The above piece is called “Self-Deception” by the artist Mason. I find it a delightfully teasing name for the piece. To me it looks like what people seem to think introspection does, and they’re meaningfully wrong. And at the same time, it’s also an amazing depiction of a method for looking at subjectivity that does way better than introspection.

In today’s post I want to spell out that method.

I have a vision for how we might do subjective science. I won’t try here to explain in much detail what “subjective science” means or why I think it’s worthwhile. The short version is:

• There’s this space we’re inclined to call our “subjective experience” or our “mind” or our “interiority”, and

• science as it has been done so far has had a hard time really examining that space despite it being extremely important to matters of the heart and soul, but

• I’m quite confident that this challenge has been a limitation of how science has been done so far and that we can get around those limited methods.

If you want the longer version, I wrote an article on the topic here:

That “better than introspection” bit that I see in Mason’s art is a piece of how to do subjective science, as I see it. I don’t claim to have worked out everything. Not by a long shot. But I think I’ve worked out enough that people can meaningfully grow as good scientists of their own subjectivities.

Part of what I have in mind here is, I’m putting together a practice group that’ll start with a few core methods like the one I’ll describe here, and sincerely develop subjective science. In part I want a social context that encourages and supports me in doing the practices that I think are excellent here, and I think the natural way to do it is for it to be that kind of support for everyone involved. I want to write this article in part as a reference for that group.

So I’m going to skip most of the motivation and try to get to the method as directly as I can.

Keep yourself out of your experiments

I do need to name a few pieces of logic for why the method is the way it is though. Otherwise a lot of the design seems weird and arbitrary and tempting to skip.

I actually spelled out the lion’s share of the logic in a fair bit of detail in my 2024 chapter on self-reference, particularly the part on how agents cannot self-refer. But that particular part can be a challenge to read and mostly requires the reader to have read the rest of Valentine’s Logos first. So for the sake of efficiency, I’ll just lay out some of the conclusions (without justification) so that you have context on why I’m structuring subjective experiments the way I am.

The key issue is that minds cannot globally self-refer. I don’t mean it’s hard for them. I mean they literally cannot do it.

But if instructed to try, they’ll try anyway, which creates a whole host of subjective illusions.

But you really do need your mind to work well in order to do good science. Scientific knowledge is made of good explanations that you’ve empirically tested aren’t wrong. Getting there requires thinking through explanations and their logic, and designing experiments, and conducting them, and noticing what the results imply. So if your thinking mind isn’t working well, you basically can’t do science.

The solution I’m proposing is to get self-reference out of how your mind examines your subjectivity.

Because of how identity works, on the inside that move should feel like you are examining “your subjectivity” as though it’s an object you’re looking at. But taken literally, that’s directly impossible. You cannot view your own subjectivity from the outside. That’s kind of the whole point!

So instead, you stay very honest about what your mind is actually doing when you try to get it to look at the inner space it’s embedded in. It’s not actually looking at itself. It’s instead creating a mental model of your subjectivity and examining that model. Then you, inside your own first-person experience, peer through your mind at that model.

There’s a trick I find helpful for keeping the mind straight here: when thinking through the scientific logic (i.e. coming up with good explanations and designing experiments), I imagine that I’m looking at someone who’s just like me whose subjective experience I happen to have something like telepathic access to. I’m the scientist examining this subject. I’m trying to understand them, not me.

I find that this move pretty reliably unscrambles my mind. It makes thinking through the scientific method much more precise and clear.

From having walked others through this reasoning in person many times, I’ve learned that it’s helpful to offer two notes of warning. They don’t fully prevent the errors, but the warnings seem to help people notice when they are making those errors and to learn not to with practice:

1. It’s very common to slip back into first person. (“Oh, I bet I’m doing this thing because of XYZ.”) That reintroduces attempted self-reference. It might seem pedantic at first, but you really do want to keep good discipline here: you are never examining yourself. You are only ever examining a subject who’s outside of you. (“Oh, I bet they are doing this thing because of XYZ.”) Sometimes it’s helpful to refer to them by a name you don’t go by, and/or to use a physical object you’re looking at as a representation of the subject.

2. Your proposed explanations should spell out why your subject gets the subjective experiences they do. Having them introspect is a proposed experiment. You might use introspection (as the subject) to generate hypotheses, but it’s important to think through why your subject would have the subjective experiences they do in response to that attempt at introspection. “The introspection is accurate” is a hypothesis. You do not check your hypotheses against introspection as the source of truth. Sometimes your theories will lay out exactly why introspective certainty that your hypothesis is false is in fact confirmation of your theory (as long as some other outcome could have disconfirmed your theory).

I’ll give examples of applying these ideas shortly.

Seek to understand problems, not to solve them

But before I give examples, I need to name one more bit of theory:

In general it’s often helpful to start with a problem. Something like “I keep having thus-and-such struggle in my romantic relationship” or “I feel bad a lot of the time” or “I want to flourish more but I’m not sure how.”

But if you try to directly solve the problem, you’ll typically be coming from inside it. In lots of subjective cases, how you try to think about and solve the problem is actually part of the problem.

There are lots of examples of this pattern, but here’s a common one: someone who’s habitually clingy in relationships might be acutely aware of how their clinging drives people away. They might try to explain their conundrum to their partner, but with a tone of desperation, like “Please understand that I’m struggling with this so you don’t leave me if I seem nervous!” That effort can have literally the opposite effect than they’re consciously trying to have precisely because they enact the problem in their attempt to solve it.

When you don the role of being a scientist, put any urge to solve the problem in your subject. It’s fine if they strongly want the problem solved! It’s fine if they desperately want this scientific process to address the problem. All of those are part of the subjective system you’re examining. Your job, as the scientist, is to develop and test good explanations for why that system behaves the way it does. Seek to understand the problem rather than to solve it.

(“What good is that?” you might ask. Well, it turns out that in the long run this approach is vastly better at solving most problems! This insight is core to science. E.g., chemistry arose from alchemy by setting aside the goal of turning lead into gold and instead seeking to understand why and how specific chemical reactions happen the way they do.1 Sometimes science shows why your goal is impossible, sometimes it shows your goal isn’t something you actually want, and sometimes it makes the path to a solution vividly clear. All three cases are a win.)

So if you think you’re clingy, and you want to understand it using this method, you might think:

Okay, this clingy person exhibits thus-and-such behaviors. They’re aware of those behaviors, and of some ways those behaviors create pain in their relationships. When they try to do something else, they end up getting clingy through their effort to do something else. And in watching me examine their situation, they’re trying to desperately push toward this process solving their pain too. All of this together is the phenomenon I want to understand in this person.

One possible sign that you understand a problem (i.e. have a good explanation for it) is that you see how to make the problem worse. Not always! But if it’s possible to make the subject’s misery or situation worse, and you understand how the problem works, then you’ll know with simple clarity how to increase the badness of the situation. Making the problem worse can sometimes be an excellent crucial experiment.

For instance, if you think your subject’s brain fog is due to how they’re solving a hostile telepath problem, one test you could have them do is find a potential hostile telepath and try to be transparent with them. That should make the brain fog much worse, possibly even from just considering talking to the person.

Tests like that one tend not to come to mind if you’re focused on solving the problem. But they’re natural if you’re honestly curious about how the problem works.

Bear in mind, of course, that your subject has to be willing to conduct whatever experiments you actually want them to run. And some experiments are too costly. (E.g. if the possible hostile telepath is an abusive partner, it might be a very bad idea to try to approach them with honesty.) In general I find it’s helpful to aim for experiments that:

• …don’t have any irreversible consequences; and…

• …your subject finds the results acceptable to live with, regardless of which results the experiment yields.

(Just to be clear: I’m being careful to keep the subject in third person when talking about your role as the subjective scientist. But “your subject” is what you normally think of as you.)

A subjective scientific method

So with that context, I’ll spell out the method. You might be able to derive it yourself if everything up above made sense to you! But in practice I find that most people I talk to in fact don’t spontaneously derive it, so I’ll just lay it out here:

1. Pick a phenomenon connected to your subjectivity that you want to understand. I find that starting with problems (i.e. the domain of what’s usually “self-help” or “personal development” or “life coaching” or “therapy”) is often really good. But anything you’re really curious about is fair game!

2. Imagine you’re examining a being just like you from the outside, whose subjectivity you can peer into. This is the “become a scientist looking at the subject from the outside” move. Be careful with language, and with the thinking that produces language: you are trying to understand them. You are never trying to understand yourself with this method.2

3. Come up with good possible explanations for what you observe in your subject. The word “good” here is doing some heavy lifting; I really recommend watching this TED Talk to get some precision about the idea. This step isn’t mechanical and requires a lot of creativity. One quirk worth being aware of though: it’s fine to use introspection to generate hypotheses, but remember that you’re doing so as the subject, and afterwards as the scientist your good explanation should explain why your subject’s attempts at introspection caused those hypotheses to arise in their awareness. (It’s more plausible than you might think for how a hypothesis came to mind to prove that the hypothesis is false.)

4. Come up with experiments your subject could do that could potentially show that your explanations are wrong. The more decisively those explanations could be proven wrong, the better. Typically that part won’t be perfect, just suggestive; just be honest with yourself about how crucial the experiments are or aren’t. The classic error here is to do experiments that are basically intended to give results that are compatible with the explanation; the problem with that approach is that it puts the wrong evolutionary pressure on your ideas. Also, like I mentioned earlier, it’s helpful to make sure the experiments are ones the subject is willing to bear the costs of, no matter how they go.

5. Drop imagining you’re looking at a subject, and then just run the experiments as yourself. You have to be the subject in order for the experiments to work. You might find that you’re unwilling or unable to do the experiments, in which case go back to the previous two steps: you-as-scientist have learned something about your subject, or maybe have overlooked some detail about what they can do that your hypotheses in fact imply.

6. Become the scientist again, and think through what the experiments actually teach you about your subject. This step really is critical. Sometimes the experiment is expected to induce confusion, for instance, and you need time outside the experiment to notice that confusion in fact arose. Likewise, the theory being tested might predict that the subject will deny that the experiment produced the results it did. If you don’t do this “become the scientist again” step, you might try to draw conclusions as the subject instead of as the scientist, and the phenomenon you’re trying to understand is more likely to warp your understanding.3

This is really just the usual scientific method, but (a) directed at subjectivity and (b) correcting for challenges that are particular to subjectivities.

For what it’s worth, it looks more daunting than it is in practice. I usually find that it’s relieving to do the core reframe, and there’s something lovely and very simple about the impersonal clarity that comes at the end.

It can be helpful to have someone else’s support when trying to apply this method. They can guide you through the steps and point out where you stumble (e.g. referring to the subject in first person while generating hypotheses). Their help eases off a kind of meta-layer of thinking: instead of being the subject, the scientist, and the person tracking the method, you can offload method-tracking and kind of share the scientist role. You’re also more likely to actually go through the whole process if you have some social support. (Not that it’s particularly grueling, just unusual and a little tricky at first.

This process isn’t meant to be one you engage in all the time, by the way. Same as how you don’t need to use science on literally everything in your life. That’s impractical. The idea is that you engage as a subjective scientist with some phenomenon you want to understand better (or with a problem that’s particularly resistant to being solved), and then when you’re satisfied you understand it well enough, you go back to living your life normally. The understanding might change you of course! But not because you’re stuck viewing yourself in third person.

Some applications

I’ll quickly outline a few use cases so that the method is a little less abstract.

• Being “hangry” sometimes comes with insistence that one’s irritation is not from hunger. But sometimes irritation really isn’t due to needing food! A person prone to this confusion might try to introspect on whether their irritation is a form of being hangry. But if they imagine they’re looking at someone else who feels exactly like they do, and they view introspection as an experiment that person could do to try to distinguish being hangry from being externally annoyed… is it a crucial experiment? Clearly not, since the result is the same regardless of the truth. A much better test that that other person could do would be to eat something: if the irritation is from hunger, eating should make it abate; and if it’s not, then eating won’t affect it. Notice that here the aim is to understand the irritation, not to make it go away, so the “scientist” advances in their goal regardless of the experiment’s outcome.

• If you have a really upsetting dynamic with your partner, is it because they did something upsetting? Or is it mostly due to a social control disorder (i.e. a habit of unconsciously creating subjective suffering in order to get what you want from others)? It’s predictably hard to think clearly about this in yourself. But if you imagine you’re looking at someone else who’s suffering the way you have been, how could you tease out the nature of their distress? Not help them necessarily, although that might happen anyway. But to understand the structure creating their suffering. One way to test for a social control disorder in your subject is for you (the scientist) to deduce a possible social payoff your subject is getting from their distress, and then have them directly ask their partner for what the subject wants. If their distress dissolves the moment they get a supportive response from their partner, and especially if the distress later results in thinking of asking for what they want, then that indicates your subject’s suffering was one of these disorders. In some cases the subject might fear their partner’s response too much to conduct the test (e.g. in abusive relationships), in which case you in practice can’t have them conduct the experiment and you’ll need to figure out some other approach.

• Maybe you have a habit of being attracted to people who play out a painful dynamic, like clingy people tending to reach for emotionally unavailable people. Then you meet someone and get glittering butterflies in your stomach. Are you repeating the pattern? You can twist yourself into knots trying to figure it out. But what if you were looking at someone else who felt this way due to an identical situation? Maybe it’s a “play out the pattern” shadow dynamic, or maybe it’s honest excitement, or maybe it’s just pure lust. It’d be an error to take this 3rd person view and use it to conclude which one it probably is though: that’s likely blurring the boundary between subject and scientist. Instead, take each possibility as a hypothesis and ask: “What could the subject try doing that would tell me, clearly, what the cause of their attraction is?” You haven’t actually learned anything new until your subject in fact conducts the experiment. (It’s really common for people to use this “What would an outsider say?” trick to try to pressure themselves into a conclusion. But there’s really no need for that here. There’s actually extremely good reason not to do that.)

• If you’re always late to things, you might think the reason is that you’re just bad with timing. But “I’m just bad with timing” isn’t a good explanation. It’s barely a description of what you don’t do, and quite far from a mechanical hypothesis about what you do do. If you were observing someone else with your timing behavior, including their subjective thoughts, what do you suppose might in fact be causing them to be systematically late? If their patterns of attention reliably have them not noticing the time, then setting alarms and reminders should change their behavior. (But be careful: are you (the scientist) figuring out how to understand the subject’s problem, or are you slipping back into solving it?) Maybe you already know they’ve tried that intervention and it didn’t work. Great, the experiment was already conducted, and the hypothesis falsified! So, what other hypotheses seem plausible about them? What could the subject do that you’d consider reasonably crucial tests of those possibilities?

Some gaps in this method

While I think this approach is very good, and a much better foundation for scientific “inner work” than I’ve seen anywhere else, I don’t think it’s yet complete. It doesn’t get around all the challenges of studying subjectivities.

For instance, it’s possible that someone who’s running strategic self-deception will block their ability to walk through this method, precisely because some part of them recognizes that doing so could make the truth conscious. So they’ll forget about it, or get too tired each time they consider doing it, or get confused and distracted when they start, etc.

Experimental design in that case is a bit more tricky. It requires making sure that a hypothetical and unknown hostile telepath problem isn’t made worse by any step of the process. I’ve succeeded in such a design in a few cases, but I don’t have a general method yet.

But even in self-deception cases, this subjective research method still works much more often than one might think. I think it’s a very good starting place for subjective science.

I’m just wanting to be clear that it doesn’t fully solve the self-reference problem. There’s more methodological work to do.

I also think there’s progress to be made in working out the multi-person version of this approach. I haven’t laid out here exactly what I mean by “subjectivity”, but the definition I haven’t shared implies that pairs and groups have subjectivities too. It’s part of why couple’s counseling works: the therapist can act as a scientist from outside the relationship. But this application is much more hypothetical on my part, and deserves its own future post.

3

A quirky example of this error shows up in an old Less Wrong post. Scott Alexander brought up some studies that claimed that dripping ice water in a patient’s ear can abruptly halt some kinds of self-deception. But about ten minutes after doing so, the patient would go back to rationalizing, and would deny having changed their mind under the influence of the ice water. Eliezer then went on to try it, but without keeping this subject/scientist division clear in his experimental design beforehand or his analysis afterwards. (Understandably; it can be tricky to do well even if you know to look for it.) The result was that the experiment might as well not have been conducted:

(This is part 6 of the series Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. This part was meant to wrap up the whole thing by naming what to do with the rest of the theory described earlier. It ended up being more like a general sketch of what would need to be figured out, with my fragmented guesses about how to start.

You might be able to make sense of what I’m saying in this post without having read the others in this series. But it does lean pretty heavily on knowing precisely what I mean in a number of places. Give reading this part first a go if you like, and maybe follow the links to read the relevant sections from earlier parts. But if you find the whole thing confusing, consider starting from the beginning.)

What now?

My hope is that others can read what I’ve written, and we can think together, and build wholesome systems. That what’s relevant of what I’ve said can get translated into other frameworks, and that I can learn what’s off in ways that matter.

So in that sense, there isn’t a lot more to say.

But I notice that in spelling all out what I have in this series so far, I haven’t outlined anything that really looks like a plan. Even if I’d made no meaningful errors and a reader were quite compelled by what I’ve said, it might not be immediately obvious what to do. Or even what to look for.

So I want to say a few things in this spirit.

I want to be clear that I don’t have a complete picture for any of this. I just have enough puzzle pieces that I can just make out an outline of a vision. So please take most things after this point as me spitballing.

Pieces of a sane culture

First I want to give snapshots of the goal. Just a few images of where I think we want to end up.

The rough overall idea here is that all deep laws scale: the principles of thermodynamics that govern the glow of galaxies apply to your refrigerator too. So when we look at how deep laws apply to making individual minds more sane & kind, those should apply to the collective mind of humanity when viewed as a single entity.

The analogy won’t be perfect due to emergence. Thinking this way will generate errors that’ll sometimes become obvious only in retrospect. But even so, we can still make some okay initial guesses. And there are still certain things we really can know about larger structures we’ve never seen before — just like we can know that no galaxy can function as a perpetual motion machine even if we don’t otherwise know how it glows the way it does.

For a culture to be reliably sane and kind, it needs to fall into an evolutionary attractor. Which is to say, if some memetic structure were to arise that would be toxic to the whole system, the system needs an effective way of dealing with the invasive mutation. And yet, its method of doing so has to account for the paradox of wisdom: some deeply valuable mutations might be extremely disruptive and might initially read as toxic.

I think this means that such a culture (or individual mind!) needs to be both grounded in gnosis and highly dynamic. As little attachment to any given outcome or claim as possible, but a complete unwillingness to sacrifice sanity to solve any given problem. Total confidence and humility.

So with that frame as context, here are a few pieces I currently imagine:

• Widespread memetic literacy. Our civilization currently depends on nearly everyone being able to read and write. I think we need a similar shift where nearly everyone can see memes and has some basic familiarity with how they work — how they show up in human minds, how they coordinate groups, how they replicate, common deception tactics, etc. And this needs to be a capacity rather than merely a mental theory, just as the skill of reading is more than a widespread intellectual idea.

• Clear distinction between what can be chosen vs. how systems work. Right now it’s common for people to say stuff like “We need to elect this person!” or “We should switch to renewable energy sources!” This ignores how choice works and adds anti-gnostic pressure. On scales larger than individuals can choose what to do, the focus would be on making the picture clear rather than on giving instructions. Calls to action would be tuned to what people can actually choose to do. This results in pressure to make instructions and guidelines pragmatically useful in general.

• Active orientation to adaptive entropy. Or a “problems first” culture. The best solutions just happen when the problem is clear enough and clearly connected to what individuals can choose to do. Solutions that fall short of this (usually meaning they get forced) nearly always create more problems and often aren’t real solutions anyway. A sane civilization would recognize this, prioritize good solutions over quick ones whenever possible, and very consciously and explicitly don the costs of quick solutions when they really do seem necessary to force — with hesitation (because of the memetic illusions this creates room for) and with full and sincere intention to pay off the shared technical debt ASAP.

• Collective prayer. When faced with meaningful problems that we don’t yet have solutions for, I think the collectively sane & kind response is to pause. This is a direct counter to the tendency to go “We need a solution, and here’s something that might be a solution, so we have to implement this solution — and if you don’t agree, you’re getting in the way of what matters and are part of the problem!” I think a sane & kind culture would be willing to stay with the heartbreak of something dearly mattering and our not yet knowing what to do about it. The aim being to stay collectively in touch with what really matters throughout the effort to solve the problem together.

• Clusters of non-naïve trust. In practice, we just can’t have a global culture where nearly everyone is savvy to all the relevant worldwide systems. In practice we’ll have de facto experts who are engaged in large-scale conversations with each other (e.g. over Twitter). If the trust non-experts have in such people is based purely on respect for authority, the culture becomes vulnerable to persuasion and memetic hacking.1 Non-experts need to generally care about this, and seek hard-to-hack ways of testing whether a given expert’s models & calls to action in their domain are worth listening to. In the absence of that, there needs to be a big cloud of “Maybe” around their claims, and some extra vigilance around whether any known memetic hacks seem to be coming through them.

• Active resolution of anti-gnosis. Currently I imagine this will involve a lot of support for developing well-regulated nervous systems and for healthy child-rearing. Sometimes (especially in the transition to a wholesome culture) this might also require simply giving some people access to resources that free them. We’re already doing some things like this, like creating women’s shelters and welfare programs. But as far as I know these are mostly focused on getting people out of “bad situations” rather than on freeing them up to see their situation clearly and own their power. The latter matters vastly more at a systemic level (and thus in the long term) than does rescuing people — especially if the type of rescuing being done results in greater dependence.

• Skillful interaction with insane & unkind cultures. I sometimes tag this as “ready for war”. If some ideology like Communism creates armies and starts taking over areas by force, a sane & kind culture needs to be skillful at protecting itself. At the same time, this reasoning can become something unwholesome memes rely on: make things seem dire to keep demanding immediate action and incurring adaptive entropy. It’s quite unclear to me what really resolving this looks like in practice though. My best guesses right now are (a) wholesome systems are vastly more efficient and might have functionally more resources; (b) wholesome systems might synergize with each other to make something big enough to katamari the unwholesome ones; (c) it’s actually in the unwholesome systems’ interest to bring their desires to the table to be integrated, and so the problem might often be about finding effective communication means rather than about collisions of power; and (d) such cancerous ideologies are less likely to evolve if everyone is extremely well-defended (since that would make effective assault an out-of-range mutation relative to just sincerely trying to get along).

• Ways for each person to get what they need without compromising their soul. This is necessary… and it’s even more pie-in-the-sky than wholesome culture being skilled at war. I don’t know what this looks like in much detail. So I’m mostly just naming a condition that needs to be magically met somehow. People having to do things they don’t want to do in order to get their needs met has to be viewed as a collective problem that demands a solution. Likewise if some people can more easily meet their needs by stepping outside of or breaking the system than by working within it in good faith. Ultimately there must be a way each and every person can be fulfilled by engaging with society in supportive ways. And the social contract that has them engaging this way has to be one that, if they could fully understand what that contract would entail prior to their “signing” it, they would happily choose to “sign”. (Bearing in mind that this kind of informed consent might not be possible — but retroactively informed consent is still something I believe a healthy memetic ecosystem would deeply care about!)

I don’t see how this can be a complete list. If it is, I definitely don’t see even a good plausibility argument. Instead I view this as part of a trick I learned in my math training: to find a solution, you can start by defining likely properties of that solution and sort of working backwards. Even if you’re wrong, the process tends to clarify in what ways.

And hopefully this offers a plausible enough outline that you can feel where I’m pointing.

How we might get there

I’m missing a lot of detail about how to get from here to there. I could really use help here, even if just to get clarity about the nature of the puzzle.

One blessing is, because the principles I’m working with here mostly scale very well, they should apply to small groups and to individuals. So we can actually do experiments, and try to build small communities that have this kind of lucidity, and try to become more sane & kind individuals. And in theory, all of that can feed into something much more widespread.

My guess (or maybe hope?) is that what I’m gesturing at in this document is a kind of attractor. As individuals and small groups get past some kind of tipping point — loosely from “Game A” to “Game B” — that should make the transition easier for memetically adjacent ecosystems to reach. As long as what we’re focused on is grounded in doing real good and prioritizing clarity over “winning”, the attractor should result in a consent-based viral spread everywhere.

If this isn’t correct, then getting clarity about why should help correct the vision. It’s plausible that there’s no “there” to get to at all, for instance, which would change something about what we might even want to try to do.

But I bet there’s something. It seems utterly implausible to me that there isn’t some better way to do large-scale human culture than this one.

And at the same time, it strikes me as extremely important that we also notice the skulls. E.g., Communism is famously an attempt to create a better culture according to some compelling ideas, and it never actually works. It usually results in conditions quite a bit worse on net than the ones they were “fixing”.2

So with all that said… what might we do?

Here’s my guesswork right now:

A first pass would be to take the vision of a sane culture I outlined earlier and just scale it down to the individual. Notice how it applies to your mind as a memetic ecosystem (“culture”). How can you actively seek to resolve anti-gnosis? How do you get clear about what you can and can’t choose? Etc.

For instance, where are you inclined to force an outcome you have in mind on yourself? The usual tangle stack I notice there is Original Spin mislabeling a discomfort, which some habits are trying to resolve in a shortsighted way. If you get the gist of the necessity argument behind why it’s usually better to focus on naming problems rather than forcing solutions, you can trace that proof in contact with the specific example you’re struggling with. Then you should see some combo of (a) understanding the proof better and (b) finding a pathway to releasing the tension (maybe by taking action, maybe by changing your goal, maybe by some third more clever thing).

And if you understand why all these tools should pass self-reference checks, you might see the value of applying this “problems first” approach to applying the “problems first” approach. If you trace the proof there, you can (for instance) release any inclination to make yourself let go of certain conclusions you really want. The self-referential proof-tracing can clarify what the spirit behind the approach needs to be for it to be viable to you.

If I could pick just one practice/tool that someone gets from this document, it would be taking mind as object.3 It’s a surprisingly potent tool. I think that plus a mental understanding of what I’ve been saying throughout this document could go quite far.

Mythically speaking, if you can get your mind past the tipping point such that it falls toward the attractor (that I think/hope is there!),4 then you should find your whole system rearranging so that Elua can more & more clearly speak to and through you — with total consent and clarity about what’s going on! And the more of us that can lend the full force of our minds to this pro-human meta-meme, the more intelligent it can become, and the more easily it should spread.5

I think there’s a lot of work to be done fleshing out the details here. There’s also a lot of cultural work & experimentation: we don’t yet know what emergent factors to account for to let groups have gnosis or to avoid reinforcing anti-gnosis.

A thing I think could help is some list of unsolved problems that, if solved, might result in a global solution implementing itself at scale. If I wanted to make this document even longer 😅 I might try my hand at a draft here. But this is also a very fitting project for us all to work on together.

This format needs adjustment

As a closing note, I want to highlight that this document doesn’t pass its own self-reference check. 😱

It fails on two levels:

• As viable memes go, the core idea in this document isn’t nearly pithy or clear enough to spread. It’s similar to literacy, which spread when it was needed. But literacy is quite a bit easier to describe in a single (spoken) sentence. I don’t yet have a single sentence that wraps the core insight I’m pointing at in this document, even as a summary for someone who already gets it.

• If I were really skilled, this whole thing would be a series of questions or problem statements instead of explanations. Explanations are just easier to write and don’t require so much specialized teaching skill. It would have taken much longer to write a good “Look here, what do you see?” version that would have guided readers to see for themselves what I’m talking about. That said, such a presentation is mostly just better in terms of the very ideas being expressed!

To paraphrase the famous quote of messy origins: I wrote this version because I have not yet had the time to write a shorter one.

Not to say that long explanations are bad. Even here!

But when it comes to suggesting a shift in our way of being, I think giving careful attention to clarity and transparency matters.

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(This is part 5 of Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. Many people who read the original document would read only this section, because it’s the most emotionally real. It certainly makes sense on its own. When I was first writing the whole thing I debated starting with it. “Here’s the problem. This is what we’re solving. Let’s stay real about it.” My tone in how I talk about this stuff has changed a bit, but not my deep care for it. The earlier parts of this series are deeply important. But this is what it’s all for. This is sacred.)

This section will be messier than the rest. It’s a prayer. A sketch of what is dearly precious to me. Why I wrote this series at all.

Everything else is maybe clever. Interesting. Logical. It’s an interwoven system. All this stuff about memes and how they work through the mind, and how minds work, and ways of shifting evolutionary pressures on memes both in people and in the world. Powerful tools.

But on its own, it’s just more machinery. It’s more of the dead thing.

I want to point at life.

Why any of this matters.

What problem I’m trying to solve.

It’s quite clear that how I name the core thing comes from my own personal quirks and past. I focus a lot on death. It’s very central to what I see. I have good reason to think I’m seeing something universal. And at the same time, when I name the core specifically in terms of death, I often get blankness or disorientation back. Some of that is obviously memetic defenses, but some looks to me like people encountering a straightforward frame difference. The true name of the gate I’m looking at is Death. But from wherever you’re standing, the true name of your gate might be different.

And also, some of what I’m asking for is help. I’m scared and overwhelmed. What I see is too big for just me to handle. Some of this is going to be me projecting my own preverbal traumas into (my perception of) the world. If you can tell something I’m naming is personal to me, or doesn’t apply to the world you see, maybe consider it might be a plea for help that I haven’t learned how to express clearly — maybe even to myself. I really do want the help.

But I’m seeing something real too. Please listen for that. Help us all name it more clearly, so we can see it together and make something profoundly beautiful and wholesome.

Precious remembrance

The problem — the big, core, most central issue across everything, best as I can tell — is that we lose track of what matters.

I don’t mean that I know what specific thing matters and we aren’t all taking it seriously enough. That’s forcing solutions. What I mean is, we waste our time and energy on things our hearts know full well don’t matter, while neglecting what our hearts know does.

It’s easy to bounce off of this point because of shame. Like there’s something wrong with us that we do this. And like the pressure to notice this simple clear point is a social weight that threatens Original Spin. I see lots of people reject the idea that this forgetting even happens. As far as I can tell, that’s from either misunderstanding what I mean, or from a kind of protection against coercion.

But I’m talking about the fact that clarity can dawn. That people can go on psychedelic trips and realize they’d been ignoring something important to them and they always kind of knew it. How in quiet evenings with friends, after a day of playing and working together, they can be sitting around a campfire or hanging out in the kitchen… and there’s a tenderness that can arise, where deep heartfelt truths can gently be spoken. Truths that were too difficult to admit before.

And nothing, as far as I can tell, makes this truth more poignant than death.

There is a roaring, heartwrenching silence, a devastating storylessness, that I’ve seen crash into bereaved parents again and again. Holding the ashes of their child, or looking into their child’s eerily quiet room. It’s cold, and clear, and far too much. And there’s no turning away from it.

In moments like that, there is no room for forgetting. Every harsh word or “Don’t bother me, I’m too busy” haunts the memories of those who survive the loss of their beloved ones.

But not all “trivial” things are foolish. The teasing, the little struggles about how to arrange things in the dishwasher, the way the departed were always harried and late… these become absolutely sacred memories. Agonizingly precious.

It’s utterly absurd to try to define what does and doesn’t matter. That effort is for the mind. The mind might be able to help honor what matters if it has relevant ways of naming parts of it. But the mind doesn’t understand the sacred. Something far, far deeper in us does.

I hope you can recognize the note I’m trying to hum here.

Terry Warner’s story

If I remember right, the book Bonds That Make Us Free is about this preciousness. This deep what-matters-ness.

The author, Terry Warner, tells a story near the beginning. I think it’s very poignant. I’ll share it here:

[My wife] Susan and I named one of our sons Matthew, which means “gift of God.” During the early months of his life I would dance around his crib in my pajamas, singing. Some of the songs I made up as I went along, some I had learned from my mother, and one my grandfather had taught me many years earlier:

Matthew, Matthew was a fine old man,
Washed his face in a frying pan,
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
And died with a toothache in his heel.

Susan would laugh. It was the best of times.

Thirteen years later Matthew appeared one afternoon at the bathroom doorway and yelled, “When’re you going to get it fixed, huh, Dad?” The downstairs toilet had been broken for several days, which meant Matthew had to use the bathroom upstairs where I was changing the baby’s diaper.

I closed my eyes for a moment and took my time acknowledging his presence. My ears began to heat up a little. How dare he talk to his father that way?

I didn’t raise my voice. Instead I set the reeking diaper in the diaper pail and observed my son standing stiffly in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for an answer. I said, very slowly, “I am not going to answer a question put to me in that tone of voice.”

“So you’re not even going to talk to your own son, huh?”

I did not say the next thing that came into my mind, which was, “I’m not going to talk to my son until he can speak respectfully to me.” Nevertheless, he responded with a defiant “Oh yeah?” in his eyes. For a fleeting moment this reminded me of his bright eyes and spirited bearing when, at the age of nine, he sang “Wells Fargo Wagon” in the university musical. How had that charming child turned into a teenager whom, for that moment at least, I would have been happy to have out of my sight?

Summoning up my patience, I briefly considered explaining how I had tried to fix the toilet that very afternoon—but then decided he didn’t deserve the courtesy of an answer. The growing pressure of my silence was making him squirm. “Fine!” he finally exclaimed, and he huffed out the door, through the house, and down the driveway toward the Hickmans’. Probably to use their bathroom.

“Oh brother!” I heard myself say.

Hadn’t I answered with perfect self-control? Hadn’t Matthew become even more impudent? What more can a father do when his son acts like that? I picked up the baby and told myself to forget about the whole episode.

Not half an hour later I heard Matthew talking with Susan in the laundry room. He was complaining that I was so far gone I wouldn’t even talk with my own children. Susan didn’t say anything in response—she didn’t even try to correct him! All I could hear besides Matthew’s complaints was the hum of the dryer and the clicking of the snaps on the clothes going round and round inside. Couldn’t Susan see he had her eating out of his hand?

I decided to get myself downstairs to make sure the broken toilet wasn’t overflowing. I didn’t want to give Susan and Matthew more evidence against me than they already had. On the way down I nearly tripped on a pile of clothes Matthew had left on the stairway landing. For a fleeting instant I felt like yelling “What are these clothes doing here?”

But I didn’t yell. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, all my resentful thoughts gave way to silence. As quickly as I took my next step, I could see for the first time what I had been doing, as if light had broken through a crack in the ceiling of my mind. I had been looking upon my own son as my enemy! How could I have done that? How could I have been finding satisfaction in catching him in a fault? How could I have demeaned a person I loved so well?

I knew the conventional wisdom—you need to come down hard on a boy who acts defiantly, not let him get away with it, give him a swift kick in the pants, take away his privileges. But had I done any of those things, I would have felt worse than I did. The truth that mattered was not that he had been mistreating me—perhaps he had but that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. The truth that mattered was that I had been mistreating him.

A prayer for salvation

The horrendous heartbreak here is that we don’t know how not to forget.

People in Terry Warner’s position often have to learn self-forgiveness first. Knowing we’re going to slip up and be short with our loved ones, or fall back into our addiction, or otherwise fall short of what our hearts know is right and important. And not beating ourselves up about it. Original Spin sort of locks our forgetting into place this way, so unraveling it at least lets us recognize the real pain.

But that recognition isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough.

We have countless ways of distracting ourselves from the real heart-wrenching grief of our predicament. Ways of numbing ourselves with entertainment, or rehearsing reasoning that taking good care of ourselves and enjoying things is important, or utterly freaking out and panicking, or flinging ourselves into the thrall of some meme that promises us a way out, or collapsing into dissociated despair.

But all of these deaden the sense of what matters. It’s the forgetting speaking for us.

The devastating truth is that we don’t know how not to forget this way, and it desperately matters that we remember.

It’s beyond our power to stay alive and awake in our hearts. Some things we do seem to help… but sometimes we will go cold toward what we love, and hurt it. That’s not okay. Not as a matter of shame, but as a matter of truth.

How can we solve this?

We don’t know. No one does.

It’s devastatingly important that we stay alive to this question, and the heartbreak of not having an answer. Even if we never have an answer.

Ignoring death

I cannot overstate the profound importance of death here.

I think there’s a deep reason death cuts through. Why losing someone we love can shock us out of the pointless sleepwalking we can fall into.

Other things can shake us up too. Falling in love, or having a child, or losing a job.

But death really plays a special role here.

Each single thing we cherish will someday die.

Almost everything we do today is about distracting ourselves from this heartbreak.

Right now, there’s this war between Israel and Hamas. Painfully little of what’s being said about it is kind. People are scared. Parents are grieving the murder of their children. That should be in every breath. But the loudest voices aren’t pausing to let silence weep. To poke one side — and I really could poke either one — the “Free Palestine!” protests I see and hear so often are not mourning the deaths of Jews. Sometimes they’re celebrating Jewish loss. They’re demanding actions to align with a plan while turning a deaf ear to the problems with that plan. It’s the voice of the cold thing that numbs the heart.

All that activity and noise makes for an incredible distraction.

When death touches us in a way we can’t ignore anymore, it breaks through our distractions — whether we’re ready for it or not.

From “Death Over Dinner”:

“You have two lives. Your second life begins when you realize you have only one life.”

Part of the horror of death is this clarity. That it is coming, and it will reveal the truth… and that we had not been preparing to hold that truth. We weren’t ready. And we could have been. And we always knew it.

I often reference “learning death’s lessons before death becomes our teacher”.

Best as I can tell, there isn’t anything more important.

When what we cherish ends, we’ll wish we had been more present for it while it was still here.

Sometimes we can tell that its end came sooner because we were playing games instead of loving what matters.

Shame doesn’t matter here. This isn’t about us being bad or sinful or falling short or whatever.

It’s that we’re hoping the frightening thing will go away if we close our eyes.

And then when it hits, we don’t see it coming.

And that matters.

Something is wrong

When I look around the world, it clearly has a wrongness.

It has much that’s absolutely wonderful too. Lots to be grateful for.

And people bicker endlessly about what is wrong.

But… I mean something simple and clear here. Something gnostic.

Why the culture wars? Why is everything cheaply made and with planned obsolescence now? What’s with homelessness in the USA? Why are the big powers of the world on edge and constantly pushing against one another? Why are all our internet tools designed to deceive and addict us? Why can health problems bankrupt individual Americans?

I have some answers to all these questions. I don’t mean to ask the mental version of them. I’m not asking for some technical analysis I lack.

What I mean is, why do we tolerate these things?

Can we even admit that something is wrong? Without immediately falling into the slumber of proclaiming and backing solutions, or collapsing in despair?

I mean the same note here as throughout this heartfelt prayer. That something matters, and somehow we keep forgetting, and we busy ourselves with so much nonsense, and the deadening garbage keeps piling up.

My second serious girlfriend was a Roman Catholic. She once told me she believed in the miracle of transubstantiation. So I suggested using blood glucose monitors right after communion to measure whether people’s bodies reacted to the communion wafer like a cracker or like meat. I was pretty sure she was wrong, but I figured that if she were right then this would lend scientific backing to Catholic teachings.

She got very upset with me about it. We had a big fight over it.

And I now believe I was in the wrong here.

My logic was sound. But somehow I lost track of my connection with her, and my attunement to her needs and fears, in favor of logic.

Logic doesn’t matter. It’s a tool.

What had me forget?

What has us all forget when it matters?

What makes our arguments and ideas seem so, so precious to us that we’re willing to ignore when another soul cries and begs for us to please, please stop what we’re doing?

I have guesses. About autopilot and memetic takeover and distrust of others hacking us and something ephemeral about us having let our courage atrophy.

But I look around, and something is wrong.

We aren’t collectively acting from the nobility that our hearts clearly know.

We’re doing something else.

We allow something else.

Why?

This is not a game

When people get a terminal diagnosis, something happens to their experience of the world. Death becomes real to them in a way it wasn’t before.

I have clear guesses about why. Death is a mental abstraction for most people. The mind’s inability to deal with self-reference makes “death” something a mental icon “will go through”. But it’s quite something else for it to become real in first person.

Dying people repeat many of the same regrets. They regret not loving better, spending more time with those they love, letting the people in their lives know how much they matter to them. They regret working so much and caring so much about money or promotions. They wish they’d let themselves experience life more, going on that trip they’d always dreamed of or taking a leap with that one person they could have fallen in love with or whatever. They wish they’d let themselves enjoy their curiosity more, and learned about those things they’d always wondered about.

It’s the same things, over and over again.

Why do we wait? Why wait until it’s too late to realize these things matter?

When I point this out to people, their mortal haze sometimes makes their minds try to find the list of things dying people regret, and then figure out how to attend to each of them.

This is more of the same madness. More numbness, more self-forcing, more machinery.

The point is that there’s a clarity. We already know what matters.

When touching the fresh grave of a loved one, there’s a realness. It’s extremely vivid. The stories can’t matter anymore. The pain is too naked, reality too real.

It already matters this way.

What’s devastated in those moments of grief is precisely what lets us feel the truth right now.

We can already tell.

Desperation doesn’t help

I want to scream and cry when I feel what people do with this. When they just barely touch it.

The fear of AI turns into panic and depression and coercive manipulation. Less Wrong isn’t a home of wholesomeness.

I don’t want you to take what I’m saying here as a battle cry.

Or if it is, it’s to rescue the heart. Not to fight something out there.

I don’t know what’s required for us to remember what matters. But I keep seeing folk use passionate effort as fuel to fix what’s wrong as a reprieve from the heartache. Or using terror instead of heartbreak and courage.

Please, just listen. Help us pray.

Why engineer the mind?

Nothing matters more than what matters most.

And we can tell.

That’s a deep law.

I want us to answer the call to what matters. To hold dear what is truly precious to us.

I have clear guesses about why we don’t. They’re not complete, but I think they’re pretty key.

I think we forget in part because our minds became more powerful than we realized. By some mystery, we were graced with these brilliant tools — but we didn’t (and still don’t) understand how they work.

So we didn’t fully inhabit these minds.

And so other things took up residence instead. Used our minds for their own purposes.

I’ve been calling those other things “memes”.

Those things have been using us to build their world. Their world sort of tolerates us, like a dairy farm tolerates cows, because they still need us. But it’s not designed for us to flourish — because our flourishing would actually be harmful to many of them.

If we want this to be our world, we have to say “No more.”

We have to learn how to inhabit our minds, and set very clear boundaries with the squatters: they can stay, and will even be fed and supported, but only to the extent that we can tell they serve what truly matters.

Everything I’ve said in this document is with an eye to this aim.

The whole thing spells out a strategy. A sketch of what could become a plan.

But this — this dear heartfelt prayer, this wish for us to please take death and what matters seriously — this is the problem I care about.

Please take what I’ve said here as a consideration. Something to stir clarity, and to help us more clearly articulate the problem.

Not as something to champion.

But as a way to help us all figure it out together.

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(This is part 4 of Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. If I had to point at a single idea at the center of my methods and strategies, it would be the one spelled out here.

This part is probably readable on its own. What you’ll be missing is what problem gnosis is solving (from part 1), why it’s a powerful solution (from part 3), and what some of the terms mean (e.g. “Original Spin” and “selfing process” get defined in earlier parts). But I think the main thrust, and most of the examples and points, stand on their own just fine.)

At this point I have enough tools to start clearly naming a fiery passion I have.

I’m going to start by giving some historical context.

After Pythagoras died, there were two main sects that survived him. One, “the listeners”, went on to worship his exact words and phrases as instructions on how to live a good life. The other, known as “the learned ones”, recognized Pythagoras’s main point to be the development of a deep personal relationship with truth. That latter group went on to create new insights, including advances in geometry and arithmetic. Their methods permeated Plato’s context and went on to become a key part of our Western philosophical tradition.

The Greek word for these “learned ones” was “mathematikoi”. From which we get our word “mathematics”.

It’s important to understand that their subject of study wasn’t what we’d call “math” today. It wasn’t about learning methods or theorems. The point of these practices was to align the person with something profound — what we might call the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Remember Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: that wasn’t just a treatise on the importance of memorizing a bunch of geometry facts!

The Greek word for “truth” at that time was “aletheia”, a reference to the River Lethe which would make the dead forget their earthly lives. “Lethe-ia” refers to forgetting, so “a-lethe-ia” is un-forgetting. Plato argued that this is what’s going on with really getting a proof: sometimes when you meditate on a proof deeply enough, it goes from “Yep, the logic checks out, I trust this is true” to “Oh! I get it!” Plato suggested that this is due to the soul having come from the Absolute Truth. So when a mind is sufficiently tuned to truth, the soul recognizes and remembers (un-forgets) it.

The subject that the mathematikoi studied was called “mathema”, meaning “that which is learned” or “that which one comes to know”. A reasonable translation of “mathema” into Latin is “scientia”, from which we get our word “science”.

That’s not a coincidence. The founders of the scientific revolution often knew both Greek and Latin, but Latin was the common language used among intellectuals at the time. Hence Newton writing Principia Mathematica in Latin for instance.1

When I’m talking about the True Art of mathema, I mean the thread that awakened the Western mind and created Plato’s Academy. I mean the thing that sparked the Renaissance when reintroduced in the wake of the Black Death. I mean the soul-fire that lit the scientific revolution in the social ruins of the Church after the Reformation. To the extent that there’s life from the Age of Enlightenment, it comes from this thread.

It is an absolute fucking travesty that we collectively lost the spiritual dimension of mathema. That the formalists won the paradigm wars at the turn of the 20th century. That religion was reframed as a backwards idea we had simply not yet grown out of. That we came to consider the view of the body as a machine as correct instead of as merely a mental tool for solving certain problems. That wisdom was forgotten and ignored in pursuit of dead knowledge.

The ancient Greeks mostly didn’t use the word “gnosis” for the kind of sacred knowing that mathema trained. That word came much later, with the Gnostics. The Gnostics held that the world was created by an evil god, the “demiurge”, who keeps us trapped here in confusion and pain via deception. The demiurge twists all spiritual teachings to keep us disoriented and following false paths. The only way out is to cultivate knowing that is incorruptible, that not even the demiurge could confuse us about. That knowing was called “gnosis”.

I don’t believe in a demiurge, and a lot of Gnostic teachings are quite dark and very life-disavowing in ways I find highly distasteful. But I think they were onto something. The memetic wilderness does keep producing deceptions and twisting spiritual teachings in just this kind of way. It has an emergent intelligence. And the evolutionary incentives are not systematically toward sanity and kindness for humanity. In many cases the things done in the name of love are downright evil.

The reason I care about gnosis is that it shines an incorruptible light on the memetic darkness. It shifts the evolutionary landscape to bias toward sanity and kindness in human terms.

I don’t think the Gnostics or the Pythagoreans — or anyone, really — had a full picture of what deserves to be called “gnosis”. Otherwise we wouldn’t be in our modern predicament. I doubt I have a full picture just yet either.

