called “chest luster”. This cluster was the fulcrum experience I set out to collect.

 

A major milestone in a naturalist study is the moment when you can stop thinking in terms of your conceptual pointers. The whole idea is to replace the symbol with the substance [LW · GW] (making room for new symbols with different relationships to the rest of your symbols). Merely abandoning a symbol immediately or arbitrarily probably won’t help in any particular way; but relaxing your grip on it in the presence of a fulcrum experience is the heart of this method.

 

I found chest luster all over the place: In math, yes; but also during physical exercise, while reciting poetry^[1], in conversation with my husband, while building a fire, while reading to my child, while reworking my schedule, and while trying to estimate how much caffeine^[2] is in a cup of brewed cacao.
 

Lustrous Tangles

I came to recognize a pattern: Usually, chest luster seemed to be “covered up”, in some way. More often than not, I find it at the bottom of a pile, or the heart of a tangle, or wrapped up in other sensations.

For example,

Reading through 4.1 (the informal discussion of substitution), I ran into a line that talked about "abbreviation", and I felt a complicated sensation in my chest that seemed to include "luster". It was interesting; luster was sort of covered up by a lot of other stuff. It was "near the heart of a tangle", and I could just barely feel it shining through. Most of what I felt was grumps and an impulse to ignore "abbreviation" or toss it aside.

 

The sensations under which luster tends to be buried are most often negatively valenced. I usually have to listen closely to hear luster, not just because it's quiet but because everything around it is loud. Which makes sense to me, in retrospect: When I'm trying to learn or to make decisions, there are all of these discomforts all over the place. Feelings of dissatisfaction, concern, grumpiness, distaste, anger, even betrayal. That's the nature of problem solving, advancement, and updating: recognizing imperfections and contending with them. It’s uncomfortable.

A lot of knots just feel dark, rather than hiding luster at their centers. Trying to untie those darker knots doesn't get me anywhere I want to go. Watching for luster mostly seems to be guiding which tangle of unpleasant emotions I choose to unravel. The feeling of luster is like a beacon that says, "if you tug on this thread in particular, the knot may loosen, and clarity may emerge." If I'm angry and sad and betrayed and there's a warm golden tingling in my chest, then I may be on the verge of a breakthrough.

At first, I was only able to notice the especially obvious instances of luster, the ones that weren’t outshone by brighter co-occurring sensations. But eventually, I grew sensitive enough to the sensations of luster that I could notice them even when a much more salient sensation was going on simultaneously. Once I could do that, I discovered that unobscured instances of chest luster—the ones that weren’t “hidden behind” some other experience—were relatively rare.

A strategy that helped me contend with the lustrous tangles I chose to focus on was to list the thoughts that seemed to increase the sensation of luster. For the tangle around “abbreviation” I mentioned before, I made this list:
 

• "'∃ x. x ≠ ∅' is an abbreviation for '¬∀x. ¬(x ≠ ∅)'" (a quote from the text)
• "(¬^φ) :⟷ (^φ→⊥)" (a quote from earlier in the text, another example of abbreviation)
• "I feel like there are holes, or like I'm floating."
• "longing"
• "there's no abbreviation in the formal rules (?)"
• "I'm not yet convinced that ‘abbreviations’ are ok. They're not definitions and they don't follow proofs. So what are they?"
• "My concepts of '¬' and '→' aren't related in the same way as 'World Health Organization' and 'WHO'."

Each time my mind moved in whatever way gave rise to one of these list items, the sensation of luster became more obvious to me, easier to see behind the grumps and discomfort. When I thought, “They’re not definitions and they don’t follow proofs,” something in my chest shimmered a little bit more than before. At the same time, the tangle seemed to loosen, to become less like a knot and more like pliable yarn that I can use for weaving.

I repeated this strategy several times, and found that my strong negative feelings were a pretty decent guide to finding lustrous gems, which tended to move me forward if I tried to loosen the knots around them. It always felt like exposing a buried artifact by gently brushing away the dust.

 

The Noticing Timeline

I began to recognize the “chest luster” experience faster and faster, progressing through the noticing timeline [LW · GW]. I noticed it right as it was happening, even in unexpected contexts like “mulling over a fiction plot”; and then I began to suspect it was coming, before it actually arrived. I was beginning to recognize the antecedents of luster.

I wanted to deliberately focus on learning the antecedents of luster, to answer, “How do I suspect luster is coming?”; and also to learn the antecedents of its opposite, “chest darkness”.

This process was almost the same as “getting my eyes on” about a new experience, because it mainly consisted of taking a series of phenomenological snapshots. However, it was much easier to locate the new experience, because I already knew exactly where to find “luster”. It’s not hard to find the nose of a cat whose tail you’ve already spotted.

To start, I chose to watch for this cat’s nose while learning what Bayes nets are, how they work, and what precisely the “screening off theorem” is. I think this theorem is ultimately a bit tangential to my study, but I couldn’t be sure of that before knowing enough to follow the proof. 

I found the basics of graph theory to be quite fun, and I think I did about a D+ job of watching for the antecedents of luster while I learned, largely because I was so drawn in on the object level. I did take a pretty good note on “chest darkness”, though.

I imagined copying down a definition I'd just read, and felt darkness (anti-luster) about it. What happened before the darkness? I felt into my inclination to write the definition on the board, and found it involved some kind of helpless grasping desperation. It was like I wanted to write it down so that I would have something concrete to do, and it would sort of look like I had done something. But the motion felt like moving away from what I want. It’s not the case that what I want is to appear to have done something; what I want is to understand Bayes nets.