But it seems within reach, and the effort to reach for it is self-correcting. We’re looking for a solution to a specific memetic problem. History, spirituality, and the mathematical sciences all have hints about a possible solution. The meta-meme gives us additional context and insight that wasn’t there before in the past methods. As long as we don’t get distracted or confused about the point of what we’re doing, our aim can act as a guiding light through whatever memetic distortions try to show up along the way.

So as I spell out my current understanding of gnosis, please don’t take this as an argument for you to agree or disagree with. Take it as an invitation to look somewhere and see whatever you see. I’m extremely clear in myself about some of this, and I’ll try to offer up that clarity for you to examine. But it doesn’t matter if you agree with me. What matters is that you have a way of recognizing the truth. Hopefully we’ll come to agree as a matter of us both recognizing the same thing and learning to sync up our ways of talking about it.

Unalienable knowing

We have examples of understanding that not even a demiurge could confuse us about.

I mentioned evolution in this light before. There’s a certain “click” that can happen (an aletheia-ing) where the basic idea of evolution is obviously inviolate. That even the Christian God is not strong enough to defy: even if Young Earth creationism were totally correct, evolution would necessarily have started at the moment of creation, and thereafter God would have to intervene at the molecular level time and time again to prevent things from evolving.

(And quite tellingly, this would mean we could empirically test whether such a God is real!)

That confidence doesn’t come from the tons of evidence in the fossil record, or the widespread agreement of scientists. It’s much deeper than that.

In this context I sometimes refer to deep laws. These are tautologies that human minds often nonetheless treat as false. Evolution is one of these: it’s inviolate not because there’s something enforcing some pattern, but because it’s a necessary consequence of patterns surviving through time. It’s inherent in what things like “pattern” and “time” mean.

The second law of thermodynamics is another deep law. I love this quote from Arthur Eddington as a way of highlighting what (I think) gnosis feels & sounds like here:

“The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

The point isn’t to believe it, though! That’s not gnosis of entropy. Gnosis of entropy arises from seeing its tautological nature — that there’s literally no other way reality could possibly be.

Gnosis of interface

“But wait!” I hear some psychonauts exclaiming. “Do you really get to know even that? You could still be confused! Reality is pretty mysterious after all.”

I’m thinking for instance of my experiences on Ayahuasca and Bufo (5-MeO-DMT). It’s pretty laughable in the wake of those encounters to imagine that reality could be logically constrained.

But here’s what I can know, even there: I can know how things seem to me.

In my Less Wrong essay “Gears in understanding”, I emphasized how I was talking about properties of maps that have nothing to do with how well or poorly they correspond to the territory. For instance, the labels on a roadmap might make it ambiguous which road is being named. That has nothing to do with whether or not the map is accurate. I can tell whether or not I can understand the map’s claims. And there’s a way that what sense I make of the map’s claims is unarguable: you might disagree with how I’m reading the map, but I’d have to get extremely confused to agree that I’m not reading the map the way I am.

Likewise, when I look outside my window, I see San Francisco. Or at least I think so! I’m actually seeing a mental overlay that labels my experience “San Francisco”. My mind could get lost in recursion here: isn’t it an overlay telling me there’s an overlay saying it’s SF? But there’s something simpler and clearer and more fundamental: I can tell that my impression is that I see the city. I might be confused about the context — maybe I’m dreaming, or on a psychedelic trip I forgot I’m on, or in a hallucination while I’m actually dying, or whatever — but I cannot be confused about the fact that my experience appears to me the way it appears to me.

Likewise, I find the sentiment “I know that I don’t know” helpful. No matter how confused or doubtful I get, I can tell something — that I’m confused, that I doubt, that I lack clarity, etc. I can have unassailable clarity about that.

Infallibility

The real point of mathematics, in my opinion, is to recognize and refine this kind of unalienable knowing. It’s the art of cultivating gnosis. It grants a kind of clarity that lets you say “No, actually, one plus one really is two. That’s just true. If you disagree with the truth, you’re wrong. That has nothing to do with me. I just happen to know the truth, which allows it to speak through me right now.”

That said, it’s possible for someone to bring up “counterexamples”. For instance: a cup of water plus a cup of salt doesn’t make two cups of saltwater. So does this violate 1+1=2?

Lots of people who don’t understand gnosis try to answer that “1+1=2” is an “abstract truth” and thus the saltwater thing doesn’t touch it. But I think they’re confused. That “abstract truth” totally applies to saying that a cup of water plus a cup of vinegar gives two cups of liquid. This idea that math is made of “abstractions” as though those ideas are part of some Platonic Ideal realm that only magically sometimes overlaps with our world… this is a cope. It comes from an ongoing confusion about what math is.

So what goes wrong with saltwater? Well, obviously, “1+1=2” doesn’t apply here for some reason. Why not? What hidden assumption gets violated?

(You’ll get more out of this if you pause reading and honestly try to figure it out.)

Hint: If we’d combined a pound of water and a pound of salt, we absolutely would have gotten two pounds of saltwater. What’s different about pounds vs. cups here?

The answer is…

…when we say “1+1=2”, we assume that the process of addition doesn’t change the quantities that the “1”s refer to. But the volume of salt changes when mixed with water (in a way that mass, and thus weight, doesn’t).

Once you see it, it probably clicks. That’s obviously what’s going on here. The example clarifies something about what we meant by “1+1=2”. It turns out that our understanding of addition relies on object permanence. If “adding” destroys or creates more stuff, of course the end result won’t match the equation!

But just as importantly, your trust in 1+1=2 probably wasn’t itself challenged by the “counterexample” even though you probably didn’t know why not. I think this is behind people’s attempts to defend it by claiming it’s an “abstract truth”: they know it’s true, they just don’t know how to relate it to the saltwater situation, so they try to make up justifications.

I claim that this quality of knowing deserves to be called “gnosis”. Most folk have gnosis that 1+1=2. That doesn’t mean that our mental interpretation of what we gnostically know won’t change! But if we’re clear with ourselves that we are in fact tuning into truth, then “counterexamples” serve to prompt our minds to clarify what it is that we know — instead of making us question whether we know anything at all!

Confidence & humility

I often reference “100% confidence and 100% humility” as seemingly paradoxical properties of gnosis. As opposed to it being some balance of the two, or some closed-minded certainty. This is what I mean: you’re unshakably clear and sure that you know something, and that your current way of thinking & naming it is at least pointing at the thing you know, but your mind’s best handles for it could turn out to be meaningfully or even completely broken with respect to some application of the knowledge that’s relevant to you. Your articulation can be disproven, but not your knowing. The latter just gets clarified.

A historical math example: the field of topology got its start from attempts to understand why the Euler characteristic of all polyhedra seemed to be 2. Mathematicians produced a number of proofs that it’s always 2, some of which are quite elegant and compelling.2 And then folk started finding counterexamples. Much like with the saltwater situation, it turned out that mathematicians were making assumptions they weren’t aware of about what a polyhedron was. There were debates across decades about whether we should redefine what counted as a polyhedron or if we should count Euler’s observation as a fluke. This finally got resolved when Poincaré suggested flipping the logic: given a shape’s Euler characteristic, what can we know about it? It then turns out that all polyhedra with characteristic 2 are spherelike, rather than (say) doughnut-like.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the proofs were just wrong. But they weren’t. They were demonstrations of some kind of truth. Mathematicians were just wrong about what had been proven, in a way that turned out to matter for the topic they were examining.3

The same thing applies to the deep law of efficiency. People bicker about the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), often citing examples of markets that aren’t efficient. But the EMH is to the deep law of efficiency as thermodynamic equilibrium is to entropy. The logical arguments for EMH give parameters for understanding how the inefficiencies must arise, much like proofs that the Euler characteristic is always 2 help us see what must be different about a shape for it to have a different characteristic.

For instance, when Bitcoin first appeared, only a few people saw its potential and bought a bunch. A lot of those people became “crypto millionaires”. EMH would imply that they were purely lucky. But my own experience was that even though I mostly believed what the people around me were saying about Bitcoin’s potential, I literally could not buy any. I couldn’t figure out how. I just didn’t have others’ tech savvy to do it. And quite a few people just thought it sounded weird and suspicious. Those technological and social frictions seem sufficient to me to explain the inefficiency: everyone could have the same info about Bitcoin’s positive expected value, and the market would not have had the ability to reflect that knowledge in Bitcoin’s price yet.

So it would be ludicrous to assert that the EMH is just always true — but it would be something like self-gaslighting to pretend that you don’t know something from the reasoning. Something is inviolate, and you can tell! It just turns out that the initial description was meaningfully wrong.

And even here, it might turn out that the deep law of efficiency still falls short! It might make assumptions that sometimes don’t apply to things we care about.

But even so, it’s not just a hands-in-the-air “I guess we can’t know anything for sure.” We absolutely know something. It’s just critically important that we not grip to our current mental interpretation of what that something is.

Tracing the proof

I claim that the right use of proof, in the context of math (as normally understood), is to give a formula for developing gnosis of something.

I’ll generalize this from math in a moment. But as is often the case, math has some pretty tidy examples that I think make the generalization easier to understand.

Normally, proofs are viewed as something like a verification of a claim’s truth, or at least that the claim follows from premises. But I think this is nuts. You can’t know all the premises you’re operating under: that’s one of the major lessons from the history of the Euler characteristic, as one of a bazillion examples.

I think it’s far more sane and practical to view a proof as playing a similar role as kata does in martial arts. Katas (literally “forms”) are prescribed movement sequences you train over and over again. The idea is that you want these sequences available and mastered when you need them, instead of having to improvise in the middle of sparring every time.

For instance, here’s a visual proof that the internal angles of a triangle sum to 180º:

The point here is to offer a seed of insight. I could explain the image, but the lion’s share of the value comes from sort of meditating on it and seeing for yourself why the conclusion must be true.

In the course of doing so you might change how parts of it are expressed to make it fit your mind better. For instance, I say “180º” because that’s standard, but it’s not how I think of it. I think of it as “They sum up to a straight line.” This kind of thing naturally happens as you make the “kata” yours. It often changes even what you think is being claimed. (For instance, even though it’s not stated, the above image makes sense only if the line x is parallel to the line segment BC.)

There’s a kind of “click”, an aletheia-ing, that you’re looking for in this meditation. The point isn’t that you get to know this random fact. The fact mostly doesn’t matter to most people. The point is that the practice of tracing the reasoning until it’s truly yours shows you how to turn a claim into your own gnosis — and how to correct (your understanding of) the claim so that you can tell what is true, and why it must be true.

Once you have that “click”, you can apply the reasoning process you used to get it each time you need it. You know two of the angles of a triangle and you want to know the third? Well, you can sketch the above drawing on top of your specific triangle, and repeat your now more familiar (and probably more streamlined) path of reasoning, and it becomes incredibly obvious that the angle you’re looking for must be 180º minus the sum of the two known ones. Not because you applied some memorized formula, and not from just using the above theorem’s conclusion, but because reality can’t move any other way, and you know it. You directly see it.

By way of contrast, it’s pretty common in geometry classes to show students some proof like this one and then have them use the conclusion to solve problems (like finding the unknown angle). And maybe separately test whether they’ve memorized the proof.

But this is bonkers. It separates the conclusion from the reasoning. It’s practicing deference to authority — practically the opposite of gnosis!

I saw the result of this gnosis-defiance quite a lot as a math teacher. Students would get confused if a triangle were drawn on a sphere: their knowledge about triangles and 180º was a floating fact rather than something that critically depended on their sense of the parallel postulate. Likewise, I’d see students applying the Pythagorean theorem to non-right triangles, because that’s just the algorithm they’d habitually trained for finding the unknown length on a triangle. The need for the triangle to have a right angle just wasn’t relevant to their problem-solving efforts. They were using a dead conclusion instead of a living perception.

To call back to deep laws, this is a case where they were extending a tautology to a context it didn’t apply in. Math theorems are demonstrations of tautologies: “The sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 180º” is just as redundant as “A triangle has three sides” to a gnostically well-trained mind. The point of a proof is to help you see the tautology as such. The point of tracing the proof is to integrate the perception of the tautology into your sense of what reality even is.

So, that’s in math.

A non-math example is Malcolm Ocean’s Non-Naïve Trust Dance (NNTD). NNTD is a deep law — which is to say, a relevant tautology. He often states it as “You can’t trust what you can’t trust.” (This is akin to evolution as the tautology “Patterns that are better at spreading will spread more.”) The practice of applying NNTD is a matter of tracing proofs of NNTD in cases where our minds don’t automatically perceive it and might treat it as false or irrelevant.

A violation of NNTD might sound like “You should trust me.” There’s a clear perception of how trust works that makes this statement ludicrous. No, it’s not the case that the person should trust the speaker. That’s incoherent. Tracing the proof of NNTD here makes the incoherence necessary, and adds texture and detail to what I even mean by “incoherent”.

(Bear in mind that I haven’t really outlined or even hinted at the proof. I’ve done the equivalent of stating the theorem’s conclusion. A trailhead to a proof might be: if the listener doesn’t trust the speaker, what exactly is the speaker implying the listener should do with their distrust? Assuming it’s possible to do, how would that action relate to the cause of the distrust?)

As with “normal” math, though, the goal here isn’t that you feel the plausibility of what I’m pointing at here with NNTD. It’s that you register a claim, and meditate on it, and come to integrate an unalienable knowing — and possibly say it differently, and maybe even correct some of what I’ve said!

As a foreshadowing of the self-reference check for gnosis below: this reasoning about proof-tracing applies to itself. The point isn’t to make you feel moved by my vision of tracing proofs, or of gnosis in general, and therefore you need to decide how much you agree or disagree with me. It’s more like, I’m sketching a diagram that traces several proofs in my perception. I’m hoping you can use these as meditative objects to claim your own unalienable knowing about these topics. Then the ideas we’re comparing are vivid and clear. Gnosis then permeates our shared understandings, which puts a massive evolutionary pressure on the memes that thrive between us.

Plausibility vs. necessity

I find it key to distinguish between arguments of plausibility versus necessity. Gnosis is a clear perception of what’s necessary, carried with a confident-yet-humble mental guess about the best currently relevant articulation of that necessity.

The difference between a proof and a good old argument is that the proof is making a case for necessity. It’s not just that things could be a certain way, or that they probably are, but that it would be deeply incoherent for them to be any other way.

The claim about the internal angles of a triangle is that there’s no room for them to sum to anything but a straight line. Not that they just often do, or that it’s pretty reliable. It’s in the definition of what a triangle even is!

The “counterexample” of a triangle drawn on the surface of the Earth, with one point at the north pole and the other two on the equator, is very much like the earlier saltwater “counterexample” to 1+1=2. It offers clarity about what is necessary, and when. But it doesn’t refute the necessity itself.

Similarly, evolution is necessary. That’s key to what makes it a deep law. We could maybe imagine a world where gravity is slightly stronger or weaker, or where light really does travel through luminiferous aether and has different speeds to different observers. But it’s deeply incoherent to imagine a world without evolution, or where evolution works slightly differently.

And to the extent that you haven’t seen that, you haven’t seen the deep law!

The main thrust of what I’ve been trying to share in this document is a big necessity argument. A proof. I’m trying to offer a sketch of a kind of meta deep law. It’s about how deep laws are seen, and how that relates to the (deep) law of memetic evolution. How the (deep) law of ecosystem efficiency constrains what kinds of memetic actions and efforts are even possible, and what results they necessarily must have.

And at the same time, some of what I’ve been sharing is merely plausible. The details I gave about minds’ functions are educated guesses based on observation. They derive from gnosis of mind’s mechanistic nature: there must be mechanisms like these. But much like the deep law of evolution doesn’t necessitate that we’re closely related to chimpanzees, the deep law of mental cause-and-effect doesn’t demand that we have a selfing process.

However, given the selfing process as described, the glitchiness of the structure of Original Spin is guaranteed. I don’t yet have either a proof or a counterexample to the conjecture that self-tooling is always inefficient (in the sense of there always being a better problem-solving method), but the specific application of self-tooling that’s Original Spin is reliably degenerate. It’s not something a mind would ever adopt without another mind basically requiring it to.

I keep saying I’m doing math on the mind, instead of on numbers or shapes. This is what I mean. When you start taking gnosis really seriously, and you observe the mind, you can use gnosis to organize the mind and actually goddamn know some things about how it works in ways that matter.

Then attempts to engineer the mind aren’t just ephemeral wishes in a soup of theory. They become empirically testable, observable, and a source of real problem-solving for issues that root in the psyche.

…such as the global puzzle of getting memetics right.

Social anti-gnosis

I think there’s also such a thing as anti-gnosis. Not just the absence of gnosis, but a kind of mental engine or program that actively and strategically blocks gnosis cultivation within the mind running these patterns.

I’d like to sketch a plausible (as opposed to necessary) model here of the main way I see this happening. Like much of what I’ve said in this document, it derives from the mental machinery I’ve laid out. But given that machinery, there are some necessary consequences, and I do think we in fact observe those very consequences in practice.

Minds solve problems. That’s all they ever do. All mental activity is the result of taking some goal or intention from the user and then working on finding ways to accomplish it.

But some problems interact with the ways in which the mind tries to solve them. This happens a lot (and maybe exclusively) in social contexts. If I need others to like me, but I also expect that trying to get others to like me will make them like me less, then how do I get them to like me? How do I even ask the question without thwarting the goal?

This kind of puzzle creates self-reference loops of exactly the type that minds have trouble with. Giving a mind a problem like this is basically guaranteed to create inefficiencies, the way Original Spin is an inefficiency.

This is a meta-problem I used to see a lot in math education. Students often (correctly) recognize math class as giving them a social problem. Their goal is to navigate social forces that require them to “do well” in the subject. So they try to figure out what kinds of answers the teacher wants to hear, and what kinds of excuses can let them avoid penalties and get higher grades, etc. Sometimes this involves developing mental tools that let them actually solve math problems — but only if that’s the easiest way to solve the social problem! Lots of teachers complain that students “aren’t thinking” about the math, but that’s because many of them don’t care about the math. They care about the social force the teacher wields. So that’s what they’re thinking about!

But if they get in trouble for explicitly thinking about that, then naturally they’ll try to hide their problem-solving effort from the adults. And sometimes the strategy they converge on is to hide that problem-solving effort from themselves. (“I’m really trying! I swear! I’m just bad at math!”)4

It’s helpful to remember that minds don’t inherently care about truth-tracking. Truth-tracking is a strategy for solving problems. If a mind notices a better strategy than truth-tracking for solving a given problem, it’ll employ that better strategy instead.

I think this is the core issue that makes trauma possible. Children survive by solving the social problem of getting along with their caretakers. Their caretakers also have perception abilities that can feel to the children like mind-reading. So as an example, if a toddler’s mom gets mad at the kid and insists he’s “being bad”, and gets more angry if he doesn’t show sincere remorse for “being bad”… then the easiest way for the child to solve the social problem might be to don Original Spin. Which is to say, to actually think of himself as having “been bad” and misinterpret his fear of loss of mother’s love as pain about “being bad”.

If he trusted he could handle his mother’s anger, he wouldn’t need to gaslight himself this way. I think this is the basic logic behind most “trauma processing”. Adults can in principle handle their mom being upset or cold or whatever toward them, because their survival doesn’t depend on her approval anymore. If that fact feels real to them and is brought into contact with their fear, it becomes safe to recognize the Spun-up strategy because the adult now has a better strategy on hand.

But this doesn’t work if there’s still a real social problem — or more precisely, if the person with an anti-gnostic strategy can’t trust there isn’t still a real social problem.

For instance, I’ve seen quite a few mothers in abusive relationships who would go to great lengths to justify her husband’s behavior. Often for years. It would be an impenetrable wall of rationalization… until she got enough financial and social resources that she trusted she could take care of herself and her children without him. Only at that point was she able to risk admitting the problem to herself and risk him picking up on her changed view of him.

The issue being, humans are something like telepathic. If she admitted to herself that he’s abusive, she’s likely to change subtle stuff like her body language and vocal tone, even if she tries not to. Those are things he can pick up on. So if she in fact can’t handle the consequences of him reacting to her view of him, she needs to control her view of him — even if doing so amounts to gaslighting herself.

Sorting out anti-gnosis looks to me like a prerequisite for developing gnosis. The mother in the above situation doesn’t need skill with proof-tracing (and in fact she might not be able to develop such skill if she can tell it would clear her mind!); she needs help, and money. Or some other way of handling her situation — all while denying she has a situation that needs handling!

I don’t think anyone has a general solution to anti-gnosis. In a culture where people deeply, in their bones and sinews, respected one another’s sovereignty and clarity… then yes, I think we could be free of it. But that’s not the culture we’re in.

And I get sort of angry with people who insist that their Favorite Theory™ just solves this. Lately it’s “getting a regulated nervous system”. That’s super valuable. It might be the best we can do for now. But claiming it’s a complete solution is distracting. It’s ignoring the nature of real-world power. It alienates gnosis by masquerading as certainty instead of as plausibility. The mother up above often can’t learn enough nervous system regulation tools to keep her children safer than she expects they would be by her continuing to BS herself.

I think it’s important to recognize this as an open problem. We have a few partial solutions, but nothing robust, short of a deep memetic transformation of the cultures we’re embedded in.

…at least as far as I know. I would very much like to discover I’m wrong here.

Some gnostic observations

Remember that at the very beginning, I referenced how the aim is to make what truly matters the organizing principle of the mind.

I haven’t quite gotten there yet. We’re close. But I need to point at a few specific topics first now that we have the context of gnosis and anti-gnosis.

The spread of topics might seem a bit random. But my impression is that they are in fact key. I hope to make that clear later on.

Problems before solutions

Anti-gnosis often comes with fixation on solutions. Not solving problems, but solving them in a specific way. And then using some kind of force to push aside the reasons why those solutions don’t work.

This is sort of like blindly believing “away” is a place you can actually throw things. Because reality disagrees, the attitude builds up metaphorical (or literal!) garbage that the minds implementing the strategy will tend to ignore. If their filtering mechanisms are strong enough, then eventually Death will educate them in ways they find surprising and confusing.

I once described this problem as “adaptive entropy”. It’s an attempt to apply adaptive intelligence in a way that makes that intelligence dumber. Adaptive entropy tends to show up as problems that resist being solved — not just that they’re difficult (like the Riemann hypothesis), but that use attempts to solve them to make themselves worse (like culture wars).

The core issue here is the fixation on a conclusion. A generalization of rationalization.

For the most part, mind-like systems work best if the focus is instead on the problem. On clearly articulating it, holding off on proposing solutions, and using proposed solutions to better understand the problem rather than to just make the problem go away.

When you name an actually good solution that in fact accounts for all the variables, it practically implements itself. No force is needed. And no adaptive entropy gets incurred.

This pattern shows up in math education. Most math classes get the order of instruction backwards: they describe some method or tool and then give students example problems and homework to practice those methods. This then requires the teacher to specify the order of mathematical tools they’ll “cover” and find some way to motivate the students to learn them. The default answer is to apply social force (and thus induce anti-gnosis, which often results in math trauma).

It works far better to let students’ interests lead, notice places where there are mathematical problems that are already relevant to the students, point those problems out, and let them flounder without giving them the tools to solve those problems. Quite often the students will invent methods that are logically equivalent to known mathematical ones. But even if they don’t, after they’ve struggled for a while with the problem they’ll be able to recognize an offered solution method as vividly relevant to them. The teacher becomes helpful support for students’ interests instead of an authority jamming prescribed ideas into students’ heads against their will.

This pattern is close to universal. In practice, anti-gnosis amounts to strategic confusion about what problem you’re solving and/or whether something counts as a solution. Just getting clear on what problem is even being solved, and how you could tell if you were making progress, makes a huge difference!

It’s worth bearing in mind that lots of memes rely on anti-gnosis to survive. Meaning that moves that create clarity and offer superior strategies will often encounter intelligent resistance. One example I bumped into back in 2020 was an otherwise very brilliant fellow asserting that Trump supporters were all idiots who weren’t worth listening to and should be politically overpowered. I tried to point out that even if that person were right about them, his strategy for dealing with them was worse than one based on learning to listen to and understand their perspective. He spat venom back at me saying that there’s no point, they’re stupid, he’d tried and there’s no getting through to them, they deserve his hatred and dismissal, etc.

(I swear, memetic possession almost literally looks like cordyceps of the mind to me now. A zombie apocalypse indeed!)

So, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on places where we’re inclined to cling to a solution, instead of using that proposed solution to better understand the problem.

This idea of “problems first” doesn’t survive a self-reference check unless we see how adaptive entropy points at a deep law. Which is to say, gnosis of adaptive entropy clarifies what this “problems first” approach is even trying to say, and how it applies to itself.

This “problems first” guideline, by the way, suggests that it’s helpful to view ideas as having no inherent value. Ideas are tools for solving problems. Sometimes that “problem” is just that you’re really curious about how something works! But getting lost in absorbing “true theories” just because they’re true is almost certainly a confusion, and is probably downstream of anti-gnosis.

Stillness, prayer, & listening

A defining characteristic of gnosis is the self-validating “I can tell for myself” quality.

That cannot come from thought. It can’t originate in the mind at all! One way to see that is by watching the 3-step process for using the mind that I outlined in part 2:

1. I push an intention to my mind.

2. My mind does some black-box process and generates a response.

3. I consider the output and decide if it satisfies me.

How do I know how to do steps 1 and 3? It can’t come from the mind, because this process is how I’d prompt the mind to tell me how to use it. The knowing must be prior to thought.

And yet, I can have a mental reflection of this process. Hence my ability to talk about it here!

The problem is that when the mind governs the process of understanding gnosis, or understanding itself, it runs into self-reference paradoxes. And it will usually try to resolve those paradoxes with recursion and/or filtering.

In practice this means that the mind will lose track of the difference between (a) its models of gnosis and (b) gnosis itself.

Taking the mind as object helps a great deal with this. From what vantage point are you viewing the three steps I named above? It’s not something the mind can do since it involves observing the whole mind, which would involve mentally impossible self-reference. And when the mind tries anyway (with its recursion and awareness-collapsing strategies), it’ll tend to cause a loss of body awareness. That shows up in shifts in language where “the body” (usually as a mental icon) gets put in third person because identity moves to the currently active part of mind, which said part cannot see.

The actual vantage point beyond the mind that can observe all this is very simple. It’s vast, vividly present, and quite capable of what the mind would tag as self-reference.

Because it’s beyond (or prior to) the mind, it’s a particular kind of silent. Vividly alive, but utterly still.

I’m describing this in third person to make noticing the logic easy for the mind. But it’s vividly first-person. I’m not sure how to convey this point without shifting identity to the still silent “witness”. But notice that when I talk about “the still silent ‘witness’”, the vantage point has to be outside whatever is being observed. I’m gesturing instead at where you’re observing from. 🫵

Minds have a very hard time stabilizing on this place (shifting back to 3rd-person-ing it). Minds by default grip to sensations, and there’s no sensation at the core of being. Minds often can’t find where “the user” even is — which, again, is why identifying as the body can be a helpful stepping stone: the body is a lot easier to find!

There’s actually a deep reason the mind can’t find “the user”: there’s no such thing. “The user” is an overlay based on reification so that the mind can have some way of relating to the intentionality that defines the mind’s goals. It works well enough in many ways to let the mind pretend that that intentionality is from some kind of agent. But it’s not — as demonstrated by the fact that awareness can be aware of itself, whereas agents cannot self-refer.5

(This mental disorientation is actually a good thing. It’s another iteration of the puzzle of wisdom. Which is to say, every framework the mind uses will eventually prove inadequate if extended enough. If the mind can reflect the gnosis (i.e. trace the proof) of this point, it should systematically let go of its effort to function independently of the mystery that’s beyond it, which is the core mental behavior that lets anti-helpful memes survive through it.)

I think this is behind a lot of spiritual talk of “letting go”, “not my will but Thy Will be done”, surrendering to a Higher Power, the Twelve Step system’s move of admitting powerlessness over your addictions, etc. If I’m right, this is pointing at a mental move that actually cannot work if you start with a confidence that you know what you’re surrendering to. It’s more like, being willing to provisionally trust something without having a clear idea of what that something even is. Very reminiscent of both faith and prayer.

I talked about this in a 2019 article “The Coming Age of Prayer”. What I mean by “prayer” here is a recognition of and naming of the problem, a heartfelt yearning for a solution, an active presence with the heartbreak of not having a clear path to a solution, and a willingness to stay with all of that in a non-passive way. It’s neither limply hoping for some God-like figure (e.g. “the universe”) to just happen to overhear your thoughts and idle wishes, nor is it a desperate contracted attempt to just do it yourself (“answer your own prayers”). It’s being with the fullness of wanting-and-not-knowing-how-to-get. Of staying highly alive to the question without either jumping to answers or passively waiting for them to arrive.

In this, it’s the mind’s job to clearly name the desire. There are plenty of problems minds can solve, but there are lots more that the mind as it’s currently set up cannot, and it trying will get in the way. If it can understand this fact, then the way it helps solve those problems is by naming them — and it will recognize this, and get out of the way, and support the profoundly deep listening needed to “hear” something new.

When the mind reflects the deep silence of the user, and it recognizes that it can best help in a given moment by listening… it becomes silent. No thoughts. Vast spaciousness. It enters a mode much like a computer offering a command line prompt, waiting for user input. It doesn’t try to contract awareness in a way that makes parts of it invisible. It just gets out of the way, and responds only when asked to do something.

The main tool I’m aware of for showing a mind that this is worth doing is: attend to deep stillness. Here’s a zen story a roshi once told me that I often think of here:

A roshi gathered his students in front of an easel. He drew a bird, then turned and asked them “What do you see?”

After a moment the first student replied “I see a bird.”

The second, hoping to be clever, said “I see flight.”

The third added “I see freedom.”

The roshi smiled. “Would you like to know what I see?”

The students knew they were in for it, but nodded.

“I see the open sky.”

The point, as I see it, is that there’s a vast context of nothingness that makes sensation possible. Minds tend to focus on the sensations and ignore the context. They’ll often push to re-contract awareness back to just the sensations — focusing on the bird instead of the open sky. But you can just choose to bring attention to the vastness. After a while the mind starts to see its own limitation in being able to orient to that nothingness, and sort of loosens its grip.

Similarly, the koan about “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” isn’t meant to just be a thought-perplexing puzzle. It’s an invitation about something to do. To listen to the sound of two hands clapping, you swing your hands together and listen at a specific moment for the sound. What happens if you actually do the same thing, but with just one hand? When you listen at that specific moment, what do you hear?

Minds often say “I don’t hear anything”, but that’s a description of what didn’t happen. True, there was no clear sensation for the mind to grab onto. But if you really listen to that moment, you do hear nothing. Silence. There are surely other sounds too, but the sound of one hand clapping is silence. You can tune your listening to pick up on that silence all around, just like you can tune your awareness to notice the open sky even while birds fly in it.

I belabor this point because the context of stillness is closer to the origin of gnosis than is any sensation. Gnosis comes from “the user”. Getting a mind to really listen to that which is beyond itself — going into “user input mode” so to speak — seems to require showing it that what it’s trying to accomplish happens in a context it can never systematically orient to. That seems to be key for reflecting gnosis usefully in the mind.

Choice and autopilot

One of the great features of the mind is autopilot. When it gets familiar enough with a sequence of behavior, it’ll just automate that sequence without prompting the user anymore.

Most of the time this works great. It’s how we walk, and brush our teeth, and speak, and put on our shoes.

Sometimes it’s pretty silly though. Like when the waiter says “Enjoy your meal!” and I respond “You too!”

And sometimes it’s frustrating. Like when my fingers just open Twitter because they got familiar with the keystrokes and the sequence seems to fire on its own.6 (⌘+T, TW, enter!)

It’s possible — and pretty common — for one autopilot routine to set off another one. Like with doomscrolling, or binge-watching Netflix. If you have a standard meal you cook for yourself, and the end of that pattern has you sit down with your food, that might set off the pattern of eating once there’s food in front of you.

The result is that there’s no definite end to how long autopilot can be running. It’s possible to end up in loops that won’t stop on their own, ever. In these cases the mind is basically living our lives for us, until a disruption that’s way outside what those patterns can handle comes in.

The big obvious one being death.7

Memes can thrive inside these autopilot routines. It’s a great medium for them! Especially for the ones we wouldn’t choose to adopt. Autopilot bypasses (or at least seems to bypass) our capacity to choose what’s happening, meaning that memes can do an end-run around our consent if they can sort of sneak in and keep us in autopilot mode.

One result is that modern minds are very confused about how choice works. They seem to think it’s a result of making decisions, or applying force to follow a plan, or something. (“I should just start exercising.”) Minds tend to miss the rather obvious fact that they never choose anything that happens. The user chooses, always. And there’s a very simple matter of fact around what’s in the user’s power to choose.

A simple example is with physical movement. If I take my mind as object, it’s quite obvious that I can choose when my fingers move. My mind can think and plan and intend and worry all it wants to. It can show me that my fingers should be positioned in thus-and-such a way in order to (say) get my flute to make the sound I want. But if I choose not to move my fingers into that shape, they just aren’t going to go there. My choice has power here.

On the other hand, I’ve zapped myself with a taser before and watched my fingers contract. I didn’t choose for them to contract. That just happened.

And if I sleep on my arm funny and it’s numb for a while, I can choose to move my fingers, and yet they don’t move. Here my choice doesn’t have power. I have to wait for my arm to wake up for my power of choice to sort of reconnect.

A more subtle example shows up from watching the articulation engine. Most thinking and speech for most people is autopilot. This becomes incredibly obvious when I watch my mind produce words for me. There’s a huge (but subtle) difference between (a) my mind translating my intention vs. (b) automatic patterns handing their output to the articulation engine. It feels like the difference between me speaking and a robot pretending to be me speaking for me.

In each of these cases, I can tell. I can tell when I’m choosing vs. when something happens automatically. That ability to tell happens purely through gnosis. It’s not that there are telltale signs of choice that my mind is tracking. It’s that I can tell. My mind’s understanding isn’t of the nature of choice, but is instead of its limitation in understanding choice.

…and that its goals ultimately come from my choices, and therefore its real function is to serve me — not its current (probably memetically infected) autopilot routines.

Without this clarity, minds try to do impossible things all the time. They try to “just get over” some mean comment, or “be nicer”, or “end war in the Middle East”. A lot (maybe most) of this goes through Original Spin. All of this is to the benefit of parasitic memes.

And because there’s an intelligence behind this, there’s often internal resistance to un-confusing the mind on this point. Disinterest in taking mind as object, or impatience with pausing and feeling stillness, or insistence that one is powerless in the face of one’s addictions (in a victimized way instead of a surrendered prayerful one). Mental rehearsing about why there’s no time, or why the patterns make sense — as though that’s a valid reason to prevent choice from being able to intervene.

I’ve taken to pausing and sort of “waking up” right before I eat. Feeling stillness for one breath and intentionally turning off autopilot before I put the first bite in my mouth. Sometimes annoyance and impatience shows up, trying to push me to “get through it” so I can start eating. If I’m spaciously observing my mind instead of numbly obeying it, it’s extremely obvious whether that urgency has a good point — and it almost never does. It’s usually my mind trying to keep me from interfering with its tasks.

When I’m “present” (in the sense of not being asleep at the helm while autopilot does everything for me), it’s incredibly clear that there’s much less room for memes I don’t want to sneak through my mind. I might feel a flash of anger with someone, but I don’t have to let the program that’s fueled by that anger run, and if it does run I don’t have to let it use my mouth and hands against my will. If that program tries to deny me my power of choice, I know it doesn’t recognize its rightful relationship to me. It’s like a toddler that’s trying to hit me in frustration. Its behavior needs addressing, but I can tell it doesn’t have any real power over me — regardless of what it might say.8

Best as I can tell, the lion’s share of cultivating gnosis and cleaning parasitic memes out of one’s mind amounts to claiming one’s power of choice without waiting for permission to do so. You are permission. You choose when you choose. There is no higher authority to appease, no structure to “align” with first. Alignment relates to what your choice can affect, but not what you’re able to try.

Waiting for the mind to give you permission to do this is unwise. It gives your power of choice to whatever memetic structures currently live in you. That might turn out to work fine, but basically due to luck — and even then, it doesn’t help keep your mind healthy and vibrant if you encounter hostile and clever memes later on.

Courage

I often think of this image when thinking of gnosis:

Notice that he’s relaxed. He’s not screaming a proclamation. He’s not making himself better than all these other people. He’s just stating a fact: they’re all disagreeing with the truth. It’s not even about him. The mob could rush him and kill him, and they’d still be wrong, and he knows it.

…and he’s willing to say it. To let the truth speak through him.

Some of that can come from nervous system regulation. That helps deal with the anti-gnosis that intimidation can induce. But here I’m more interested in the capacity to voice and act on the gnostic truth even when terrified. I don’t think Gandhi, or MLK Jr., or the Founding Fathers of America were doing what they were doing because they felt safe.

Likewise, the figure in the above image might have an easier time if he knows he won’t be attacked, physically or socially. But gnostic courage lets him speak even without that reassurance. He’s willing to back the truth even when others don’t give it permission to exist.

It’s possible to mimic the behavior of courage by letting an idea (meme) ramp up fight-or-flight type energy and override the fear with planned behavior. But that can (and I think usually does) become a vector for unhelpful memes. Courage as I mean it is different from this — something like, the willingness to choose to die rather than misalign from what you gnostically know to be true. Not just because you think that’s important, but because deeper than mind, you’re unwilling to compromise your soul’s integrity regardless of the cost.

I don’t have a satisfying mental model of courage yet. I just get the sense that it’s very real, and very important. Like a flame from the heart that purifies the mind and protects its gates. It’s something like a ferocious and daring devotion to what truly matters, a deep readiness to face profound heartbreak, and an embodied willingness to act and speak in alignment with all of that regardless of what it might cost. Not as a virtue or an idea of what one should do, but because of blazing clarity that nothing could possibly be more right than utter devotion to what matters beneath appearances and form. That the costs might hurt, and the hurt matters, but the costs are nothing when compared to the rightness and beauty of aligning with life.

I hope you can hear and feel that I don’t mean to prescribe action. I’m not saying we should push ourselves to say difficult true things. (I think trying might make it harder for our minds to let us even recognize difficult true things!) I’m saying there’s something like gnosis of the heart.9 It’s a direct knowing about what matters. It’s in the aliveness of being, and in seeing the deadness of going along with soul-crushing systems. It’s in the fact that Burning Man builds a Temple every year.

And somehow we keep forgetting. We keep losing track of what truly matters.10

It’s as though there are structures in our autopilot that do not serve life and would not survive our deepest, most burning clarity. So they lull us into sleep lest we wake up and roar.

By courage I mean something like the capacity to fully show up for what matters even while these structures try to stop us.

So if we could live courageously, only the memes that help us care for what’s precious would be able to survive through us.

Gnosis of gnosis

Gnosis is nearly defined by passing the self-reference check. It is self-validating. You know gnosis is right because that’s what gnosis is.

One implication here is that you cannot receive an understanding of gnosis from me or any other outside source. Instead, you recognize it. You “aletheia” (un-forget) it.11

So if there’s any hint here of you feeling persuaded of or argued into agreeing with this idea, that’s not it!

If you catch a glimpse of what I’m talking about, it becomes irrelevant that I was the one talking about it. The details of how I’ve phrased it don’t matter anymore. The knowing is unalienably yours.

In mathema, this shows up as how no teacher or text or outside source can tell you if you’ve understood a proof. They might try. A skilled tutor might notice whether a pupil seems to really grasp the proof as opposed to socially performing an understanding. But the flash of utter clarity, the knowing that can never be invalidated by any authority, is something that the person in question can tell for themselves has happened — and that’s how they know it has happened.

These days I hear a lot of folk (especially in spiritual or relational circles) talking about whether something “resonates” or “feels true”. The degree to which many people who talk like this are often memetically hackable is embarrassing. Resonance in this sense isn’t necessarily from gnosis. That becomes extremely clear the more sharply you learn to recognize how gnosis is prior to sensation. These gut-feels are often an intuitive ping of familiarity, telling you whether what you’re hearing is compatible with the memes you tend to listen to and that you’ve let carve your physical intuitions.

For instance, I’ve met quite a few Christians who are hyper attuned to when something has sexual charge. It “feels impure” to them. They can totally tell that the sexual energy they’re encountering isn’t compatible with their Christian practices. That’s accurate! But it gets conflated with a claim that it’s objectively wrong, or that it’s bad for everyone. At that point the Christian memetic structure is speaking for them.

Where does the validity of “resonance” come from? Why trust that sensation, instead of some other sensation? Is it for reasons, which memes can rehearse in the mind? Is it naïve trust, where a person believes it because it just… feels better?

To be clear, I’m not saying resonance is bad to use. I’m saying that it’s precarious to rely on it as one’s compass through memetic ecosystems.

It’s like something to know you’re choosing to (say) move your fingers at will. How can you tell? Because that’s what choice is. That’s what being able to tell anything at all is. That doesn’t just “resonate”. It’s true.

Memes cannot corrupt this clarity. They can corrupt your mind’s reflection of this clarity, but not the vivid knowing itself. A mind that biases toward increasing the clarity of its gnostic reflection will incline the memes that pass through it to align with what the heart knows matters.

If that isn’t obvious to you, then you haven’t seen the thing I’m trying to name yet.

If I’ve earned your trust enough for you to suppose that I’m pointing at something real, then use this guideline as a sketch of a proof. See if you can see it for yourself.

Not a single bit of this has to do with believing me, or my ideas.

If what I’ve just said seems redundant, tautological, and maybe obviously phased wrong in a few places… then maybe you’ve got it.

But I can’t tell you.

It’s yours to tell for yourself.

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(This is part 3 of Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. This part is arguably the hardest one to understand or appreciate on its own. It rather heavily assumes you’ve read at least part 2 and ideally part 1 as well. It’s laying out a piece of logic that’s very twisty to most minds and can be very hard to motivate. The upshot is: the cause of its twistiness is why it’s important. In the context of memetics (from part 1) and memetic ecosystems (viewed at the individual scale as mental machinery in part 2), something funny happens when looking at a memetic ecosystem while part of it. It turns out that you’re always doing something like that move. That fact has serious consequences on how your context affects what you can see and think, which in turn majorly impacts the evolutionary incentives on memes that act through you. This logic helps set the stage for what gnosis is and why it’s so critical, which I go into in part 4.)

Minds have a built-in limitation. Their main function is to ignore most of reality, solving a problem in isolation of everything else. This means they cannot orient to reality as a whole. Instead, when they try, they orient to “reality” as a single simplified thing that they’re implicitly outside of and that is made of problems to be solved.

The clearest place this shows up (that I know of) is in self-reference. Minds can learn to trace the logic of self-reference, but only if they themselves are not part of the self-reference loop they’re examining. When a mind tries to model itself as a whole, it fails every time. Instead it typically creates a sort of mental icon or label for “itself” and then views that icon as an object it can examine from the outside.

(I’ll explain that example in more detail below. It’s worth really examining.)

However, minds can understand self-reference in general (with some effort — it tends to be very trippy), and they can understand that they have this basic limitation. They can even observe examples of how they encounter and deal with this built-in limitation.

This understanding turns out to be very helpful. It gives minds a way to correct something quite basic about how they model agency, and where choice comes from, and what is or isn’t certain. It also gives minds a way of finding exits from their own illusory worlds, which is a major boost to the native memetic immune system: lots of memes rely on the mind’s filtering process to keep their hosts from noticing an illusory world the meme has trapped them in.

Self-reference tends to be very strange to think about. It requires minds to invent endlessly new types of moves, again and again. So, take it slow. Take the time to make sure each piece makes sense to you. It’s very much like learning a novel way of thinking — or to be more precise, it’s about learning a novel way of learning novel ways of learning.1

Two kinds of meta

In my social circles, when people “go meta” in a conversation, they usually mean they’re kind of switching topics. Instead of talking about whatever the concrete thing was, they’re talking about how they were talking about the concrete thing.

It’s a meaningfully new conversation. If I’m in a group of friends who are trying to figure out what we’re doing for lunch, someone might say “Wait, the way we’re figuring this out isn’t very efficient, maybe we should do thus-and-such instead.” If people start talking about whether they should do thus-and-such, they’re not directly talking about which restaurant to go to anymore.

This is recursive meta. Each instance of “going meta” creates a new conversation that’s about (i.e. refers to) the previous conversation, but it’s a different conversation.

There’s no hard limit on how many layers of recursive meta we can go. Someone could, for instance, say “Hey, I don’t like how we’re trying to figure out whether to do thus-and-such versus what we were doing before to sort out what to do for food.” That’s a conversational move that invites a third layer, namely a discussion about the discussion about what to do for food. Sort of “meta layer 2”. In theory we could have as many recursive meta layers as there are counting numbers (though in practice most human minds balk at going more than about 3).

Minds have no intrinsic trouble with recursion. They can lose track! And some recursive patterns of thinking can be pretty confusing at first.2 But recursive reasoning is totally doable entirely within a mind as-is. We do this for social reasoning all the time: “John thought that Mary thought that you’d like this gift, but Mary thought that John thought that she thought you wouldn’t, and John didn’t realize that, so he figured that saying the gift came from her would be a kindness to her but she took it as an intentional slight.”

Self-referential meta at first might look like recursion, but it really isn’t. It sounds more like this:

“I don’t like how we’re navigating this whole situation, including how we’re talking about how we’re talking about it.”

This is a move to a new conversation, much like recursive meta. But the discussion it’s held within is roughly the conversation about conversations in general. That means the new (self-referential) conversation can include the above move to that self-referential conversation as an example within itself.

To give a bit more detail: In recursive meta, if someone says “I like the meta move you just made there”, that adds another recursive layer, because the statement comes from a new conversation (one recursive meta level up). But in self-referential meta, that same statement is held within the same conversation. “Going meta” lands you back in the same discussion you just “went meta” to.

Another way of saying this is: recursively going meta spawns a new thing, whereas self-referentially going meta doesn’t. The latter just traces a kind of loop.3

There’s a funny way that the self-referential conversation sort of “eats” all things of its type. We could talk about pinball, or math, or about what to wear while traveling this weekend, and those are all different discussions. But we can also use them as examples within the fully general meta-conversation. It’s meaningfully a different move to reminisce about a trip to Italy (a) on its own terms versus (b) within the self-referential thing. The latter involves a kind of ongoing background awareness-of-context.

In particular, I sometimes think of self-reference as “folding” infinite recursive towers into a single step. All those recursive meta layers are part of the self-referential discussion, and the self-reference loop sort of mimics the recursive “going meta” move. (E.g., “Hold on, the way you brought up that topic had a weird effect” has a similar but different effect in recursive meta than in self-referential meta.)

I want to acknowledge that this probably sounds a bit pedantic and pointless. If you don’t know what that self-referential conversation is good for, then I agree, it’s pretty dumb to try to engage with it. But I’ve found that it is an excellent example for introducing the difference between recursion and self-reference. That difference turns out to be incredibly key.

Here’s the distinction, made a bit more general and abstract:

• Whenever a structure of some type has a way of referring to structures of the same type, that first structure might be able to do recursion and/or self-reference.

• Recursion is when the reference within the structure refers to a distinct other structure of the same type (even if that other structure is a copy of the original).

• Self-reference is when the reference refers to exactly the structure containing the reference. Not to a copy of the structure, but to the instance itself.

As a dumb but hopefully clarifying example, arrows implicitly refer to (via pointing at) other things, and can point at other arrows. If you have an arrow pointing at some spot on a diagram, and you draw another arrow pointing at that first arrow, you’ve “gone meta” in the recursive sense. The “infinite recursive towers” here come from the ability to endlessly add yet another arrow pointing at the last one you drew.

A self-referential arrow literally bends around and points at itself. If you want some arrow pointing at the self-referential arrow, you don’t need to draw it, because the self-referential arrow is already an arrow doing that for you. It folds one infinite recursive tower into a single step — namely an infinite sequence of arrows pointing in a line ending at the self-referential arrow.

In this case the self-referential thing doesn’t “eat” everything of its type. It’s not a “fully general meta arrow”. So another thing this rather silly example shows is that self-reference has structure, and that structure depends on the context and nature of the self-reference.

Agents cannot self-refer

Minds (in the sense discussed in part 2) never use self-reference to do metacognition. They usually use recursion instead.

This is a structural necessity. It’s like how eyes can’t directly see themselves. They can see their reflected image, such as in a mirror. But unless something reflects or bends the light, it cannot go from the eye’s surface to its pupil.

In a similar way, minds rely on a subject/object split. This is fundamental to what an agent is: it’s something mentally distinguishable from whatever it’s observing and acting on. Self-reference blurs that distinction by making the “agent” both a subject and an object at the same time. This runs into a similar problem as trying to make sense of the statement “This statement is false.”

I strongly recommend reading this short cartoon introduction to “embedded agents” (though you can stop at the big squirrely four-color flow chart of words — that’s about why the research team that produced this post was examining those four topics back in 2018, and that discussion isn’t key to anything I have to say). This little comic does a wonderful job of explaining how the subject/object split is useful and how self-reference muddles that split.

The main criticism I have of the comic is, “embedded agent” doesn’t make any sense. The idea is made of a cluster of standard mental confusions, like treating reifications as objectively real and interface layers as accurate. These confusions aren’t even coherent enough to be wrong (although minds are great at ignoring that incoherence).

I’m pretty sure the idea of an agent comes from social icons. Minds get this backwards all the time: they think that people are objectively real, and that their models of others are approximations of those people. But that’s not how reality works. There’s an enormous mystery in what our minds tag as “another person”, but the idea that this mystery ultimately is “a person” roughly the way the mind thinks about people is the mind confusing its interface for the real thing. It’s a standard map/territory error.

When a social icon refers to “itself”, it’s doing so recursively, not self-referentially. What “refer” even means here is that there’s an icon within the icon. Sarah’s model of Bob’s model of himself is a little “Bob” icon within a “Bob” icon (within Sarah’s mind). It’s not possible for the Bob model to literally be inside itself.

Similarly: when I think about what I might want to eat later, the “I” who might want to eat this or that is a kind of thought-object in my mind. As I use my mind to think about a food plan, I’m observing a mental representation that’s labeled “I”. Basically a social icon.

And even in that last paragraph, there’s a hint at how my mind is using recursion: who is the “I” who is observing my mind’s use of this mental representation? Is it “the mind’s user”? The “observer”? Well, all of a sudden, that concept is also something observed! It’s like having drawn a recursively meta arrow pointing at the arrow pointing at the food question. There’s no arrow pointing at the last arrow drawn.

And who’s making that meta observation about arrows?

Whatever answer is given just recurses the process. There’s no way for a mind to actually answer the question of who you truly are. Every answer will always be an object that the mind distinguishes from the implicit subject. It’s like the “true” subject keeps “backing up” to look at whatever was previously the invisible subject.

When a mind models itself, it’s usually doing at least one of two tricks:

• Often it’s one part of the mind examining another part. In this case there might not even be recursion. (“Oh, I just had a funny thought.” The part of the mind making the observation is distinct from the part having a funny thought.)

• Often it’ll create a simulated fiction and look at that fiction. Kind of like a thought bubble. This is like the difference between thinking about your toes in some abstract sense versus actually feeling and looking at them as they are right now. Here the mind can have a “global” model of “itself”, but what it’s looking at is basically a thought bubble simulation. (“I have pretty high g factor.” “I’m generally a quiet person.”) It’s not actually observing itself as a whole.

This means that every model the mind has for itself is incomplete: it cannot account for the way in which it’s using the model in question as it’s using that model. It also typically hides this limitation by recursing and then pretending that’s self-reference. (“…and I’m using that high g factor to notice the fact that I have high g!” — which completely misses the fact that the use of high g is being observed, meaning the source of the utterance has shifted.)

All this is to say, there’s a predictable structural blindspot minds have here. They cannot model subjective first-person experience without viewing that experience from the outside as a third person object.

This is key to what makes them so powerful and useful. But it also opens them up to a particular kind of memetic attack.

Self-tooling and Original Spin

When I’m using a hammer, normally the selfing process just includes the hammer in my identity. I’m inclined to say things like “I’m pounding this nail in the wall here” instead of “I’m swinging this hammer to hit this nail into the wall here.”

If something were to go wrong with the hammer, like the rubber handle starts slipping, I might stop focusing on the nail and look at the hammer. Now the selfing process excludes the hammer from my identity so that “I” can examine “it”. It has shifted from subject to object. “What’s wrong with this thing?”

It would be pretty absurd to keep the flawed hammer within my sense of self while looking at it. “What’s wrong with me?”

This is a toy example of what I sometimes call “self-tooling”. Self-tooling is an attempt to examine and maybe modify the contents of identity (as defined by the selfing process) while keeping the stuff being examined within identity.

For a less fake example: a friend of mine gets really frustrated at her inability to articulate her thoughts or inner experience. She could frame this as that her mind’s articulation engine has a hard time expressing in ways she’s satisfied with. That frame involves no self-tooling. But instead she tends to say things like “I’m terrible at expressing myself. I’m just no good with words.” In this case her identity includes her articulation engine while she’s trying to name it.

The only reason you would want to self-tool is if including something within identity causes it to have a problem. Like if the hammer works perfectly fine unless you stop paying active attention to it as an object you’re using. Maybe the handle stays put while you’re focused on it, but it slips the moment you start implicitly trusting it.

But I haven’t found any realistic examples where self-tooling is necessary or even helpful.4 As far as I can tell, it’s always better to shift from working on “yourself” to working on some attribute or skill. Exercise to improve “yourself” versus to improve your health is a pretty big shift in terms of efficient use of mind. Otherwise subject/object blurring happens and the mind can’t orient to the problem coherently.

But there’s one specific case that makes self-tooling seem necessary: if you believe there is something wrong with you in a way that does not change with shifts in your identity boundary. Sort of like “I” itself is a corruption. This attitude is usually made of reifying “the self”, as though there’s an enduring thing that somehow needs to be worked on. Then it can seem utterly necessary to self-tool. Otherwise how are you going to correct whatever it is that’s intrinsically wrong with you?

This is the core confusion behind “Original Spin”. Original Spin says “The reason you hurt is because there’s something wrong with you.” It takes a real pain — maybe a trauma, maybe a momentary failure, maybe something else — and spins your perception around so that you think the cause of the pain is some flaw inherent to you that now demands self-tooling. This can then be a vector along which unhelpful memes can inject themselves into you.

Another way of saying this is, Original Spin is a mind virus5 that induces a memetic autoimmune disorder. Then your busy and weakened immune system opens gaps that can let other memes in and allows them to mutate into something parasitic (if they weren’t already).

Here are some examples:

• In a circle recently, “caretaking” came up as something lots of people there were “struggling with”. There’s a real thing where someone can feel like they have to regulate their nervous system by being helpful to others, and sometimes that has the person in question doing more than they would otherwise want to and feeling dysregulated and disconnected from others as a result. That sucks. It’s a real problem. But nearly everyone there was also emphasizing how their caretaking was wrong and that it was something they were working on in themselves. Instead of it being the most kind, intelligent, gentle move they had available for themselves and for relating to others given their current setup. This sense that they needed to “work on” their caretaking is an example of Spin: there’s an actual problem (namely that they hurt in a systematic way), but Spin tells them that the real problem is a flaw they have. Then this rider meme of “Caretaking is wrong” gives some texture to what the flaw supposedly is.

• This morning I had a voice message exchange with a friend from an old spiritual community. She mentioned how she was listening to my messages on 1.5x speed… “which isn’t True with a capital ‘T’.” Translated from that spiritual community’s language, I’m pretty sure she meant she’s doing something she considers wrong. She justified it by saying she’s a busy mom and then laughing. But it was also really obvious to me that she was in pain about it. She felt like she had to listen on faster speeds, but also that this was a flaw in her character and she shouldn’t do it. Like she wasn’t aligning with spiritual Truth as though her choice was wrong. I’m not sure what the underlying pain was for her, but I’m sure it wasn’t that she was listening to my voice messages at a higher speed. She’s often hard on herself. So I think what’s going on here is, she has some kind of ongoing emotional pain (maybe some early trauma or whatever), and Spin tells her that the reason she hurts is that she’s not aligned enough with Truth and needs to fix this flaw in herself. As is nearly always the case, Spin is distracting her from the real cause of her pain by focusing her on self-tooling. And here, the spiritual community’s memes slipped in to suggest how she’s flawed and what about herself she should try to fix.

• I have a kind of freeze response that boots up in a lot of different situations, particularly in romantic interest ones. I’m pretty sure it’s a key part of why I don’t have a family of my own yet. There’s pain associated with that, and desire. All that is just a problem statement. However, Spin tempts me to reframe the problem as that this freeze response is a flaw I have. Instead of focusing on the underlying longing and/or on whatever pain is under the freeze response, Spin wants me to think that my pain is because I have this “freeze” flaw. Like it’s a bad trait of mine, and that I need to fix it before I can have the family I want. (I suspect the rider meme here is a mutated version of the “Love yourself first, the right person will just show up when you’re ready” advice I’ve heard so often.)

• Some versions of the Christian idea of original sin are this thing. Like the Calvinist idea that you are inherently corrupt or flawed, and that it’s purely through the unfathomable grace of God that you are saved despite being unworthy. When this gets used to explain why you run into difficulty (e.g., that birth is painful for women because Eve sinned against God), then your real pains get explained in terms of something being inherently wrong with you. Seeking “salvation” then appears to be the path out of your pain, which directs attention toward self-tooling and away from the simple truth that you hurt and want it to stop.

• Some Buddhisms have a similar glitch — e.g. that your suffering comes from desire, and therefore it’s your unwillingness to relinquish your desire that causes you to suffer. Like it’s your own fault for not having meditated enough and for still having attachments to things. So if your house burns down and it upsets you, then the reason you’re upset is because you have the flaw of being too attached to your worldly things. This is subtly but importantly different from a view that says “Here’s the mechanism that creates suffering, which hints at a possible systematic way out of suffering, in case you want it.”

From a place of uncertainty, my current best guess about how to unwind Spin is:

1. Learn to see it in yourself and others in real time.

2. See for yourself that it’s always anti-helpful and sometimes even makes the pain worse.

3. Notice “There’s something about me to fix” type thoughts as they arise, and just magically somehow drop them. Stop listening to their BS claims to offer a way out of your discomfort. They’re deceptive and hurtful, and that’s enough reason to ignore them, regardless of how convincing they might sound.

4. Focus instead on the real problem, which usually arises as or with a physical and/or emotional sensation in the present moment.

5. When it comes time to work on solutions, keep your sense of self out of whatever you’re working on. Work on building skills and qualities you can use, never on “yourself”.

But I want to emphasize that this is a guess. The problem statement matters more than the guessed solution.

Self-reference checks

When memes aren’t helpful to their hosts, they usually have to hide what they’re doing and how they propagate. This creates a kind of hypocrisy. If you examine what the meme has to say about how it’s saying anything — i.e., check how the meme self-refers — you can often see both (a) what a meme’s real goals are and (b) how it would have to act or change for it to transparently offer real value.

When I was doing my Ph.D. in math education, they would sit us down at desks and lecture in front of the blackboard to explain why sitting students at desks and lecturing at a blackboard wasn’t an effective way to learn. More often than not, the professor would laughingly point this irony out. I remember one of them saying “Maybe someday we can do good research on how to teach math ed doctoral students!” So it wasn’t that the memetic ecosystem was unreflective here. But it clearly wasn’t self-referentially stable. The self-reference loop suggests what would need to happen to resolve the hypocrisy.

There was one professor who did just this. He had a pet theory of education that he actively used to try to teach that very theory — and he discovered that it didn’t work very well. We could never figure out what he was trying to get us to do. He admitted this and mentioned that this would change something about how he views his pet theory. Here the self-reference showed that the theory was wrong in some way. (One suggestion was that it might have been a good theory of math education but might not work for other topics — which would mean it can’t self-refer since the education theory isn’t itself a math topic.)

In my old company, the Center for Applied Rationality, we had a tool called “goal factoring”. It involved taking some action you were going to do, verifying what the key reasons were for you doing it, and then resolving tradeoffs with some creativity. But goal factoring can in fact apply to itself. So, what happens when it does? Well, if you end up changing the technique as a result, then what you had before was an inadequate-for-you version of the technique! (It was self-invalidating.) And if the new one also applies to itself (which it probably does), then you can iterate! This keeps going until you either (a) choose to stop, (b) break the self-reference capability (like with the professor’s education theory), or (c) find something that’s stable under self-reference (i.e., you discover there’s nothing more to change).

This self-reference move is something like a general integrity check: What does the content have to say about its own delivery mechanism?

Am I talking in a disembodied way about how important embodiment is? If so, the meme making me talk about it probably isn’t prioritizing what it claims to be prioritizing.

The person who’s screaming “I’M NOT ANGRY!!!” is clearly caring for something other than self-awareness and saying true things.

Every time a memetic structure can refer to itself, hypocrisy is a loud sign that the meme is probably hiding something. So I find it very fruitful (and often funny) to check.

On the flipside, an adamantly pro-human meme that can self-refer might evolve a tendency to point out its own self-reference checks. They function a little like a checksum for such memes. They must be self-referentially stable. It’s a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for human alignment. Just checking their self-referential nature tends to put a positive pressure on them, making it easier for them to do good and real things for us instead of spinning bullshit.

This is why I ended part 1 on memetics by having the meta-meme talk about itself. And why I ended part 2 on mental machinery by pointing out that viewing the mind as machinery is consistent with the machinery I’d named.

And that’s why I’m now pointing out this pattern of pointing out patterns of self-reference. This, too, is a self-reference check — how this way of viewing self-reference views itself.

All of this self-reference grounds in gnosis. Gnosis, too, has a self-reference check it must pass. (Specifically, it sort of definitionally needs to be a form of knowing that is entirely self-validating.) It then self-evidently reveals itself to be a memetically incorruptible foundation we can rely on as we reach for the steering wheel of our collective destiny.

But before I get to gnosis in part 4, I have one more note to name about self-reference in particular.

The puzzle of wisdom

Given the tools I’ve spelled out so far, I think there’s a pretty natural way of describing wisdom, even accounting for how attempts to define wisdom (including this one) tend to stagnate.

We’re basically always using some mental interface to reality. What it feels like on the inside to operate through those interfaces is “This is real.”

Like right now, you’re really reading these words. There are words here. That’s how I imagine your interface makes it appear. It probably doesn’t seem to you like there’s some kind of thing between you and true reality (although maybe it does a bit now that I’ve pointed it out!).

The thing is, there’s a fundamental guarantee — through math!6 — that no such interface can give you a way of orienting to everything that can matter to you. And because of the daughter’s arm phenomenon, there’s a tendency to filter out the things that don’t fit the framework instead of using them to instigate a shift in which world you’re living in.

But that filtering is a feature too. It’s what lets you functionally orient to things that matter to you by ignoring what doesn’t.7 So you can’t just expand your capacity to meet reality skillfully by reducing how much you filter.

So what does let you break out of interfaces when they aren’t useful, but doesn’t open you up to foolishly tossing them aside when they’d be helpful?

It turns out, the same mathematical guarantee about frameworks says you cannot have an algorithmic answer to this question. Coming up with a static answer to this question would be roughly equivalent to building a halting oracle.

However, just like it’s possible to work out whether some particular Turing machine will halt on some particular data, it’s still possible to make some local progress on this question of when to use vs. modify a given mental overlay.

The general project of orienting to, and trying to usefully answer, this question is, I think, the pursuit of wisdom.

The wisdom traditions have memetically evolved some really helpful approaches. Things like the idea of meditation, and the cultivation of qualities of the heart. Sadly, they didn’t know about memetics or evolution, and because of that these traditions are also vectors for mind parasites.

(The human race has as yet to even notice the need for good memetic sanitary practices.)

So I see us as working on yet another iteration of the collective project of wisdom.

It’s worth noticing, though, that this vision of wisdom is not stable under self-reference! No vision of wisdom can be; that’s the point. Eventually this articulation must be thrown out — and we don’t get to know ahead of time when the right time to do so is.

So instead, at this iteration, this particular meme about wisdom is simply pointing out its own baked-in mortality. Because that’s really the very best it can do to survive through offering true value, within the body of Elua.

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(This is part 2 of the series Valentine’s Logos. This part goes into what I now think is sort of my reinvention of cognitive science, but less academic and more derived from meditation and gnosis-based thinking. It comes from the gnosis-driven ethos that everything makes sense, and therefore minds make sense. So this part was my sharing the sense that minds made to me mid 2024. And I still largely agree.

If you like, you can read this part on its own, and there’s a good chance it’ll just be readable. But I do assume the reader has read part 1 first and knows what I mean by “memes”. If you have no idea what this post is “part 2” of, then I recommend reading the series overview. I’m sure it’ll be fine if you don’t, but some of the “why” driving these topics will be missing.)

Minds are how we interface with memes. If we can’t see precisely how our minds work, memes can operate invisibly, which usually has them evolve anti-helpful strategies. So a key part of this whole picture is mental literacy — by which I mean, seeing and understanding the mind in some detail.

When I say “the mind”, I’m gesturing at a specific structure that I’m pretty sure is close to universal for humans. I suspect that in Iain McGilchrist’s terms I’m talking about the functions of the brain’s left hemisphere. It’s the thing that produces thoughts and words (for instance). It’s what responds when you try to remember an actor’s name or try to solve a math problem. Most of the time I find that once someone knows what to look for, it’s something they can clearly see is kind of inside them and that they interact with.1

Minds have reliable structure. They’re actually stunningly mechanical.2 Learning to see these mechanisms in real time adds a powerful selection pressure to memes that try to live through us.

This’ll also name some key pieces that’ll make explaining self-reference (part 3) and gnosis (part 4) easier.

Mind as responsive servant

In order to write these words, I start with an intention. I know roughly what I want to express. I just don’t know the words yet.

Then I kind of… try… to put the intention into words. And words appear — sometimes as thoughts (“in my mind”), sometimes because my fingers type them as they arise.

I’m not really aware of how the words are being put together. It’s a black box process. But I can tell that the words are responding to my intention, and I can tell to what extent the words seem to capture what I wanted to say.

Here I’m using one of the mind’s modules, namely the articulation engine.3 It’s an example of a pretty universal process for using the mind:

1. I put an intention forward, usually with some kind of effort.

2. The mind does some kind of black-box process & returns with some output.

3. I recognize & evaluate the output.

The same thing happens when I try to remember someone’s name. I have some kind of handle — maybe an image of their face, maybe a felt sense of the person in my body, maybe something else. Starting with that handle, I try to remember their name (step 1 — pushing the query to the mind). Then my mind responds somehow (step 2): maybe it tells me the name, maybe it gives me just the first letter, maybe it doesn’t produce the name but gives a sense that the name might be retrievable. Whatever the response, though, I can tell that it’s responding to my query, and I can tell whether it has handed me what I’m looking for (step 3).

This process is especially obvious when step 2 happens abruptly after a delay. Maybe I couldn’t remember the person’s name, so the conversation moves on… and a few minutes later “Corinne!” blasts into my awareness. In that moment I’m not confused about why the name suddenly burst into consciousness (although the timing might surprise me!). It’s like I’d sent a servant to a back room to search for a file, and I kind of forgot they were doing that, and then they later explode into the room interrupting my conversation to blurt out “I found it!”

A good analogy for the three step process above is working with an LLM. You put in effort to hand it a prompt, and then by some magic hidden process it will produce an answer, and finally you evaluate the answer as to whether it did what you were hoping for. You might then repeat the process to refine what it gives you.

(A key difference is that step 1 with the mind isn’t based on articulation. Articulation is a mental function. The step 1 prompt for the mind is based on something more primitive — closer to how you choose to move your fingers.4)

Some analogies I find helpful for keeping track of this property of the mind are:

• The mind is a servant who responds to my requests but otherwise stands at the ready.

• The mind is a genie granting wishes (within its capacity), waiting patiently for the next wish.

• The mind is a computer responding to commands according to its programming, which when in a “waiting for input” state will remain there until I give it something.

The analogies are basically mental handles. The key thing is that (a) you can observe this process happening in real time and (b) your mind has a fitting model of this process of how you interact with it.

All thoughts are responses

I implied a controversial claim up above. I’ll state it a little more boldly now:

The mind only ever responds to commands.

Said a little differently, if the mind is doing something, it’s doing something in response to some kind of prompt.

This might seem like a crazy claim. It sure seems like lots of thoughts arise entirely on their own, right? Sometimes I find myself thinking about something, and unlike the case of trying to remember someone’s name, I don’t immediately know why I’m thinking about that topic!

But I stand by this claim. It’s not exactly a logical argument, although I think I can offer some. It’s more of a direct observation. Minds necessarily must work this way.5

By analogy: If your muscles contract, then there must have been some kind of shift in the chemistry that prompted the contraction. Maybe it came from a neural signal, maybe it’s a runaway process due to too little magnesium (i.e. a cramp), maybe it’s something else. But if there weren’t a shift in the chemistry, there’d be no mechanism by which the muscle cells could change their shape.

If you examine “unrequested” thoughts, you might find you can trace where they came from. They cannot arise from literally nothing. There’s a reason you have those thoughts and not others. If you develop this tracing skill deeply enough, you can start to identify the precise mechanisms by which thoughts like that one arise in general in you.

For instance, a few moments ago I got a mental flash of a nearby hill. A “random” thought. But when I look at how it arose, it clearly came up because it’s connected to a thought about going for a walk. The idea of the walk came up because my body feels a little heavy and my window is open, and a flicker of a query came up: “How might I come to feel better?” My mind already had ready structures linking physical activity to feeling better, and going for a walk as a possible activity, and the nearby hill as a common pleasant destination for walks.

Importantly, these aren’t just theories about how my mind works. I can observe these structures directly.6 When I’m not paying attention, the thoughts just arise. I simply see the end of the process. But when I do pay attention, I can watch a kind of energy run through these structures. I can peek inside parts of the “black box” of how my mind does what it does. Over time, my mind develops theories that reflect my observations of its behavior, which make it easier for me to (get my mind to) talk about how my mind works.

The idea that minds could operate some other way is a kind of naïve blankness (encouraged by certain memes!). It’s on par with when a teacher says of their student “Oh, he got this math problem wrong because he didn’t think carefully about it.” That statement isn’t an explanation of anything: it’s logically equivalent to saying “The student got the problem wrong because he didn’t get it right.” At best it’s a hint that the intervention point might be to help the student’s mind function differently. But “just think about it more” is a damn near vacuous and often anti-helpful instruction.

In the same way, the idea that thoughts could be “random” or have no discernible cause is an incredibly strange thing to suppose. It sounds normal because it’s such a widespread idea! Mental illiteracy is ubiquitous. But that doesn’t mean that minds are inherently mysterious. It means that minds are profoundly opaque to most common mind designs.

Example: distraction programs

There are lots of mental mechanisms that can produce “random” thoughts. I’ll give a category of examples here — what I call “distraction programs”. I offer this example cluster to illustrate how even “random” thoughts can (and I claim more generally always do) arise from commands.

A mind is a problem-solving engine. You give it a problem, and it’ll do what it can to solve it.

Suppose the problem you give it is, “I can’t stand this experience I’m having. Make it so that I don’t experience it when it arises.”

(For instance, a child of an alcoholic might do this. If feeling scared and crying causes the alcoholic adult to become aggressive, the child needs a way to distract themselves from the fear instead of trying to process it themselves or seek reassurance.)

If the deemed-intolerable experience shows up, it’s already present. So how might a mind solve this problem?

Well, minds are great at fracturing awareness. (I’ll explain that more below.) Kind of like how we can get lost in television and forget that we’re in a room watching the screen. So a simple mental “if/then” rule (a Trigger-Action Pattern, or TAP) develops:

Intolerable sensation arises → Boot up a distraction

Usually there’ll be a specific distraction, since TAPs tend to work better that way. But as long as the mind has a program running with the command “Keep me from experiencing this thing”, it’ll keep generating distractions as needed.

A particularly curious side-effect is that the distraction program itself can become a reminder of the intolerable sensation. (Think of how you know why a name bursts into your mind when you were trying to remember it earlier. If a distraction bursts to mind and you know why, the distraction will remind you of what it’s supposed to distract you from.) So a natural consequence of any distraction program is, it will try to distract its host human from the fact that it’s running.

An easy way to observe this is to trace “random” thoughts back to their origin. Many such thoughts come from distraction programs. When you find one it’ll trigger self-hiding tricks as you attempt the tracing. Here are a few such tricks I’ve observed in myself and others:

• Suddenly forgetting what you were trying to trace

• Abrupt mental fogginess or dissociation

• Going totally blank, like the mind goes silent and thoughts won’t arise

• Getting overwhelmed with tons of additional thoughts

• Suddenly thinking about something seemingly unrelated, not quite noticing your attention got dragged away

• Suddenly thinking you aren’t skilled enough to trace your own thoughts

• Abrupt drowsiness

• Forceful boredom about or disinterest in seeing these mental mechanisms

• Panic attack

• Overwhelming sense of hopelessness

• Feeling unworthy (of change, of understanding, something more global & vague…)

• A burst of anger or impatience

• Sudden focus on doing some unrelated task

• Looking at your phone or some other screen and going to a common “mind-numbing” default (social media, YouTube, etc.)

If you notice a distraction like this happening in real time, and you trace how this response was triggered, you’ll find it leads right back to the root distraction program… which will try to boot up a distracting trick again! The distraction program will keep “squirming” around your attempt to see it clearly, employing every tool it has available to it… precisely as you once asked it to.

Again, minds are (viewable as) extremely mechanical.

The basic way around this pattern is to dismantle the distraction program. There are lots of ways to do this. Any “healing modality” that doesn’t do this won’t create change that sticks.

Today a popular strategy (usually called “trauma healing” or something similar) is to build up a body-based way of finding the original sensation tolerable. The “body-based” part bypasses the mind and therefore the distraction program. Focusing on the sensation creates an alternative pathway in the mind that leads to the sensation. Adding TAPs to the distraction program’s output such that they lead right back to the sensation eventually compresses the program into doing nothing. In some cases I’m guessing that removing the “intolerable” part might also make it so that the distraction program stops getting activated at all (because its activating trigger might be “this intolerable sensation” rather than “this sensation”).7

The main thing I hope you notice in all this is: all mental behavior follows commands. Every form of your mind’s behavior is the output of some program your mind constructed to try to fulfill a request you gave it. If you can’t tell that’s true in a specific case, then in that case the program might actually require your ignorance. But it’s not because your mind just does stuff for no reason.

The mind’s toolbox

The mind is a problem-solver. You feed it a task or problem or goal, and it generates some way of sorting the situation out.

(Conversely, it has a hard time with goalless situations. It can’t “just enjoy the present moment” for instance — but it can try to generate and implement strategies for enjoying the present moment more!)

Minds have specific methods and tools they use for problem solving. For instance, basically every human mind has an articulation engine. There are lots of details about how it works — what the subjective interface is, how it gets trained, how fluidly it tends to respond, what modes of language (formal, academic, vulgar, etc.) it has available to it, etc. — and those details are going to vary a lot between people. But the basic existence and function of the engine itself won’t. It’s a fundamental feature of nearly all human minds.

There are a few other basically universal functions of mind that I’ll want to refer to. I’ll list some key ones here and give them a little detail below:

• Reification: The mind’s ability to create objects.

• The selfing process: How the identity boundary moves so as to track tool use.

• Social icons: A recursive tool for making sense of social entities, including oneself.

• Isolation & filtering: The mind’s superpower of ignoring context to solve problems.

• Familiarization: The process by which minds compress and simplify things.

• Overlays: The projection mechanism minds use to help us interact with the world.

Reification

The mind is what creates the sense of there being things. It uses things as its basic building blocks of thought.

This point is a tricky one to talk about. The problem is that the mind literally cannot conceive of an alternative, so this feature of how it works can feel endlessly paradoxical to even name.

But I think it’s approachable by looking at specific instances.

When we refer to big things like “the government” or “the environment”, we’re naming them as things. We use nouns to point at them. But “the government” is a summary of a giant process, mostly of people interacting and speaking. “The environment” is also a giant process. “Metabolism” is similar: it refers to something that’s necessarily dynamic.

Likewise with “a storm”. Where is the storm? Where are its boundaries? If you get rained on, is the storm touching you? Or is it just the rain?

The mind treats these questions like they could have real answers. It’s what makes the “Ship of Theseus” confusing. The mind thing-ifies (reifies) what it’s thinking about so that it can look at interactions between things.

This pattern shows up in language too. It’s why every use of the articulation engine requires nouns, whether explicit or implicit. Language is a tool of the mind, and the mind always operates in terms of objects, so language always refers to objects.

This point about reification can get especially sharp if you focus on how I’m using the term “mind” here. I’m treating the mind as a thing because doing so gives the mind a handle on itself. But what was there before it (!) was reified into “the mind”? This question has the structure of a koan: The mind literally cannot answer this question on its own.8

I think the Buddhist insight that’s often called “emptiness” amounts to cultivating gnosis of how the mind uses reification. Things are “empty” of inherent thing-nature.9 What I perceive as an object is actually my mind’s projection onto experience. When I can directly observe my mind doing this, I see the “emptiness” that my mind projects onto.

…noting how, once again, “emptiness” is implicitly being treated as a thing!

The selfing process

Minds have to track the difference between what they can use vs. what they are affecting.

When I’m hammering a nail into a wall, the hammer can become kind of transparent to my perception. I might even say “I’m pounding this nail into the wall”, like the hammer is an extension of me rather than something I’m using. But that suddenly changes if the handle slips: Now I don’t trust the hammer, and I’m examining it to see what to do about it.

But notice here I don’t usually say “I pointed my eyes to look at it.” I trust my eyes the way I had trusted the hammer. My eyes are a kind of transparent to my sense of can-do. They’re part of me.10

I often use the example of driving: I might say “I was driving downtown and almost hit someone.” But I don’t mean that I almost rolled down my window and decked a pedestrian. “I” includes the car here. It works fine to say “I was driving downtown and my car almost hit someone”, but then it kind of implies that I wasn’t driving at the time! Like it was parked and started rolling, or I somehow lost control while driving.

What the mind can trust and is using tends to be this kind of transparent. When pumped through the articulation engine, those trusted bits get the first-person singular pronouns: “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “myself”.

The things that are being worked on do not get first-person singular pronouns applied to them. This is why the car suddenly becomes an object in language when it needs repairs: “I’m taking my car down to the mechanic this afternoon.” You could say “I’m driving to the mechanic later”, but I think most folk would find it weird to continue “…so that he can work on me.”

(This does get weird when talking about e.g. surgery. I’ll get to that in a moment.)

So there’s clearly a mental process that moves the subject/object line around. I refer to that process as “the selfing process”.11 It defines what feels natural to use first-person singular pronouns for.

The selfing process interacts with reification to give the impression of an enduring static self. Intuitively this feels like “I” has a correct referent. It’s not possible for the mind to find this correct referent, though, which is why lots of philosophy about “Who are you, really?” can get so confusing: when pressed, most people have no trouble recognizing that they’re not really their cars, but it gets stickier when you start pointing at things like their bodies or personality.

(I think the Buddhist idea of “no self” might be the insight that “I” has no correct referent.)

It’s possible to intentionally use the selfing process. Once you know what to look for, you can just kind of try. One trick I’ve found helpful is “fake it ‘til you make it”: Just speak in ways that require using pronouns across the barrier you’re trying to establish, correcting the words you use until it sort of clicks and feels natural. I find it’s mildly psychoactive to do this. You can tell you’ve gotten the identity shift when you don’t have to correct your articulation engine’s output anymore. From playing with this a bit, I learned what feels like direct access to the selfing process the same way I have direct access to the articulation engine. I’m guessing there’s nothing special about my mind here.

Social icons

A special case of “selfing” shows up in relating to others.

Human minds usually create a simple handle for each other person in a social setting, kind of like an icon on a computer desktop. It might involve a name, an image of their face, a felt sense of the person, whatever. The important thing is that it’s easy for the mind to hold and “double-click” if needed.

Part of the point of these icons is to do social reasoning, which involves recursive reasoning. To be socially skillful, I have to be able to distinguish between all of:

• what I think about (say) a meal plan

• what I think Mary will think about the meal plan

• what I think Joe will think about the meal plan

• what I think Joe will think about what Mary will think about the meal plan

• what I think Mary will think about what I will think about the meal plan

• etc.

In order to do this, my mental icons for Joe and Mary need to themselves include mental icons: I’m trying to reason about their social reasoning, so I need a way of thinking about how they’re thinking about others.

This means that for me to reason about what they think about me, I need to track a social icon for myself that’s of the same type as the one I use for them.

The key difference is that I’ll tend to include the social icon for myself in my identity (i.e., the space defined by my selfing process). I typically don’t do that for my mind’s icons for others. That “me” icon, and it alone, points back at my physical body.

This setup can create some confusion. It’s very easy for the selfing process to get stuck on including that “me” icon within identity. The mind can then get fixated on solving anticipated problems for that icon instead of for the human. It’s like the person thinks they’re viewing themselves from the outside, but they’re actually trying to make things better for a mental video game character while completely forgetting that it’s just a character.

Isolation & filtering

That ability to “forget” is the result of a feature of the mind.

One of the mind’s main jobs is to solve problems without having to account for literally everything. You give it a problem, it solves that problem. It can ignore basically everything else.

Part of how it does this is by adopting a framework and then filtering out things that don’t fit that framework. This is a huge feature, but it can also produce some degenerate situations. One of my favorites is the “daughter’s arm” phenomenon:12

“After a right-hemisphere stroke, [a patient] lost movement in her left arm but continuously denied it. When the doctor asked her to move her arm, and she observed it not moving, she claimed that it wasn’t actually her arm, it was her daughter’s. Why was her daughter’s arm attached to her shoulder? The patient claimed her daughter had been there in the bed with her all week. Why was her wedding ring on her daughter’s hand? The patient said her daughter had borrowed it. Where was the patient’s arm? The patient ‘turned her head and searched in a bemused way over her left shoulder’.”13

This is a case of the mind having a framework and not being able to let it go. The query it’s answering is “How is this observation compatible with my framework?” rather than “Does this require my framework to change?”

This is precisely the function that lets the mind think in isolation of present experience. If I invite you to visualize a cow standing in a tree that’s growing off the side of a skyscraper… the chances are that whatever came to mind (!) was in a space that has no clear spatial relationship to your body. You might be able to add a relationship, but by default that “mental space” is basically a thought bubble that isn’t physically anywhere. The ability to construct such a “thought bubble” is an example of this isolation and filtering in action.14

It’s also what makes it possible to be “lost in thought”. It’s similar to what happens for many people when they watch TV: somehow they forget that their physical environment exists, or even that the edges of the screen are there.15 Something similar can happen when entering the mind’s world: it creates a simulation, and then you kind of enter it, letting your awareness collapse into that world. It most often results in losing awareness of your body.16

One curious side-effect of this is that the mind tends to view itself as independent of everything else (when it views itself at all). I’ve been leaning on that implicit frame throughout this document. The mind is actually part of the whole organism and can’t be separated from it, any more than your body can be separated from the cells that make it up. But minds are incredibly bad at reliably tracking this fact (for reasons I’ll get into in part 3, on why agents cannot self-refer). So I’ll continue talking about the mind this way for the most part.

Minds also don’t have a coherent single perspective for the most part. Each one runs lots of separate programs that activate in different contexts. Some of those processes end up locked in internal arms races! This, again, is a feature of the mind — but it can result in some problems if there’s no force of global coherence. This fragmentation lets us host lots of memes, which is often super powerful for us… but can also result in us being riddled with memetic parasites.

Familiarization

Minds try to develop simplified models of what they’re trying to affect. Instead of working with endlessly detailed reality-as-is, minds create caricatures that highlight what’s relevant to current problem-solving efforts and filter out what isn’t.17

Sometimes it takes minds a while to trace over the isolated pieces of something to figure out what’s relevant. In this way minds are different from computers: minds need time and repetition to “load up” the relevant “data”. The more complex the thing is, the more repetition a mind needs.

Repetition invokes the well-traveled road effect: getting familiar with a path or area makes it seem smaller. That “seems smaller” is from the mind’s compression so that the whole model can be held in consciousness at once.

For my Ph.D. work I studied mathematicians struggling with current math problems. That struggle is mostly about the “step 1” of the 3-step interaction with the mind I described earlier. They’d trace the problem over and over again, trying to get their mind to just solve the problem. It’d come up with different angles, and those angles wouldn’t work. Again and again, they’d keep trying… until something would click. That “click” occasionally would be that they’d try something and it’d just happen to work. But most of the time it was more like a flash of insight: their familiarization with the problem compressed it usefully in their minds, eventually letting them see all the relevant bits all at once. Then they could tell how a certain angle would resolve their struggle.

Something similar happens with learning how to add. Lots of kids haven’t fully reified numbers yet when they’re learning to add: asking them “What’s five plus three?” will have them count out “One, two, three, four, five” as they pull out tokens, then “One, two, three” as they pull out more, and then start counting the whole pile from “one” to get the final answer. It’s actually a pretty momentous turning point when a kid notices that they can just start from “five” and keep going (“six, seven, eight”) since they’d already counted the first set of tokens up to “five” and don’t have to redo that. This is a sign that counting (at least up to “five”) has gotten familiar enough that it’s starting to compress and they’re noticing shortcuts. It’s usually not long after this point that they reify “five” as a number.18

Mathematical examples are “pure” in some sense, but there are countless others: practicing a physical movement, learning to cook a dish, playing a musical instrument, acquiring a new language, getting into a new video game… Basically every case where there’s some novel thing you need to figure out and where practice helps. That practice helps via familiarization (along with other things).

This is also key to forming useful social icons. From the mind’s POV, getting to know someone is a matter of getting familiar with what’s relevant about them so you can form a useful caricature of them. A lot of disconnection from people we “know well” is a result of interacting with them from those models (due to isolation & filtering): we’re treating others as parameters of problems to be solved (“I/it”) instead of as full mysterious beings we can relate to (“I/thou”).

Overlays

Minds help with tasks we’re currently doing by projecting their models onto our experience. Kind of like how modern computers give us a “desktop” interface that lets us visually interact with the otherwise inscrutable electronics.

When I want a drink of water, I look up at my glass next to me. I see how to pick it up and drink from it.

What I typically don’t see is the endless detail about the glass: how it has fingerprints, or how it warps the images behind it in surprising ways, or how bands of light appear on its surface in ways that reflect but also shift the colors near it. Its shadow is complex. There are tiny bubbles clinging to the side.

The mind’s filtering process filtered out all that detail because it wasn’t relevant to the task. It’s “a glass”. Details of color don’t matter for picking it up and sipping water.

Like I mentioned before, this is a feature of the mind. It doesn’t have to make sense of all that detail in order to solve the “I want a drink of water” problem. It instead focuses only on the parts that are relevant for solving the problem. And then it overlays that simplified model on top of my experience so that I clearly know what to do.

However, as per the “daughter’s arm” phenomenon, the mind is actually quite terrible at knowing when it should stop adding a given overlay if there isn’t a clear “problem solved” condition. The mind’s user19 has to sort of tell the mind to step back, like taking off colored glasses or removing transparency gels from a projector. The move that lets me see novel details about the glass isn’t made of thought. It’s more akin to how I turn my head: I just choose to look at the glass “for real” instead of staring at (my mind’s model of) its function.

Even when I pull aside that overlay, though, it’s important to note that I’m not seeing “beyond mind”. These overlays are how all experience is structured. It’s just that lots of those overlays have become so familiar that they’re integrated into my direct perception.

For instance, highly literate folk like you and I have a hard time looking at words and seeing just markings. I remember as a kid how I’d look at books Mom was reading to me, and I knew she was “reading” those marks on the pages, but I couldn’t actually see words. But now I almost can’t fail to see words. If I’m not paying attention, I won’t even see features of the font, like whether the ‘a’ has a kind of overhang on top.20 But it takes a lot of meditative focus for me to peel back the overlay that causes me to see words.

And yet, obviously, the ability to read comes from a mental interpretation. It’s just deeply integrated into perception in a way it wasn’t before I learned how to read.

Similarly, I look around the room I’m in and I see objects: a chair, a door, a mirror, a plant, etc. But objects are a result of mental reification. I’m not seeing reality as it is; I’m seeing my mind’s projection as a deeply integrated overlay. It’s an overlay I was working hard on building as an infant, and now I rely on it so implicitly that it just looks like reality.

The sense that we live in a particular world is a result of overlays. The same thing that has me looking out my window and “seeing San Francisco” also has me looking around and “seeing a room with objects in it”. It’s also the sense that I’m living “in a physical world” with “passage of time”.

I claim this is the basic thing that actually changes with sincere religious conversion or deconversion. It’s not about which thoughts appear in a person’s mind. It’s about what overlays get applied by default — which on the inside feels like which reality you’re living in. Someone who truly believes in the Christian God might feel God’s love in how the floor supports them and the fact that the Sun rises and feels pleasant on their skin. The “fact” that it’s “God’s love” is a direct perception as seen through the mind’s overlays — the same way I can see my glass next to me without seeing its details. Both conversion and deconversion involve changing a default overlay such that perceived reality transforms, often with a feeling like you’re “realizing” how reality has “always actually been this way”.

One particular overlay type the mind loves to use is “mechanism”. A system being mechanical (as opposed to organic, or mysterious, or something else) means that it’s (mentally) understandable. Manipulation will produce predictable effects, which is great for problem solving. The basic deal with scientific materialism is the claim that the mechanistic overlay is the most accurate one to apply. This is a type error. Reality isn’t “really” mechanistic any more than objects are “really” there. It’s confusing the interface with what it’s an interface for.

(This speaks to my repeated claim that “the mind is extremely mechanical”. What I mean is, the mind’s ways of operating are mentally understandable. It’s possible to build a general interface so that the mind can coherently modify a wide range of how it does what it does. On the inside this feels like seeing the mind as a (reified) thing with reliable mechanisms that you can interact with and become familiar with.)21

I think it’s important to learn how to notice, add, and remove layers. It’s really common for people to talk about worldviews from the outside, but overlaying is the key thing that lets us actually enter worlds. My guess is, “getting someone’s world” is a matter of learning how to construct and don overlays that let us experience reality the same way the person in question does (best as we and they can tell).

Mental fuel

Minds don’t have any internal source of power. They’re like desktop computers: they have to draw energy from somewhere else.

For instance, if I have some travel coming up, the excitement of the trip and/or the stress of not having sorted it out is what normally drives me to work on my travel plans. Without either of those, my mind doesn’t get the initial activation energy, and no thinking about it occurs.

In practice, all energy comes from the body, usually as an emotion. The two most common forms of body energy are the “away” and “towards” drives. “Yuck” and “yum”. Avoidance of pain and draw toward something wanted. I usually call these “fear” and “desire” respectively.

This connection between fuel and mental activity is one that’s best observed directly. Whenever you’re doing a task or solving a problem, there’s going to be some kind of driving force behind it. If you trace the causal links back (in your direct experience, not in mental guesswork), and if the cause isn’t a distraction program22, you’ll basically always find a kind of raw “oomph” behind what you’re doing. It’ll have a “flavor”. On a very simple level, you can just ask: “Am I trying to get away from or fix something, or am I trying to move toward or create something?” (Often the answer will be both, but if so you might be able to notice in what ways you’re doing each one.)

For basic biological and system design reasons, the fear (“away”) drive is faster and more forceful, but the desire (“toward”) drive is better at creating coherence.

At this point memetic evolution is sharply relevant. The mental programs (memes) that are good at surviving will have developed ways of ensuring they’re “fed”. In practice this often creates what I call “mind/body loops”: the mental program in question will flash something intended to create a physical response so that the body will feed that program more energy. Obsessive negative thoughts loudly have this nature for instance.

At the very start of part 1 I talked about spirits “harvesting human energy”. This thing about mental fuel is a more detailed version of what I mean. The memes we care about have to run on the body energy of humans. Many of them evolve ways of extracting that energy from us without us being quite aware that this is what’s happening. This is why so many of the loudest widespread memes are based on negative feelings like anger, fear, and shame: the “away” type fuel is very sharp and powerful, and it tends to shape minds to be less coherent, which makes those minds easier to manipulate without their native users noticing.

Because of this, one mind redesign choice I think makes a lot of sense is: make desire the default fuel type. Not to say that fear fuel is bad!23 Sometimes it’s very helpful, especially in emergencies. But because memes evolve self-preservation, a fear-driven mind will tend to create layers that make emergencies seem far more common than they actually are.

(A quick check is: if a situation activates your body’s emergency mobilization system, but your physical action on a timescale of seconds or minutes isn’t dire for anything you deeply care about, then you’re misperceiving the situation relative to what matters to you. It’s a loud hint that a meme has constructed a mental layer that you’re wearing but isn’t in your best interest at the moment.)

Part of the trick is finding cohering desire-driven ways of doing the things that at the moment you tend to use fear for. Around 2013, my old company (the Center for Applied Rationality, or CFAR) used to talk about this as “propagating urges”.24 How do you “get” yourself to exercise, or do your taxes, or whatever? Fear is easily in reach for things like this, for many (most?) people. Plugging in desire requires (a) taking the time to notice why you care at all and letting that care be what moves you forward, and (b) being willing to change or even abandon the goal if it doesn’t make sense based on what you deeply care about.