I tried again the next day, this time with another Thinking Physics puzzle. (Mild spoilers for “Coming To a Boil” follow, but I’ll present the puzzle itself first, in case you want to try it).

You are bringing a big pot of cold water to a boil to cook some potatoes. To do it using the least amount of energy, you should...  a) turn the heat on full force  b) put the heat on very low  c) put the heat at some medium volume

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I noticed a bit of luster when I reframed the problem as one involving a campfire—talking about how many sticks to feed the fire at once—rather than an electric stovetop. I then paused to try to reconstruct what had happened just before, and ended up gathering my first nugget of phenomenological detail on the antecedents of luster: a sensation I referred to as “focus”:

I think I was looking for a way to ameliorate a feeling of helplessness I had. There was too much "magic" going on around "energy" and "mysterious unnamed heat sources". I couldn't feel with my stomach what it meant to "turn the heat on full blast" or "turn the heat to low". And I also couldn't quite seem to get over "but you can always just leave the stove top on longer though? Electricity and gas aren't that expensive?" I... couldn't viscerally track what mattered! This helped me increase my sense of what mattered, helped me have something to steer by. It focused my guts. I think the "focus" may have been the immediate antecedent of luster.

There was more “focus” in my next snapshot of a moment preceding luster, and also “concentration”:

A little more luster: I imagined trying something like a reductio. [It ended up being, “Can an endless string of tea lights boil a pot of water?”] Again, the antecedent was a kind of "focusing" or "concentration". Concentration in the sense of drawing a substance together into a smaller volume.

But I wondered what happens even before the focusing or concentration. I was able to answer that question a little bit the next time I noticed luster. 

I began a sentence, "My monkey intuitions say you should", and I was about to complete it "use 1.5 sticks", but I found I didn't believe the sentence and couldn't complete it. The source of my disbelief popped up and suggested a new test. Following the new test felt lustrous. It's almost like I was trolling myself. I was trying to get my guts in close contact with the concrete parts of the problem. The shift was very fast. There's a feeling of sinking into contact. It's not a matter of "getting closer to the answer"; it's a matter of getting closer to the things that physically necessitate the answer be what it is.

I'd like to emphasize that these experiences I'm naming as "focus", "concentration", and "luster" are usually tiny. People sometimes talk about "five second versions" of rationality techniques. The perceptions I capture when I look for the antecedents of an experience tend to be much more fleeting than that, around 300 milliseconds each. I take a little slice of phenomenal time that at first seemed unitary, and learn to zoom in on the nearly microscopic experiences comprising it. This move takes practice! One way I trained it is by doing the psychomotor vigilance task several times a day for a week. It gave me a handle on what sub-second time intervals actually feel like, and taught me that I can in fact watch for experiences this small. (So can everyone I've so far worked with on it.)

 

The Point Of Naturalism

The above note log note ("I began a sentence, ...") contains an example of what I consider to be the point of naturalism.

I started out this incarnation of my study investigating the conceptual pointer “closeness to the issue”, a concept discussed in the essay “Hug the Query”. Once I thought I’d found a fulcrum experience (“luster”), I did my best to set aside whatever concepts I associated with the experience, pouring my attention into this particular cluster of qualia instead. Most of the time, I no longer thought of myself as “studying ‘Hug the Query’”, or even as studying “closeness to the issue”. I was only studying “the phenomenology of chest luster”. 

This strategy aimed to help me make more direct contact with the territory [LW · GW]: to be a full person, in the presence of my subject, while aware of sensation at my point of contact with that subject. In the course of investigating the phenomenology of chest luster, the following story arose out of those experiences of direct contact: “It's a matter of getting closer to the things that physically necessitate the answer be what it is.”

(Compare to my story going in: “I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.” I think it’s a pretty big change!)

From your perspective as a reader, this new story might not seem like a big deal. “A sense of the physical necessity of things” is another phrase on a page, one that could very well have appeared in “Hug the Query” to begin with. 

To me, though, I see this phrase as what came out of me when I made myself the source of “Hug the Query”. 

And, importantly, it’s on a slightly different topic than the original essay. It focuses not on avoiding distraction, but on awareness of the perception of physical necessity.

It’s not the case that this style of investigation will always result in such a large shift. You won’t necessarily go in thinking you’re studying one thing, and come out conceiving of your topic in an entirely different way. Sometimes you’ll just be even more sure of your original conceptualization, having torn it down and rebuilt the exact same thing from scratch (though I daresay you’ll relate to that conceptualization somewhat differently than before).

But in some naturalist investigations, your understanding will get a pretty fundamental overhaul. That’s what happened for me this time.

 

1. ^{^}

   The instance of chest luster that I found in poetry recitation was especially interesting to me, because that’s pretty far outside of the domains where I’d been expecting to find this experience. So I paused to take a really detailed snapshot, and I now think I understand what was going on.
   
   The chest luster grew in the moments when something changed about how it felt for me to recite the poem. I wrote, "I felt the rocking of this rhythm, and the way that I was sinking into the imagery and into the feeling."
   
   There’s a difference between saying the words, and feeling their impact. In terms of "closeness to the issue", an experience of the poem itself is "the issue" to stay close to during recitation, at least the way I do it. A poem is a kind of experience, not a series of words on a page. I felt chest luster when I moved from a mindless rote recitation of words, to the sort of rich, emotional, imaginative experience that is the point of those words.

2. ^{^}

   Probably about 10-15mg, but unfortunately I haven't personally tested this because disposing of ethyl acetate sounds scary.

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