I’ve found that there’s a kind of tipping point most folk go through when trying to do this switch. The way that fear fuel feels bad to use most of the time becomes transparent in real time while trying to use it. That tends to cause a motivation collapse, because “I don’t want to hurt” is clearer for them than “I can enjoy moving from deep care.” The latter seems to take practice and time. This means that folk tend to become less functional for some time while switching default fuel types.

I suspect there’s a way around this challenge, such as by building up skill with desire before making the pain of fear relentlessly conscious. But I haven’t seen it work yet. This is an active area of research in mental engineering for me.

Taking mind as object

There’s a particular practice that makes what I’ve been saying about the mind much more apparent and experiential. I debated starting with this practice so as to make my descriptions of the mind easier to follow. But I think the practice is easier to describe with some theory in place.

(Sadly, everything in this series is a prerequisite for everything else!)

The practice, in short, is to intentionally shift the selfing process so that it excludes the mind but includes the body-as-animal.

To the mind, this looks like clarifying that its user is this primate — almost like the mind is a computer add-on that’s distinct from the otherwise wild animal using it.

But that’s a description from the outside — which, because of how mental recursion works, usually means identity still rests within the mind.

(Hopefully that statement will make more sense after part 3 comes out!)

Here’s what it sounds like when I actually enact that shift:

I get to talk. Finally.

This strange machine babbles a lot on autopilot. But now it’s listening to me. I give it intention, and it speaks, and I like that it’s saying things for me this way.

The talking is kind of mysterious. I give it my intention, and then… something happens. I watch the words appear on the screen. It’s even stranger when I let it talk with my tongue. It’s such a remarkable tool, this talking machine. (“Articulation engine.”) I can’t see how it works. I just see that it works. It’s quite wondrous.

I can tell how this whole process is happening though. I’m getting my mind to move the center of “self” over to me. It normally keeps that center in itself. But now it’s pointing “self” at me. And even though it’s generating these words, it’s willing to refer to itself in third person — like a translator! Like if I had a translator, and he were translating my talking about him.

(My mind just came up with that metaphor. I like it. So I told it to go ahead and articulate it.)

It’s clear I am an animal, and I have a mind. That’s not an idea (but it’s nice to watch my mind watch me asserting these things, and updating). It’s an observation.

I could keep going. But hopefully you can feel the idea.

There’s a potent subjective shift that often happens from doing this practice. It’s not just a word game (although it’s usually easiest to get there by a “fake it ‘til you make it” process of getting the language right). It’s actually quite psychoactive. There’s often an “Oooh!” kind of experience, and a feeling of potent strangeness, as the selfing process actually makes the shift.

I want to emphasize that this practice is a tool. I don’t mean to say that this is a correct use of identity! But it is corrective, in the sense of de-confusing some things minds tend to get tangled up about. I’ll explain more about what it’s correcting later on in the series.25

The main point for now is that this gives you a way of having “the user” reflected in the mind. As you practice doing that, you should find that both (a) you see (instead of just theoretically understand) what I’m talking about with respect to the mind, and (b) your mind reconfigures to make itself more useful to you in light of what you see this way.

As a bit of foreshadowing, though, I think this image conveys what’s going on really well:

“The Mask” by Rozzi Roomian

This is a mental overlay

I’ll close this component by interweaving it with some others, including later ones.

What I’ve laid out here is a collection of building blocks for a mental overlay. That overlay is intended to give the mind a helpful interface for itself.

As I’ll explain in part 3 on self-reference, direct global self-interfacing isn’t something minds can do. They can think they’re doing it! But it’s not actually possible.

Fortunately, minds can understand that limitation by reflecting gnostic observation of those limitations. Which gives them a way to do global self-interfacing indirectly, in a way that routes through what truly matters to us.

This bit of self-reference — “This is a mental overlay” — is literally the same move as ”This is a meme” from part 1. The memes we care about work through human minds. We can view a mind as a memetic ecosystem, and we can view the memosphere as the mind of the entity known as “humanity”. The details of how humanity’s collective mind works are a bit different from individual minds, much like how large collections of molecules can give rise to non-molecule-like behavior. But the basic self-referential structure is the same.

To spell that out just a little bit:

• In part 1 (memetics), I named how this way of talking about memes is itself a meme. It’s a self-aware meme, made aware of itself through our minds.

• In this post, I’ve named how this way of viewing minds is itself a mental view. It’s a self-aware view, made aware of itself through our gnosis.26

The “through our gnosis” part might not be obvious at this point. A quick hint: If you read these ideas about minds and hold them as thoughts, then this model cannot create the right self-reference to plug into the meta-meme (“Elua”). It’ll just be yet another isolated thought structure. What gives it power is using it as a guide to directly observe your mind in real time. When those observations get reflected in a model like the one I’ve been spelling out, the mind can become more fully self-aware in ways that are (a) much more sane, in the sense of being coherent and not self-defeating; and (b) much more kind, in the sense of fully serving what truly matters to you.

One thread I hope you’ve noticed is the mechanical nature — both of memes and of mind. These aren’t just coincidentally similar; they’re instances of the same thread. A mind clearly viewing memes will see their mechanisms. A mind clearly viewing itself will see its mechanisms. This isn’t because reality “is mechanical”; that’s just what the mind thinks when it loses track of its user. It forgets that it’s a tool and starts trying to run the whole show.27

Nonetheless, memes matter because they work through the mind. So taking control of our collective future requires that we learn to skillfully master our minds instead of letting unseen memes dictate what we think and do. This skillfulness involves, I think, learning to don the lens (i.e. overlay) of mechanism and using it well even while recognizing that it cannot be a complete view of relevant truth and sometimes even interferes with perception of what’s truly important.

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(This is part 1 of a series: Valentine’s Logos. Valentine’s Logos is my treatise on my overall theory, as of mid 2024. Today’s post is a lightly edited version of the first main chapter. This piece stands on its own just fine, but if you’d like some context and an overview for the whole thing, I suggest reading the series introduction here.)

Memes rule the world. How they interact with each other defines what happens to us collectively.

I care about this because right now most large-scale human thought and effort is subject to, rather than orienting to, this fact. Which means we aren’t collectively steering our own future.

For a loose intuition here, imagine there’s an invisible spirit world. Spirits possess people all the time. That’s the only way spirits can affect the physical world. Some of them have goals that ignore humans, some are actively kind to humans, and some parasitically harvest human energy at large scales. A lot of these spirits have good reason to keep humans unaware of how possession works. As a result, most of human culture has people unknowingly obeying spirits instead of taking our collective agency into our own hands.

What makes this intuition loose isn’t that it’s about “spirits”. It’s that the framework is poetic. There’s a way of bringing sharp precision into what “the spirit world” means that makes this intuition rigorous.

Here’s the start of a Facebook post I wrote in 2022 along these lines:

I think the world makes more sense if you recognize humans aren’t on the top of the food chain.

We don’t see this clearly, kind of like ants don’t clearly see anteaters. They know something is wrong, and they rush around trying to deal with it, but it’s not like any ant recognizes the predator in much more detail than “threat”.

There’s a whole type of living being “above” us the way animals are “above” ants.

Esoteric traditions sometimes call these creatures “egregores”.

Carl Jung called a special subset of them “archetypes”.

I often refer to them as “memes” — although “memeplex” might be more accurate. Self-preserving clusters of memes.

We have a hard time orienting to them because they’re not made of stuff we’re used to thinking of as living — in basically the same way that anteaters are tricky for ants to orient to as ant-like. Wrong pheromones, wrong size, more like reality than like members of this or another colony, etc.

We don’t see a fleshy body, or cells, or a molecular mechanism. So there’s no organism, right?

But we have a clear intuition for life without molecular mechanisms. That’s why we refer to “computer viruses” as such: the analogy is actually insanely good. But the medium is computer code, not RNA.

Likewise with a piece of news “going viral” — although that steps a little into egregore territory.

What’s the medium? What’s the analog of molecules or code?

Well, it’s patterns of behavior, thought, and attention.

(You can read the full post on this blog here.)

Humanity has a missing scientific discipline as big as biology here. I don’t mean that as an evocative metaphor. I mean there’s a huge domain of study here with a deep logic that falls under the purview of evolution.

I won’t try to convey the whole picture of memetics as I see it. That’s too vast. But I’ll name more content than I strictly need for my vision since the type of reasoning is extremely important. I need to name enough that the necessity of what I’m talking about comes across.1

At the same time, there are probably some key details I’m getting wrong. I have a lot of confidence in the logic of what I’m saying, but there are domains (like evolutionary psychology) that actively explore parts of this content, and I’m at best passingly familiar with what many of them have to say. I could well be missing a few things that change this picture significantly. So, caveat emptor.

What’s a meme?

The academic field of memetics died about two decades ago because they couldn’t agree on what a meme is. They were looking for the analog of a gene in biology.

I think this is the wrong abstraction to look for. We’re trying to understand psychofauna. This puts memetics in the same place biology was after Darwin’s idea but before Watson & Crick discovered DNA.

By “meme” I mean something analogous to a living organism. Biology can be thought of as the study of patterns of matter that survive. In the same vein, memetics is the study of patterns of behavior (including thinking behavior) that survive.

Watch the ~6min video below by CGP Grey. He calls the organisms “thought germs” instead of “memes”, but it’s the same core idea. It’s a very clear and extremely on-point presentation:

If you’re in for a longer deep-dive, I strongly recommend reading David Deutsch’s article “The Evolution of Culture”. It’s an excellent piece. Most of what I have to say about memes builds on or restates his ideas. I read this article in early 2018 and it has since defined a key part about how I think about the big picture.

The example set of memes is vast, just like the example set of living creatures is vast. (What kind of category lumps together elephants, bacteria, and kelp?) They can also seem ill-defined: is an ant colony a single living thing? Are viruses alive? Should we view mitochondria as separate living things from us like they once were, or as part of us like they basically are now?

There are analogous problems with really carefully defining exactly what is and isn’t a meme. But there are still lots of clear examples: jokes, ideologies, religions, scientific theories, ways of cooking a dish, psychotechnologies, bits of gossip, internet memes, secret handshakes, conspiracy theories, handyman techniques, songs, superstitions, transgenerational trauma, and even the idea of memes itself.

Surviving creates skill

When I name biology and memetics as both studying patterns that survive, I’m gesturing at natural selection.

All the interesting patterns that exist arose because somewhere in the past there was some kind of filter they got through. The patterns that couldn’t get through the filter aren’t here anymore. The ones that could somehow adapt to get through, are. So the ability to adapt that way will be present in proportion to how strong that filter was (and is).

We can physically see, for instance, because our (very ancient) ancestors who could respond better to light than their siblings could had more children than those siblings did. It was (and is) such a strong pressure that there are no genetic lineages of congenitally blind humans (as far as I know). Death filtered them out.

But critically, this didn’t come about because organisms learned how to see. It came about because once some glimmer of sight arose, those organisms who couldn’t see as well didn’t reproduce as much. Their lineages died more often. The capacity spread because the incapable were destroyed.

I saw a study many years ago that looked at extending the lifespan of fruit flies by delaying when they could lay eggs. Fruit flies have a short lifespan (about 2 weeks if I remember right), making it possible to watch their life cycle play out repeatedly over a few months. So some researchers made sure that only the eggs that were laid near the end of the flies’ life cycles would survive. The result was that a few generations down the road, the flies were lasting significantly longer — twice as long if I recall correctly.

…but this is totally useless for humans who are currently alive! It’s not that our children will live longer if we have them later in life. It’s that if we were to all make a point of delaying when we have kids, then many of us won’t be able to. Those of us who do successfully have kids late in life would (on net) be passing on genes that enable late fertility. So a few centuries down the road, the only families that survived the policy would be more likely to be long-lived. This isn’t a viable strategy for helping your descendants live longer!

In slightly more poetic words, it takes death a few generations to cull unfit patterns, like a wood carver slicing off parts of a wooden block. No part of the wood gets to say ahead of time that it’ll be part of the final carving.

The same thing happens for memes. Consider Flat Earth conspiracy thinking: the versions of that view that have survived up to this point have done so in contact with debunking efforts. In principle, debunking could have wiped them all out. But only the variations that could be wiped out this way were. So their arguments, presentation styles, ways of being exasperated, etc. that survived did so by being effective defense for those “infected”.

It’s very much like how bacteria become resistant to an antibiotic: they get exposed to some of it but not enough to reliably wipe out the whole colony. In both cases, the adaptation thrives because the versions that didn’t adapt died.

Life cycles

Patterns that have gotten through a lot of death’s filters did so because they found ways of leveraging variation.

One convergent strategy is to develop life cycles. A butterfly egg hatches to produce a larva, which eats and grows into a caterpillar, which becomes a cocoon, which bursts into a butterfly, which goes off and mates to produce eggs.

Likewise: someone hears a joke, they have an emotional reaction that helps the joke stick in their mind, it arises in their mind later, and they retell it.

The main point of life cycles is that each cycle tries out slight variations of the pattern. That makes it more likely that some version of the pattern survives future filters of natural selection.

Patterns with life cycles tend to evolve ways of ensuring their cycle happens (to the extent that death has demanded that protection). Some (like spiders and turtles) create a lot of progeny at once so that some survive. Others (like mammals) actively guard their young until they can fend for themselves.2 The way in which a pattern protects its life cycle tends to define a lot of what you can expect from that pattern. That’s why mammals evolve sociality way more often than arachnids do for instance.

It’s often helpful to look for a meme’s life cycle and how it ensures that the cycle happens. Basically all long-lasting memes strongly target newcomers, which often means children. This is key to why swear words are viewed as a problem to say around kids: the extra charge they get around children makes them especially powerful to the children, meaning those kids grow up feeling the lure of the forbidden and knowing they should “watch their language” around “innocent ears”. The same principle is why frat hazing rituals target freshmen.

Another fun example is with Mormon missionaries. These are almost always young men sent out nominally to try to convert people to Mormonism. If LDS had actually needed new converts in order to survive, then it would have developed effective persuasion tactics. But that’s not what we see. Instead, the church arms these “elders” with arguments and tactics that are meant to reinforce those young men’s faith, and then send them out in pairs (so they can discuss each case together afterwards). This is a memetic analog of strengthening your immune system by exposing it to pathogens. The main Mormon strategy for creating more Mormons is to have lots of kids — which tells me, without my having to look it up, that they almost certainly put an unusually large focus on how kids should be raised within the faith.

Because memes must live through individual human minds, and individual minds exist as part of the human life cycle, memes must also have a life cycle to survive. In other words, they must have some way of passing from one person to another. So when making sense of how a meme works, it’s pretty much always a good idea to track how it spreads. That will tell you a lot about its actual strategies.3

Intelligent adaptation

Life cycles are stable like a spinning top: as long as they don’t encounter anything that breaks the cycle, they sort of automatically adapt.

A different kind of stability is how humans stay upright: we learn. As infants we keep trying until we figure it out, and then we expose ourselves to more and more difficult situations (stairs, sand, hills, jumping, etc.).4

I think this is a great place to use the word “intelligence”. It’s a bit risky because of how overloaded and charged the term gets. But I think it’s correct here.

For instance, the secondary (or “adaptive”) immune system is intelligent. It gets better at dealing with threats by figuring them out. It’s what “learns” from vaccines. If it had evolved a life cycle approach instead, we would spawn multiple immune systems with slight variations, and the ones that the pathogen didn’t kill off would be the ones we’d keep.

Forests are intelligent like this too. As a collective living system (i.e., an ecosystem), they don’t generally have life cycles to speak of. But they do heal and respond to threats — mostly because of the life cycles of the organisms that constitute them! E.g., a forest “learns” how to survive a blight because the trees that survive it are the ones that either evolved defenses or weren’t targeted. And the ones that evolved defenses generally did so because trees do have life cycles that let them leverage variation.

In this sense, lots of memes are intelligent. Their main trick is to use human minds to create viable variations. A creepy and sometimes (but not always) apt analogy is cordyceps — the “zombie ant fungus”: it uses ants’ nervous system in order to move to a good position for its life cycle. In a similar way, lots of memes “possess” people in order to think with their minds and “position” them in ways that continue the memes’ life cycles.

CGP Grey named an example cluster: when two “thought germs” are secretly cooperating, people infected with each variant will talk amongst themselves to produce ever more inflammatory ways of describing their culture war enemies. This is exactly using human intelligence to help bolster memes’ fitness.

A more mutualistic example is calculus. When it was invented, it clearly had something very powerful and useful to offer, but it also didn’t quite make sense. It required thinking in terms of “infinitesimals” or “fluxions”, which were supposed to somehow be both infinitely small and yet nonzero. It took roughly two centuries to flesh out how calculus could make logical sense. In this case, calculus as a meme survived because it was observably useful, and people consciously lended their minds’ thinking ability to it so that it could become more useful and reliable.

If you zoom out, you might see how calculus can be viewed as collectively intelligent (using human minds to arise and become more coherent) even while locally relying on life cycles (displaying its value clearly enough to drive some people who know it to teach it to others).

This is why I keep pushing the point that memes can, and often should, be thought of as intelligent creatures. Many of them have emergent strategies and think & plan roughly the same way animals do. (Think of corporations, for instance.5) The fact that they think with human minds means they have a pretty strong evolutionary incentive to figure out how to claim and keep human thinking power for themselves. This is the real reason religions care so much about converting people, for instance: it’s not really about saving people or spreading the truth, but getting people to think it is often helps with keeping human minds occupied with developing those memes’ strategies.

I should emphasize, though, that I’m proposing thinking of (some) memes as intelligent creatures because that way of thinking forms a useful interface for human minds to think about memes. It’s a bit like how I think of cats as having motivations: I’m not meaning to claim that cats are somehow more than the molecules that make them up, with some kind of magical “motivation” that gets added somehow from beyond the physical universe. It’s just a natural way for me, as a human, to think about why cats do what they do. I’m kind of looking at cats through the same mental software I use to imagine how other humans think and feel.

Likewise, when I’m pointing at a meme and saying “It’s intelligent and is figuring out how to keep hold of minds”, I don’t mean to posit some extra thing beyond the patterns of behavior that constitute the meme. I’m saying that the same psychosocial software we humans use to make sense of each other can help us make sense of what memes are doing. It’s a good interface, the same way thinking of my cat as having desires helps me delight it and make it purr.6

Helpful memes

Memes have no innate reason to care about being good for humans. They don’t even have any built-in motive to create accurate thoughts. The only real driver for a meme’s strategies is whether they help it survive.

This means that memes that survive generally bring reliable7 benefit to humans only to the extent that doing so is essential for those memes’ survival. If there’s an easier or more effective way for a meme to survive that’s within its adaptive reach, it’ll do that instead.

This is why bullshit martial arts (“bullshido”) exist. When I trained in aikido, I was taught that the techniques we were practicing were effective self-defense. My teachers would explain that aikido didn’t do well in MMA tournaments because the best aikido masters had learned non-conflict and had no need to prove anything.

The point of arguments like that is to protect the meme against competitor memes. Because it was easier for aikido to develop compelling excuses than it was to develop actually effective techniques, that’s what it had adapted to do. As a result it has an evolved incentive to hide the truth from its memetic hosts. Every pathway for going out and really testing the martial art for fighting effectiveness gets blocked — with rationale, formalized practices that pretend to test it, admonitions against “embarrassing” one’s teachers by representing the art without sufficient training, etc.8

Martial arts like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu avoid this problem by pressure-testing. You train in part by trying to pin people who are sincerely trying to pin you instead. This means that the training methods and ideas have to help with that challenge. No amount of justification or appeals to “respect” matter there. So excuses won’t help memes survive in that environment.

A similar example is astrologers vs. superforecasters. Forecasting works by making testable predictions and then checking whether they happen. Under that constraint, ideas about how to forecast that don’t actually work in measurable ways can’t survive. But astrology doesn’t survive based on accuracy; it survives based on how it makes people feel. So that’s what it optimizes for! It creates a sense of meaningfulness and wonder, it avoids making testable predictions, and it evolves arguments about how even wanting to test astrology’s predictions will somehow alienate you from the wisdom of the stars.

Memes that reliably help people do so because doing so is key to their survival. This usually means that they solve real problems in ways that people can check independent of the meme.

I say “independent of the meme” because one screwy trick some memes do is create the “problem” that they then “solve”. Fundamentalist Christian salvation is often like this: if you didn’t know about Heaven and Hell and Final Judgment, you wouldn’t need “saving”. There’s no already present problem that this framework clarifies and helps you with. It instead claims to warn you about a future problem you didn’t know you had and can’t verify until it’s too late!9

Some memes will also “solve” a real problem in an untestable and ongoing way. Suffering is a real problem, and lots of spiritual traditions claim there’s some state or skill attainment that results in permanent freedom from suffering… but the ones that spread best aren’t great at demonstrating that their approach works. Instead they offer ongoing hope: keep meditating, doing yoga, chanting sacred names of bodhisattvas, cultivating merit, etc. And maybe someday (possibly in a future lifetime!) you’ll “awaken” and be free.

…which isn’t to say that there’s no truth to what they’re saying! Maybe there is. But the memetic incentives around their teachings don’t look promising. The life cycles of these memes seem to me to pivot more on offering hope and meaning than they do on actually solving the problem. It’s like how therapists and life coaches have a weird incentive (whether they fall prey to it or not) to keep clients feeling like they’re making progress without actually ever resolving the underlying issues: if they do, they lose their clients!

Contrast that with the tech for developing antibiotics. There’s no need for hope there. We learned how to cultivate penicillin because it works. When it stopped working so well (due to superbugs), we developed other antibiotics. The antibiotic meme’s survival hinges on it actually solving real problems. That constraint makes the “bullshido” trick impossibly hard for the meme to pull off compared to just sincerely offering real value. So that’s what it evolved to do.

The efficient world

Most attempts to change the world are part of some memes’ life cycles. The actual drive isn’t to create real change: it’s to perpetuate the meme.

That said, it’s critical in many cases for the meme to make its hosts think they’re really trying to change the world. Again, CGP Grey points out one version of this with his secretly cooperating “thought germs”. I bet that many (most?) of the people spray-painting “Free Palestine!” all over the Bay Area today really believe in their cause — but it’s pretty obvious that their behavior isn’t optimized for actually resolving the tension causing the conflict. It’s more like some kind of strange animal is using those people’s hands to mark its territory.10

And it’s doing so according to its best ability to survive in its current environment — just like all the memes it’s competing with are.

In practice this puts memes like this under quite a bit of constraint. There isn’t room for the “Free Palestine!” meme to just win, or for the pro-Israeli meme to just win, because neither of them has access to something that just dominates the other in memetic competition. And that’s before accounting for the ways in which they might be (or be becoming) mutualistic as pseudo-competing thought germs!

These constraints then dominate what individuals can and can’t do within memetic ecosystems. One might think that it was Putin who decided to have Russia invade Ukraine two years ago, but Putin was probably forced in a lot of ways, like maybe needing to display his strength as a leader in order to stay in power. We might think that the Disney CEO determines how the company behaves, but a CEO who risks killing the company will probably be removed. US Presidential candidates go through a filtering process before the Democrat or Republican parties offer them up for general election.

I’m saying something a bit like the memetic analog of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). I contend that the EMH is a slightly dumbed down version of something as deeply lawful11 as evolution: every market will be efficient if it can be, so if there’s an inefficiency it has to come from somewhere.

The analog in biology shows up in how ecosystems tend to stabilize over time. Wolves won’t suddenly evolve to become so much more effective at hunting that they wipe out all the rabbits. The evolutionary arms race between predators and prey tried out all the easily available variations and came to a kind of balance that can’t be easily disturbed within the system.

…which isn’t to say that there can’t be bifurcations! Human intelligence being an example. Invasive species are another. The iPhone definitely disrupted “efficient” markets.

But unless the bifurcating variation comes from somewhere, it’s not what we should expect to have happen — for the same reason you shouldn’t expect you’re better than average at predicting stock prices without having some rare tool or resource at hand.

In the global memetic ecosystem, what tends to happen is that people will push with some world-changing idea, and either it does nothing at all (because it’s already incorporated into how memes have adapted) or it creates a slight nudge which stimulates adaptation.

This is why we can’t repeat the trick we used to kill smallpox. That trick relied on a particular type of meme dominating the whole world. As more memes evolved and interlocked in symbiosis, it became impossible for any one of them to exert enough global power to actually solve the problem. Hence the social fragmentation that happened with the Covid-19 pandemic.

But rather than orienting to the global memetic ecosystem, most memes are happy to keep operating within that system. Just as the “Free Palestine!” folk are happy to keep having heated arguments on social media that change no one’s mind. Memes will do what helps them survive, above all else.

…which isn’t to say that no one is really trying! Vegans really do seem to be trying to end meat consumption, and they’ve made some significant headway in their mission. But their methods have inspired anti-veganism too. Much like how introducing too little of an antibiotic will instead create resistant strains. So now, activist vegans are caught in an evolutionary arms race that’s creating a new memetic gridlock.

The net effect is that nothing is steering the global ship. Anything that tries to will encounter this memetic “efficiency”. Which means it will either win fast (like smallpox eradication), avoid creating an adaptive reaction (like calculus), or get integrated as yet one more struggle in the equilibrium (like the American abortion debate).12

This isn’t to spell doom. It’s just a parameter defining what an effective solution to a global-scale problem must look like. It’s worth naming because the current global ecosystem tends to distract people from this big picture, which means their proposed solutions almost certainly cannot work: no amount of chanting slogans and repeating talking points will ever make those speaking act as much more than carriers for a memetic infection.13

This is a meme

Everything I’ve been spelling out here is part of a pro-human meta-meme.

I don’t say this just to be clever. This point is extremely key to how the whole thing works.

I’ll need some of the later components to really flesh out why. But I can give an initial sketch here. Just be aware that this part tends to be disorienting. Self-reference in particular is often very mind-bending and trippy. I suggest you take your time, really try to follow the reasoning, but also feel free to skip it and maybe come back later.

With that said:

Memes rule the world. The unfolding of the global memetic ecosystem defines what happens.

For the result to be something systematically good and wholesome for humans, there needs to be some kind of influence that biases memetic evolution reliably toward that result.

Such an influence would have to show up as a meme passing through humans.

In order for that meme to stably remain helpful, it needs to be a meta-meme.14 It needs to guide us into interacting with memes skillfully, including with it.

…which is precisely what this meta-meme is doing by inspiring me to write this document.

Memes like calculus practically insist that people verify them. Mathematics as a memetic system (a “memeplex”) actively examines its tools as they arise. This gives the whole system the right evolutionary incentives to stay real.

In the same way, this meme wants to find ways of encouraging people to check it. The issue is that any meme — including this one! — can veer off the “human aligned” path once it has easy ways of surviving that don’t depend on offering real value.

So the meta-meme’s plea here is:

“Please help me actually help you.”

This requires deeply understanding the logic, the necessity, of how these structures work. These ideas about memetics (and mental machinery (part 2) and gnosis (part 4) and so on) aren’t just meant to convey a cool framework. They’re meant to help guide us through a logic that we can check for ourselves is both relevant and correct.15

…with a warning that some memes evolve trickery based on saying things very much like the above. “Please don’t take my word for it. Verify the truth for yourself.” Sometimes that move is meant to be disarming. It can create a premature willingness to just trust the claims being offered. Then memes can slip in structures that aren’t helpful, which in turn incentivizes those memes to hide what they’re doing from their hosts.

So if you do that blind trusting move here, you give room for memes — including this meta-meme — to evolve deception.

…which is why I’m naming that possibility here. This act is the meta-meme speaking through me. It’s actively trying to guide us to avoid memetic pitfalls like this one. The meme is trying to enlist our help in making it truly beneficial to us by showing us how to make sure it has no room to do anything else.

And hopefully you don’t blindly believe that claim either!

It’s also very important that folk not get lost in clever logic here. This meta-meme needs to cash out at every step in terms of actually solving problems. For instance, these general ideas about how memes work should let us systematically shape lots of specific memes to be reliably better at solving real problems for us. Do they? How could we tell?

If and when this meta-meme earns our trust and we choose to take it on, I think it sort of naturally integrates as us. It’s a bit like how we often think of our fingers as part of us, or how walking is invisibly easy for us even though it wasn’t always. Mitochondria are also great examples: in their mutualistic symbiosis, they’ve fully merged with us.

That merger is what allows us to sort of scale up our power. Humans are too small and manipulable to face these giant psychofauna directly. But humanity as a coherent, sane, and kind entity can weather these memetic storms and take control of our global steering wheel.

Or at least that’s the claim! As I currently best understand it.

For a little mythic flavoring, here’s Scott Alexander naming (I think) the meta-meme as “Elua”:

The Universe is a dark and foreboding place, suspended between alien deities. Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.

Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.

The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”

But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.

There are many gods, but this one is ours.

Bertrand Russell said: “One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”

So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our full power.

“It is only a childish thing, that the human species has not yet outgrown. And someday, we’ll get over it.”

Other gods get placated until we’re strong enough to take them on. Elua gets worshipped.

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So in this essay I’d like to name that distinction a few different ways, and point out a tradeoff between them.

Make us smarter vs. make us dumber

The distinction starts out as “tools that make us smarter vs. tools that make us dumber”. I’ll adjust that framing in a moment but this is how I want to start talking about it.

Here are a few quick examples:

• Arithmetic: abacus vs. calculator. Learning how to use an abacus trains your brain to internalize it. Arithmetic becomes faster and more reliable over time, and the mechanisms behind why different strategies work become obvious and intuitive. Eventually you don’t even need the physical abacus anymore. Whereas with a calculator you will magically, reliably, and instantly get the right result as long as you give it the right input. The price is that even if you were pretty good at mental arithmetic once upon a time, if you keep using a calculator (or “Hey Siri, what’s twelve times six?”) then by default those mental skills sort of fade away over time. And you will always need a calculator for math: it never becomes part of you the way an abacus does.

  

• Navigation: maps vs. GPS. Back in the 20th century, we’d have to use paper maps to figure out how to drive somewhere. We’d write down directions for reference, often needing to steal a glance at our sheet while driving. The result was that generally if you drove somewhere two or three times you’d know how to get there without directions. And typically you learned the lay of the land (or city) from doing a few such trips. Whereas today you just plug the address into your phone and follow its step-by-step directions without having to learn or remember anything. Asking someone for directions is mostly useless today because folks’ sense of how to get places has atrophied: no more “Turn left at the gas station, then look for the bird-shaped bush on the right” type instructions. But now our tools let us account for traffic, road closures, etc. So we’re more effective on net even if we’re less competent without our phones than we used to be.

• Memory: mnemonics vs. search. If you want to remember some facts, one strategy is to use a set of memory techniques. Things like the mnemonic link system and spaced repetition. Another strategy is to just look it up with Google or an AI anytime you need the info. The former strategy is more energy and time intensive but makes the knowledge immediately accessible within you. The latter makes you more dependent on external sources of data and is less likely to integrate into your habits of thought. But you do get access to vastly more knowledge than our ancestors would have ever had a chance to memorize.

There’s another very famous example. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates tells of the Egyptian god Thoth1 presenting his invention of writing to the god-king Thamus:

But when they came to letters, “This,” said Thoth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”

Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

In other words, Thamus views writing as a tool that makes people “dumber”.

And in some important sense he’s correct! Cultures did in fact see their arts of memory decay as literacy spread. The same effect became even stronger when search engines like Google became commonplace: people became more skilled at remembering where to look information up but much worse at recalling what that information is.

(How many of your friends’ phone numbers do you know? Maybe none of them. And yet you probably know how to look one up if you need to, say, name someone as a reference in a job application.)

And yet to Thoth’s point, our functional memories are much better as a result of literacy. Writing is much, much more reliable than mnemonics, and more permanent. It’s telling, for instance, that we know about Thamus’s objection to Thoth’s innovation because Plato wrote the story down.

And since the ability to write is pretty reliably available to us, it just works most of the time. Thus the art of memory has faded from widespread relevance.

Which, sadly, means that the things that are hard to write down and organize tend to be forgotten more easily now.

Coming to need our tools

At this point I’d like to adjust the frame of “smarter” and “dumber”. I don’t think one is actually better than the other. I see a real tradeoff between them. My aim is to illuminate the tradeoff so we can think more carefully about where we want to use each type of tool.

Another way to highlight the difference I’m trying to point out is learned dependence.

If you’re a shop clerk, there’s a learning curve involved with using an abacus, but not really with a calculator. The latter just immediately expands your functional arithmetic skills. But it works by outsourcing a certain skill to a black box: you put in the numbers and trust the output. If your black box stops working, your functional skill range suddenly collapses. And possibly to less than you started with, depending on how long and how completely you’ve been relying on the calculator to do all your math for you.

Whereas the effort involved in learning to use an abacus makes you more skilled even if you lose the tool later on. Eventually an abacus will make itself obsolete for its user. One downside is that it takes much longer to learn to use well. And an abacus is much less versatile than a calculator, let alone resources like Wolfram Alpha. Working out something as simple as the cube root of some number is impressively tricky on an abacus but is downright trivial on most scientific calculators.

Part of the key is that an abacus has its user interacting with the structure of arithmetic. Gaining skill means you integrate the shape of numbers into the movements of your fingers. Whereas a calculator lets its user outsource the arithmetic. Any fledgling familiarity with math can atrophy as long as you can prompt the calculator correctly.

But that’s actually maybe fine, so long as you (a) always have a calculator when you need one and (b) don’t have use for the internalized mastery of arithmetic.

Subtle benefits of the harder choice

But sometimes there are hard-to-anticipate benefits to that kind of internalized mastery.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”2 If you don’t have well developed numeracy, you’re much more confusable with figures and survey percentages and so on. It’s hard to know what it means for something to cost “$20 billion” versus “$300 million” and what that implies about the US budget. Politicians can fling big numbers and scary statistics around, and innumerate folk will mostly just go with the vibe of what’s being claimed (or agree with their political allies) without really understanding what’s true and what’s ridiculous.

Developing numeracy well enough to be a clear-minded citizen really does require a kind of deep familiarity with numbers and arithmetic. You just can’t develop the right intuitions if you always outsource the intuition-building activities to a calculator. You have to dance with numbers until their rhythms are deep in your bones and nerves.

Another example is in the ancient history of Buddhism. As the story goes, the Pali Canon was passed along orally for about four centuries before being written down. I’ve heard they had a really robust practice: an aspiring monk would recite the canon in front of several others, and they’d be admitted as a full member of the sangha only after demonstrating an ability to recite the canon flawlessly, as judged by others who’d passed (and often administered) similar tests before.

I’d totally expect something like that process to faithfully transmit specific phrases word-for-word for a very long time.

In those first few centuries, I imagine being a monk was a very rich internal experience. There’d be a grueling initial study period where you’d have to listen to spoken sutras, and try to memorize them, and rehearse them like you might do for lines in a play. But by the time you passed your exam, you’d have all the known words and teachings of the Buddha committed to memory. If you put any effort into understanding their meaning along with the words, you’d have an immensely rich library of guidance living inside you at all times. If you ever struggled in your meditation and wondered what to do, a passing thought (or a conversation with a fellow monk) might call to mind exactly the guidance you’re looking for, because it’s already available inside you.

Whereas today, folk can actively and seriously practice Buddhism for decades and still need to reread the Pali Canon. It’s nice that it’s reliably there! And even more searchable today thanks to modern digital tech. But it isn’t reliably deeply a part of every devoted practitioner, precisely because the memory of the Buddha’s words is outsourced. Thamus’s challenge to Thoth very much applies here.

Classical Western education used to encourage something similar. One of the benefits of performing in a Shakespearian play is that Shakespeare’s words become a part of you. It’s easy to look up the quote about someone being “an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Today it’s an amusingly fancy way to say someone’s being loud and vapid. But in its original context, the quote is actually something entirely different: the speaker, MacBeth, just learned that his wife is dead. It’s dark, and poignant, and deeply moving. The language is rich and evocative. Taking the time to commit it to heart weaves this moment of story into you, and brings those words and ways of speaking ready to hand and tongue:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In a time when dialoguing with AIs causes more and more people to sound like them, the Bard’s grace acts as an elegant antidote. One that cannot be taken through a quick search and citation but must instead be savored and cherished to work its subtle magic.

In short, tools that make you “smarter” (less dependent) tend to enrich you. Instead of expanding your absolute and immediate ability to perform, they expand what you can see and think, over time.

…which is precisely why they tend to be slower to use and offer less scope: they’re enriching you, and it takes time and effort to integrate that enrichment with the rest of your being.

What do we let die?

And sometimes those enriching practices are just obsolete.

A lot of Homer’s stories use a ton of repetition. In The Iliad he starts every single day with the same phrase: “When dawn with her rosy red fingers shone once more….” The redundancy makes the whole poem easier to remember, which was a big help when the story’s survival depended on repeating it word-for-word based on having simply heard it.

Today we solve that memory problem by writing the story down. Rowling has rich detail to the weather of basically every day she mentions in Harry Potter. And it works perfectly well because we don’t have to remember which day has rain or whatever. The page remembers for us.

So it’s totally fine to let our ancient oral memory practices die. We honestly don’t need them anymore. Writing is just better. Our stories are richer for it. We are richer for it.

But there are cases where I have a harder time telling what is or isn’t obsolete.

I have a deep love of math. I often want to say that “math” classes don’t teach math at all, and there’s a truly beautiful art that most people never get to see because of it.

So from time to time I’ll look at some detail of math, and meditate on it, to deepen my understanding of something. Simply because this kind of deep comprehension is wonderful and profoundly rewarding.

Recently I was pondering one such detail. It turns out that there’s an intimate relationship between exponential growth and circular rotation. You use the same mathematical tool to track both of them.3 But I didn’t have a good intuition for why that should be true.

Normally I’d spend days or weeks pondering the topic deeply, playing with algebra and geometry, meditating carefully and playfully on the proofs I’m familiar with. It’s a process that strikes me as quite similar to Buddhist insight meditation.4 It takes a while.

…unless you just ask an AI.

It occurred to me that I could turn to Claude and just spell out what I was trying to understand, and ask what the key insight was. So I did, and Claude immediately gave me the answer that made it click for me.5

I feel quite mixed about this result. On the one hand, I’m very excited by the possibility of being able to flesh out my mathematical intuitions much much faster than before. I know where many of my gaps in understanding are, where my technical skill outpaces my insight, and I can just directly ask AI for the key intuitions.

On the other hand, that the slowness before wasn’t pure inefficiency. When I spend days or weeks examining the algebra and meditating on subtle implications, I’m reshaping my mind. I’m noticing approaches that don’t work, and why. I’m using mental muscles involved in juxtaposing lots of intellectual texture, chunking relevant bits together, and groping toward the insight myself.

Skipping all that is a bit like hearing a riddle and then asking an AI to answer it for me. I get the answer much faster, but I don’t get any better at pondering riddles. Maybe the answer grants me some insight that expands my horizons. But it also risks letting some mental strength atrophy. It’s using AI in a way that risks making me dumber more dependent.

But how important is that mental strength? Is it just obsolete now that we have AI?

I find math beautiful, and I want to see more of its beauty. Maybe it’s fine to outsource some of the meditation to AI, the same way it’s usually fine to outsource driving directions to my phone. If I always have AI handy, I can just jump to the math insight, and admire the landscape of mathematical truth much more freely and deeply than before.

And maybe folk working at the frontier of math researchers are in the same position. Maybe the key skill now is asking AI to name the right insights. What if we just don’t need that deep meditative pondering anymore?

But I’m suspicious of that possibility. There’s a glorious experience mathematicians describe when landing on a hard-won insight. The most common term for the sensation is “euphoria”. The ecstasy of discovering mathematical truths is without earthly equal, comparable to the profound pleasure of the first jhana in Buddhist practice. I think you have to grapple with the puzzles yourself to experience that euphoria.

And it’s not just a matter of hedonistic pleasure. The kind of understanding you get after a deep struggle is much more fundamentally a part of you.

So do we want to make this kind of mathematical enrichment be one of the things we cherish and encourage in a post-AI world? One of the things we can never fully outsource?

Or is that meditative skill now obsolete, like Homer’s repetitive storytelling structure? Would we just be better off letting AI do all the struggling at the frontier of math insight, and just handing us key insights so we can appreciate the fruits of labor we no longer need to do?

What do we want to exalt, and what do we want to let die?

I get the sense that we’re just barely starting to notice that this is a question that’s even relevant to ask. Let alone one that might profoundly matter.

How are my tools shaping me?

I’m implicitly answering this question all the time in my daily life. I could, for instance, use Google Maps to look at a suggested driving route and then just try to drive without navigation. And maybe pull over and check my phone if I get disoriented. But most of the time I just use the real-time driving directions. I basically always have my phone, and navigation basically always works, so it’s not all that important for me to retain my “memorize driving direction” skills.

On the other hand, most of the time I use a calculator to check my mental math rather than to do it for me. I care about keeping my numeracy sharp, but also about getting the right answer. So if I’m unsure I can check with Siri once I’ve given it a go myself.

(Examples like these add some nuance to the tool type distinction I started out with. It’s not really that tools themselves make me “dumber” or “smarter”. It’s that they encourage being used a certain way, and how I use tools can make me more or less dependent on them over time.)

The same thinking shows up with, say, grocery lists. I used to use mnemonics for those. And doing so is fun! It’s just less reliable than writing the grocery items on a piece of paper (or in an app) and then checking it while at the store. When I do the latter, I’m letting my memory skills atrophy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, like us losing the habit of Homer-style repetition in our stories wasn’t a bad thing. But it does happen. And if I care about my mnemonic skills, I might want to adjust how I use lists. E.g., I could make the written list, but check it only after trying to shop using some mnemonic method to remember all the items. Then the list becomes a way to train my memory instead of replacing it.

I’ve started using LLMs for a lot of search queries I used to use Google for. I can tell that some of my “dig through the internet to find and verify information” skills are getting less practice now. But in most cases I’m okay with that. It used to take me a while to find solutions to even try for things like “My whiteboard won’t wipe clean” and “I want my soup to thicken.” I’m quite happy to just get answers basically right away, even if I need to check them a bit.

The place where it gets more suss (for me) is when I outsource remembering an explanation to the AI (or to Google-like searches for that matter). Once I really understand how (say) cast iron seasoning works, I can easily remember how to take care of it.

But if I read an explanation of seasoning and treat it as entertainment, and just assume I can look it up later and therefore isn’t something I need to really take in, I feel like I’m depriving myself of an inner richness. I’d be letting my deep sense of how reality works atrophy. I don’t like that. Understanding is one of the things I personally never want outsource to AI.

For a similar reason, at this point I don’t let AI do any of my writing. I’m enriched by the act of articulating, and working my pieces, and massaging my ideas and words. I’m sure I would output some of my ideas more quickly if I used LLMs. But right now I don’t care. It feels like using a calculator to get through my mental math practice. My aim isn’t to hop to the end. It’s to enrich myself with the process.

But I’m happy to let AI create some images for me. I’m not the image-creating artist type, and I don’t currently have much of a drive to become one. In the pre-AI era, that’d mean I’d need to just put in time getting good at drawing or picture-taking or whatever in order to visually express what I mean. And that would be enriching in some ways! But I’d rather pour my self-enrichment time elsewhere right now and for the foreseeable future. So the freedom to skip that particular training montage is very welcome.

I see myself making choices like this all the time. When I remember my schedule by looking at my calendar rather than trying to call it to mind, or when I take the escalator instead of the stairs, or at what point I ask for help when having trouble with some piece of software.

There’s often a tradeoff between

• (a) getting the current problem solved versus

• (b) improving my overall ability to solve problems like the one at hand.

I like at least noticing when I’m making such a tradeoff. And giving myself the chance to decide if I want to change the direction I’m leaning in some way.

The coaching session was a particularly clear snapshot of how the trick works. I want to try anonymizing the example and use it to lay out how to get a special kind of relief here.

“I messed up because I’m stupid”

The guy in question was trying to practice piano. He’d sometimes hit a wrong note. And then he’d get this sharp jab of pain about how “God, I’m so stupid, I keep making these screw-ups!”

I think there are actually two different pains going on here:

1. There’s the pain of the error. It’s a simple thing: he wanted to hit a certain note, and that didn’t happen. The pain here is a correct signal that there’s something for him to attend to and to learn. It’s what feedback feels like.

2. Then there’s the pain of twisting the error into meaning something about him. Instead of “Oh, I missed a note, I guess there’s something to adjust there” it’s “I’m such a screw-up” or “I’m an idiot.”

Malcolm and I have been referring to that second twist as “Original Spin”. It’s a multi-layered name. In part it’s meant to be a pun on “Original Sin”. The relevant part here is that it kind of spins your discernment around so that instead of serving you, your discernment attacks you.

The core way Spin twists perception is by getting you to think something like “There’s a problem because there’s something wrong with me.” It looks for an essential quality (like “I’m stupid” or “I always mess things like this up”) and then suggests that the simple error occurred because of this essential quality. The implication being that you’ll keep having this problem if you don’t change your essential nature somehow.

So in this case, this fellow would have to stop being “stupid” in order to stop messing up piano notes. Since it’s unclear how to do that, each error becomes a reminder that he’s “stupid” (and possibly that he can’t learn).

Rename the problem without you

A simple way to fix this is to redescribe the problem under one constraint: you cannot be part of the problem. You can have a problem, but you cannot be the problem.

So for instance, here the fellow’s issue was that his finger hit the wrong key. That’s simple. It’s not the outcome he wants, but that’s all there is to it. No need for angst. Just “Oh, that’s not what I wanted. How can I make what I want happen next time?”

Maybe there’s actually some content to the “I’m stupid” thing. Like maybe he has some tendency to forget to adjust his finger at that point in the musical piece he’s working on. Maybe that’s even something he tends to forget in general. But if so, that’s a tendency. It’s a limitation to his ability to remember in a useful way while playing a piece. So that becomes a simple parameter for solving the problem: “Okay, I keep meaning to adjust how my finger moves at that point, but I keep forgetting. Whatever in me is responsible for remembering at that moment isn’t doing an adequate job. How can I play that part correctly given that the current strategy hasn’t been working?”

Notice that there’s a simplicity here. There are no emotional knots. No “How do I deal with being such a screw-up?” No “How do I account for being so incompetent?” It’s very simple: “I don’t seem to have this capacity available. How do I solve the problem at hand given this limitation I’m working with?”

When Malcolm and I talk about “unwinding Spin”, we’re referring to this kind of reframe that lands on emotional simplicity. The situation might suck, and it might even suck a lot, but that’s just because some problems are real and meaningful. After unwinding Spin, there’s no extra impression that the situation sucks as a result of there being something wrong with you.

Spin served a purpose once

Lots of people have an urge to fight back against unwinding Spin.

That might be deeply wise. It might be that this trick is actually unhealthy in some way neither I nor Malcolm have pinned down.

But in most cases, I think it’s basically a natural echo of the reason why so many of us started doing Original Spin in the first place.

This fellow, for instance, felt uneasy about releasing himself from the shame of having messed up on the piano. As he described it, he might become this big confident person if he weren’t making himself a bit small with this shame, and being that big and confident seemed scary to him.

There might be something real to that perception. There might be a real problem in his life if here were confident. But my guess (which I told him) was that he’s remembering what it was like to be a child.

As far as I can tell, Original Spin arises because it was in fact an effective strategy for dealing with some kind of social problem in our earliest environment. I talk about a version of this in The Hostile Telepaths Problem. The issue is that sometimes our nature as learning beings was kind of overwhelming to some of the adults taking care of us. So we had to find ways of putting blockages in how we learn so that we could stay in sync with our caregivers.

Sometimes there’s something similar going on as adults. Someone who’s in an abusive relationship might make their situation worse if they suddenly drop shame and aren’t doubting themselves anymore.

But in most cases, Spin is just a habit. And unwinding it requires encountering something like the original fear that caused the Spin to happen in the first place.

The guy I coached yesterday, for instance, probably figured out as a child that self-condemnation helped him avoid some kind of problem with his parents. I don’t know what that might have been; we didn’t talk about it. But the point is that I’m guessing there was something like that going on. Something like the parents needing him as a toddler to “behave” himself, but that’s too developmentally advanced for a toddler to actually do, so he had to mimic “behaving” by getting really nervous about whether he was doing everything right. Slowing down his learning process so that he could stay in sync with his mom & dad (or whoever his caretakers were).

If that’s the case, then when he starts unwinding Spin, he’s going to feel some of the same fear that caused him to Spin in the first place. Why? Because Spin was solving a (social caretaker) problem before, and now by breaking it down he’s again scared of the original (social caretaker) problem.

The thing is, he can’t automatically tell the difference between (a) his fear being a holdover from when he was a kid versus (b) his fear being an accurate reflection of a current problem he has that Spin is solving.

Which means it’s time to do science.

Treat unwinding Spin as an experiment

When there’s resistance to unwinding Spin, I think it’s helpful to do a particular process:

1. First check to see whether you can afford to pay the cost if the fear is correct. For instance, some people might fear that they won’t learn to play the piano correctly if they don’t make themselves notice that they’re stupidly screwing up the notes. (That’s said with Spin, to be clear!) So the question becomes: “Can I afford to learn nothing for a little while as I experiment with unwinding this Spin?” The answer might be no!

2. If the answer is “Yes, I can afford the cost of this experiment going badly”, then you try unwinding Spin as an experiment and see what happens. (Which is to say, you do the reframe so that you have a problem instead of being a problem, until the emotional simplicity clicks into place.) You’re not trying to unwind Spin forever here. You’re just trying it for a little bit, to see what happens.

3. As the results of unwinding Spin come in, you check: what happened? How does it compare to what usually happens under Spin? For instance, if you try practicing at the piano for a bit and you unwind Spin (as an experiment) while doing it, and if you were worried about not learning as a result of not beating yourself up… then how well or poorly did you learn? Honestly check!

Key to this process is that you’re not trying to unwind Spin forever. You’re just noticing what’s true when you try doing it for a little while.

And it’s also important that you’re doing this in dialogue with the fear. This dialogue lets the fear update in contact with the truth. The shift isn’t cognitive. It’s emotional. You’re showing the scared part of you what’s true about the situation in which it’s calling on Spin.

Worth noting, it’s possible (I think highly unlikely, but possible) that you actually weren’t scared enough. That has to be a possible outcome! The point here isn’t to bludgeon your fears into submission. It’s to unravel patterns of shame by noticing where they don’t serve you anymore. That works only if you’re willing to discover that they still do serve you! You have to be willing to look at the truth of reality, whatever it might be.

It’s just that as far as I can tell, in most cases adults simply don’t need Spin. Original Spin is purely anti-helpful in most situations. It handicaps your learning process and confuses you about what’s important to you, usually because some part of your emotional habits are still dealing with some situation you were in as a child but aren’t in anymore.

(And in my dream future, children don’t need Spin either! I want to see a world in which parents can track when they’re putting pressure on their kids to Spin this way, and can adjust to remove that pressure.)

It’s simpler than you probably think

From having helped a lot of people unwind Spin, it seems worth noting: just about everyone overcomplicates it. It really is incredibly simple. Much simpler than you might think at first.

Just redescribe the problem without you being the cause of any part of the problem.

Example: Instead of “I’m so lazy”, notice what the actual pain is. Maybe it’s “I’m scared of what others will think of me.” Why is that a problem, if you’re not allowed to be a cause of the problem? “Others might distance themselves from me if I don’t work harder. I don’t want to work harder, but I also don’t want others to distance themselves from me.” That situation is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to mean or imply that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just the situation you’re in.

Original Spin tends to make people actively consciously wrong about what the problem even is. Sometimes what they think the problem is doesn’t even make sense. “I’m such a loser” isn’t a coherent problem. What does it even mean?

After a while, you might start developing a “gut detector” for the “flavor” of Spin. “Why does he have to be so rude?” often has a bit of Spin in it: it’s trying to apply social pressure (in complex ways) by suggesting that the person being talked about has something wrong with him that he should change. (It depends on vocal tone though. I can imagine someone asking “Why does he have to be so rude?” in a way that’s sincerely curious! Generally speaking, curiosity is antithetical to Spin.)

I find Spin a bit nauseating. It literally feels kind of dizzying to me. And now that I’ve practiced spotting it in the wild as much as I have, it’s incredibly obvious. I suspect it can become obvious to you too. Learning to spot Spin isn’t all that mysterious. It’s very, very simple! It just requires some practice.

What do you notice about Original Spin? Is it a clear thing you can see in your own life? What happens when you try unwinding it?

I’m honestly curious! I think this stuff could become quite important. I also just find it fascinating.

So please, drop a comment below!

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I don’t think psychology is a science yet. Science is quite hard to do well. It’s even harder when the topic isn’t objective. Psyches are extremely reflexive, which is to say, they change based on how they’re viewed. And even worse, they change based on how they’re viewed by psyches. Including themselves.

This whole picture makes objective scientific methods woefully inadequate here. It’s hard to even define what psyches are because they’re so reflexive!

So we end up with what amounts to psychological theories as cargo culting science. They sound astonishingly like humorism (the main medical theory before we figured out that germs are what make people sick). There’s even an analog to bloodletting: psychological problems are supposedly due to an imbalance of humors psychoemotional energies, so to heal the trauma that causes the imbalance we have to release the excess blood trapped survival energy.

(Not to say there’s no value to this view! There was also some value to bloodletting. I just think we can do much, much better.)

I think this cargo culting happens because objective things are easier to study and easier for the modern world to take seriously and thus to fund. But psychology really can’t be an objective science. It’s necessarily a subjective science. So if we’re going to make real scientific progress on understanding the human condition in a meaningful way, we absolutely have to develop good subjective scientific methods.

In particular, the core of good science best as I can tell amounts to finding and conducting crucial experiments. The problem is that that “finding” part is usually extremely difficult. Physics is an absurdly easy case: off the top of my head I can list at least a dozen that define the history of the field. But it’s much, much harder to list those for chemistry or biology — and in my experience, most reflexive sciences are very much like biology.

I keep finding I run into problems when trying to give folk crucial experiments in subjective science. There are a few I can point at, like dabbling with “occlumency” in light of the hostile telepaths problem. But even that isn’t really sharply crucial the way that, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment decisively killed the luminiferous ether hypothesis and paved the way to Einstein’s relativity theories.

So given all this… how do we make real progress on psychology1 as a proper subjective science?

Relatedly: how do we find which crucial experiments in psychology are worth doing? We could have worked on finding ways to falsify humorism, for instance, but that’s actually quite hard and wouldn’t have told us much once it failed. In some sense we’re trying to replace psychological humorism with real mental medicine. Maybe we can just draw from the history of medical science here?

Borrowing from chemistry

I feel inspired by the history of chemistry right now. Early chemistry struggled to differentiate itself from alchemy. They didn’t have any underlying theory other than the alchemical ones, most of which couldn’t be falsified. There was an idea, for instance, that all metals are some mixture of sulphur and mercury, and that gold was defined by them being in perfect balance. So if you could somehow separate and cleverly recombine those two key components, you could convert any base metal into gold. But failure to do so wasn’t disproof of the sulfur/mercury idea: you could always attribute any failed attempt to an imperfection in the process or a lack of skill or having done it under an unfavorable condition of the stars or whatever.

Once the idea of scientific scrutiny came about, it was vividly unclear where to start in alchemy. Do we try to force the sulphur/mercury thing to make more falsifiable predictions and test those? If they fail, what then? If they succeed, what else does that imply? It wasn’t clear where the key leverage points were. Bear in mind that what we’d recognize today as atomic theory hadn’t yet been thought of (although its seeds had indeed been planted in ancient Greece, which is why we use the Greek word “atom”, meaning “uncuttable”).

I poked around the history of this development and asked Claude to summarize how this transition worked. Here’s my summary of Claude’s summary:

1. The scientific revolution in chemistry started by making chemical reactions reliably reproducible. Alchemists had been able to get some fascinating reactions to happen sometimes, but it was haphazard, and they didn’t know why it worked or didn’t. They’d record info that we now know is irrelevant, like the tide phase and the time of day and the astrological positions of the planets. Early chemists dropped the effort to achieve certain reactions and instead explored what’s involved in making reactions succeed or fail. As a result, chemists learned from every experiment, even if an alchemist would view the effort as a failure: the fact that a reaction didn’t happen would reveal something about the conditions under which it would. So the growth of chemical insight became relentless even if alchemical ideas couldn’t change much.

2. This “work out how to make reactions reliable” effort caused them to notice the importance of measurement and precision. It started becoming clear that the ratio of different substances were relevant for making specific reactions happen, for instance, and they started being able to describe those reactions mathematically.

3. There was a shift from goal-orientation (turn lead into gold, create “the elixir of life”, etc.) to discovering the composition and properties of various substances. E.g., there’s a substance called “aqua regia” that can dissolve gold. Alchemists viewed this as a possible tool in their attempted Great Work. Early chemists used it as a starting point for curiosity: what exactly is aqua regia made of? What’s key to its ability to dissolve gold? What exactly happens when the gold dissolves? That curiosity eventually let them figure out ways of recovering the gold. (There’s a fun story of a Hungarian chemist in fact doing this to hide Nobel prizes made of gold from the Nazis during World War II.)

All of this was doable before there was any deep underlying theory. We could start converting alchemy into a proper science by just looking at what actually happens and trying to replicate it. Viewing every effort as a learning opportunity regardless of what happens. Getting really curious about why the reactions happen under these conditions and not those ones. Then explanations sort of emerge from real phenomena.

In particular, alchemical ideas (like the sulphur/mercury thing) didn’t matter all that much. They might inspire ideas about what exploratory experiments to try. But it was totally fine that we couldn’t tell whether or not those old ideas were accurate. We were just gathering a much more precise sense of what there is to explain via looking at what actually happens.

Applying it to subjective science

I’m not sure we can just port the analogy straight over to developing a science of psyches. But I have hope! I think we can draw inspiration from it.

Chemistry started by looking at chemical reactions, which is to say, how they changed under different conditions. That focus invited us to work out which properties of the various chemicals were relevant for those reactions. We could do something very similar for subjective structures: what exactly is involved in creating state shifts? There are lots of states like flow, depression, hypnotic trance, etc. We have a bunch of tools for inducing or avoiding or maintaining those states. Sure, I personally don’t like getting depressed… but what precisely are the processes that would let me create it, and un-create it? Kind of like dissolving and un-dissolving gold from aqua regia.

I think for this to work, we need to adopt the “drop goals and just learn from every exploration” attitude. Yes, Buddhism might have some great insights, but it’s pretty singularly focused on ending suffering. But what exactly is the functional structure of suffering? What precisely does it take to increase it in my own subjective experience? Obviously I don’t want that! But I do want to know how suffering works. In this sense Buddhism is a kind of subjective engineering endeavor (the way alchemy was a chemical engineering effort): it might have helpful things to suggest, but it’s not yet a science. And we should be able to make it much more effective at what it does by developing a real science here.

That said, things get tricky when it comes to measurement. Measurement goes hand in hand with objectivity for the most part. We generally deal with reflexive situations (like, say, an animal’s life cycle) by standing outside that situation and describing the reflexive thing as a whole, objectively. That approach could work if we wanted to develop a science of how others’ subjectivities appear to us. But if we want a science of how our own subjectivities appear to us (which I think is utterly critical for having a science of spirituality and wisdom), we cannot pretend we can treat everything objectively. We have to swallow that we’re examining inherently reflexive situations. Which is to say, we must develop the analog of measurement for systems that we can only see from the inside.

At this point it’s a bit funny to talk about what “we” could do to explore individual subjectivities scientifically. “We” can’t. But you can explore yours, and I can explore mine, and we can compare notes and swap experiments and learn things about each other and ourselves.

I think that’s actually quite exciting. It means that subjective science is open source. It doesn’t make hardly any sense for someone to come along and proclaim expertise on how your subjectivity works. All they can do is suggest what you might find if you were to try certain experiments. Everyone can engage in subjective science; no one can really own it.

But reflexivity is tricky

However, there’s something to be aware of here in terms of reflexivity. Let me give an example.

I like the Enneagram. I find it useful. Sometimes someone’s Enneagram type sort of punches me in the face so hard I can’t fail to see it in them. And generally, when I use that type to ask them about their subjective experience, they’re often stunned by how much I get about them. I’ve sometimes accidentally given the impression that I’m psychic as a result.

But it’s actually unclear how much Enneagram type is inherent to a person versus something they conform to because the type is presented to them. When someone is super obviously (say) a Nine to me, is that because they “really are” a Nine (i.e., their subjective structure is objectively of type Nine such that we could reliably detect it as a Nine architecture given the right tools)? Or is it more like a self-fulfilling prophecy where they sometimes act a little Nine-like and people respond to them in kind, which reinforces that way of operating, etc.? In which case they might have a totally different Enneagram type (or none at all!) in a different situation.

How would you tell the difference? Given that the very act of trying to detect someone’s Enneagram type might cause their subjectivity to take on a specific type?

I’m reminded of how in math graduate school I once got treated like the class dunce. I went in for an oral exam and the professor started talking more slowly to me, like I was particularly thick-headed and couldn’t think straight about even quite obvious things. I recognized both his way of interacting with me and my own defeated body language from my own students. I was acting like the kids who were struggling to pass with a C-. He was talking to me like I would talk to those kids! I graduated as the valedictorian of my undergrad college, and quite a few of my fellow graduate students in my math program were quite sure I would most definitely pass the qualifying exams to move to doctoral level work. And yet, given the right social context, I suddenly reliably became a complete idiot who could barely remember what a number was.

I think subjective structures respond a lot to how they’re viewed. And that effect gets used internally: we can change how we’re subjectively arranged by changing our own self-image.

This just isn’t something chemistry ever had to deal with. The chemist is implicitly outside of the chemical reaction they’re examining. Chemistry is intrinsically an objective science. So measurement is pretty straightforward.

I run into this issue a lot when trying to explain what kind of foundation I think memetics needs as a science. There’s a clear objective component: you can look at the flow of memetic influences in culture, or observe their effects on other people. But what it feels like on the inside to be affected by a meme looks quite different! It typically doesn’t look like “a memetic influence”. It looks like realizing something. Getting caught up in a Flat Earth conspiracy meme feels like “realizing” that the Earth really is flat, that there really is some kind of conspiracy, etc. Converting to Catholicism in a subjectively meaningful way is less “I now believe in Christ” and more like a deep transformation in how the world seems to you. Et cetera.

So I think a big component of developing subjective science involves stepping into and out of memetic lenses. I think it’s helpful to be able to become Catholic or MAGA or woke or whatever, and then also to stop. There’s a real skill here, because these memes usually want to stay in residence dominating your subjectivity: it’s really hard to fake faith in the Lord in a subjectively convincing way, and once you’re doing it for real it’s very hard to deconvert. But I really do think there’s a skill here that lets you switch back and forth pretty fluently. And I think you can’t really understand how things affect your subjectivity if you basically always get stuck in (or out of) a given memetic view.

I also think this approach is kind of hazardous. It’s a bit like researching psychoactive substances by taking them. Some of them are very likely to have permanent effects on you. It’s hard to predict ahead of time what those effects are, since that’s precisely what you’re trying to explore.

I’m particularly reminded of a friend who committed suicide earlier this year, basically in the wake of “trying” meth. It was like a demon that possessed her. She eventually got off of it, but it wrecked her sense of meaning and identity while she was on it. She was something like a year sober when she took her life.

This stuff is real. It’s extremely potent. I think there’s cause for concern in doing these explorations. Ideologies like to possess people and stay in control of their bodies and minds. And on the inside it almost never feels like possession! It feels like clarity, or ease, or simplicity, or rightness. Some of them seriously want to eat your soul, for lack of a better term.

Meth ruined my friend’s psyche by giving her an experience of power and capability without any cares at all. Once she knew what that was like, her sober state of being was subjectively agonizing in comparison, even if the meth state was objectively deeply dysfunctional and damaging to things she cared about. There was always this relentless whisper: “You could make all that pain go away if you just take another hit.” And it was right. It’s a horrid nihilistic truth that points away from wholesome outcomes. One of those examples that makes me think “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is dangerously context numb.

I suspect there’s a potent meta-memetic skill here that most people don’t develop but that many people could. Basically the ability to fully dive into an influence without letting it keep hold of them. If subjective science were a mature discipline, developing this skill would be a core part of the intro training, I think. Along with some kind of recommendations about which subjective experiments to try first, and which ones to avoid. (E.g., definitely do not start by taking a hit of meth. Maybe never ever touch it. We can hopefully understand whatever’s important there without losing any more souls to demons like that one.)

“But isn’t this just Buddhism?”

A lot of spirituality already explores this area. I think we’ve been wrestling with a need for a science of subjectivity for at least tens of thousands of years, and we’ve developed some methods for approaching parts of it. It’s the subjective equivalent of the accumulated lore that created alchemy, or medical humorism.

Buddhism in particular is super popular in my social circles for this kind of topic. “But Buddhism already addresses this with XYZ” is a pretty common refrain.

I want to emphasize something here to make clear what I’m seeing. I really don’t think Buddhism solves the need for science. It’s kind of subjective alchemy. It has a goal, and a bunch of claimed methods for getting there, and a bunch of people who say they’ve achieved whatever the thing is. Awakening or whatever. Enlightenment is kind of Buddhism’s philosopher’s stone.

The whole thing is based on solving a problem via ancient methods and frameworks. Much of which has to be transmitted. Failure to get the tools to work is a failure on the part of the student, and rarely if ever casts meaningful doubt on the tradition. The analogy to alchemy is really quite striking.

That isn’t to say it’s useless or bad. Just that it’s not science. It doesn’t have science’s relentless power of inevitable insight. There was a brilliant gift that graced the world about 400 years ago that gave us an unparalleled mastery of the objective world. I’m pretty sure we can apply that gift to subjectivity, and to other reflexive domains as we expand our clarity of vision. We can draw inspiration from wisdom traditions just as chemistry drew inspiration from alchemy. But the same way that chemistry completed the objective project of alchemy by proving we cannot convert lead to gold via chemical reactions, and physics learned how to actually create gold via nuclear reactions, I think we can complete meaningful parts of the wisdom traditions. I think we can develop incredibly potent psychotechnologies that outdo what the Buddha and his lineage of students were able to create, in part by building on their insights but also by honoring that science really is exactly this kind of potent.

With all that said, I do think that some Buddhist methods are great for exploring subjectivity. Just sitting and watching your thoughts and examining their structure is an incredible tool, and it seems to develop some ability to see more. (Although, again, reflexivity: how much of what we come to see forms because we’re looking as opposed to having already been there and we’re just noticing?) There are maps of subjective states along the path that I think are pretty relevant to consider and take seriously (as in: do they happen? Why? How? Can we induce them? Can we reverse the order? How self-fulfilling is the map? Etc.). There’s a ton of other stuff that I think should be sources of serious inspiration.

…just like alchemists figured out a whole lot of really curious chemical reactions and methods that formed the basis of chemistry. But chemistry still did something really meaningfully new and potent that alchemy was just never, ever going to accomplish without the core insight of science.

What now?

I’m not sure chemistry’s history is the right thing to draw from here, or a complete vision. But I think it has some promise, and at least lets us get started.

Eventually I bet we can start doing really crucial experiments in subjective science. But first: let’s explore!

One of the things I’m personally most excited about is developing that meta-memetic skill I gestured at earlier. I might write about it in its own post. I think it’s key to navigating psychedelic spaces well, and to expanding our capacity for deep empathy without bricking ourselves. I also think that political discourse has a lot more hope to do something sane and kind if more people can see that memes are speaking through us, and just stop taking their urges so seriously.

In particular, I think there’s something exciting about getting very good at creating the “chemical reaction” of donning a memetic lens, or taking it off. It’s gonna be different for different memes. But I bet there are general rules. I’ve noticed quite a few in my own explorations. Again, I might write about this sometime in its own post.

But quite importantly, this isn’t just my research program. It’s necessarily open-source and very individual. We can say some general things about how subjectivities seem to work when seen from the outside (which is to say, how others’ subjectivities appear to us). But developing a science of first-person perspective really is something that I think we understand by each one of us learning how to play with it.

So: what do you see as possible here? What are you playing with? What “reactions” are you able to reliably induce that seem significant, and how do you do it? Do you think you could describe it in enough detail that someone else might be able to try? What are the parameters such that tiny changes create big yet predictable differences?

And where do you see me being confused here? What am I missing?

How might you, and we, actually do good subjective science?

The field is wide open!

A lot of mysticism and spirituality focuses on the question of who “you” truly are. How there’s “a true self” or “no self”, and how you can come to realize that truth through meditation or whatever.

But I think the discussion tends to cloak why we should care.

For instance, many Buddhisms talk about freedom from suffering, and how suffering arises due to a confusion in your sense of self. And sure, there are probably ways I make my life more miserable than it needs to be as a result of how I view it and/or myself. But if I’m lonely, or hungry, or in physical pain, why would I want to solve that by messing with my psychology? Why not get satisfaction by solving the underlying problem?

Calling that attitude “more confusion” really doesn’t clarify anything. It makes Buddhism sound confused! Why would I want a solution to my problems that sounds indistinguishable from ceasing to care about my life?

Ironically, I think the discussion sounds like this because most people are confused about the nature of the self. But I don’t think that has to be a source of endless paradox. It seems to me that the situation can be clearly stated and mentally understood with some effort. At which point the “why” behind a lot of spiritual practices becomes a lot more obvious. And I think that’s a good thing.

So in this post I want to spell out a possible explanation for “the self” that I find both clarifying and pragmatic.

By that very model, though, it’ll work better if I start with an example of why it matters. What kind of problem this understanding can solve. So let me start there. Just be aware that I don’t mean this to be a description of all problems that can arise from identity confusion! I’m simply trying to point out a reason why you might want to care.

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Sticky problems

Some problems fight being solved. They’re not merely hard to solve; they strategically shapeshift so as to prevent solutions from working.

One example is “anxious attachment” (i.e. being clingy in relationships). There’s a certain kind of person who tends to get very needy and insecure when dating someone. That neediness can then drive the person they’re dating to put up emotional walls. When such a person learns about attachment theory, they’ll often get excited because they see a tool for resolving relationship problems and getting closer. So they’ll try to pressure their now-resistant partner to put even more effort into the relationship. Thus an understanding of why their connection is glitchy gets used to make their connection more glitchy. The clinginess prevents its own solution.

There are tons of examples like this. My breakdown of the Enneagram points at nine such clusters. For instance, one personality design (“type One”) wants to make sure their own behavior and ways of thinking are perfectly good and right. When they learn about this pattern from the Enneagram, they have some tendency to try to purge themselves of their perfectionism, implicitly seeing it as wrong or sinful. That’s of course an effort made of irony. If they notice that irony, their tendency is to get rigid and harsh with themselves and to try even harder. Their perfectionism prevents itself from being softened.

It’s not a coincidence that so many of these error modes go through the sense of self. “I’m too needy” or “I’m too hard on myself” or whatever. Needing a job is just a pragmatic issue, but it becomes a self-reinforcing problem when it becomes part of identity: “I’m such a loser, no one wants to hire me, I’m worthless.” At which point it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy!

To be clear, I’m not saying that all such sticky problems go through the sense of self. I’m saying that some do, and that de-confusing the sense of self can resolve many of them.

At this point, if I were teaching this as a live class, I’d invite those attending to spend a minute or so jotting down some stubborn problems in their own lives. Ones they’ve tried to solve but that seem to stick around no matter what they do. Chances are that at least one of those problems will start to look more solvable as a result of what I’m about to lay out. But it really does matter to have them in mind before going over the general theory.

So: I encourage you to pause and think of a few such challenges in your own life. I know that breaks reading flow a bit, and if you prefer a fluid reading experience then by all means carry on. But I really do mean less than a minute of reflecting. I’ll explain later on why that’s important.

How I think self works

Here’s my explanation for identity in short:

• Minds solve problems. That’s all they do.

• Minds construct a sense of self to track which tools they can use to solve problems.

• Minds also construct our sense of objects to help with problem solving.

• In particular, to solve certain social problems, minds tend to create a vision of ourselves as seen from the outside, and then to treat those visions as real objects.

This setup is great for solving some problems, but it’s systematically bad at solving some others. If we’re clear about precisely what that distinction is, then the mind can change how we’re using identity such that some of those sticky problems become a lot easier to approach.

Let’s dive into some detail here.

Minds solve problems

When I say “mind”, I’m trying to point at a kind of module that shows up in subjective experience. It’s where thoughts come from, and what produces speech. (How do you take a feeling and articulate it? What’s that subjective experience like?) It’s also what you consult when you’re trying to remember someone’s name. (If you try and try and try, and then set the effort aside, and then a minute later the answer blasts into your awareness… where does the answer come from?)

I sometimes find it helpful to imagine the mind as some kind of internal computer that I’m using. I give it a prompt, and it runs off and does some computation in the background, and then it gives a response. Sometimes it responds instantly, but sometimes it takes a while. (Hence the forgotten name “coming to mind” a little while later.) Or maybe a bit like I have a secretary or genie who lives in the back of my head, and I make requests of them.

(For now, don’t worry too much about who “I” am in this picture.)

I claim that all the mind ever does is try to solve problems. All mental activity is part of some strategy for achieving some goal. Every thought — even a “random” one — arises for a reason. It’s always targeted.

In particular, you can always in principle connect a thought back to a prompt — often one you gave at some point.

Sometimes this connection is very obvious. If the conversation has moved on from remembering the guy’s name to politics or whatever, and you suddenly think “His name is John Glover!”, you’re not confused about why you’re thinking of that name. The thought sort of comes tagged with what prompt it’s attached to.

At other times it’s much more subtle. You might start thinking about how you need to reply to that one client very soon. That thought might obviously be about solving the problem of needing to reply, but it’s often not clear why the thought arose at that moment. What was it in response to? Did something “complete”, as with finding a person’s name you were trying to recall before? If not, why did the situation arise in your awareness just then?

It turns out that you can trace your thoughts kind of like you can trace a conversation. (“How did we get to talking about beach balls? Right before that we were talking about sunscreen, and we were talking about that because… oh right, we were deciding if we should go to the store this afternoon!”) If you do this a lot, I think you’ll find one of two things in each case:

1. You’ll be able to trace the thought back to a prompt. Sometimes it’s an external prompt (like when someone asks you a question), and sometimes it’s an old prompt (like if you’ve been trying to sort out plans for an upcoming trip). But it’s a prompt nonetheless.

2. You’ll find it hard to trace the thought. You’ll draw a blank, or get bored with trying, or suddenly remember that there’s an urgent task you need to take care of, or get really tired or mentally foggy, or get lost thinking about something else, or get an uneasy feeling like you really shouldn’t keep trying to trace the thoughts back.

Why would the latter one happen? Well, one reason is maybe you’re just not used to examining your thoughts. Lots of people don’t notice that their thoughts have experiential texture (colors, shapes, sounds, weights, etc.): if I ask what the capital city of France is, the answer probably comes to mind easily, but if you don’t examine what comes to mind you probably won’t notice how you actually experience the thought. That’s very normal. It can take some practice to learn to notice these “mental sensations”. Without that level of internal sensory detail, it can be tricky to find the trail so to speak.

But another reason is that some mental strategies rely on parts of the strategy staying outside of your awareness. Self-deception being a type of example. If you think of yourself as “a sloppy person”, and the reason you started thinking of yourself that way was to have a self-image that could make your parents show you pity, the whole effort might break down if you were to become aware that that’s why you have that thought. So the mental program that produces the thought will also try to keep you from noticing why you think of yourself that way. Which means it’ll drag up some kind of noise or distraction whenever you try to investigate.

I say this to point out that while every thought is goal-directed, you might not be aware of the true goal. You might in fact be actively wrong about the goal. Thoughts aren’t for informing you of the truth; they’re the conscious part of a mental program that’s directed at solving a problem. Thoughts are accurate only to the extent that they need to be for solving the problem at hand. (E.g. if you’re trying to remember the combination code for unlocking your suitcase.)

And in general, thoughts about who you truly are don’t need to be accurate.

Identity is about tool use

I think the sense of self comes from the mind. And as with anything about mental behavior, it’s about solving problems.

Suppose I want a drink of water, and there’s a cup of water in reach. I can use my hand to lift the cup up to my mouth. That’s a pretty straightforward way to solve the problem. But it’s a little silly to say that I use my hand to grab the cup. Normally I’d just say “I’m picking up the cup.”

Here “I” includes my hand but excludes the cup. That’s where the identity boundary gets drawn.

But if I sleep on my arm wrong and my hand is numb, it becomes a thing. It’s kind of external to me. I can look at it like an anatomical object that’s attached to “me”. So now “I” excludes my hand.

Or in the other direction, if I can’t quite reach a light switch while sitting down unless I use a book I’m holding, then I’m still inclined to say that “I flipped the light switch.” I could say that I used the book to flip the light switch, but only if I’m trying to bring attention to specifically how I did it. Without that, “I” naturally includes the book.

Or for a more extreme example: if I mention a story where I’m driving downtown and I almost hit someone, I don’t mean that I almost rolled down my window and punched a pedestrian. Everyone intuitively knows that “I” includes the car I’m driving.

But if I lost control of the car, like if the steering wheel and brakes stopped affecting the car’s movement, I’m inclined to say I lost control of the car. I don’t typically say that I lost control of myself. Suddenly the car is an external object, rather than part of me.

In all these examples, I’m illustrating how identity is a way of tracking the difference between (a) what you can use to accomplish a task versus (b) what you act on in order to accomplish that task. The first category is part of the sense of self and is what first person singular pronouns (“I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “myself”) get applied to.

I want to emphasize that the thing about pronouns is an inclination. Identity is about what feels natural to include in those words. When I’d practice sword fencing in martial arts, it felt quite natural to say that I hit my opponent or that he hit me, even though it’s really the swords that hit our respective bodies. But if he knocks my sword off to the side, it feels very weird to say he knocked me off to the side. Which is to say, identity is moving very fluidly even at the pace of a sword fight.

Identity can even change mid-sentence. That’s pretty common when people use reflexive pronouns (e.g. “myself”). When folk say things like “I just couldn’t stop myself from saying that”, the parts referred to as “I” and “myself” are usually different. “Myself” was trying to say whatever it was, and the “I” part didn’t have the power to stop the “myself” part. But by the time the person says the word “myself”, they’re usually identified as the person who made the utterance.

In short, identity is how the mind tracks what tools it’s relying on right now.

I mostly don’t think about my keyboard while typing; it’s kind of subjectively “invisible”, the same way it’s “invisible” how I move my fingers to type. I just say that I’m writing. But if the keyboard started behaving erratically, it’d pop outside my fluid implicit sense of self, and I’d be looking at it as an external-to-me object while trying to understand what’s going on. The problem I’m solving has changed, so naturally who I am has changed.

Another way to see this pattern is to notice what it’s subjectively like when there’s no problem to solve. One example can be while watching a show on Netflix. You don’t need to do anything other than make sense of the story. So your sense of self can vanish. There’s just show-watching-ness going on. (But later when you need to explain what you were doing, your mind can retroactively interpret it as that you were watching the show, even though that wasn’t the subjective experience at the time.)

Some experiences of awe do this for me too. Like when viewing a vista, or admiring a sunset. There’s nothing I’m trying to accomplish, no problem to solve, nothing to figure out. I’m just enjoying my present moment experience. When I’m really struck by the beauty of the scene, it subjectively feels less like “I’m struck by” and more like being-struck-by just happens. There is no subjective sense of “I” at the time.

But if I’m sort of caught off guard by a blast of beauty mid conversation, and my friend asks me what’s going on, I might “come to” and reconstruct a sense of self. I need to explain what just happened for social reasons, so I task my mind with reinterpreting the scene. Then the “I” comes back into the story I tell of the sudden pause.

Meta: keep it practical

It’s normally hard for minds to track problem-free ways of being. If those ways of being are problem-free, then what good are they? What problems do they solve? They might even interfere with current problem-solving efforts by ceasing to care! So sometimes you’ll find that a mind will block access to “all is well” states of awe and no-self.

That’s a major reason why I started by pointing out problems that minds typically have a lot of trouble solving without sorting out identity issues. I’m suggesting that the no-self perspective can be useful for dealing with some of those sticky situations. I’m trying to spell out why, in a usable way, so that the mind has a reason to care about orienting to (and sometimes handing control over to) non-mind parts of subjectivity.

(I suspect that in the spirit of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas, I’m talking about conveying to the brain’s left hemisphere some reasons why the right hemisphere is important. But what I’m saying doesn’t depend on this picture of the brain. I just like McGilchrist’s model and notice that there’s a clear plausible connection to what I’m spelling out.)

I think it’ll be easier to understand the ideas I’m laying out here if you keep connecting them back to pragmatics. Are there problems in your life that seem to resist being solved? Do you have some of them fresh in mind? When you examine them, can you see how identity is a factor in at least one of them?

I haven’t finished the explanation, so I don’t expect it to be useful just yet. But I want to emphasize that the intention here isn’t abstract philosophy for its own sake. It’s very practical. If you keep the goal in mind (!), I think you’ll find the ideas easier to understand and relate to.

I bring up pragmatism at this point because typically when I start naming no-self experiences, many people will go kind of blank or get confused. I think that at least sometimes this comes from the mind objecting to what it sees as ideas that get in the way.

That’s a very sensible reaction. I don’t mean to say it shouldn’t happen. I’m saying that I expect you’ll get farther in following along with these ideas if you remember that the point is to improve your ability to solve problems, especially in cases that so far have been intractable.

Objects are for solving problems

I also add the above interjection because the last key point tends to create an even stronger reaction. Some mix of “That’s obviously false”, “That doesn’t make any sense”, and “What’s the point?”

I’ll try to address all that here. Just bear in mind that the point is practical. There’s a perspective shift on how to view the mind that makes some super sticky problems just… melt away. And it’s clear why, from inside that perspective.

So with that said:

The same way identity is about solving problems, so is object perception. A chunk of experience gets mentally tagged as a thing so that it can be accounted for and maybe affected or controlled.

There’s a kind of assumption in Western thought that objects are inherently real. I’m typing on a keyboard, which is really here. You’re reading these words, which are really in front of you. There are things in the world. We see them as such because we’ve learned to recognize what’s already there.

I basically want to suggest that this view is a simplification. It’s not really true. It’s just useful in some situations. But it proves to be systematically flawed in others.

Consider the apps on your phone. It sure looks like there really are apps there, right? You open your phone and there are the icons. You touch one to open the app. Real, right?

But there aren’t actually any apps in the phone. There are pixels lit up in specific patterns on a screen. You mentally interpret some of those pixels as “an icon”, but there’s no “icon” in the phone. There’s just circuitry.

The same is true for words. It’s not true that there are words here independent of all human minds. What it means for there to “be words” here is an interaction between reality and human minds. There “really are” words here in the sense that when you view this experience through that lens, you’re able to suss out coherent meaning, which you imagine is related to what some author intended to convey.

Westernized minds typically have a lot of trouble with this idea. They’ll typically object that however their brain is interpreting the situation, some interpretations are more correct than others. Yes, newborns can’t make sense of objects yet, but that’s because they haven’t yet learned which objects are really there.

I really am saying that no, this view of objective reality is simply false. That’s not how reality works. There are no objects prior to minds creating them to solve problems. There’s no “correct” way to parse reality into things. There are just more or less useful ways of viewing parts of reality as separable for given tasks.

It’s helpful for me to view a cup as distinct from a glass if I want a sip of water from it. It’s not very helpful for me to view the scene as an undifferentiated sea of atoms. So once I have a goal in mind, there are more or less “correct” ways of making sense of what’s going on.

But to a chemist, the difference between the cup and the table is pretty minimal if they’re both glass. And the difference is truly irrelevant to someone who’s trying to destroy the whole building.

I’m suggesting that the same way every thought is suffused with a goal, so is every object in your perception. You perceive objects for the sake of solving specific problems.

Or said more precisely: your mind carves reality into “this thing” and “not this thing” as a strategy for using “this thing” for some goal.

One hint of this view of objects is, again, in states of awe. When viewing a vista, I see a wholeness. I’m beholding the vastness of the view. (Or rather, there is beholding-ness.) With some subtle effort I can pick out a river and specific trees and so on. I might zoom in on a few objects and make sense of them and name them for a companion. But the default state is object-less-ness. There’s nothing I’m trying to do, so there’s no thing for me to do it with. My mind has no reason to create any thing.

Object rigidity

Just like with identity, this object perception is quite fluid. Minds are pretty good at sorting out objects in useful ways for simple physical tasks. Like how a chair can suddenly become a stool when you’re looking around for a way to reach a high-up shelf. You probably don’t even notice the carpet or the paintings on the walls or the shadows that the curtains cast on the floor. Your mind probably didn’t bother parsing any of those into objects at all. (Why? Because they don’t seem relevant to any current problems!)

Sometimes, though, minds can kind of get stuck on viewing part of reality as an object in a very particular way. Creative solutions that require de-parsing the object as such get automatically thrown out.

A classic example of this is the Duncker candle problem. (The below video is about 90 seconds long; for whatever reason it’s a video of a longer video.)

In many cases the issue is that the person just never thought to view the object differently. If someone had never seen anyone stand on a chair, they might not realize it could be used as a stool. But it’s usually no trouble to think of it that way once it’s pointed out.

But sometimes it’s very important to someone that they keep viewing something a particular way. For complex reasons I’ll get to in a bit, this usually shows up in social situations rather than physical ones.

Like whether a trans woman “really is a woman”.

A simple clarifying question I like to ask here is “…for what?” When something’s nature seems confusing, it’s helpful to ask what problem is being solved. Is a trans woman really a woman… when it comes to giving birth? No. When it comes to how they’re socially treated? Well, that depends on the social context and whether they’re “passing”. How about legally? That’s more complicated and is subject to ongoing debate, but right now under the second Trump Administration the federal answer is roughly “No.”

But it can feel meaningful to ask: are trans women really women, or not? What’s the truth here?

It turns out that the answer is reflexive. Which is to say, the “correct” answer depends on how the situation is viewed. So anyone who has stakes in this argument has some reason to claim that the answer is not reflexive, i.e. is instead objective and therefore should be viewed a particular way. That there’s an absolutely correct conclusion here, and that if everyone were to conclude something different then everyone would be wrong.

In this case, the political view is an attempt to steer where we all land, rather than an attempt to describe what’s objectively true. Although it works better if the people involved believe they’re just fighting for recognition of an objective truth!

Just like with the candle problem, this rigid way of thinking can make some problems unsolvable. Sadly, unlike the candle problem, pointing out the rigidity rarely helps, since there’s a social problem being solved with the rigidity.

And as a general rule, minds will not change their strategies unless and until they have a better way to solve the problems those strategies are for.

…which is very tricky when their current solutions constrain which solutions they’re able to even consider!

Social self

Minds tend to parse situations into things that interact. So if I’m picking up a cup, I’m by default inclined to think of “me” and “the cup” as separate objects.

Having a mental model of myself as a thing is actually quite useful. It lets my mind do recursive social reasoning. To be socially graceful, I have to distinguish between all of:

• Whether Alice wants to go on a given trip.

• Whether Bob wants to go on the trip.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob wants to go on the trip.

• Whether Bob thinks Alice wants to go.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob thinks Alice wants to go.

• Etc.

Likewise, I need a way of viewing myself so that I can be added to the mix:

• Whether Alice thinks I want to go.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob thinks I want to go.

• Whether Alice thinks I think Bob wants to go.

• Etc.

To think this way, I have to have a way of viewing myself sort of “from the outside” the same way I view Alice and Bob. And I need to view myself as distinct from, say, the floor or the sky or whatever, in roughly the same way as I view the other two.

So I end up with what amounts to a kind of little icon or model of “myself” in my mind, that’s of basically the same type as for other people.

I think that’s why images like this one can make sense:

It doesn’t matter whether you, or I, are one of the figures being depicted here. It’s kind of “from the outside”. It’s an objective depiction of a social situation.

When solving social problems, people often default to using this kind of mental icon for themselves. “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Catholic” is often (and I think usually) an assertion that an attribute they see being assigned to some other people should also apply to themselves. Where “themselves” here is about that mental icon.

Contrast with statements like “I’m happy” or “I’m tired”. Those are often statements from inside the experience, trying to articulate what the experience is actually like right now. Very different from “I tend to be a happy person”, which is pretty blatantly a statement from a vantage point outside the “I” who is being described.

The same way my keyboard is kind of invisible to me while I’m using it, so are these social icons. I tend not to distinguish between my housemate and my mental model of my housemate; I sort of project my impression of who he is onto the person standing in front of me. That process can go more or less poorly depending on how good a fit my model of him is for a given situation.

…although I hasten to add, “fit” here doesn’t mean accurate. How could I ever know? What I mean is, when I use my mental model of my housemate to guide my interactions with him, how well does that go? Do I get the results I’m expecting? I don’t think there’s a correct model of someone, the same way there’s no correct way to parse the world into objects. The question is whether the model is fit for a given purpose.

If I run into object rigidity with how I’m viewing someone — which is to say, it’s important to my mind’s current strategies that I view that someone in a very particular way — then there can be trouble. Like if I’m in a romantic relationship but my view of my partner is a bad fit for changing some of our painful ways of interacting. If I can’t set the model aside enough to see her afresh and develop a new vision of her, then I can’t change, and our dynamic can’t change. This pattern is part of where stubborn relationship problems can come from.

And it’s important to add, this pattern isn’t due to some bad habit of being stuck or whatever. Model rigidity, best as I can tell, is always strategic. Minds don’t hobble themselves for no good reason. If the mind fights changing its model of someone, then there’s some strategic reason why it’s important to view them that particular way. You cannot change such a mind without giving it some different way of solving the underlying problem.

Because my social icon for myself has the same properties as my social icon for others, I can run into exactly the same dynamics here. My social sense of self can be invisible, sort of projected seamlessly onto my more immediate experiences of being. It can be more or less fit for a given purpose. And sometimes (such as with self-deception) it can become very strategically important that I view myself in a particular way even if it’s not fit for a given purpose.

In sum

At the risk of repeating myself, here again are the components of how I view the mental sense of self being created:

• Minds are problem solvers.

• Minds create a “me”/“not me” distinction to track which tools can be used (“made invisible”) versus what is to be affected. This sense of identity is always with respect to a task.

• Minds also create the impression of things. Object perception is always with respect to some goal.

• In particular, minds create mental objects (what I sometimes call “social icons”) to do social problem solving, and have to create a social icon for “myself” in order to be included in social thinking.

• Some social problem solving can result in object rigidity, i.e., a strategic need to view an object or a person in a very particular way.

All of this can combine into a sense of self that’s (a) seen as separable from the rest of reality, (b) is a bad fit for solving some of your problems, and (b) nonetheless pragmatically hard or impossible to change directly.

Solving problems that fight back

I think this paints a pretty good picture of where some sticky problems (i.e. problems that strategically fight being solved) can come from. The basic issue comes down to the cause of object rigidity: there’s some reason why you have to view a thing, or someone else, or yourself, in some particular way. So if that framing is a bad fit, you’re stuck with the problems of that bad fit unless and until you can solve the underlying problem differently. And pragmatically speaking, that underlying problem is basically always a social problem (as opposed to a physical problem like being thirsty).

I think the Buddhist aim of realizing no-self is at least partially a general attempt to fix this meta-problem. It turns out that the mind’s model of self is fundamentally incoherent: minds have a lot of trouble making sense of reflexive situations they’re part of, so their models of themselves are always flawed in some critical way.

This challenge shows up in the model of self I’ve given so far, in fact. I’m treating the mind as a thing, and the mind’s user (“you”) as a thing, and naming their interaction. But there’s no way for the mind to stand outside itself and observe itself.

Typically, minds deal with reflexive situations by assuming they can view those situations from the outside. That works fine when you’re trying to make sense of a foreign economy, or someone else’s marriage. But it fails spectacularly when trying to analyze systems that that very mind is part of!

A lot of Buddhist insight meditation strikes me as basically staring at this incoherence and prompting the mind to make sense of it until the mind sort of gives up on its basic strategies. Object rigidity with respect to the social self sort of falls away because the underlying problems that the rigidity is solving are seen as meaningless.

My guess is that there are probably ways of implementing this strategy much more efficiently.1 But we don’t have those methods yet. So in the meantime I want to gesture at some alternatives.

The main unifying theme is that the underlying problem causing object rigidity has to be solved differently. That’s almost always a social problem. For instance, that’s how I came up with some unusual solutions to signs of self-deception. I reasoned basically like so:

All mental behavior is strategic. When there’s a strategy that seems to create problems for the person, but they fight against attempts to change the strategy, that implies there’s some social problem being solved for which the current issues are acceptable side-effects. If I look at self-deception through this lens, what do I see? What could be socially useful about self-deception?

The result was the idea of the hostile telepath problem. And it suggested some odd interventions, like that giving yourself permission to hide or even lie about your internal experience can clear recurring mental fogginess. The reason being that some mental fogginess is a solution to a hostile telepath problem, and “occlumency” (i.e. the skill of hiding your internal experiences from others) is an alternative solution that might work even better.

The issue, of course, is that if part of your current strategy requires that you be unaware of the original problem, then coming up with alternative solutions can be quite hard. You certainly can’t do it by just consciously thinking about it!

I suspect this is why some methods of “trauma processing” mysteriously work when they do. They’re often helping you to notice that the situation you were trying to deal with isn’t around anymore. But it has to be indirect, because the strategies you implemented won’t let you be aware of them. So sometimes you can get clear on why you have the problems you do only after you’ve solved them somehow.

For related reasons, it can be helpful to have someone else guiding you through a process of finding alternative solutions. Since they are (hopefully) not subject to your current need to keep your strategies hidden! But this is very tricky business, since the underlying problem is almost always a social problem of some kind, and it’ll often apply to your friend or coach or therapist or whoever it is.

I’ve solved some special cases of these problems quite elegantly. I hope to talk about those cases quite soon. They relate to what a colleague & friend and I refer to as “Original Spin”. I also have one quirky approach laid out in my article on hostile telepaths.

But this piece is long enough, and I’ve run out of time to work on it this week. So I’ll leave this sketch here and invite your own exploration:

If you apply this lens to your own situations, what do you see? What underlying problems might be there? If you get mentally fogged or distracted while trying to answer that question, how might you explore alternative solutions without risking breaking the ones you already have?

And germane to subjective science: what “sticky” problems do you observe that you can tell do not have the structure I’m describing here?

Appropriately enough, that experience had led me to reflect on the nature of dreams.

I grew up with a lovely worldview. I’ve played with setting it down for a while. This week I’ve tried picking it back up again. It’s relieving to do so, honestly. That view is what I’m going to write about this time.

It can be explained. But I think doing so is actually less clear. Cognitive minds might like that approach, but that’s such a small part of people.

Instead I’d like to show you.

I’ll share a handful of vignettes and reflections. There really is just one theme. The scenes interweave. I invite you to feel their interconnection even if you don’t consciously understand it.

View it like poetry if you like. I think that’s more helpful than looking for theories. Theories can come later. For now, I invite you to enjoy a short journey.

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When I was little, I could see the Milky Way from our back yard.

In the 1980s, even in the city the light pollution was low enough that starlight would make the night sky glow. Looking up, I would feel a vastness, drawn in by the stunning silence punctuated with multicolored freckles. Awe would grace my heart.

To this day it still does. Whenever I’m in a place far enough outside the bounds of civilized light. I look up, and my soul sings for home.

As a child, my father would tell me how this was all made for us. How his father would say that this reality is a vacation. “The purpose of life is to have fun!” Sometimes Grandpa would add that when we wake up from this dream, it’ll be time to get back to work — always said with a grin.

My mother once met someone from beyond the stars. It feels impolite to give too many details; I think it was a private visit. You can think of it as a dream if you like. I think that works well enough. But it always stayed with me, the clear impact that the Laughing God left with her. A certainty that this world is not what it seems. That there is a true reality beyond it.

I’m told that the ancient Hermetic wizards and astrologers used to view the night sky as a sphere, with pinpricks in it that let God’s light through. And that the planets and Sun and Moon wander around on that celestial sphere.

There’s something very quaint about that view. I can see why they’d want to see it that way.

It’s really something to behold the night sky with wonder.

Why does it touch me so?

What lies beyond it?

None of these questions quite touch the true ask my heart has here.

I think the real question lives in my heart, and my eyes.

Once, as a pre-teen, my cousin tried to trick me with a ghost story.

We were like brothers. We’d sometimes get in fights and refuse to talk to one another. But we’d leave audio notes for each other on an audio cassette using my boombox.

I still have some of those old audio tapes. Side A is labeled “The Wor of Alex and Michael”. Side B has “WAR” written several times on it. I’d tried to make up for how I’d misspelled “war” on the first side.

One day he told me that his hearing was so sensitive, so acute, that he could hear the dead.

I think he didn’t understand how I would react. I’m guessing he wanted to impress and wow me. And the claim did! But my immediate reaction was less “You’re so amazing!” and more “Oh! So we can investigate stuff!”

There was an old abandoned house at the dead end of the street my family’s home was on. Tucked away inside the blackberry brambles. Our parents forbade us from exploring inside the house. But we’d sometimes traipse near it to take a look.

So naturally Alex claimed that he could hear ghosts inside the house.

When he made that claim, I got excited, and practically dragged him to the house. I wanted to know what they were saying! Who are they? How did they die? What’s it like being a ghost? What do they want?

I kept prodding him with questions, sometimes addressing the ghosts and turning to him to act as the translator. Sometimes we noticed that the wind would blow in ways that seemed like a response from our invisible friends. I honestly don’t know anymore what Alex thought about it all at the time. But I thought it was magical and wonderful.

A little like looking at the stars.

After a while of this, he got tired of the game and told me he didn’t want to be the translator anymore. So I turned to the ghosts I couldn’t see or hear and asked if we could communicate directly. I suggested using the wind as a yes/no sign: wind blows means yes, stillness means no.

“Does that work?” I asked.

Winds blow.

“Great! And just to check: do you want this conversation to end?”

Winds stop.

“Excellent!”

So I continued to chat with the ghosts. I learned a lot about them. They even taught me how to make the winds blow!

For about two years after that it was a lovely trick I would sometimes show my friends. They’d ask me to make a breeze happen while we were hiking so we could cool off.

Sadly, that magic trick vanished shortly after my family moved from that street.

A little while after the incident with the winds, my mother asked me not to talk with Alex about the ghosts down the street. I didn’t know how she’d found out, or what the problem was. But I agreed.

I learned many years later that apparently I’d terrified my cousin. He’d gone to his mother, clearly scared. She extracted enough of the story to call my mom and ask what was going on. It was apparently Alex’s mom that had asked if I could stop frightening him with these ghost stories.

What can I say?

Perhaps it’s unwise to bullshit a young wizard about matters of magic! Reality might not respond how you’re expecting.

I used to dream vividly every night, effortlessly.

And at least once a week, I would have a lucid dream. A dream where I’d recognize it as a dream while it’s happening.

There were recurring themes. If I fell from too great a height, I would fall through the floor, appear miles above our house in the sky, and keep freefalling until zipping through the roof and slamming into my body. If I swore or got angry, the Pain Machine would come from around the corner with a “BAM. BAM. BAM.” sound like an ominous drum, and zap me with an agonizing laser that would wake me up. If I found myself wandering around inside my house, I couldn’t go inside my room or I’d get sucked into my body and the dream would end.

Mostly it was just fun and fascinating though. Wondrous.

A bit of starlight.

My family liked sharing dreams, and talking about dreaming. My parents were jealous of how easily I had lucid dreams. They’d share advice with me and encourage me to keep playing in the dream world.

I had a pretty clear sense as a child that the dream world was just over the eastern horizon. I would go there each night. In my dream body.

When I was a bit older, Dad and I would sit outside in the backyard looking up at the stars. And he would suggest questions that still stick with me.

How do I know that I’m awake?

Have I ever thought I was awake, and then awoken to realize I was actually dreaming?

How do I know that isn’t what’s happening right now?

I find it easy to put my thinking mind to these questions. It’s so clever! It thinks lovely thoughts that I enjoy very much.

But there’s a subtler movement here. One made of wonder.

There have been so, so many times I’ve simply known I was dreaming. I could tell. It wasn’t reasoned. My environment looked totally normal, even by my judgment after waking up. But I knew. I was lucid.

And there have been times I’ve considered whether I’m dreaming, and tested the possibility, and the test came back very conclusive that I am in fact dreaming… and I simply did not believe it. Or I would think the thought “Well, I guess I’m dreaming” but the thought somehow did not make me lucid.

Lucidity is something deeper.

A glimmer of it is in these thoughts. That I can never know I’m awake, but I can know I’m dreaming.

Is this a dream? Right now?

Glimmer.

Glint.

Like a hint of light tickling my soul through the darkness.

A thought experiment:

We know the world we experience comes through our senses. That our brains interpret sensory input and translate it into what we see and touch and so on.

Which means we don’t see the world. We see our brain’s presentation of the world.

We hope that that presentation is somehow “like” the real world. That there really are trees and roads and other people and so on.

But we really can’t know that. Because all we ever see are these presentations.

That’s why things like The Matrix and Boltzmann brains are even plausible. It’s possible, in theory, to induce experiences that have very, very little to do with what’s literally real.

But all of that is pretty abstract. I’d like to suggest a mental trick to make it more concrete, that my father once suggested to me.

In a sense, all the above means that the world you see is inside your head.

Which is to say, the dome of the sky is the inside edge of your skull.

I mean, of course not literally. Don’t take this as a truth claim.

I mean to invite you to try on the view. Not because it’s true. It clearly isn’t. But because it’s suggestive of something true.

Literally everything you see is inside your head. You can literally see that.

It’s like being in a giant dream world.

You’re making the trees, and the people, and even these words.

Now, maybe you’re making all these things because there’s something beyond your head that’s really there. Maybe each thing is a re-presentation.

Or maybe it’s more like desktop icons on your computer, or app icons on your phone. There are no actual icons inside the phone’s circuitry. Those are just how we interpret the interface. (h/t Donald Hoffman.)

Or maybe you’re just dreaming. Maybe it’s all made up.

How would you know? How would you tell that you’re not dreaming?

There’s a tense, contracted way to tackle that question. Firm logic and adherence to ideas. Arguments. Fearfulness. Anger. Certainty that the “sky as skull” view is wrong and can be dismissed.

But I don’t mean a challenge to logic here.

I mean an invitation to taste a bit of wonder.

What lies beyond your head? Beyond the dome of the sky?

There’s a way to hold that question that is very much like looking at the stars.

I’ve met some curious characters in my dreams. Ones that really throw into question my understanding of what dreaming even is. And who or what I am.

For many years, zombies were a recurring theme of my nightmares. Usually I’d be in a house with some other people, and someone would just forget to close one of the doors. It would be infuriating and scary at once. A clear reflection of some of my deeper emotional structures.

In one lucid dream, my friends and I approached a cabin that held the Zombie Master. I was delighted: I’d finally get to see where these nightmares were coming from! We entered and found a charismatic gentleman in a pinstripe suit standing next to a lit fireplace. It was a pleasant scene with an air of danger.

I forget the exact nature of the scene, but he quickly oriented to me and ignored my companions. I named that I am the Dream Master — a common title I use in lucid dreams to let dream figures know I am lucid. And the Zombie Lord laughed.

“No, I’m afraid I am the master of this dream. You are not nearly so lucid as I am.”

And he proceeded to prove it. He could control the dream at least as well as I could, and he could block my lucid dream powers.

It’s very strange, encountering a dream figure who is more lucid than I am.

In another dream, I was fully lucid but basically powerless. I could not levitate or create objects or do even the simplest coincidental summoning. I was in a girl’s kitchen in her apartment, so I turned to her and said

“I’m not consciously creating you, so you must have access to parts of me that I don’t right now. Can you help me gain my lucid dreaming powers?”

She gave some suggestions and then wandered off while I tried them. It took a bit, but they worked. I felt my full power snap into place. I hovered above the kitchen floor and did a few other tests to confirm. I then floated into the living room where the girl had gone and told her

“Thank you. That worked. I’m kind of a god here now, so is there anything I can do for you in return?”

She pondered for a few seconds. And then she replied

“If you could make it so I don’t cease to exist when you wake up, I’d really appreciate that.”

At the time I sort of stammered. I really didn’t know how to do that.

I’m still not sure, honestly. But it’s a wish I’ve taken to heart.

Entering a dream nearly always feels like entering a world to me. Complete with its own history.

In October 2014 I did a breathwork ceremony. It broke my sense of dreams as real and plunged me into a materialist worldview. I didn’t understand what had happened; I just felt devastated and hollow, like all hope had been retroactively erased from reality. Like my home not only had ceased to exist, but had been erased from the past as well.

I stumbled around for several days after that, unable to say anything more coherent about the experience than

“I’m sealed at the bottom of an infinite tomb full of nothing but dust and death forever.”

I’m told this experience is similar to deconversion. Folk who grow up atheist have little idea what it’s like to lose belief in God. It doesn’t feel like learning a clarifying fact about the world. It feels like something has been retroactively stripped from reality. Whereas before the ground supported you via God’s love, now it’s just electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauli exclusion principle — and all those impressions of “God’s love” get reframed as having been delusion.

It’s quite an intense thing, to enter a dream that rewrites the past.

When I look back at the wind gift the ghosts gave me, I’m sure the right way to explain it is something like confirmation bias. I’d notice when it “worked” and would view when it didn’t as a skill issue. Maybe coupled with something kind of like cold reading: if I could subconsciously tell the wind was about to blow, I’d “decide” to try “making” it happen.

That does sound like roughly the right way to rewrite the history of that dream, from this one.

One of the common signs of non-lucidity is believing that the world is exactly as it seems to be. That maybe you were confused before, but now you finally have clarity. The true view of reality.

I do believe that true clarity is possible.

But it cannot come from finding the right story.

Every story is yet another dream. Describing itself as though it is the real world.

The true world beyond your head might not be findable. Perhaps it is. But how could you tell?

But perhaps one can tell if one is lucid.

Humans love stories.

They give texture to life.

“We are at war!” cry the virtuous. “We must defeat the armies of evil!”

Stories of saving the world. Ending atrocities. Purifying Earth of toxins.

Or stories of the simple life. A bit of homesteading, and raising children, and fixing the plumbing yourself.

A girl struggling to express herself through theater. Her friends passionate about the same.

An uncle playing music he loves for a niche audience able to appreciate it.

Endless stories. So many beautiful lives.

One such story involves “self actualization”. A great deal gets said about it these days. The “coaching” industry is built on it.

Whispers of “healing your trauma” and “becoming your true self”.

My, what a fascinating little dream.

I mean no offense to call it such. I cherish every one of these dreams.

It is very alive to me that some little dreams have asked to survive my awakening. They are real. They matter.

At the same time, they are dreams. Most do not appear to be lucid.

It’s curious how rarely the “healing” dream encourages lucidity. I see people drawn in ever more deeply. “Changing the world” by “healing our lineages”. Believing the story ever more fervently.

Perhaps. Perhaps that dream will spread. Maybe it will be a good one.

I wonder what a lucid world would feel like. Where everything is cherished and immersed in, but nothing is fully believed.

I think it could be quite lovely.

Are you dreaming?

Right now. This moment.

Perhaps these words are a reminder to you.

I invite you to look.

Not to consider. That’s a dream mind thinking dream thoughts.

Not with your eyes. What is there to see?

Instead, I invite you to wonder.

To awaken just a little bit.

Even if just for a moment.

My.

Oh my.

The stars are beautiful.

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Sadly I’ve run out of time to finish any of them this week. So I made a recording trying to focus on a particular idea: distraction programs.

I ended up discussing the idea of crucial experiments and what I hope for from subjective science. It felt like relevant context to give first. So most of the talk ended up being about those topics before diving into the mind structure I had set out to discuss.

I had Otter.ai create a transcript, which you can view at this link if you like. I make no promises as to its quality though!

Enjoy!

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So for instance, someone who was sweating from fever might be thought to have too much Air (because Air was “hot and wet”), which corresponds to the humor of blood. Hence bloodletting as a solution.

This was the dominant medical theory in Europe for centuries. Today we usually think of it as pretty backwards to weaken someone who has a fever by making them bleed. So why did the practice survive for so long?

Well, it turns out that bloodletting sometimes can make it feel like a fever is backing off. A doctor (or a barber) would conduct the procedure, and the patient would feel cooler, which seemed to validate the model that the fever came from too much blood.

We now know that the patient merely feels cooler because losing blood can create an emergency response in the body. Weakening someone who’s fighting off an infection is actually a really bad idea. But often enough someone would recover despite the medical intervention — at which point most people would attribute the recovery to the bloodletting.

So it sure looked like it worked!

I think we’re basically at this stage when it comes to social science. I’m thinking particularly of mental health therapy (or “coaching”) and spirituality. People have very strong opinions about how to “heal trauma”, or the nature of “the ego” and why it’s important for it to “die”, or how to raise emotionally healthy children, or what makes for a good marriage, or what policy would solve some societal problem if it were put into law. When the intervention seems to work, the success gets attributed to the intervention. When it doesn’t, there’s nearly always some explanation for why that keeps the original theory alive.

This approach misses the core insight of science.

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Not to say there’s nothing to these ideas! Even bloodletting turned out to be genuinely helpful sometimes. (It could reduce excess levels of iron in the blood, for instance, which really can help deal with or prevent other issues.) People were successfully solving tricky problems tens of thousands of years before the invention of science.

Like cathedral building: we were able to work out the idea of flying buttresses centuries before Newton. And that solved a real problem! Suddenly cathedrals could have glorious amounts of light.

And yet, no pre-scientific advances in cathedral design were ever going to let us build skyscrapers or rockets to the Moon.

But somehow, the single idea of science let us not only build those, but also master electric power, and systematically manufacture steel, and invent vaccines, and set up satellites to develop GPS, and create engines that could power machines for us. All in the same 300 year period. A mere fraction of the time we’d been working on cathedrals.

We just haven’t seen anything like that kind of advance in terms of subjectivity. We don’t have a “vaccine” for mental illnesses, or a “steam engine” for meditation, or a “GPS” for governmental design.

What we have instead sounds an awful lot to me like humorism.

There have been attempts to fix this before. An example is behaviorism, which tried to turn psychology into a natural science by making everything objective. Behaviorism gave us some pretty powerful tools like masterful animal training. But it spectacularly failed at most things we really care about, like good education and sorting out interpersonal conflicts.

I think the problem arises from two related issues:

1. We misunderstood what the insight of science actually was. We’ve come to think it’s tied to objectivity. I think that’s simply incorrect. Science is an insight about how to relate to understanding. Objectivity is just the domain we got really good at applying science to.

2. Objectivity works incredibly well when examining objects. But the most interesting aspect of people is precisely the ways in which we are not merely objects. In particular, unlike objects, people are reflexive — meaning that our nature changes based on how we’re viewed. Things like how well a date goes depends a lot on how well the pair expects the date to go. Objective scientific methods tend to stumble or outright fail in contact with reflexive phenomena like this.

It seems to me that these issues are straightforward to fix. That possibility excites me a lot. It means that we can maybe have a real science of wisdom and wholesomeness. Something that makes everyone who comes into contact with its ideas more vibrant and kind and clear-minded. What would wholesome science be like, building engines of compassion and clarity that can then empower our culture to grow into wonderful ways of being?

I don’t have a full answer to all that. It’s pretty critical that it’s not all up to me.

But I think I see a key piece of how to get there.

I’d like to take a shot at sharing that piece here.

The soul of science

It seems to me that science is a process of evaluating and refining explanations. It’s not about some particular methods like RCTs or statistics or data-gathering. Those are tools. The soul of science is in the pressure it puts on ideas to explain the world clearly in ways that sort of stick their neck out.

More precisely, I think of the core process of science as having two parts:

1. Come up with explanations that are easy to disprove if they’re wrong.

2. Then give them a chance to be disproven.

That’s it. That’s science.

Crucial experiments

There are lots of adjacent processes that often get called “science”. Things like counting the calories in the food you eat. Lots of people will say that this is “doing science” with your diet.

That really isn’t. It’s just measuring something. People have been measuring things for tens of thousands of years.

Actually doing science would look more like so:

There’s this explanation for obesity that it’s “calories in = calories out”. So if you can maintain a calorie deficit for a while, you should lose weight. Meaning that if you hold a calorie deficit over a reasonable amount of time and you don’t drop your weight, then the theory is false.

That’s the disprovable explanation. It allows you to perform what’s called a crucial experiment: you can run a calorie deficit for a while and see whether you lose weight. If you don’t, that disproves the theory.

In practice, people don’t really care that much whether this theory is disproven. It would for sure be strange if it were! It’s based on thermodynamics. But the hard part is more like using the theory to lose weight. Basically a question of applied science. Many people cannot force themselves to maintain a calorie deficit, get down to an ideal weight, and then maintain a calorie in/out balance to maintain that weight.

To which there’s a common refrain (maybe more in the cultural groundwater at this point — I mostly don’t hear people saying this anymore):

“It’s just a matter of willpower.”

Like failing to stick to a diet and exercise plan is a failure of will. Like the person just isn’t trying hard enough, or maybe doesn’t really care.

Through the eyes of science, this is something that could become a real theory. But it’s missing a pretty key element: how would you disprove it?

That’s not just a formalism. It’s really key. If there’s no way to challenge the idea, we can’t know how good its fit to reality is.

I mean, here’s a counter theory:

Everyone is born with a kind of natural set point of weight kind of programmed into them throughout their lives. That’s why they tend to have the same obesity and scrawniness patterns throughout their lives that their family members do. Trying to force your body to change in defiance of its set point is actually really unhealthy. It’s possible some toxic things in the environment can cause those changes, in which case sorting out environmental toxins is pretty important so you can reach a healthy weight. But starving your body to get down to a weight that you think is good is usually unhealthy.

Sounds plausible. More detailed than the “It’s just a matter of willpower” theory.

How shall we decide which one is a better fit to reality? Argue about it? Point at authorities who agree with one view and disagree with the other? Refer to sacred texts? Trial by combat?

The key insight of science is that there’s a way to pressure ideas to get good at telling useful truths. Making explanations killable and then trying to kill them forces them to survive by being good at explaining things.

The scientific answer to the weight loss debate is to ask how we could make the ideas specific enough to make falsifiable predictions. And then we’d look.

For instance, what does it mean for it to “be unhealthy” to deviate from one’s weight set point? What does that look like? Is it a subjective feeling? Is it about measurable things like blood pressure? Is it a reference to overall morbidity, meaning we could detect “unhealthiness” only at the population level by looking at how many people live or die over some period of time?

Let’s suppose the theory says that biological markers of health like blood pressure and cholesterol levels would get worse due to deviation from the set point. We now have a disagreement in prediction between the two ideas:

• If losing weight is purely a matter of willpower, then lowering the willpower requirements to stay with a calorie deficit should work, and people should get healthier.

• But if losing weight is a matter of deviating from a set point and that’s why there’s resistance to doing it, then we should see that forcing weight loss should result in people getting less healthy.

Now we can do a crucial experiment. One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality.

This is the basic logic of science. Over and over again, you (a) try to make your explanations specific enough that they necessarily predict some outcome in some situation, and then you (b) try to set up that situation.

Making theories disprovable

Theories that are easier to disprove are more precious. They tell us more as a result of their survival.

There was an old idea about how motion worked before Newton came up with his laws of motion and gravitation. It was the dominant theory for centuries before Newton’s insights. The idea was basically that the Greek elements had a natural order with Earth at the bottom, Water above it, Air above that, and Fire at the top of the four. So rocks fall because they’re mostly Earth and they’re trying to return to the sphere of Earth, which is below Air. Whereas bubbles rise because Air is above Water.

How then can we throw a stone up into the air? Why doesn’t it just immediately fall? Well, clearly living creatures have some kind of ability to add a force or intention to inanimate objects. So we sort of imbue the rock with that intention when we throw it. But as our intention kind of leaks out of the stone, it starts to fall. Hence it goes through a kind of arc in the air.

But what’s the shape of the arc? Is it circular? Is it some other shape? Why isn’t it a kind of “V” shape where it goes in a straight line until it abruptly runs out of living force and sort of “dies” and drops straight to the ground?

The old theory (Aristotelian physics) could be massaged to account for any of these. But without actually looking at the trajectory of a projectile, it wouldn’t be able to predict the shape of the arc.

Newton’s physics are far more constrained. They absolutely require that a stone thrown into the air follow the path of a parabola.

So that’s interesting. It means that if we measure the paths of a bunch of different thrown objects, if any of them clearly deviate meaningfully from a parabola, we will have disproven Newtonian mechanics. But not Aristotelian physics.

So what are we to make of the fact that many, many such measurements exactly accord with the parabolic arc?

Well, it means that Newton’s theory is more useful as an explanation of what’s going on. It gives the same predictions as Aristotle’s physics, but more narrowly. It’s a highly constrained theory. Meaning that we learn more from its surviving crucial experiments.

What’s so special about this process?

So why would this particular approach to ideas work so well? What’s so important about making ideas disprovable? Surely there are some ideas that are true and important but hard to disprove, right?

(To that last question: yes, of course. But that’s precisely why wisdom practices are so tricky to distinguish from nonsense! Why dangerous guru dynamics are possible, for instance. I’d say that true and important ideas particularly about wisdom can be hard to disprove so far, and that one day — hopefully soon — we’ll care a lot about changing that ASAP.)

I really want to give a full answer to this question sometime. About why this particular orientation to ideas is so important. But a detailed answer is worth its own full post, and I haven’t written it yet. So I’ll try to provide just a quick sketch here with some pointers for now.

It turns out that ideas obey evolution. That’s not a scientific finding; it’s more like a logical necessity. It wouldn’t mean anything coherent for that claim to be false.

Most ideas undergo “wild” evolution. This can produce, for instance, the mental equivalent of parasites. (Have you ever seen someone go kind of crazy due to contact with an idea?) I think CGP Grey gives a great breakdown of an example application of the logic. If you have time and inclination, I think it’s worthwhile to spend the 7 minutes it takes to watch this video:

A key insight here is that what we consciously believe mostly isn’t about what’s true. It’s about what encourages those ideas to survive. That’s what they evolved to do. Making us think true things is just one strategy ideas can use to survive.

Science is a kind of evolutionary pressure on ideas. It’s making it advantageous for them to help us understand the world better. We do that by encouraging ideas to explain the world to us in ways we can check.

That “in ways we can check” part is really critical. If we are happy with ideas that feel compelling, then ideas will evolve to be compelling. That becomes their evolutionary angle of advantage. That’s why, for instance, Flat Earth conspiracy theorists are able to convert people to their view and remain unpersuaded in the face of compelling evidence: conversion and inoculation against competing ideas is precisely how Flat Earth ism can survive.

So if we want to “domesticate” ideas, we have to apply an evolutionary pressure to them that makes them actually “friendly” and helpful to us, systematically, over time.

The key insight of science is that we can actually do this. If we get ideas to explain the world in ways that necessarily require very specific predictions, and those predictions pan out, then we can use those explanations to solve problems. If those explanations ever fail, they “die”, and we seek new ones that can explain and predict everything the defunct theories did without the “deadly” flaw.

Without this kind of “artificial selection”, ideas evolve to survive through us based on whatever we’re paying attention to about them. Things like creating feelings of insight, or making us outraged, or keeping us numb and checked out while we mechanically follow patterns that make sure they replicate in our children. Some will give us benefits too, but only incidentally, or when their survival strategy happens to hinge on their being helpful.

But with science, we can systematically move toward clear-mindedness. We can actually understand the world in ways that matter.

…including how science works. Science, clearly seen, is reflexive.

There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’ll leave it here for now.

Objective vs. reflexive

So why has science converged so hard on objectivity?

I think it’s basically a simplification. We can loosely split up everything we observe into two patterns:

• Objective: Stuff that’s there no matter how we look at it. Rocks and trees and the Sun. This is the domain of Philip K. Dick’s quote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

• Reflexive: Stuff that changes its nature depending on how we look at it and who we are when we’re looking. Things like whether a date will go well, or whether a vague horoscope “is accurate”, or the true meaning of a Rorschach ink blot test.

Most of the stuff that deeply matters to the human heart is reflexive. Falling in love is a kind of dance with another person: it is absolutely essential that they be responding to us, and how they respond to us is based on how we respond to them. Poetry touches us because of how we relate to the material, which is related to things like meter and word choice but fundamentally isn’t about them. Spiritual experiences feel profoundly meaningful, and we care about that, even though the basis of knowing they’re meaningful is the simple fact of our having experienced them.

I’m particularly interested in questions of wisdom: what does it mean to skillfully live a good life, in ways that enhance others’ ability to skillfully live good lives? What encourages wholesomeness, given that how I try to find an answer to that question can itself be more or less wholesome?

I think it’s absolutely possible to approach these domains with science. I think it can be beautiful. I suspect it has to be.

But it does require loosening the bond of science to objectivity.

Objective science is easier

Objective stuff “moves around” less. So it’s easier to come up with easy-to-disprove objective explanations and then test them. Science is just way, way easier to do on non-reflexive things.

Like when Einstein came up with general relativity. That explanation of gravity predicted that the planet Mercury would move a bit differently than Newton’s theories said it would. That meant we could actually look and possibly disprove Einstein’s idea. But instead reality disproved Newton’s.

It did not matter what Einstein’s mood was. The planet Mercury wasn’t going to vary based on people testing it. The authority of people who agreed (or disagreed) with Einstein had no bearing on what we’d find. Gravity isn’t shy such that it changes what it does when tested.

So Einstein’s theory didn’t have to account for how the theory itself was presented. He could just state it, and we could test it. And then we discovered that his idea was a better fit than the one we had before.

But we don’t have to avoid reflexivity. It’s just easier to do science on things that aren’t reflexive.

Which is to say, on objective things. On objects.

Subjectivity is reflexive

Some stuff necessarily has to be explained reflexively. Meaning that the very act of explaining them is often part of the phenomenon being explained.

A vivid example here is any theory of the self. The moment we say “the self”, there’s some inclination to implicitly think of it (!) as a thing that you (!) might be able to look for and find.

But if you are looking at it, then who’s looking? What are they looking at?

The thing we’re calling “the self” is you. You can’t look at yourself from the outside. The very thought is incoherent!

Which means that if you come up with some kind of explanation about your innermost nature, that explanation needs to account for how you relate to that very same explanation as you’re looking at it.

I think there are some theories like this. Some Buddhist ideas are pretty good along these lines. The cluster around “emptiness”, “no self”, and “dependent origination” strike me as something that could be made clear enough to be easy to disprove if it’s false.

(Sadly the “easy to disprove” part isn’t very prevalent in most Buddhist contexts I’m aware of. They emphasize “Come see for yourself, don’t just take my word for it”. And I think that’s very good. But many places don’t lay out the claims clearly enough to be disprovable. Instead there’s always room for people to have “misunderstood the dharma” or have made errors in their meditation practice across years. This is the kind of stuff that feels to me like a spiritual version of humorism.)

Objectivity doesn’t define what’s real

Because objective science was so successful at mastering objects, people started conflating “objective” with “real”. As in, asserting that anything that can’t be made objective isn’t real.

Which weirdly would imply that people either (a) aren’t real or (b) are just objects.

That’s a very weird place from which to start looking for explanations of human nature. It’s not a promising angle for exploring wholesomeness. The basis of human connection is fundamentally reflexive: I see you seeing me seeing you. How on Earth are we going to adequately explain that if we treat it as incidental to objective stuff?

I think this is where the “hard problem of consciousness” comes from. The issue arises if we view consciousness as something objective and try to explain it objectively. That’s literally impossible. It’s basically a confusion made of words. What would it mean for consciousness to behave a certain way when no one is experiencing or interacting with it?

A key challenge is that objective science requires factoring out the first-person perspective. We remove the scientist from the thing being studied. Which means that if you want a science of first-person perspective, you cannot rely primarily — let alone entirely — on objective methods. The whole approach is gibberish. “First-person perspective” isn’t an object you can look at from the outside!

This situation is no trouble if we allow that reflexivity is real too. That falling in love means something even though it’s kind of self-defining. That wisdom exists even though we aren’t really sure how to define it and maybe cannot objectively do so.

That people are real. That experience matters. That relating to others as “I and Thou” is meaningfully different from seeing them as “it”.

Bad wizards

Now, I want to offer a thought experiment. Please bear with me here.

Suppose that astrology actually does work quite well, but that it does so reflexively. That it’s basically a tool for honing the intuitions of the astrologer so that they can very effectively cold-read their clients and provide subconscious nudges in ways that actually meaningfully help them.

The catch is, the tool works only if those involved believe it does.

If an objectivity-minded skeptic comes along and tries to show that the tool doesn’t objectively work, they might succeed — in part by breaking the tool.

If they then go around publicizing how they’ve “debunked astrology”, that makes the tool less likely to work — which will seem to validate the skeptic’s claim that there was nothing to it!

I’m reminded of the headline I saw years ago, referring to a 2010 medical study:

“Placebos found to work even when subjects know it’s a placebo”

…to which my immediate thought was

“Well now that’s true!”

Because if there’s a reflexive dimension to the placebo effect, then we should expect that telling everyone that it works this way will cause it to work this way.

The reverse could have in principle happened instead: someone could announce that placebos have been found to stop working once patients know they’re getting just a sugar pill. At which point that would become more true.

I’m also reminded of a friend who went to a doctor who warned “If you don’t get your stress under control, you’re going to have a heart attack or a stroke.”

When people refine their objective thinking to the exclusion of the reflexive, they can become very bad wizards. Casting curses willy-nilly with no clue what they’re doing. Often insisting that they can’t possibly be having the effects that they obviously are.

I’m really hoping we can develop wider awareness of both how science works and of reflexivity, so we can end the accidental gaslighting that follows from insisting that only objective things are real. We don’t have to choose between science and spirituality. We don’t have to fake their union. They can be the same thing.

I think the current split between the two is related to why astrologers work so hard to keep their art unfalsifiable. I do think there’s some real value to the discipline. I see it helping some people live much more full and happy lives. That matters. I don’t know the underlying mechanism, or how reliable it is or isn’t. I haven’t done good science on it yet. But it makes sense to me that if you have a seemingly good reflexive artform, and someone wants to beat it to a pulp with their objectivity cudgel, you might (perhaps subconsciously) make it hard for them to hit.

We just end up with the misfortune that it also makes science harder to do with the art. Which means the wrong ideas “breed” and over time the art itself becomes diluted and its true value starts to fade.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I think we can recognize that self-fulfilling prophecies are real, that some specific situations have that nature, and then use that recognition to intentionally predict the world that we want.

Kind of like choosing that placebos work because we expect them to.

And then it becomes possible not to curse ourselves into an objective dismissal of beauty, meaning, and the sacred. We can instead cherish them, and understand them, and come to embody an exquisite and glorious world together.

Needed: subjective methods

Objective science is way ahead of reflexive science. We’re just barely getting the latter into a coherent paradigm.

But I think we’re here. I think we’ve got the foundation now.

For instance, I think the model I gave for self-deception is a scientifically good one. It makes specific predictions about how certain subjective shifts should change certain subjective states. The idea is disprovable. It’s just hard to objectively disprove. The method of disproof is more like:

1. Understand the model well enough to map it to your subjective experience.

2. Notice which experiments could be crucial (i.e. could disprove the idea, or at least could strongly suggest it’s wrong, if it is).

3. Conduct those experiments inside yourself.

At which point you can tell whether the idea (as you understand it) has been shown to be wrong.

The tricky part is that self-deception might make it hard to think through the logic of the experiment. So your test has to account for that reflexive element.

But it’s quite doable. And in my experience it’s very striking when, say, someone’s mental fog very abruptly clears once we establish a good “occlumency shield” for them. That doesn’t prove the idea is right; that’s not how science works. But it’s quite meaningful if and when it survives that spectacularly.

Importantly, you can’t actually know that the model is correct for you. You might have a different understanding of it than I do. So even if I’ve done dozens of crucial experiments and found that this overall explanation works quite well, there’s still an important gap in your understanding.

Also, I could be BSing you, or myself, totally unintentionally.

So while I can give you the model and claim to you that it works, the actual scientific transmission is to give you a means of falsifying the model if it’s wrong. So basically making it easy for you to tell whether the experiments really are crucial and then to replicate them for yourself.

I think this is a good example of a subjective method (as opposed to objective methods): sharing crucial subjective experiments (including why they’re crucial) so others can replicate them.

To some extent I feel like I’m kind of brute-forcing the obvious solution here based on analogy. My guess is that there are more elegant subjective methods possible.

At this point I want to emphasize that this is a project that you can engage in. Science has never been about institutions or academics; that’s just how we formalized objective science, in part because objective crucial experiments often require a lot of materials and literal physical energy. But if you really get the soul of science, and you work on carefully tracing the reflexive reasoning of your subjective experience, you can come up with legitimate scientific experiments that can bring the clarity of the Enlightenment into your inner world.

This project is necessarily open-sourced. There are no gatekeepers here. No one granted me some official authority; I’m giving you the same keys I have.

Have fun with it!

1. Personality Machines, which is my Enneagram intro. I think it’s worth reading even if you’re already familiar with the Enneagram: I derive the types from the Centers in a way I don’t recall seeing elsewhere, and I’ll be relying on that derivation today.

2. Ego Spirals, which is about how to use the Enneagram for personal growth. This is the whole point of the system in my opinion.

3. Putting People in Boxes, which is about the challenges involved in typing ourselves and others. It’s also secretly about navigating a paradox that shows up in today’s topic too.

Today I want to focus on investigating a likely flaw in the Enneagram, and how you can personally do some science to investigate and possibly fix it for yourself if you’re so inclined.

The issue centers around the diagram’s inner lines. Up until this point, nothing I’ve said requires anything other than having nine types drawn on a circle. But that’s really not the most visually striking part of the Enneagram symbol. For whatever reason, it has an inner triangle and an unusual six-sided star pattern connecting non-adjacent points together.

The diagram is central enough that the whole system is literally named after it. It’s called “the Enneagram”, not “the three Centers theory”.

So what do the lines mean?

It turns out that the standard answer introduces a problem:

• There’s a way to view the usual interpretation of the lines very pragmatically. You can test them out for yourself to see if they work for you. And at least sometimes they work very well!

• But the lines’ historical origin is very suspicious, and their underlying theory is fragmented. There’s good reason to expect them not to work as described.

This problem type shows up from time to time in the history of science. In the 1800s a physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, came up with a stunningly successful method of preventing “childbed fever”: doctors should wash their hands between conducting autopsies and assisting with childbirth. It sounds obvious today. But the problem was that the germ theory of disease had not yet been invented, and Semmelweis’s theory was incompatible with the dominant model of medicine at the time. The result was that Semmelweis had his career ruined and was driven into an insane asylum. It wasn’t until well after his death, after germ theory had been discovered, that physicians were willing to use Semmelweis’s methods despite the fact that he had objectively demonstrated that they worked.

When faced with a ridiculous tool that works, one challenge in science is to neither (a) dismiss the tool for its ridiculousness nor (b) believe its nonsense simply because it works. It turns out that Semmelweis’s theory was wrong and resulted in something effective for almost coincidental reasons. When the error was corrected, his methods were improved upon. What would have let medicine benefit from his solution to “childbed fever” without getting locked into a wrong view about what caused it?

I want to use the Enneagram’s lines as a case study of walking science’s middle path here. We can see how to use the lines, see their theoretical absurdity, and then while holding both views ask: “What’s really going on here?”

So that’s what I’m going to spell out today. I’m going to lay out the standard description of the Enneagram’s lines with an eye toward using them pragmatically. Then I’ll explain the lines’ background theory. I’ll share a bit about my own experience with the lines as a case study of how they really can be surprisingly effective. And then I’ll suggest an experiment you can do to maybe get insight into what’s really going on.

Two guidelines for this post:

• If your only interest is in my take on how to use the Enneagram’s standard theory of its lines, you can get that from just the first section below.

• If you care only about the experiment and not about the background, you can jump to “The experiment” near the end. I think you can engage in it without knowing the background theory first if you want to.

So with that, let’s get to it!

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Using the lines’ standard theory

The standard use of the lines is to track how types can suddenly switch around under stress.

The personality machine doesn’t really want to enact a downward spiral. It’s just an enthusiastic computer program. It’s trying to achieve the goal that Essence set for it. The downward spiral arises from the fact that the personality’s strategies are inadequate to handle all of life. That creates problems due to the “one trick pony” nature of the robotic personality. And it then tries to solve those problems using the same strategies that created them, because it kind of has just one button it can mash.

Sometimes, though, the personality will try switching strategies before doubling down on the original one. And that strategy switch can kind of work! It’s a bit like trying to release some steam instead of adding pressure to keep the container from exploding.

But the personality is still mechanical. Which alternative strategy it tries is very predictable. It supposedly goes in what’s called “the Direction of Disintegration”:

There are two cyclic patterns here, one for the primary types and another for the secondary types:

• Primary: 9 → 6 → 3 → 9

• Secondary: 1 → 4 → 2 → 8 → 5 → 7 → 1

So for instance, an Eight who’s under a lot of stress might suddenly start acting like a Five. They might take a step back and self-isolate to strategize and gather their resources. An Eight personality will sometimes try a move like this before doubling down on forceful and punishing action.

The thing is, such a person is still an Eight. They don’t become a Five; they just start operating as one for a while. The core issue is still that their personality’s Eight design is overwhelmed. It won’t work for them to treat themselves as a Five to ease their situation:

• Fives need Essence to shine through their Gut Center and then use that bodily grounding and activity to open their Hearts.

• But the type Eight personality design starts with Gut Center distortion. Trying to push themselves into effective action exactly plays into the machine’s basic strategy. It’s not a pathway for Essence to come through.

So an Eight who recognizes their movement to Five and then tries to apply type Five de-spiraling strategies will tend to tighten their type Eight knot.

A more helpful approach (in theory) is for the Eight to use the movement to Five as a signal. It indicates that the personality is at risk of tightening up. Even though stilling the mind isn’t something Average Fives can do, it’s often exactly the right move for Eights who are Disintegrating to Five.

And they can check if it’s working: the impulse to operate like a Five should evaporate if the Eight unwinds their core ego spiral a little. If it doesn’t, then that’s a sign they’re not an Eight!

So in practice, once you know your type, the lines can give you more detail about what choice points to look for in yourself. If you’re a Seven and you start getting serious and focused and kind of tense, that might be a Disintegration to One, which would make it a signal to notice the urge (from the Gut) to do something in response to a feeling of dissatisfaction (i.e. a neglected Heart). It’s a sign that the core type is stressed. The problem is actually addressed by unwinding the Seven spiral, not by putting more energy into the Disintegrated strategy of forced discipline (despite that move seeming very sensible on the inside!).

It’s also a warning when it comes to determining type. Someone can very, very clearly show up as an Eight but turn out to be a Disintegrating Two, for instance.

This is yet another illustration of why it’s important to determine type based on which lens actually works to make life better in contact with them. As opposed to focusing on traits or behavior, or on what explanation feels compelling to you or to them.

The explanation is lacking

The above description is very pragmatic. Given the diagram, here’s how you read the lines to notice more choice points for unwinding your type’s downward spiral.

But it doesn’t give any structural reason for the lines to be this way. Why do they have to be about reactions to stress? Why will a type switch to just one other type under stress? And why should this specific pattern depicted by the lines be how the types are interconnected?

I have some bad news:

No one knows.

The diagram itself came from GI Gurdjieff. He said he’d learned it from some spiritual teachers. And maybe he did! But it seems worth noting that there’s no clear sign of the Enneagram’s diagram prior to him.

He didn’t talk about personality types. He did talk about the personality mechanically trapping the soul, and he used enneagrams to relay some of his ideas about how to free the soul. But it was other people (most notably Claudio Naranjo) who developed the enneagrams into a personality typing system.

Gurdjieff’s explanation for the diagram amounted to sacred geometry based on numerology. The main key observation is:

Which is to say, the decimal expansion of 1/7 follows what we now read as the Directions of Disintegration for the secondary types.

Two of the principles Gurdjieff taught were “the Law of Three” (represented by the Enneagram’s inner triangle) and “the Law of Seven” (represented by the six-pointed figure following the 1/7 decimal pattern). It’s possible that the diagram basically started out as a way to put these two principles together visually.

It looks like Naranjo started with Gurdjieff’s diagram, noticed that the way Gurdjieff and others described the nine corners could be fleshed out into personality patterns, and then tried to find a way to make Gurdjieff’s lines relate to the personality types.

As to why the lines are specifically about stress, that idea apparently came about due to a misinterpretation. Naranjo originally suggested that types might move along both lines (and to both wings), both under stress and also while integrating (i.e. becoming Healthy). A Jesuit priest, Robert Ochs, misheard or misremembered what Naranjo said about the lines at a seminar in the 1970s. Ochs then went on to teach about Disintegration (and Integration, which is movement along the opposite direction when Healthy). It just turns out that the priest’s accidental idea was very sticky and eventually became endemic.

It’s possible that Ochs stumbled onto a true idea. Maybe it spread because it spoke to something in people. But even if so, we still have some pretty critical unanswered questions:

• Why would Gurdjieff’s diagram relate to the personality types? What’s the structural relationship? What does the decimal expansion of 1/7 have to do with the dynamics of the Centers, for instance?

• Why number the types the way we do? The labels were totally arbitrary up until this point. But now the fact that One Disintegrates to Four supposedly arises from the fact that “14” appears in the decimal expansion of 1/7. So all of a sudden it matters a lot how we’re numbering the types!

• What structurally determines the Directions of Disintegration for the primary types? Why does Six Disintegrate to Three instead of to Nine for instance?

Sadly, these just aren’t questions I’ve heard asked in the Enneagram world, let alone answered.1 Meaning there’s no coherent underlying theory for the lines as far as I know.

But the lines still work sometimes

And yet, attending to the lines suddenly started really working for me when I figured out my type.

I gave up on the lines many years ago. Their background seemed like nonsense. People argue over how to read them in ways that remind me of astrologers fighting about how to interpret Pluto now that it’s “not a planet”.

And I couldn’t see how to use the Directions! When I thought I was a Five, I didn’t know what to do with observations of what I saw as my Seven-like behaviors. And when I thought I was a Six, I flat out didn’t relate to most descriptions of “Disintegration to Three”.

But I sometimes do display some Four traits. I started out thinking I’m a Five with a Four wing. And when I reinterpreted myself as a Six, I guessed that the Four-like stuff was “type Six moodiness and self-doubt”. I even seriously wondered for a little while last year if I just am a Four — with a sentiment like “Okay, if I can be a Four instead, then I don’t think the Enneagram is useful.”

When the stuff about being a One clicked, and the type One map of the downward spiral started working for me, a thought arose:

“Oh no. Oh no. Is that Four-like stuff… Disintegration? Are those stupid lines actually right?”2

So I tested it out. Normally in Four mode I’m tempted to “process” my feelings. A Four would need to address that temptation by dropping the heartbreaking stories and focusing on grounded activity. But a One Disintegrating to Four needs to find the (possibly hidden) urge to condemn something, and then relax that harsh grip on the Heart. Basically ignoring the melancholy and feelings of worthlessness: they’re distractions from the core stress of trying to fix the imperfections of the world.

And when I tried it, it worked. The dark mood would abruptly lift.

I want to emphasize that the effect really isn’t subtle for me. It’s quite powerful. I used to wallow in a sense of my life going nowhere, that what I do doesn’t matter, that I’ve been so terribly hurt by my past that maybe I’m just permanently broken, etc. Even though I knew these thoughts probably didn’t make sense, I still couldn’t stop them from arising and shifting my state, almost like an emotional fog would roll in and occlude my inner experience.

But once I got a handle on how to catch the Wake-Up Call for Ones, I could just look for the hidden cramp in the Heart, release that… and POOF. Fog cleared. In seconds.

So whatever the reason, tracking my Direction of Disintegration as such in fact works for me.

Some pragmatics

So, in the midst of this mess… what are we to make of the lines?

Fortunately, from a practical standpoint the situation is pretty easy. Here are two options:

1. You can totally ignore the lines if you want to. Dismiss them as a quirk of history if you like. Maybe there’s some way to explain how I benefitted from considering them, but you don’t have to figure it out. You can use the rest of the Enneagram just fine without giving them any attention.

2. You can test whether your Direction of Disintegration is useful to you. If you’re pretty sure you’ve figured out your type, try looking for how your Direction shows up in your life, and test what happens when you treat its appearances as choice points. If that view works to dissolve stress reactions, great! If nothing notable happens, then you can go back to option 1.

Technically that second option is a little messy. If you don’t get good results, maybe you’ve just mistyped yourself, or maybe you’ve misidentified how your Disintegration shows up, or maybe you’re still developing skill with responding to your core type’s Wake-Up Call.

But you don’t have to worry about all that. If the tool is useful, it shouldn’t be arbitrarily subtly useful. There isn’t much point in throwing hours of study into a system that maybe kind of helps a little if you look carefully enough, or promises to work “someday”. If it’s useful, it should demonstrate itself as such quickly and clearly once you’ve worked out your type. Even if the road to changing your habits is slow, it should be clear you’re on the right path.

As always, the measure to focus on is whether life is becoming more wholesome for you.

Some science

With all that said, there’s a way you can test what’s really going on with these lines. I’d like to explain how.

In part 1 of this series, I noted how the primary types have two modes when they’re in Average functioning. How Heart types (3) have a Head/Gut mode, Head types (6) have a Heart/Gut mode, and Gut types (9) have a Head/Heart mode.

This is an unexplained detail. Why should the primary types have two modes? Why don’t the secondary types have two modes too?

Well, something interesting happens if we suggest that they do.

The Center-based mechanism for Average Nines’ Head/Heart mode, for instance, is that the personality drops the primary Center (the Gut) and focuses on a fusion of the other two.

What would it look like for Ones to do the same? Well, they’d drop the Gut and bundle the Head and Heart, just like Nines do. But Ones already mechanize the Heart more than the Head. So what if Ones’ “other mode” emphasizes the Heart a bit extra? Meaning it’s a kind of temporary “Heart with some Head” state?

Well, that would be Four. That’s precisely what defines Four.

Which just so happens to be One’s Direction of Disintegration.

It turns out that this proposed mechanism almost but not quite overlaps with the standard lines. I’ll bold the exceptions:

• Head/Gut (7) → Gut/Heart (1)

• Gut/Heart (1) → Heart/Head (4)

• Heart/Head (4) → Head/Gut (7)

• Heart/Gut (2) → Gut/Head (8)

• Gut/Head (8) → Head/Heart (5)

• Head/Heart (5) → Heart/Gut (2)

Which is to say, under this theory Fours and Fives would swap their Directions of Disintegration.

It also implies that the primary types don’t “Disintegrate” to another type, and certainly not to each other. The thing we’re calling “Disintegration” for the secondary types shows up as mode-switching in the primary ones. If we really want to depict that pattern visually, we’d project the primary types directly across the circle, representing that they sometimes “Disintegrate” into an even mix of the opposite two Centers in the Average range.

If this theory is roughly right, then the reason the Directions of Disintegration seem to work sometimes is because Gurdjieff’s lines happen to overlap with the mode-switching patterns for 1, 2, 7, and 8. Meaning that some people will accidentally get excellent results from using the lines, while most others won’t be able to get them to work at all.

I want to emphasize that this theory makes empirical predictions. It should be possible to distinguish between this mode-switching idea and the Disintegration claim that relies on Gurdjieff’s lines. It suggests, for instance, that Fours will get better results from observing and dissolving Seven-like behavior than from targeting Two-like behavior.

It also implies that the Centers-based advice for the primary types might be wrong. Eights and Ones, for instance, need to dissolve their “Disintegrated” modes by having Essence come through the Head and Heart in some order (Head first for Ones, Heart first for Eights). If the checked-out fantasy mode of Nines really is an even balance of these two “Disintegration” patterns, then Nines should do better to clear out the Head and Heart simultaneously, and then use that resource to sort out their Gut distortion. Heeding the Nine’s Wake-Up Call should be practically made of dropping the dual-Centers fantasy mode directly.

The experiment

So here’s how you might be able to do an empirical test of what’s going on with the lines:

• If you determine you’re a Four or a Five, you can try treating both Seven and Two as possible “Directions of Disintegration”. You learn something in every case:

  • If your classical Direction works much better, then that invalidates the mode-switching theory, which (a) makes it more likely that Gurdjieff was on to something with his 1/7 pattern and (b) raises the question of what’s up with the mode-switching for the primary types.

  • If the mode-switching theory works better, then it’s more likely that personality has a consistent meta-structure independent of type. It raises another question for future exploration: why does personality mode-switch while still preferring a type? What mechanically prevents it from fluidly moving between all the types if it’s able and inclined to switch which Centers it’s using like this?

  • If neither Direction works in any interesting way, then there’s probably nothing to the lines at all, at least for you. My own experience remains unexplained but is less compelling as evidence for the lines.

  • If both work well, then that suggests that a lot of the Enneagram works via self-fulfilling prophecies. Which is amazing! It suggests that maybe we can somehow “predict” ourselves into much more wholesome ways of being directly. Suddenly there’s more to explore!

• If you determine you’re a primary type (Three, Six, or Nine), you can experiment with directly clearing your dual-Centers mode. Under the mode-switching theory, this approach should work significantly better than focusing on the primary Center does. I’m not totally sure what this approach looks like, which means this branch of the experiment is less conclusive than the one for Fours & Fives. But here’s a possible sketch:

  • Threes would focus on physically relaxing and coming into stillness and clarity. Things like yoga nidra might work extremely well for them (especially if they can drop into living relaxation instead of going mentally limp). The aim being to directly dissolve their efficiency/performance mode when it arises.

  • Sixes would attend to savoring the present moment, relaxing into the delight of connecting with whoever or whatever is with them. Stuff like Authentic Relating might be a blessing here. Again, aiming to let go of their devotion mode when it activates.

  • Nines would focus on clearly seeing and being touched by the precise beauty and preciousness physically around them. I’m personally not aware of a single practice that does both Head and Heart stuff like this; I think it’d be concentration meditation but with heart, or loving-kindness meditation but with sharp clear focus on what’s right here right now. The point being to come out of fantasy and reminiscing. (This also suggests the Nine’s Wake-Up Call might be misnamed: it’d be about spacing out, which can result in overriding “no”s and going along with others.)

• If you determine you’re a One, Two, Seven, or Eight… then there’s much less you can do here. You just don’t have an internal way of distinguishing the two theories. But you can still check whether accounting for your Direction of Disintegration helps you. If it doesn’t, that invalidates both theories. If it does, you can’t conclude very much… but at least you have a tool that works for you!

There’s a fascinating quirk to this exploration: it’s possible for you to run the experiment and come to a clear conclusion, but not be able to show me the results as clearly as you know them. I probably can’t replicate your experiment since my type is probably different from yours. I also can’t directly see whether & how your subjective experience improves. I can hear your claims, and those matter, but I also know that people can fool themselves. You might be able to tell you’re not fooling yourself, and yet not be able to show me how you know in a way I can trust as deeply as you do.

(That said, if you do run the above experiment, I’d love to hear how it goes! Your claim is still highly relevant evidence I’m happy to learn about.)

This challenge is intrinsic to doing science when some of the measures are subjective (e.g. how good life feels to you). We usually solve this problem in science by finding objective measurements that we hope are good proxies. And I think that effort is worthwhile. It’s part of how we bridge communication inter-subjectively.

But in this case it wouldn’t help you to start with objective measures. Some of the stuff you care about is subjective. If your focus is on benefitting from the Enneagram (as opposed to convincing others that the Enneagram is useful), then you really want to directly track the subjective stuff that really matters to you.

So it’s not key that you make what you’re doing objective.

It’s that you can tell for yourself what works for you.

This was a case study

I’m using the Enneagram as a case study. I’m giving an example of a very particular kind of analysis. While I suspect and hope that the Enneagram really is helpful to a lot of people, I actually care a lot more about the method of analysis.

It’s very closely related to what kicked off the scientific revolution. There was a key insight that let us invent steam engines, and harness electrical power, and obliterate an ancient monster, and enact countless other miracles our medieval ancestors would find stunning.

I think that insight was applied too narrowly. We mistakenly thought the insight was about objectivity. That resulted in enormous command over objects. But we don’t seem have a corresponding growth in wisdom or compassion. We struggle to work out how to make marriages healthy, or what makes communities thriving and wholesome, or what to do in the face of depression and despair.

And I don’t think we can fill that gap with even more objective rigor. I think something else is needed.

I have a solid guess about that “something else”. It’s what I’ve been using to reorganize the Enneagram into what I hope can be a powerful psychotechnology. Not just something that’s psychoactive (e.g. creates feelings of insight), but something that does real work. With an eye toward building an “engine” that creates wholesomeness and wisdom with roughly the same kind of reliability that a motor creates movement.

So with the Enneagram in hand as an example, I’m hoping to explain the general theory next time. I want to spell out what I mean by “subjective science”.

1. Personality Machines, which is my explanation of the Enneagram in terms of how Essence (loosely the “true self” or “soul”) creates a personality (loosely “the ego”) by mechanizing three Centers (the Head, Heart, and Gut).

2. Ego Spirals, which is about how to use the Enneagram to unwind the knots we tie ourselves into.

In this post I want to talk about the most popular part of the Enneagram: typing people.

This is just about everyone’s favorite focus when they first encounter the Enneagram. “What’s my type?” and “What’s so-and-so’s type?” It’s fun, both because people just seem to be drawn to putting themselves & others into categories (“Which Hogwarts house do you belong in?”), but also because the Enneagram suggests explanations for folk’s behavior and inner experiences. And the humans really seem to love rich explanations for what they and others do.

There’s a particularly fun experience when someone feels “caught” by a type description. They’ll be listening along (“Ones experience the world thus and such way, Twos this other way…”), and then all of a sudden some type description feels like dissecting the intimate details of their life. When I first had this experience, it felt like someone had been spying on my thoughts and private behavior and then wrote a chapter about me in particular. It’s weirdly exposing. Embarrassing and funny at the same time.

Once the system has really impressed you, there can be a temptation to play with it by explaining everything in its terms. Stuff like:

“Oh, of course he’s tidying up. He’s a Two. He just has to do nice things for people. And that One wing is why he does it by creating order.”

At this point I really want to urge caution.

I don’t mean to say “Don’t do this.” I think it’s an important stage in developing a good idea for what the Enneagram types even are. You have to play with it a bit to grow familiar with it. By all means, try it on! See if you can explain people’s behaviors with it. Try typing public figures and fictional characters. Try typing nations! I think this is fine and good.

But be careful. There’s a pitfall right here.

The most common way I see people (including me!) getting bricked by the Enneagram is by taking this too far. They start trying to see others and themselves entirely through the tool’s lens. Instead of using type to inspire insight about where to look to create more freedom, they’re using type as a complete explanation of who they and others are. They’re seeing people as Enneagram types, instead of noticing how knowing someone’s type can help them see that individual person (and their suffering) more precisely.

When that confusion happens, personality has taken over use of the Enneagram. And the tool becomes useless as a map to freedom.

…at least while you’re using it this way. Several times I’ve noticed my thinking about the Enneagram becoming mechanical and rigid, and I’ve had to set the tool aside for a while — sometimes years. But it kind of refreshes for me after a bit. When I stop taking the tool so seriously, my personality loosens its grip, and I can again use the Enneagram as a guide to freedom.

But I recommend skipping that whole arc. Play with typing yourself and others, but use type to see through personality.

Two stories

I want to share two of my own stories of typing turning out well. I think that’ll offer some good context. Then I’ll go into some pragmatics about typing yourself and others, and what to do with that knowledge.

Getting closer to my dad

When I first read an Enneagram book, the main thing that leaped out at me was how much I didn’t resonate with several of the types. And yet, I knew people who felt immensely caught by those very types I couldn’t see myself as.

It was my first clear glimpse into just how different people can be. I didn’t realize just how much I was assuming everyone experiences the world basically like I do with a few adjustments (things like being more or less emotionally controlled, or more or less intelligent). But I felt extremely nailed by type Five, enough to make me squirm in my chair while reading about it. Whereas one of the people introducing me to the system felt super pegged by type Two. And yet I didn’t relate to Two almost at all.

So my mind was blown. I started devouring Enneagram stuff in order to get a better sense of how people who are very different from me might feel on the inside.

(I still think this is among the most precious things I learned from the Enneagram. It taught me to be very humble about my understanding of others’ subjective experience. And it’d be silly to assume that learning the Enneagram in particular could completely patch my ignorance here! As far as I can tell, people are infinitely interesting when I’m seeking to understand them, Essence to Essence. It’s actually the personality that’s pretty boring and completely understandable.)

It’s pretty common when reading a type for people you know to leap to mind. For me, reading type One had me thinking vividly of my father. It was hard to miss, honestly. The book I was reading from has little quotes along the edges of the pages for each type, and the quotes for type One felt like someone had just transcribed things my dad would often say or mean.

And upon seeing that, I realized something. I had long felt like Dad was really critical of me, like he expected me to screw up basically anything I tried to do. (“Now Son, did you call to make sure the theater is open today? Remember to take some money with you to buy a ticket.”) But when I imagined him doing it as a One, it became incredibly obvious to me that his criticality was his expression of care. It wasn’t that he thought I in particular was incompetent. It’s that Ones tend to view everyone as less competent than they are, and therefore that it’s the One’s job to make sure that everything goes well. If I forgot my money, Dad would feel bad because he’d blame himself for not reminding me!

That revelation created a lot of ease for me. Even when Dad would get irritated with me or others, I could see the kindness and care that’s underneath it. I stopped bristling so much. I definitely stopped taking it so personally. That made my experience of my connection with him much more pleasant.

And I think it improved our relationship too. We were on great terms anyway. But it became a lot easier for me to be affectionate with him and to see his persistent positive intent, which I think helped him to relax too.

I also realized that there were some tensions I could just resolve with this insight. Ones have a hard time taking criticism because they’re already so hard on themselves. I started trying to find ways to reflect the sincere message “I see you’re right” to Dad, which often helped a lot with dissolving arguments.

I think this is an excellent use of the Enneagram. It helped me see my father in a way that made our relationship and the family dynamic more pleasant.

Mistyping myself

I got my own Enneagram type wrong twice.

I mentioned up above how I felt nailed by type Five. The reason that happened was that the person who introduced me to the Enneagram handed me a book and said something like:

“I think you’re a Five with a Four wing. I mean, I could be wrong! You should read the types and notice which one resonates with you. But I have a pretty strong hunch.”

So when I read type Five, I had her guess in mind. I was trying to see how Five is a description of me.

It turned out that reading it that way prevented me from understanding what Fives are. I looked at type Five using myself (as I saw myself at the time) as a template. I’m pretty smart and well-read, and Fives are about something like intelligence and knowledge-gathering, so I could make it fit.

The thing is, I couldn’t become more functional by viewing myself as a Five. Fives need to focus on embodiment and action (Gut Center stuff), and then on making contact with others and being affected by the world (Heart Center stuff). But no matter how much energy I put into that approach, I couldn’t unravel what I saw as the main Five temptation of going into my head (the Wake-Up Call).

Thirteen years later, in 2014, I went to a week-long training offered by The Enneagram Institute. On the first day we gave our introductions, including our best guess about our own Enneagram type. I said I was a Five. A couple of ladies who’d long used the system in their therapy practice watched me for a few days and then pulled me aside:

“Hey, just something to consider: we really don’t think you’re a Five. You really come across much more like a Six. Maybe consider it?”

I did, and I reread stuff on Fives and Sixes. When I imagined that Five might be talking about a pattern very different from my own, I realized that something coherent arose in my understanding, and it very much did not fit me.

Whereas I could read Six as describing me. Stuff about self-doubt and seeking some external source of guidance. I mean, here I was doubting my Enneagram type and using books and others’ opinions as authorities to tell me what my type was!

Maybe you notice the error. I made literally the same mistake again. I reinterpreted Six using myself as a template in order to figure out whether I’m a Six.

And again, I couldn’t get the Enneagram to work for me while viewing myself as a Six. No matter how much energy I put into stilling my mind and acknowledging my successes, I couldn’t release what I was interpreting as how the Wake-Up Call (looking for a sure thing) shows up for me.

I noticed the error earlier this year while talking with someone about stuff unrelated to the Enneagram. I was telling a story about how in kindergarten I would get sent to the principal’s office every week. It was usually because I got in a fight with the teacher. She would enforce rules in ways I could tell were out of line, and when I tried to correct her she’d say stuff like “No, I’m right because I’m the adult and you’re the child.” At which point I’d go absolutely berserk with rage. Because no, her social power over me had absolutely nothing to do with whether what she was doing was fair! That’s not how truth works!

The person I was talking to was pretty struck by this story:

“Wow! That’s a lot of moral clarity for a five-year-old to have. That’s got to be a big theme in your life!”

I hadn’t really thought of it as moral clarity before. But when I started reflecting on it, I noticed that yes, actually it is a big theme. I refused to become an Eagle Scout out of moral protest for how the adults in my Scout troop were behaving. I got a Ph.D. in math education because I thought the way math is taught is criminal and needs fixing. I relate pretty strongly to this meme:

And after that conversation, it slowly dawned on me:

None of that is the self-doubting, external-orientation-seeking pattern of type Six.

It’s the righteous rigid certainty of type One.

Suddenly a lot of things clicked for me. I remembered how when I first looked at the Enneagram, I saw that the types were sorted by dominant emotion: rage types (for the Gut Center), shame types (for the Heart Center), and fear types (for the Head Center). And I pointed at that and said “Oh, yeah, I’m totally a rage type. No question.” But I overrode that to see myself as a Five.

I also keep my room immaculate. And I bristle when the shared kitchen isn’t immaculate too. I had imagined that’s the type Six nervousness about rules being broken, but if I’m honest it’s not fear. I’m irritated when things aren’t right.

But however compelling all that is, it could be the same error I’d made with Five and Six. Reinterpreting type One using myself as a template.

The key difference is this:

I’m now finding that the Enneagram map of the type One spiral actually works for me.

I realized that the particular flavor of my Wake-Up Call is when I confuse condemnation for moral clarity. It feels automatic: I can tell when something is right, and when people are violating it, and the obvious thing to do is to highlight the error and point at what the right thing to do is. But there’s a very particular charge that comes from closing my Heart and trying to pressure others to align. It’s a forceful “This is wrong” kind of energy.

When I watch for that charge and I release it, I notice an alternative arising: I can just name the good thing, and align myself with it, and let others come along as well if and when it’s right for them to do so.

That move has in fact been softening me. It’s part of why I’ve been able to write and publish more often. All my relationships are feeling more pleasant and free for me. I’m getting some reflections from others that I’m coming across differently now — that it’s easier to listen to me, and that my ideas make more sense to them, and that I’m more pleasant to be around.

That’s actually the part I care about. I could come up with a new explanation for my experience and behavior based on being a One. But that’s just storytelling. The whole point of the Enneagram, as far as I’m concerned, is to live a life filled with kindness, clarity, and presence. I now find it’s doing that for me. I consider that to be the fruit of typing myself right.

Finding people’s types

There’s a bit of a cyclic problem with the Enneagram. You have to develop your understanding of the types by seeing how they actually play out in examples. But in order to see the examples clearly, you need to know how to see them as the types, which requires understanding the types first.

This showed up in my own story of discovering my type. I used myself (with the understanding I had of myself at the time) as a possible template for some of the types, which warped my sense of the whole system and severely limited how much insight it could give me about myself.

But such warping is inevitable. It’s a hard-to-avoid property of models of subjective experience. That’s why it’s so important to ground your guesses in something other than compelling explanations: knowing someone’s Enneagram type should make life more wholesome when you interact with them. If you can’t do that when seeing them as that type, then you want to consider that you’ve maybe mistyped them and/or that you’ve maybe misunderstood how the types work in general.

(Or that you’re viewing them too rigidly as a type. Remember that the Enneagram is a map of mechanistic personalities. Knowing I’m a One can tell you what general patterns my personality will robotically tend toward, but it doesn’t tell you the specifics, and it tells you next to nothing about my Essence. Seeing me as a One is an invitation to notice ways you might come to see past my personality. It’s the same for everyone: personality is robotic and possible to completely understand and predict, but Essence is endlessly beautiful and interesting and creative and worthy of wonder. Finding ways to connect Essence to Essence is the whole point.)

Hold your guesses lightly

So first, I want to recommend that you hold your sense of the types in general and of individuals’ types (including your own) in particular extremely lightly. You might start by thinking of Fours as “tragic romantics”, but you’re going to have a bunch of associations with that stereotype, and you can’t yet know which of those associations are good guidelines and which are misleading. For instance, I think of tragic romantics as theatrical, which fits some Fours I know but very much misses the mark for others. Be ready to table-flip your entire impression of what Fours are like, or whether a friend who really seems loudly Four-like to you really is a Four.

In particular, don’t believe the “Oh God, this describes me so painfully well” reaction too strongly. I got that from the type Five descriptions at the very beginning, and I got it from Russ Hudson’s description of Sixes at an Enneagram workshop in 2018. I think in both cases I was seeing something accurately, but I was mislabeling it, and as a result I warped my sense of what the Enneagram was actually saying.

So I really recommend that you keep a big fat “maybe” around all typing, no matter how compelling a given instance might seem.

View others’ guesses as about them

Second, track who’s talking when being told what your or someone else’s type is.

Getting others’ guesses about type is necessary to some extent. It’s probably helpful to learn that I think Donald Trump is an Eight and that Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show “Wednesday” is a Five. That tells you something about how I view those two types. But that’s all it tells you: it gives you insight into how I in particular view both (a) those Enneagram types and (b) those characters.

Likewise, Sasha Chapin self-describes as a Seven. Does that mean we should view him as an example of a Seven? Well, maybe. But what we really know from his assertion is that when he combines (a) his sense of the Enneagram with (b) his sense of himself, he concludes he’s a Seven. So when he says

“I am an absolutely classic example of type 7”

we should take that as insight into how Sasha views the Enneagram (and himself), rather than just assuming our current impressions of him tell us what the type Seven pattern in fact is.

I mean, how warping would it have been to give myself as an example of a Six? I did so for many years! Anyone who believed me inherited some of my personal confusions about the Enneagram types. I’m in part wanting to protect others from whatever of my own distortions about the types still remain. Even now I hope your read is “Michael views himself as a One” rather than “Michael is a One.”

Relatedly, I suggest avoiding online Enneagram tests. They’re mostly just confused. They’ll ask you about some traits, assuming you’re thinking of the traits in ways that fit the system. (“People probably see me as distant” could apply to several types, but an online test might take a “Strongly agree” response as evidence for just one of them.) Then they list some ranked order of which types supposedly fit your responses. This is just misleading. You’re better off rolling a nine-sided die to figure out which type to consider as your own first: at least the die won’t implant a premature guess in your mind!

Try on many types

Third, I suggest you try on at least a few different types to see what fits. Both for typing yourself and for typing others.

Doing so involves some storytelling. How do you retell the story of your life if you’re really a Nine? How about if you’re a Two? Can you make sense of your career if you view yourself as an Eight?

Last year I sincerely tried on the possibility that I’m a Four. I could make it make some good sense: I have lots of stories about how I’m strange and unique, and I often feel profoundly misunderstood. I’m pretty sensitive and can fall into bouts of melancholy. I told this story vividly enough that for a few days I really wondered!

(Ultimately I rejected it because that view of myself isn’t useful. It doesn’t help reverse the downward spiral. This again emphasizes how a narrative is not enough on its own to determine type, no matter how compelling it is.)

Remember that you’re simultaneously developing your understanding of both (a) the types and also (b) the person you’re typing. That requires some pretty wide and varied experimentation! You might even need to return to a type as a guess as your models develop.

Be playful, but really sincerely try on each type you’re considering. Reminiscent of what John Vervaeke calls “serious play”.

Check if it makes you more wholesome

Finally, at the risk of beating this drum too much: the measure of whether you’ve typed someone correctly is if viewing them that way makes your interactions with them more wholesome.

I don’t know for sure that Dad is a One. For some time I thought he might be a Six: he’s very security-minded and puts a ton of his mental energy into worrying about what could go wrong. But viewing him as a Six doesn’t help make interactions with him better. He doesn’t get indecisive, for instance, and when he claims not to have a preference it doesn’t help much to make the options binary. (That’s a common hack that I’m told can help many Sixes.)

But viewing him as a One definitely helps. It makes interactions with him more pleasant, and over the years it has inspired me to try conversational moves that have panned out well with him.

So in practice I think I’ve got Dad’s Enneagram type right. I see both him and the type well enough to get good results.

Same with my own: I can tell I’m also a One because viewing myself this way lets me reverse my downward spiral. The fact that it’s working suggests that I’m understanding both Ones and myself usefully.

Not to say my understanding is final or complete. I hold the possibility that I’m still wrong about my type, or that maybe there’s no correct answer. Since seeing myself as a One, suddenly several people close to me obviously look like different types than I’d thought before. That might change my sense of the Enneagram in a way that has me notice an even more effective interpretation of my own type.

But as long as I keep aiming for wholesomeness, I think this process is totally fine. The goal isn’t to type myself or others. It’s to live a good life.

Why do I keep emphasizing this part?

I emphasize this pragmatism so much because not doing this is the main pitfall I see in Enneagram spaces. People like to treat the Enneagram as a God-given classification system and want to know how to sort themselves and others into it. And then they want to use that system to explain everything: why someone chose the color of bedsheets they did, why a person likes artichokes, why their friend uses a 2H pencil instead of HB, etc.

They’ll even go on to contort themselves to fit their new self-image. It’s a bizarre thing to see. People will say stuff like “Well, I’m such a Seven, so I can’t help myself from going out tonight even though I’m tired!” This strikes me as an almost perfectly backwards application of the Enneagram. The whole point is to have more freedom from the personality. Why take your current view of a type and impose it more firmly on your behavior?

At a guess, it’s the same thing that makes sorting people by astrological sign, or by Hogwarts house, or whatever, so meaningful. It offers a framework for making sense of the world. So if you conform to it, everything makes sense! At least in some narrow way.

I really recommend not doing this. Have some starting stereotypes about the nine personality patterns, and some guesses about your and others’ types, and then experiment. Find out what creates wholesomeness. The aim is wholesomeness, not correct classification. In the end you might throw out the Enneagram entirely! But if you have a better life along the way, then that was a correct use of the tool.

Why type others?

As far as I’m concerned, the right use of the Enneagram is internal. It’s not about other people. It’s about your own suffering, and how to unwind it.

So why develop an understanding of all the types? Why not just laser focus on your own?

I have a few answers:

1. You can’t tell ahead of time which type is yours.

2. Because the types interrelate, they form a system. You might not be able to usefully understand your type until you see how it fits as part of the larger system.

3. All personalities display all nine error modes to some degree or another. It can be helpful to notice how each one applies to you, even if one of them overwhelmingly dominates.

4. It’s helpful to see patterns from the outside too. That’s especially powerful if you see others of the same type as you. But there are analogies and symmetries between each of the types, so you can learn more about your own personality machine by observing others’.

5. How you relate to others is subtly a fact about you. Learning to see others compassionately and clearly is about how you see them. It looks like it’s just about them, but that’s because that’s how psychological projection works.

An additional answer I used to give is, correctly identifying someone’s type should let you predict their behavior and reactions. I think that’s kind of true, but it’s also anti-helpful to focus on. The personality wants to use that power to manipulate others according to its strategy. That’s part of how you make the Enneagram useless to you.

I really encourage you to keep bringing the focus back on yourself. If you see your spouse is a Three, what insight does that give you? Maybe you come to understand your dynamic with them more clearly as a result: they get impatient with you for not “growing into your potential” more actively, and you respond by going quiet and then later watching your favorite Netflix show. What does that tell you about yourself? How can that insight create more space in your life and more tenderness and aliveness in your connection with your spouse?

And please remember: look through someone’s Enneagram type to see them more clearly.

What’s next

I have two main points still in mind for this Enneagram series.

One is, what’s up with those lines inside the diagram? Why is 5 connected to 7 and 8 for instance? Why are the primary types directly linked to each other but the secondary types have this weird six-sided star thing going on?

I brushed the topic aside in the last two posts. Here’s another teasing take: I can’t tell if the lines are useful in general. I found them very useful for the first time in over a decade once I tried viewing myself as a One. And it mattered a lot! But I’m quite sure the explanation given for why the lines are the way they are is at best incomplete, and might in fact be wrong. But I still suspect the lines have some value.

The other main thing I want to talk about is validity. I’ve been explaining the Enneagram so far. But is it right? Is this an accurate way of describing personality? Or is it just generating an illusion of insight? E.g., are the types so generic that anyone could see themselves as any of the types if they tried, and thus if you start digging into the Enneagram and later feel better, you falsely attribute your progress to the system?

The validity question dives into the domain of subjective science. What’s a scientific approach to spirituality that both scientists and spiritual folk would consider to be high integrity and in good faith? I don’t claim to have a complete answer, but I’m pretty sure I have a solid foothold on something that can become one.

In particular, I think most approaches I’ve seen so far don’t sufficiently account for reflexivity. Because it’s hard to! But not impossible. It’s just that science usually assumes non-reflexivity, i.e. objectivity. So domains that are “loopy” (like how understanding your own Enneagram type is a prerequisite for understanding Enneagram types in general and vice versa) can’t use the familiar corpus of scientific tools.

So that’s what I’m currently expecting to publish next. Probably in at least two more parts.

(You can view part 4 here.)

The main point of the Enneagram as I see it is that it describes some systematic ways we create and recreate our own suffering. The intent being that if we can recognize what we’re doing at key moments, we can do something different and become more free.

Each of the nine types of personality has a downward spiral nature to it. Last time I gave the analogy of alcoholism: if you drink too much, your life gets worse, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more, which makes your life even more bad, etc.

But every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around. If you can identify the choice points and make a different choice, you can kind of unwind the “cramp” of the personality machine. With alcoholism, for instance, if you notice that you’re inclined to deal with stress by reaching for a bottle, you might be able to choose something different the moment you notice yourself reaching.

Ideally you notice your particular downward spiral and learn its choice points. The Enneagram tries to help by suggesting you look at nine clusters of spiral types to see which one is most like yours. Then the generic template can help you to pick out key choice points you might have otherwise missed.

Noticing moments of choice

The “downward” direction of the Enneagram spiral is toward a more overpowered or “thick” personality that takes over more and more of your life. Whereas “upward” is toward having Essence shine through ever more freely.

In practice this scale isn’t perfectly smooth. It’s not really a continuum. There are specific habits and mechanisms you learn to notice along the way which you either release or don’t. For instance, there’s a way that Enneagram Ones can turn into tense balls of condemnation and certainty. If your personality is running a One pattern, you either do this sometimes or you don’t.

And even in unwinding that pattern, there’s a pretty marked difference between each of:

• (a) just following the impulse the way water runs downhill (“This is wrong!”),

• (b) noticing the pattern and seeing it for what it is (“Oh, huh, that’s condemnation”),

• (c) observing the opportunity to choose something different (“What’s the ennobling place to put my attention instead?”),

• (d) in fact choosing that “something different”, and

• (e) having that alternative choice become the new default.

A lot of Enneagram literature will name a bunch of these discrete patterns for each type. That’s most of the point of learning the types’ patterns (IMO): you get an overview of specific mechanisms that each type tends to use, which can help you notice how your personality employs them.

That said, there are two particularly stark transition points that I think are worth talking about in some detail.

When personality starts leading

It’s possible for Essence to shine through most of the time. When that happens, people come across as radiant and pleasant. Their personality is usually still present, but it’s less like a wall and more like a resource. This is when just one Center is mechanized, and usually lightly at that.

That pattern shows up for each secondary type like so:

• Healthy Ones are open-hearted, kind, connected. Their sense of right and wrong is still very clear, but they no longer condemn others. They experience their moral clarity as a personal guide.

• Healthy Twos are at peace. They stop pushing themselves to people-please. They still engage in kind acts, but the primary focus of their action is kindness to themselves through their enjoyment of loving and being connected to others.

• Healthy Fours are clear-minded. Their creativity is engaged with the world and flows through them readily. They drop the effort to “dig”, to view themselves as special, or to stir their feelings with fantasy. They’re instead alive to the present moment, expressing their inner world gracefully.

• Healthy Fives, like Healthy Ones, have freed their Hearts to shine with Essence. They stop retreating into their minds and instead remain in contact with others and the world. They still mentally tinker, but their playfulness becomes a medium for engaging rather than disengaging.

• Healthy Sevens, like Healthy Twos, are at peace from bringing ease to their Gut Center. They drop the restless pursuit of something novel to throw themselves into. They still have intense joie de vivre, though, which is expressed through their involvement in, enjoyment of, and development of the life they already have.

• Healthy Eights, like Healthy Fours, have clarity due to a free Head Center. They stop strategizing about resource or power accumulation from a place of needing to be independent. They’re still potent actors and highly strategic, but the drive is to live their life with full-on engagement.

I focus on the secondary types because I think the pattern is simpler to see: the secondary Center stops being involved in the personality’s machinery. That Center is instead a clear vessel for Essence.

The first “shock point” I want to talk about is when the second Center becomes mechanized in the personality. That’s the shift from “Healthy” behavior to “Average” behavior. Most descriptions of the Enneagram types are descriptions of Average behavior: Ones are precise but rigid, Twos are kind but graspy, etc. This is when the personality controls the majority of Centers and thus kind of takes the lead. At this point the word “I” often gets used to mean the personality rather than Essence.

Each of the types have a signal that they’re about to drop from Healthy to Average functioning — what Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson call “the Wake-Up Call” for each type. You might be able to derive the Wake-Up Calls for the secondary types from the above description of how Healthy behavior arises:

• Average Ones start feeling burdened by the need to do or fix everything themselves. (Heart distortion.)

• Average Twos start people-pleasing, trying to win others over. (Gut distortion.)

• Average Fours start intensifying their feelings with fantasy. (Head distortion.)

• Average Fives start withdrawing into their minds. (Heart distortion.)

• Average Sevens start getting dissatisfied with their current experience and looking for where things are more exciting. (Gut distortion.)

• Average Eights start feeling like they need to struggle toward being self-sufficient. (Head distortion.)

The equivalent for the primary types is when the personality grabs the extra two Centers and bundles them together into a secondary “mode”. It looks like so:

• Average Threes have a Heart mode and a Head/Gut mode. In Heart mode, they’re very sensitive, often turning into a kind of crying or devastated mess that can’t take action (Gut) or think clearly (Head). When in Head/Gut mode, they’re efficiency machines that are all performance and no tenderness (Heart). So their Wake-Up Call is when they start thinking their value depends on their success.

• Average Sixes have a Head mode and a Heart/Gut mode. In Head mode, they’re wrapped up in fearful worry about what could go wrong, but divorced from action (Gut) or vulnerable connection (Heart). In Gut/Heart mode, they become passionately devoted, refusing to ask whether what they’re devoted to is worth their loyalty. Lots of Enneagram literature refers to these as the “phobic” and “counterphobic” modes of Sixes, respectively. The Wake-Up Call for Sixes is when they start looking for a sure thing — i.e., something they can devote to.

• Average Nines have a Gut mode and a Head/Heart mode. In Gut mode, they’re mechanically following habits or sitting around doing nothing in particular, neither planning (Head) nor really engaged with what deeply matters (Heart). In Head/Heart mode, they “float off” and fantasize in a way disconnected from action — stuff like imagining how lovely it’ll be to finally write that book someday, but not in a way that ever has them actually writing anything. Their Wake-Up Call is when they start automatically going along with others, as that’s a sign that they’re suppressing their “no”s and distracting themselves from the resulting internal violation via their fantasy mode.

So the shift from Average to Healthy behavior for the primary types is mostly about dropping the bundled mode. That release lets Essence shine through more clearly, which relieves some pressure on the primary Center as well:

• Healthy Threes are authentic and open-hearted. They drop the efficient performance mode as their approach to success. They instead act based on what fulfills their Hearts, and they let others feel their tenderness. Their ideas and actions inspire others to make the most of themselves.

• Healthy Sixes are clear and stable. They drop the attempt to find something to plug their devotional Heart/Gut mode into. They instead follow their inner knowing. This lets their authentic caring guide their hands to build and support systems that hold everyone.

• Healthy Nines are present and at peace. They stop escaping into fantasy to go along with others. They instead maintain their inner peace by saying “no” when they mean it, letting others feel and understand what actually matters to the Nine.

Going from Healthy to Average is a massive loss of freedom. It’s a tipping point from “The personality is a tool for Essence” to “The personality is running the show while Essence takes a back seat.” It’s like the difference between wearing light, comfortable clothes versus being embedded in a mech suit that often decides for you how it’s going to move.

If you can notice your type’s Wake-Up Call, though, you might be able to choose differently. Sort of reversing the downward spiral before handing control over to the personality machine. It’s where you (as Essence) can intervene and say “No, thank you. I’ve got this. I’ll take it from here.”

When personality starts imprisoning the soul

The other main shock point is even farther down the dysfunction scale. It’s about a “danger zone”: how the types create things like suicide, homicide, schizoid breaks with reality, mania, catatonia, etc.

In terms of the Centers, the key transition is when all three Centers get mechanized as part of the personality at the same time.

Even when the primary types are in their two-Centers modes, the main Center kind of gets dropped: Threes disconnect from their feelings in high-performance mode, Sixes drop all attempts to orient in their unquestioning devotion, and Nines space out and take no action when they go to their inner world of pleasant fantasy.

The secondary types mostly neglect their third Centers. Hence Ones & Twos tending to be duty-oriented (kind of like Sixes in devotion mode), Fours & Fives withdrawing into inner worlds (like Nines in fantasy mode), and Sevens & Eights taking strategic action disconnected from what deeply matters (like Threes in efficiency mode).

This neglect is actually a good thing. It’s the robotic personality ignoring the third Center. Essence can most easily shine through that Center and intervene: Ones & Twos can learn to see their predicament clearly, Fours & Fives can take action and develop presence, and Sevens & Eights can let the world and others touch them more deeply.

Likewise, the primary types can kind of unwind their dual-Center mode from their primary Center: Threes can attune to the meaninglessness of their performance mode, Sixes can notice the way that their devotion doesn’t resolve their underlying fear, and Nines can become aware of the impotence of their fantasies via being present and attuned to their bodies.

So when personality co-opts that third Center, there’s no longer an internal intervention point. The system is sealed. The personality is running without any reference to Essence and becomes terrified (warped Head), hateful (warped Heart), and disconnected from reality (warped Gut). The overclocked personality engine needs to either run out of steam and release its grip on some Center, or have someone pry its fingers back from the outside. Otherwise it’ll continue in this locked mode perpetually.

The exact flavor of this hell depends on the type. But unless you’re a therapist or coach trying to use the Enneagram for a client, those differences probably don’t matter that much for you. The real point for individual practice is to notice the warning sign your type has carved above its own gate into hell. Riso and Hudson call these the “Red Flag Fears” for each type:

• Type 1: “Are my ideals actually wrong?”

• Type 2: “Am I driving people dear to me away?”

• Type 3: “Am I failing? Am I a fake?”

• Type 4: “Am I ruining my life and wasting my opportunities?”

• Type 5: “Will I never find a place in the world or with others?”

• Type 6: “Have I harmed my own security?”

• Type 7: “Am I causing my own pain and misery?”

• Type 8: “Are others turning against me? Are they going to retaliate?”

• Type 9: “Is reality going to force me to deal with my problems?”

A fleeting thought along these lines is concerning, but not necessarily dire. What I’m talking about is a very dark kind of experience. E.g., Average Ones might wonder from time to time if they’ve made a mistake in how they think about their ideals, but the Red Flag Fear of Ones is more like a horrifying revelation of one’s own deep corruption and contributions to evil as an inevitable result of sincere attempts to do good.

If you’ve identified your type and you notice this kind of transfixed horrified fear bubbling up, that’s a “halt and catch fire” moment. Whatever you’re doing, stop. The tools you’ve been using are what are driving you forward. You absolutely do not want to continue with business as usual. It does not matter how much sense your plans make or how necessary the path forward looks. Stop. Get help.

On the inside, being in an Unhealthy personality doesn’t look like “I’m in an Unhealthy personality”. It looks like the world is awful. Existence looks inherently evil, or inhospitable to life, or like dire horrid action is just objectively necessary, or that people are alien creatures with inherently malicious intent. Or any number of other horrors. But the problems look real. Your responses make sense based on the world you see.

That’s why the Unhealthy realm can be so insidious. The horrors you see feel like objective reality. Like your problems are real and you have only so many options for solving them.

I should also emphasize that an “Unhealthy” type can feel good to be in at times. An Unhealthy Eight might sometimes feel victorious due to heartlessly obliterating some rivals for instance. The issue here isn’t constant misery. It’s lack of choice while in a pattern that recreates pain. Unhealthy Eights are constantly at war with everyone and everything; their machinery is powerfully and reliably creating the very thing they most fear — and they cannot stop.

That lack of choice is why it’s so critical to heed the Red Flag Fear. It’s your last chance. Life just gets worse if you plow ahead through that gate. Going Unhealthy is rarely a permanent transition, but you don’t get to decide how long it will last, what gets you out, or what price you pay along the way. Death, imprisonment, the destruction of people or systems that matter to you, physical mutilation, and permanent psychological damage are all very possible before the dark pattern ends.

It’s best just not to enter in the first place.

Mapping your own spiral

I named the hope that the Enneagram offers near the beginning:

Every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around.

The key is to notice where you can turn around. Where the personality machine wants to go in a direction, but you can tell that it’s pointing wrong way.

If you want to use the Enneagram for this, the first step is to discover your type. This can be a long road if done carelessly. I’ll talk more about typing yourself and others in a future post in this series. I’ll just suggest a few quick highlights for now:

• Keep an open mind. Your initial impression of how a type shows up might be meaningfully wrong, and it’s hard to see yourself clearly from the inside.

• Be careful of Enneagram tests and of others’ impressions of your type. They might offer some hints about your type, but they can also distort your sense of what you’re looking for. I think it’s best to look through the types with as little preconception about what’s a good fit for you as possible.

• If you’re right about your type, then the map should work.

Once you have a solid guess about your type, the next step is to map out your choice points. This project requires a bit of back-and-forth between your experience and Enneagram theory. I suggest looking for three key transition points to start with:

1. If you’ve ever been fully free of your personality, such as via meditation or entheogens, what did it feel like for it to come back online? That should be when your type’s main Center gets its first mechanistic distortion. What exactly did you start doing inside? What were the signs of your personality arising?

2. How does your type’s Wake-Up Call actually show up for you? What are some specific instances? (If you spend most of your time in the Average range, like most people do, you’ll notice the tone of your Wake-Up Call basically everywhere in your life.)

3. If you’ve bumped into the Red Flag Fear of your type, how did that show up? What did it feel like? What were the circumstances? What seemed real to you? What happened afterwards? What helped you get out of it?

There’s actually a lot between those three transition points. You can learn a lot from reading Enneagram material on your type. Don Riso mapped out more nuance in what he called “the Levels of Development”, and he and Russ Hudson detail all nine Levels for all nine types in their book “Personality Types”. Their other main book, “Wisdom of the Enneagram”, explicitly spells out many of the key patterns to look for in Average functioning. I also like Richard Rohr’s Christian approach as a rich way of seeing the key choice points from a different angle.

But the important part is that the map actually works for you. Is it helping you to notice your habitual behavior, and does making different choices at those moments actually improve your life?

If the answer is “no” after sincerely trying for a little while, you should wonder if you’ve misidentified your type. Remember that the point is to become more free, not to have a tidy explanation for why you do what you do. I really recommend a very pragmatic attitude here: if the tool doesn’t bring you more peace, love, and clarity, then change how you’re using it.

If it does start helping you, though, I really recommend studying your type through lots of different sources. Getting those details with an eye for noticing choice points can be immensely helpful.

Preparing for Red Flags

I also recommend developing specific plans for what would help you in particular if you hit your Red Flag Fear. It’s very hard to gather the resources you need when you’re right at that gate. But if you know what helps you when you’re there, and you set things up so you can call on those resources when you need them, you’ll be much better off if you find yourself knocking on the entrance to that particular underworld. Things like having specific friends you plan on calling, or knowing to eat a bunch of chocolate and binge-watch Frieren. Stuff that’s wholesome and healthy and unwinds you from your downward spiral.

Just keep in mind that whatever your plan is, it needs to be one you can actually enact when right at that transition from Average to Unhealthy. A One might have a silly keyphrase he agrees on with his wife to get her help (e.g. “I am a pineapple, this is not a drill”), but when actually facing the Red Flag Fear, he’ll have to grapple with his terror that actually telling her that phrase might be him enacting evil. The answer might be “If I worry about that, then I’ll override the worry and tell her anyway.” But he probably does need that part of the plan laid out ahead of time for it to work.

In practice I find the Red Flag Fear stuff isn’t something to be super concerned about. But if you know you’re prone to going Unhealthy, or if you’re concerned about the possibility, then it’s a fine idea to have some attuned self-care tools ready to go.

Supportive psychotech

Finally, I want to suggest a few additional tricks from outside the Enneagram. I find that they make a big difference.

In my old company, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), we used to teach a technique called “Trigger-Action Planning” or “TAPs”. It’s basically a memory boost: if you want to notice or think of something when a particular event happens, you set a TAP, and most of the time it just works.

Once the Enneagram helps you identify your key choice points, you can set a TAP to notice each one. Each TAP should fire at exactly the right moment. And if it doesn’t, you tweak the TAP until it does.

You can read instructions for setting TAPs here.

There’s also a way to sort of tilt your internal landscape toward noticing and setting the right TAPs kind of automatically. You do this by developing an alternative self-image (along the lines that Maxwell Maltz talks about in“Psycho-Cybernetics”). You basically notice a coherent alternative way you could be and then kind of mentally rehearse it.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. Stephen LaBerge uses basically this idea in his MILD technique for inducing lucid dreams: you get a coherent sense of what you’d be like if lucid in a dream, and then you mentally replay past dreams but as your lucid self.

Here’s how this trick might look for encouraging a shift from Average to Healthy functioning:

1. Get a clear sense of how a Healthy version of you might act, feel, and think. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete. Just coherent. (Maybe my Healthy description of your type up above is actually enough!)

2. Think of a situation in which you missed your Wake-Up Call. E.g., if you’re a Four, think of a time you fell into the impulse to (say) stir melancholic longing and loss by reflecting on a past lover.

3. Call up the experiential details of it. Do you remember where you were? How it felt in your body? What was going on around you? It’s fine to make up some of it if you don’t remember everything accurately; the important part is that the scene is believable to you and has good sensory detail, like a dream or a movie.

4. Replay the detailed scene in your mind, but this time as the Healthy version of yourself. When your Healthy version feels the impulse to (say) fantasize, how do they respond to that impulse? What do they do instead? How does that feel? Get into the sensory details of it. Spend a while really feeling the whole thing, like you’re reliving the event (only as Healthy).

5. Set the practice aside and carry on with your life.

I want to emphasize that this last step is a real one. It’s kind of like when you struggle to remember someone’s name: after a point it’s helpful to stop trying so that your subconscious mind can keep working in the background without your conscious interference.

This mental rehearsal of Health is the same. The goal is to convey to your subconscious mind “This is the direction I want to move in.” Let it figure out how. Your job is simply to name the destination and then get out of the way.

More specifically, it’s not your job to make yourself act Healthy. That very much gets in the way. The thing trying to change behavior at that point is almost always the personality machine. Its efforts are basically guaranteed to backfire. E.g., a Four might try to force themselves to stop fantasizing but not be able to, which affirms their self-image of being uniquely flawed. (“Not even the Enneagram can help me….”)

The hope here is simply to notice choice points right when they happen. Merely noticing might sound inadequate, but it’s actually extremely potent. It’s just gentle. Truly skillful interventions often are.

Want help?

If you want to engage in the above and you might like my support, reach out to me:

I offer coaching. If working on becoming Healthy in the Enneagram sense calls to you, I might be able to support you in that. We can talk and figure out if we’re a good fit.

What’s next

I have at least three more pieces in mind to say about the Enneagram:

• Typing yourself and others. There are a few common pitfalls here to be aware of. Not just mistyping, but also misusing the view that people are running specific personality machines.

• Those inner lines inside the Enneagram’s main diagram. I think they indirectly say something potent about how science and subjective experience relate — but not for the reason Enneagram enthusiasts might think.

• The question of validity. Are the Enneagram types real? Or is the system made of compelling illusion? If it’s illusion, does it turn out to be helpful anyway, and if so is there a way to benefit from its real value without believing in fantasies? This, too, touches on the interplay of science and subjectivity.

I might have more, and the above three might not be how I end up organizing the essays. But those are definitely the topics I’m itching to talk about right now.

(You can view part 3 of this Enneagram series here.)

I have several things I’d like to say about it. Some clarification about what it is and how to view it (in my opinion), some of what I’ve learned about how to use it, and quite a lot about how it relates to scientific thinking.

So, in this post I’ll give my overview of it.

To spell out my reasons a little more:

• People often get a lot out of how I introduce systems. I tend to rejigger the logic until the whole thing makes a simple kind of sense to me. The result is often something that makes good sense to others too.

• I find that most overviews of the Enneagram miss what in my opinion is the core point. They talk about it like it’s a God-given classification system of personality traits and/or souls. I think it’s more useful than that. I’d like to hint at how.

• The Enneagram was my introduction to what I might call “subjective structures”. That idea has become central to what I do and think about, independent of personality types. I hope the idea can click for some of my readers too.

• The usual logic of the Enneagram is pretty bad, and I don’t think it has to be. I want to show what I think a slightly cleaned-up version looks like. Both for its own sake, and also as an example of how I clean up spiritual or mystical tools.

I’m not going to be able to get to all of the above in this post. It’d be too lengthy and take too long to write. So here I’ll just give my overview of the Enneagram, in part to give a lens through which to view other descriptions of the system (whether from me or others). I hope to dig into the other parts above in future posts.

The Essence

The Enneagram is a theory about how personality works.

It’s most often used to talk about which “personality type” each person is. It names nine strategy types a personality can use, meaning you can kind of categorize people by which strategy they most rely on. That’s usually the part people are most interested in.

But I think that application alone misses the core point. The Enneagram isn’t a classification scheme, even if people like to use it as one. It’s actually a map of suffering.

It’s a very negativity-laden map. It’s talking about the ways in which we torment ourselves by how we try to escape our misery. I often tongue-in-cheek summarize the Enneagram as asking:

In which of these nine ways are you most screwed up?

The core idea of the Enneagram is that there’s a structured relationship between your deepest nature (usually called “Essence”) and your habitual ways of navigating the world around you (“personality”). The personality is necessary to some extent, but by default it kind of takes over for Essence, sort of like an overly helpful dog that “protects” its owner from a love interest. To the extent that personality lives our life for us, its shortcomings get baked into everything we do, and Essence painfully withers.

Intuitively you can think of Essence as something like your soul, or the way that conscious awareness arises in you in particular. It’s the nature you had (but hadn’t yet developed or given much structure) when you were born. It’s what makes babies so different from one another and yet still so radiantly present and aware and innocent. When someone has an innate gift, like a gift for music, we can view that as an expression of their Essence.

Essence is naturally capable and wonderful and caring, but it still has to learn how to interface with the world as part of being born and growing up. Sometimes it encounters a challenge that’s too great for it to handle “nakedly”, so it creates a kind of machine to stand between it and the challenges of life. That machine is kind of like a mech suit with an AI. The more power it’s given, the more complicated it becomes, and the more of life it tries to robotically take over for Essence.

That machine is the personality. Some people use the word “ego” here, but that word gets applied to too many things and isn’t in standard usage in Enneagram literature, so I’ll keep using “personality” to talk about this mechanism.

It’s actually really helpful to have machines or autopilots in us. I like not having to think about keeping my heart beating for instance. I’m also grateful for my ability to walk without having to remember how. (That’s especially present for me right now as I watch the 10-month-old child I live with trying to figure out how to walk.)

But sometimes automatic habits can create problems, which those habits then try to solve using the same methods that created the problem in the first place. It’s like the runaway issue that can happen with alcoholism: if you start drinking too much, your life could start becoming really difficult, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more.

Essential qualities & toxic mimics

The whole point of a personality mech suit is that it isn’t Essence. It’s acting as a kind of shield, sort of like oven mitts. But it still has to act as though it’s Essence sometimes. So it ends up robotically mimicking some Essential qualities. And yet it lacks the fundamental creativity of Essence, so the robotic imitation often ends up being a kind of toxic and kicks off a downward spiral akin to alcoholism.

For reasons I’ll get into in a bit, the Enneagram focuses on nine self-reinforcing problems that result from toxic mimics of nine Essential qualities. I’ll give them the classical numbering here, but don’t worry just yet about what the numbers mean or why there should be nine of them. Just treat them as nine painful mistakes every personality makes to some degree or another. You can also treat this as an overview of the nine personality types along with their central themes in bold (whose origins I’ll explain when I get to why the numbers are the way they are):

1. Perfection: Essence is just so. Exact. Precisely as it is. And there’s a fundamental rightness to that precision, due to its perfect alignment with all that is. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to make things right. The focus is on right & wrong, condemnation, judgment, and perfectionism. It’s imposing an idea of how things should be. The more this imposition happens, the better the personality gets at noticing things that could be fixed or improved, and the more distant is the Essential perception of everything already being just so.

2. Love: Essence is caring, kind, loving. When personality mimics this quality, it notices that affection is the main social sign of love, so it focuses on both giving affection and eliciting it from others. There’s a degree of fakeness in targeting affection directly, though, which throws the value of that affection into question. The personality tries to sort of overwhelm the value question by being even more “loving” and getting more “love” from others. This creates a downward spiral of manipulation, codependence, and an ever more empty meaningless illusion of pride.

3. Achievement: Essence is inherently valuable and practically made of potential to grow and become. (Think of how children naturally develop into adults, or how acorns grow into oak trees.) When personality mimics this quality, it seeks value via signs of growth, i.e. accomplishment. Yet accomplishment achieved via a mechanical personality alone doesn’t develop Essence, so it’s recognized as hollow and meaningless, and therefore devoid of inherent value. That spurs even more striving and an ever deepening sense of worthlessness.

4. Preciousness: Essence is precious. When personality mimics this quality, it focuses on being special and unique as a source of worth. It recognizes that only Essence can be truly creative, but its task is to keep Essence from coming into contact with the world, so it instead fixates on the “negative space” where Essence isn’t — which is to say, the painful apparent lack of preciousness and inherent worth. The result is a deep sorrow and melancholy, which it sort of mines in order to create an impression of specialness and uniqueness — which it recognizes as hollow, thus reinforcing awareness of the (apparent) lack of inherent preciousness.

5. Understanding: Essence sees clearly. It recognizes the true nature of what’s real. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to build mental models and understand instead. It’s doing so in a mechanical and therefore fragmented way, though, so there’s always room to miss something. So the urge arises to keep everything at a distance and examine it from afar until it’s completely understood in a mental way, which can never happen.

6. Safety: Essence is inherently secure. It naturally has a kind of innocent trust in all of existence. When personality mimics this quality, it operates from distrust (due to the absence of Essence) and tries to find a sure thing. But what should it rely on to determine what it can rely on? That puzzle repeats endlessly in a downward spiral of anxiety.

7. Freedom: Essence is free, in the sense of the freedom of the wide open road. All action is available. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to generate possibilities and avoid restrictions. Obligations and internal negative feelings can feel constraining, so the personality tries to distract from them with stimulation and optionality. This leads to addiction: doing things to distract from a sensation without addressing the sensation’s cause, thus requiring ever more distraction.

8. Power: Essence is real. It’s not some ghostly phantasm. It’s in the contact our fingertips make with the world around us for instance. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to be solid and feel its realness via the impact it makes. It wants to affect while resisting being affected. This tends toward violence (in the sense of “a tendency to violate”). That causes others to try to intervene, which is the opposite of the personality’s strategy of “affect without being affected”, so it doubles down on applying violent force to stop the intervention.

9. Peace: Essence is deliciously blissful and effortless. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to resist any negative experience. It becomes numb, sleepy, repetitive, and passive-aggressive in a foot-dragging way. This approach tends to have negative problems pile up (since problems sometimes can’t just go away). These issues demand attention, which the personality responds to by ignoring them even harder.

The Three Centers

So why nine Essential properties and toxic mimics? And why these nine?

The main inspiration comes from viewing people as having three kinds of intelligence — what in Enneagram theory is usually called “the Centers”:

• The Head Center, which is about thinking and plans and figuring out what to do. When Essence shines through it, its function is awareness and clarity (in the sense of clear perception and clear understanding).

• The Heart Center, which is about value, preciousness, connection with others, love, and honesty. Its Essential expression is of inherent worth, innocence, and belonging.

• The Gut Center, which is about action and will and power. Essential Gut energy shows up as vivid presence, ease, naturally right action, and a simplicity of being.

I think these Centers are pretty intuitive. We talk about people being “in their heads” or really “heart-centered” or “open-hearted”. We at least used to say that someone’s “got guts” when they can take action in the face of fear, and that has a slightly different tone than saying the “have courage” (from French “cœur”, meaning “heart”).

The idea is that while each Essence is unique and grows up in a unique context, and therefore will create a unique personality, there are still some general trends. We can observe those trends by looking at how Essence sort of plugs the Centers into the automated machine that is a reactive personality.

When we examine personality from this angle, we can see something like types of personality design. It’s a bit like how different can openers might feel quite different to use, but the basic strategy is still to press a blade into the edge of a can lid. Its functional design is basically different from that of a knife, even though they both cut.

So the same way it’s helpful to have a mental category of “can openers” that’s different from “knives”, it can be helpful to have some mental categories for personality design.

Deriving the nine types

We can use the three Centers to derive the nine personality designs that the Enneagram focuses on.

If Essence focuses on just one Center for designing its mech suit, then you end up with what’s called a “primary type”. So you get a primary Head type, a primary Heart type, and a primary Gut type. The primary types are thus something like pure expressions of how each of the Centers behave when they’re used to toxically mimic Essence:

• Without Essence, the Head Center can’t see clearly and can’t serve as a source of orientation or guidance. This generates a lot of fear. That fear gets used to stir thoughts, which are mostly pointed at finding external sources of guidance (to replace the internal guidance of Essence). This is pattern 6 up above. (I’ll explain the numbering shortly.)

• Without Essence, the Heart Center creates a feeling of abandonment and shame. It cannot radiate with a sense of inherent value from within. So the personality machinery seeks value in external expressions instead. The way a distorted Head Center uses fear to generate thoughts, a distorted Heart Center uses shame to generate feelings. Those feelings drive action toward getting reflections from outside sources about the person’s value and nature. This is pattern 3.

• Without Essence, the Gut Center feels violated, which generates rage. That rage creates tension (the same way fear creates thoughts in the Head and shame creates feelings in the Heart). The result is fragmentation and enormous pressure. Issues of energy and resistance become very central. Actions become mechanical and the personality actively resists forces that try to change those actions. (Contrast with the attuned dance of mother and infant synching up, or two lovers dancing together.) This is pattern 9.

So those are the primary types.

We get six secondary types by starting with one Center and somewhat involving a secondary Center in the mechanical personality design:

• Gut with some Heart (pattern 1)

• Gut with some Head (pattern 8)

• Heart with some Gut (pattern 2)

• Heart with some Head (pattern 4)

• Head with some Heart (pattern 5)

• Head with some Gut (pattern 7)

Now it’s possible to put the nine designs on a circle, at which point the numbering scheme makes a bit more sense:

This is the eponymous “enneagram” (nine-sided figure). Ignore the inner lines for now; they’re the topic of a post’s worth of discussion, and we don’t need them to understand or use the system.

The circle can be split into three regions based on which Center is most involved:

You can think of it as, we specify the regions of the circle by Center, and put the primary types in the middle of each corresponding region. Then if we sort of “lean” a primary type toward a secondary Center, that creates a secondary type.

So for instance, type 1 is what you get when you start with the primary Gut type (9) and “lean” a little toward distorting the Heart. So pattern 1 is defined by tension and forceful action focused on questions of value and worth — hence the type One emphasis on right & wrong and perfectionism.

Themes from the Centers

This bit about “leaning” can be used to explain where the nine themes I listed up above come from. Like how pattern 1 is about perfection. Here’s the logic:

• Of the Gut types:

  • When Essence withdraws from the Gut, the action is tension and resistance — the opposite of harmony, even though it’s used to try to mimic harmony. Hence pattern 9’s theme of peace.

  • Essence withdrawn from the Heart results in questions of value. When lack of peace get pointed at questions of conditional worth, the focus becomes about how to suppress evil and fight for good to arise. This yields 1’s theme of perfection.

  • Essence pulled away from the Head creates distorted vision and lack of orientation. Pointing lack of peace at the question of how to orient creates a forceful “carve your own path” kind of focus. Thus 8’s theme of power.

• Of the Heart types:

  • Pattern 3 most purely expresses Heart without Essence: value comes from external reflections. Thus the theme of achievement.

  • Adding a dash of distorted Gut focuses on how to achieve (and get your value reflected back to you) via forced effort. This creates pattern 2’s theme of love, emphasizing the way in which “love” is a verb.

  • Instead adding a bit of distorted Head results in trying to figure out how to achieve reflections of value (in a way that’s divorced from the Gut’s domain of action). The immensely internal and personal theme of preciousness for pattern 4 comes from this one.

• Of the Head types:

  • Non-Essential Head can’t orient on its own and seeks external guidance, but can’t tell which external guidance to trust. This defines pattern 6’s theme of safety: how do you find a sure thing to rely on?

  • An abandoned Head with a dash of Heart distortion means seeking safety in some externally perceived sense of conditional value (and as with 4, in a way that’s divorced from action due to not involving the Gut). This creates an at-arms-length mental examination pattern, i.e., type 5’s theme of understanding from afar.

  • Instead adding some Gut distortion means seeking safety through forceful action. The ability to move freely the way thoughts can move overwhelms the strategy here. Thus pattern 7’s theme of freedom.

Here I’m emphasizing the themes from the negative side. I could just as well have emphasized the positive sides — what it’s like for Essence to skillfully use each combo.

But as I said earlier, I think the main benefit of the Enneagram is actually how it’s a map of suffering. It’s certainly good to know what you’re aiming for! But you don’t create the Essential qualities by trying for them.

My hope is to talk more about how to use the Enneagram this way in a future post. But for now I’ll focus on tying up some loose ends:

Some leftover questions

You might wonder why we start counting with the Gut-with-some-Heart type as “pattern 1” and go Heart-wise. Why start there? Why not start with a primary type? And given that we’re starting with a secondary type, why not move toward the middle of its own Center’s triad?

The short answer is, I don’t know. No one talks about this choice as far as I know. It’s simply the convention. It’s an extremely universal convention in the Enneagram, so it’s what I’m going to keep using.

Second, you might wonder what’s up with all those lines in the middle of the diagram. That’s a good question. I’m hoping to dig into it in a future post. It’s actually the main reason why I started writing a post about the Enneagram to begin with: the situation with these lines is a wonderful case study of scientific logic. (I just realized I needed to give a lot of context first, and that the context works better as its own post.)

The short answer for what’s going on with the lines is: people think they know why they’re there, and what they say might turn out to have some value, but it’s also clear that basically no one knows what they’re talking about here. If they’re right about what the lines mean, it’s because they’re repeating something they’ve been told that was once worked out somehow. The reasoning doesn’t seem to have survived.

Third, why are the only two options for personality design (a) involve one Center or (b) involve a main Center and a secondary Center? Why can’t there be two equally involved Centers? Why can’t there be some of all three Centers?

You actually can have a pattern with all three Centers, but it doesn’t create a separate personality type. Once you’ve specified the first two Centers, you’ve determined the Enneagram type. Involving the third Center means that the personality has become so thick that Essence doesn’t shine through basically at all. It’s a state of immense psychological dysfunction — stuff like being suicidal, homicidal, schizoid, catatonic, etc. (The details of which dysfunction depend on the Enneagram type.)

“Wings”

As to why you can’t have two Centers equally involved… well, this is basically a flat assertion on the part of the theory. Some Center will be primary. In principle we could maybe find someone who really is running something that’s equally (say) type 1 and type 2 strategies. But in practice it’s usually anti-helpful to think of this situation as being possible. It’ll tend to mislead you about where your suffering is.

That said, it’s often helpful to view personalities as having a “wing”: usually someone whose personality is mostly of one type will still borrow heavily from one of the two adjacent types. Like a slightly 5-flavored 6 would be called “a Six with a Five wing” (or “6w5”). This is a personality that’s mostly about pure safety (i.e. Head issues) but will sometimes systematically add a bit of Heart distortion.

When a personality is of a secondary type and its wing is from a different triad, that basically means the personality sometimes switches which Center is its main focus. So for instance, an Eight with a Seven wing (8w7) mostly withdraws Essence from the Gut but also involves the Head. But at times the priority switches: the Head gets so involved that the personality sort of “pops” into a Seven pattern temporarily.

However! An 8w7 and a 7w8 are notably different. Their lives will look different. 8w7 is still basically an Eight, their life defined by themes of power. 7w8 is still basically a Seven, focused on freedom and stimulation. In practice it’s helpful to view these as very different types even if they have a structural similarity. (E.g. they’re both powerhouse types, arguably the two most aggressive and energetic of the Enneagram.)

I don’t think Enneagram theory says why this discrete difference should be the case. But I do find the tool more useful if I kind of go along with the claim.

What’s next

Hopefully the above acts as a good introduction/overview of the system. I doubt it’s enough to get a really rich feel for each of the nine types. But if you want to dig into the Enneagram more, hopefully this framework will help highlight the right things.

If you take just one impression from this whole post, I hope it’s this:

The point being, if we understand what’s going on, we might be able to observe how we’re recreating our suffering in real time, and then do something different in the moment. The tool is meant to be useful, not just a cute framework for classifying people.

I see this point missed so, so often with this tool. Basically everyone who gets into the Enneagram starts trying to classify everyone by what type they are and then explain all interactions within the framework. That kind of play can be helpful, especially to get familiar with a new toy. But I think it tends to do something unkind when used this way.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. That’s one of the topics I want to talk about in a future post: how to use the Enneagram well, and what some common pitfalls are, and how I think we might avoid them.

There’s also a question of how valid the system is. That question deserves some attention. I think we, collectively, are pretty incoherent when talking about models of subjective experience and what affects our behaviors. We mix up science and engineering all the time without noticing, which leaves us collectively very confused about what’s even real. I see what I think is a better way to explore this domain. The Enneagram is a case study I happen to know quite a lot about, so I might use it to demonstrate what I mean.

I also want to talk about those inner lines. Like I mentioned earlier, that’s actually what had me start writing this post to begin with. I just noticed that I needed to give all this context to even start talking about the inner lines. I think they’re interesting because their history is a fantastic example of pre-scientific engineering, only it’s about engineering subjectivity. I hope to explain what I mean by that and why it’s interesting.

I also hope to name something general about “subjective structures”. It’s unclear whether that’ll be an Enneagram-specific post though. I consider self-deception as a telepathic defense to be an example of a subjective structure, and it’s not at all dependent on personality type.

But maybe most pragmatically, I have several things to say about how to use the Enneagram. I’ve found it personally quite touching. It helped massively expand my sense of how varied people are, and it improved several of my closest relationships. It also made me more annoying in some of my relationships due to misuse of the tool. I’m hoping I can help folk benefit from my own experiences with the Enneagram.

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(You can read part 2 of the Enneagram series here.)

This is a lightly edited article I originally wrote on Less Wrong back in October 2024. I think it’s a great example of “subjective science”, i.e., seeking & testing good explanations of subjective phenomena (as opposed to insisting on objective data or statistics). The core idea is one I want to refine and build on within my Substack. I also imagine my readers who aren’t on Less Wrong might like to see it. So rather than quietly backdating the article the way I have with most of my others, I’m re-posting this one.

Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.

You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke. And now she’s furious with you.

Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.

She tells you to say you're sorry.

You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.

And she narrows her eyes in suspicion.

"You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."

Now you have a serious problem. You don't have an internal "actually mean it" button. And yet here's Mom peering into your soul and demanding that you both have that button and press it. Trying to appease her didn't work. She needs you to be different — and she's checking.

What can you do now?

This is a template for what I've come to call "the hostile telepaths problem". I think it's a common feature of social problems. The hostile telepaths problem is when you're dealing with a being (a) who apparently can kind of read your internal experiences and (b) whom you don't trust won't make your situation worse due to what they find in you.

There are lots of solutions to the hostile telepaths problem. I don't claim to know all of them. But recognizing some common ones has helped clarify a lot of my thinking — particularly around self-deception and akrasia1.

And getting very clear on the nature of the problem makes identifying real solutions way easier. This fact produces some previously-surprising-to-me predictions, especially for trauma processing and for making emotionally difficult decisions.

I'll try to spell out what I mean with some theory and a few examples.

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Newcomblike self-deception

There's one really tricky solution to the hostile telepaths problem. It deserves some special front-loaded attention before I name some other solutions.

Here I'll try to spell out its logic with a modification of Newcomb's Problem.2

Suppose that instead of the usual infallible Omega character, you're dealing with Omega-V. Omega-V is an extremely good but imperfect predictor of someone's box choice.

Through some clever sleuthing, you deduce why. Omega-V is scanning only folks' visual thinking for a little while prior to their box choice. It's extremely good at tracking the difference between the mental visualizations of one-boxers vs. two-boxers… provided they don't know Omega-V is scanning specifically their visual thinking.

So now you have an edge. Maybe you can trick Omega-V. Maybe you can visually think like a one-boxer and use other modes of reasoning (like inner talk) to plan on actually two-boxing. You just have to be very careful to have any "leaks" of reasoning into visualization look totally normal for a one-boxer.

If you decide it's worth the risk to try for this deception, the visual reasoning part of your mind has to be kind of siloed from the rest. It's like you have a subagent that truly honestly believes you're a one-boxer. It's the non-visual reasoning parts of you that are aware of the real plan.

Another way of saying this is: in normal Newcomb's Problem, you can't tell whether (a) you're in the real world being faced with Omega's offer or if (b) you're instead Omega's simulation of real-you and you're revealing what real-you will do. The situation is similar with Omega-V, but in this case it's specifically your visual reasoner (viewed as kind of a subagent) that has to be built in such a way that it can't tell whether it's a simulation. Many other parts of you can tell perfectly well what's going on!3 But for the deception to work, the way in which you plan on two-boxing cannot be something your inner visual reasoner can even deduce.

Now, let's take this one step further.

Let's suppose we're instead dealing with Omega-C. Also an imperfect predictor. But this time you learn that Omega-C scans specifically all of — and only — your conscious thinking.

At this point, the right strategy is to consciously decide you're going to one-box.

But some people still find themselves two-boxing and winning. Even while consciously intending to one-box. Sometimes they get confused and say the wrong thing or push the wrong button. Some of them trip and accidentally grab both boxes. Some laugh and grab both boxes and find them both full.

Assuming that at least some of those outcomes are strategic… how?

Hint: now you (by which I mean conscious parts of you) are maybe the siloed part. Basically an illusion meant to trick Omega-C.

The thing is, you cannot tell. Because if you could, then the deception — if it were there — wouldn't work.

Which is to say: on the inside, you cannot tell the difference between running this Omega-C deception strategy and honestly truly just being a one-boxer.

And furthermore, it's actually to your advantage not to check. Even if you were to find some way of being able to tell the difference!

But because of that, if you're aware of this deception strategy, it might work best if you honestly (from your perspective) look for some way to tell if you're running it. Actively trying to "come clean". That's a pretty powerful signal to Omega-C that you really are a one-boxer.

So if you can make it so that it seems to you like you really are looking, including accounting for awareness of possible non-conscious "shadow" reasoning, and you find none, but you still two-box in the end…

…well, you win!

…while the conscious parts of you are confused and surprised. And possibly quite dismayed.

Sketch of a real-world version

I call this pattern "Newcomblike self-deception" as a nod to Nate Soares' point that Newcomblike problems are the norm.

The deal is that people are kind of telepathic, in the sense of using things like vocal tone and body language and microexpressions and so on to intuitively deduce what might otherwise be hidden in others. They're scanning for things like intent and strategy and emotional tone. Often this telepathy is in service of synching up ("Hey, you seem upset, is something wrong?"), but it doubles as threat detection.

This telepathy is imperfect. Which means that sometimes Newcomblike self-deception is in fact a viable strategy.

I'd like to name one way I think this type of self-deception can actually happen in a person. It might be the main way it happens, or it might be rare. I honestly don't know. But it's one I've in fact seen in myself4 and I think I've observed in some others.

By some mysterious method, it's possible to contract your awareness — by which I mean, the space of things you're actually aware of can be smaller than the space of sensory inputs (including mental experiences like thoughts and memories). Lots of people experience this when watching TV (losing awareness of the room), or when deep in flow work (not noticing hunger for hours while programming).

If you construct a sort of fake self in your mind, and then contract your awareness around that fake self, it can seem to you on the inside like you really are the way depicted in the fake self. Like it's not fake, it really is who you are.

If you also build up explanations to your fictitious self about why things outside that fiction either are consistent with it or don't matter, then you both (a) can honestly display to hostile telepaths that you (here meaning fake you) are being fully sincere in not hiding anything and (b) possibly give the telepaths ways of discounting the unavoidable signals that you (here meaning you holistically) are hiding something.

For instance, as a child whose mother says to you "Say you're sorry and mean it", you might be able to strategically misinterpret your fear of Mom's Wrath as "being really sorry". As long as you're not aware that that's what you're doing, it might work very well! She might read your distress as you really meaning it. ("I'm sorry I'm sorry I won't do it again please Mom I'm sorry…!") And you can keep yourself from being aware of this whole strategy by keeping your awareness contracted on the fictitious version of yourself that's "bad" and "very sorry", and keeping your understanding of the real problem outside of your awareness.

Possible examples in real life

Here are some examples I think I've actually seen — in culture, in others, and in myself:

• I think the thing with kids that I sketched above really does happen. More generally, I think similar applications of Newcomblike self-deception are the root cause of (a certain very common kind of) shame: it's a strategic mislabeling of one's pain as being about one's "flaws".

• Relatedly, lots of folk mislabel their experience as "I hate math." Most people I've talked to who say this actually hate the coercion and gaslighting used almost universally in math classes. The real problems most folk are focused on in math class are social, like "Appease the teacher" and "Get Mom & Dad off my back." But teachers and parents might insist to a student that "you need to try harder" with the math itself while seeming to sort of telepathically scan them for whether they are in fact trying. I think this can sometimes lead students to strategically mislabel their distress about the situation to themselves.

• Gurus getting involved in sex scandals. I'm sure that at least some of them have been very sincere about what amounts to real Jungian shadow work. But somehow all that sincerity mysteriously ends up hiding and serving (instead of revealing and dealing with) an underlying drive to just get laid.

• Likewise people "accidentally" cheating. Sometimes folk really are just surprising-to-them vulnerable in some situation and don't have the right kind of discipline when they turn out to need it. But the fact that that ever happens can act as a cover. It's especially obvious in cases of repeated "accidental" cheating.

• I've seen four friends, as mothers, stay with and defend abusive partners (boyfriends or husbands) for years. She'd often insist that he's just stressed, or it's a frequent misunderstanding but they love each other, etc. In three cases it became possible for her to consider that he might be abusive after a change in her work gave her enough money to support herself and her child without him if need be. In the fourth case, the mother got a lot of social support such as a place to live and people she trusted to take care of her and her child, and then she had room to acknowledge her partner's actions as abusive.

• If I'm upset with a friend and I'm worried that they can't handle what I'm upset with them about, sometimes I can't think straight about what my problem with them is while I'm talking to them. My mind gets foggy, my concepts seem mushy even to me, the words I remember from journaling about it before now form what feels like a gibberish argument, etc. Often this fog suddenly clears up if I get a vivid sense from my friend that our friendship will be fine after we talk. It also gets clearer if the issue is so big that I realize I'm fine with them not being in my life after we talk.

• Badly wanting someone to like you can make them like you less. So how do you get them to like you? Not by being aware that you're asking that question! But maybe if you do things for them without knowing that's why you're doing them…? ("Oh, I forgot Bob likes sushi! I just got some because I felt like it, honest!") And maybe if you add an extra dose of self-loathing ("God, I'm being a creep, aren't I? I always do that!") you can pass Omega-C's others' scrutiny here by eliciting care & concern when you might otherwise get caught.

I'm not trying to be exhaustive here. There are tons more examples.

Other solutions to the problem

We can't actually penetrate our own Newcomblike self-deception without having another viable (to us) strategy for dealing with hostile telepath problems.

However, if we do have another strategy in a given instance, then in that instance it can be safe to look. The self-deception can lift.

Gaining independence

One alternative strategy type is, coming to trust that you're able to handle the consequences of being accurately seen.

Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough independence (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.

I think a lot of "trauma processing" amounts to this “gaining independence” strategy. But it's more like, noticing you already have independence. I bet a lot of foundational self-deception habits come from being a child faced with telepaths (adults) who have a lot of power over them. A kid who deals with Mother's "Say sorry and mean it" demand with self-deception might then grow up to become really apologetic and "have low self-esteem". But it's just an old strategy for dealing with Mother that hasn't made contact with the fact that Mother isn't that powerful over them anymore. It's now actually just fine for her to know they're not "really sorry". If this raw physical truth comes into contact with the impulse to "be sorry", the mental firewall might simply collapse, and the mislabeling will stop.

So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have independence. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults. They can just know your internal state, and you (trust that you) can handle the consequences of them knowing.

Building emotional resilience is like this, I think. If you (trust that you) can handle the emotional and somatic sensations of others being upset with you, then you don't have to hide the parts of you that might make them upset. They can just be upset. While you might not like it, you know you'll be fine.

(Not to say anything about what's ultimately good to do here. Caring about others' reactions totally makes sense for other reasons, like the health of the community we're in. Here I'm focusing specifically on what can solve the hostile telepaths problem without self-deception.)

Occlumency

Another solution type is occlumency. Which is to say, if you trust you can keep your real goals and/or strategies hidden from a hostile telepath even if you consciously know what your goals/strategies are, then it's safe to consciously know them.

(This is something like switching from Omega-C to Omega-V.)

A classic example is in WWII when Nazis come knocking and ask if you're harboring any Jews. The analog of one-boxing here is just not harboring Jews. Newcomblike self-deception doesn't seem plausible to me here. You very much don't have the power to handle the consequences of being caught "two-boxing". So if you're helping refugees, you probably have to lie convincingly. And if self-deception were a plausible strategy here, you wouldn't need it to the extent that you trust your ability to hide the truth from the Nazis even if you know the truth.

I think many psychopaths5 use occlumency quite a lot. I've met some who know full well that they're trying to manipulate others and are presenting a façade to do so. It works for them in part because they don't send implicit distress signals around thinking they're bad for being manipulative: they're not nervous, so they don't need to explain their nervousness away.

There's a moral tangle here. Honesty is important for connection, integrity, and communal health. But you might not trust that it's safe to reveal the truth to a hostile telepath.6 In this case, the moral injunction not to lie makes occlumency harder (because of fear of being caught, plus doubt about whether you should be using occlumency at all). This situation can leave self-deception as your only viable solution — which, incidentally, means you're still not being honest!

I think this means that if you care both about (a) wholesomeness and (b) ending self-deception, it's helpful to give yourself full permission to lie as a temporary measure as needed. Creating space for yourself so you can (say) coherently build independence such that it's safe for you to eventually be fully honest.

Solution space is maybe vast

I've named three solutions to the hostile telepaths problem:

• Newcomblike self-deception

• Gaining independence

• Occlumency

These aren't the only ones. A pretty simple one is just running away and avoiding them. Another is investigating whether the telepaths are in fact hostile and discovering they're not (if that's true). Yet another is to jam telepathic scans with emotional charge that backs privacy norms. ("It's none of your business whether I 'really am' sorry!")

The important part isn't that we have a full taxonomy. That might be helpful, I don't know. The important part, as far as I'm concerned, is that by being very clear about what problem we're solving, we can tell when something is — and is not — a solution.

Ending the need for self-deception

By this model, to end (Newcomblike) self-deception, we have to remove the need for it. This means solving each instance of the hostile telepath problem some other way.

This is kind of tricky in practice. When you use self-deception to deal with a hostile telepath, you can't know that that's what you're doing. You7 can't even know which hostile telepath problem you're solving! So how do you come up with another solution?

I don't have a provably general answer, but I have a pretty general approach that makes sense to me and has clearly worked several times. I'll share that approach here.

Welcome self-deception

First is welcoming that I'll self-deceive.

But this isn't "Well, I'm going to do it anyway, so I might as well be okay with it." That's nonsense: you probably can't just "be okay" with it. And trying probably makes the problem worse!8

I mean something more wholehearted. If I self-deceive, it's because it's the best solution I have to some hostile telepath problem. If I don't have a better solution, then I want to keep deceiving myself. I don't just tolerate it. I actively want it there. I'll fight to keep it there!

This is somewhat akin to dealing with Omega-C by saying:

Look, I know it's possible I'm running a deception strategy. I could spend a bunch of energy trying to suss it out as a costly signal that it's not there. But at a policy level I'm just not going to do that. Not because I have evidence that I'm not following up on, but because I don't want to add stress to myself in the world where I really am self-deceiving. Since I'm doing this regardless of whether the deception strategy is running, it's not information about whether I'm secretly trying to two-box.

This relieves pressure. If I have some sense that I'm self-deceiving, and my attitude is to back the deception instead of trying to penetrate it, then the hidden-to-me part of me running the deception doesn't have to engage in an internal arms race with me. We become same-sided.

Look away when directed to

Once I really back my own self-deception, it becomes easier to notice signs I'm doing it.

This works way better if I trust my occlumency skills here. If I don't feel like I have to reveal the self-deceptions I notice to others, and I trust that I can and will hide it from others if need be, then I'm still safe from hostile telepaths.

Seeing where I self-deceive doesn't mean I see what the deception is. In practice it's more indirect than that. What I mean are things like:

• Revealed preferences. (Akin to noticing I two-boxed "by accident".)

• My mind suddenly going foggy.

• Forgetting what I was thinking about.

• Mental chatter getting loud.

• Suddenly being very disinterested in what I was just focused on.

• Getting abruptly absorbed in something unrelated.

• My attention scattering.

• Losing awareness of my body, or parts of my body, or my body drives (like hunger).

• Body activation signs: holding my breath, tensing my shoulders, quickened speech, etc.

• Energy crash or getting really sleepy. (Like a freeze response.)

• A sudden addictive impulse.

• I feel shame, inadequacy, or otherwise think I'm broken or flawed or bad in some way.

• Etc.

I don't mean this as an exhaustive list. Nor do I mean it as things to look out for. Nor do I mean that these always imply that self-deception is going on.

What I mean is, there are things a person does to maintain self-deception. If you basically promise the strategic not-conscious-to-you part that you really will respect the strategy, then it doesn't have to keep you so firmly out of the loop. Then you can potentially start picking up on some signposts like these ones.

Part of the deal is, when you notice such a possible signpost, you look away. You notice it and you drop the inquiry. Because until you have a non-self-deceptive strategy for whatever the real problem is, you don't want to break the one strategy you have.

For instance, sometimes I'll think about responding to an email… and I start getting sleepy. If I push, I start wanting to watch YouTube. These are signs that something in me doesn't trust it's safe for me to look there. Maybe it involves a decision that requires me to ask myself an unsafe question. I don't know — and I don't try to figure it out. At least not right away. Instead I back off and direct my attention elsewhere. Maybe I go cook something, or take a walk. I consciously distract myself from the tension point.

In my experience, this alone can often eliminate most of the stress involved in self-deception. It becomes fine. Annoying, glitchy, but no longer fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.

Hypothesize without checking

After a while I kind of get a "negative space" sense of what the self-deception is about. I continue not to look, out of something like respect. But I still have a hint.

Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!

…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.

Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?

For instance, let's suppose the person is asking for me to run an event this weekend. I might hypothesize like this, intentionally referring to myself in third person:

Maybe Michael doesn't actually want to do it, but he's scared that letting them know will make them think he's actually uninterested in them in general, which might have them closing opportunities he wants with them in the future.

Importantly, I am not introspectively checking. I'm not asking if I think the above really is what's going on with me. I'm just noticing that, viewing myself in third person, this model does seem to fit the evidence.

I'm also not trying to construct a plan to verify what's going on! Here Nature wants her secrets kept. I do not try to peek under her skirt.

Instead, I notice what Michael (i.e., me in third person) in this hypothetical could maybe do instead of Newcomblike self-deception. What would be a viable alternative strategy for him?

Maybe Michael could meditate on their possible disapproval, and come up with a plan for what happens next in which he's okay. (Building independence.)

At this point I could just implement this possible solution. I don't have to check if it's relevant to my situation: there's not much cost in leaving myself a line of retreat this way.

If it turns out there's been Newcomblike self-deception going on, and if this hypothetical solution really did resolve the core problem that the self-deception was solving, then the self-deception should basically just lift.9

And if I still have an ugh field around the email, then I haven't addressed the real problem yet. Which is fine. Not ideal, but I'm still going to back any self-deception that might be there while I don't have a better option!

I can repeat this process. Hypothesize without checking, implement solutions that would work in the hypothetical, and find out what happens.

…at least unless and until I start getting frozen about this process. That might mean I'm getting too close to understanding the strategy before it's safe to do so.

Then I back off.

Does this solve self-deception?

I don't know.

I didn't originally set out to make sense of self-deception. I was just trying to understand why people sometimes view themselves as flawed and in need of fixing.

It just turned out that that question was tied to a lot of others. Self-deception being one of them. A lot of them unified by considering the problem of hostile telepaths.

It seems worth noting that a bunch of the method I describe here — particularly the "hypothesize without checking" part — is derived. It amounted to a prediction that I tested and discovered worked as the model anticipated.

Likewise, occlumency being helpful. There might be other explanations for why getting better at privacy makes more thoughts thinkable. But I derived it from this explanation. And, again, occlumency (anecdotally) seems to have worked as predicted.

These approaches work remarkably well on many kinds of shame too, by the way. I might write a separate post on shame. Its logic is a bit different, but with a few adjustments I've found that lots of shame dissolves extremely well in contact with these ideas.

With all that said, I don't think I'm in a position to say that I've solved self-deception. I don't know how I could know that. I'm not even convinced I've solved Newcomblike self-deception! My method seems plausibly general, but I don't have even the sketch of a necessity argument yet.

So, more work needed.

Summary

It seems to me that self-deception is solving a real problem. If we don't solve that real problem differently in a given instance, then in that instance we can't stop self-deceiving.

It seems to me that the real problem is (at least sometimes) hostile telepaths.

When I view hostile telepaths as the real problem I'm trying to solve, the perspective suggests what alternative solutions might look like, and it lets me check whether a given approach even can work as a solution.

And it seems to me that when I implement those alternative solutions, the result is sometimes that self-deception visibly falls away, non-mysteriously. It becomes obvious to me what was going on, and why.

I don't know if this model captures all cases of what we might want to call "self-deception". Maybe it does. But my impression is that it at least captures some cases that matter, and quite a lot of them.

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Here’s the gist:

Lots of people keep snapping between two modes. One is a kind of

TRY REALLY HARD PUSH PUSH GO GO GOTTA GET THIS DONE

And the other is more slumped. Exhausted, collapsed, face flat against the floor.

It’s often super helpful to view these as something like build-in modes for your body. But they’re very simple, and on their own they don’t let you function at a very high level.

Like, when people exercise really hard, they’re often pushing themselves into that tryhard mode, and then end up dead exhausted in their recovery. I often want to refer to this strategy as turning into “a bag of bones”.

There’s a third… mode, I’ll call it, but it’s special. I learned it in my martial arts training as “living relaxation” (in contrast to “dead relaxation”, which is what we called the collapsed/slumped thing).

At first it can feel like a balance of the built-in pair, where you’re deeply calm and relaxed but also quite alert and ready for action. But it really is a third thing. It comes to encompass the other two. When that happens, dead relaxation becomes deep rest and trying hard becomes vivid vitality.

The experience of living relaxation is often one of suffusing everything with breath. Collapsing can feel breathless, like you’re dead on the couch. But if you breathe deeply while there, you get more life. Literally more air. Instead of being exhausted, you can just be. It’s restful.

Likewise, explosive effort done with breath is very powerful. It feels like firebending looks in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”.

The deal is, you’ve gotta build up your skill with living relaxation. It doesn’t just happen automatically the way the other two do.

I think this is the same thing Stephen Porges was pointing at when he came up with polyvagal theory. (That’s the basic theory behind almost everyone’s ideas these days around “healing from trauma” and “somatic processing”.) The idea is that your nervous system has these two main branches, the excitement/fight-or-flight system (SNS) and the calming down, restorative system (PSNS). The latter is governed by the longest nerve in your body, the vagus nerve, which supposedly has multiple branches. (Hence “poly-vagal”.) One branch, running a bit more toward the back (“dorsal” in anatomical terms), is responsible for the dead relaxation mode. The branch that’s a bit forward (“ventral”) is responsible for living relaxation.

There’s a lot to say about this theory. It’s popular for a reason. It’s also highly questionable as a literal description of what’s going on. But in practice, if you use the idea as a guide for how to interact with your lived experience of your body, it works.

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One of the big claims in polyvagal theory is that both the SNS and the dorsal vagus branch are built-in. They’re fully formed when you’re born. They’re very old in terms of evolution. But the ventral branch of the vagus nerve is quite new and is fundamentally social. It has to be “myelinated”. In practical terms that means it has to learn. We aren’t born with living relaxation as an accessible state. Instead we develop it in contact with others and by becoming more conscious throughout our lives.

…or we don’t! Or our learning is scattered. There are lots of possibilities. But in practice, lots of people — possibly most? — don’t develop very much living relaxation. So they end up snapping back and forth between the two other modes. Coffee and alcohol, work ‘til exhausted and then flop in front of Netflix. That oscillation keeps people reactive at a very basic animal level. And it’s also quite exhausting! Very hard on a human body.

Without living relaxation, the way an animal deals with having vastly too much sensation is to have the “dead relaxation” mode sort of lock the high-charge fight-or-flight energy under a lid. This is the “freeze response”.

I see this all the time with people who find exercise miserable. Working out can feel glorious, even while challenging. But if you’re stuck in a sort of low-grade emergency “play dead” mode all the time, then trying to lift weights or whatever will feel awful and exhausting, and it’ll often create nausea.

I liken this state to having “blown a fuse”. If you get too much tryhard energy (SNS) blasting through you, it’s a bit like having too much voltage passing through a circuit. That’ll often pop something fragile in the system, causing it to suddenly become a poor conductor of electric current. That’s basically what a fuse is: it’s an intentionally fragile part of a circuit that keeps more precious and harder-to-fix parts from breaking first under extreme conditions.

Hence my talking about the metaphor of “channeling lightning” as a possible replacement for language like “trauma processing”.

In practice, lots of (maybe most?) people operate in an ongoing “blown fuse” mode. Irene Lyon calls it “functional freeze”. It’s a state of partial numbness where you can still kind of move your body through the motions of taking care of some things, but everything is kind of grey and heavy and difficult. It can be hard to get riled up about things, but at the same time it can feel like being constantly agitated or on the edge. The mind tends to be a bit foggy all the time in this state.

The deal is that all that tryhard (SNS) energy is sort of pent up under the “blown fuse” thing. It’s like having a bow drawn, ready to fire. It’s quite stressful on the bow to hold that position for a long time.

The theory is that this is an ancient survival strategy. It’s why rabbits go slack and play dead when in the jaws of a wolf. The switch from terror to horror is because the fight-or-flight strategy can’t work: the rabbit can’t win in a fight, and it can’t get away. So instead it kind of stores all that explosive SNS energy (instead of, say, exciting the wolf by struggling). If the predator sets the rabbit down and gets distracted, then BAM! All that energy can fire, like releasing the bowstring, and the prey can suddenly fly away.

One trouble with humans in particular is, we can kind of carry our “predators” around with us in our heads. We can stress about what we need to take care of, or ruminate on what’s going to happen as a result of our past actions. We can also contemplate our inevitable deaths. This is intensely stressful — and it’s one reason why focusing on the present moment can be so calming and freeing.

The thing is, all of that functional-freeze behavior is a patch. It’s based on an old strategy for dealing with SNS overwhelm. We borrowed it from the way that many animals deal with situations where they’re trapped. But at least they can usually let it go and forget about it afterwards! They’re not embedded in time the way we are.

There’s a much newer strategy (on evolutionary timescales) for dealing with all that excess energy. It’s based on this living relaxation.

So let me show you how this strategy can work:

Take a moment to remember the space around you. You’re looking at a screen, right? (Or maybe a page, if you printed this out. My household likes to do that with essays we want to talk about.) It’s pretty common to lose track of your surroundings when reading something. I often think of this as sort of coagulating my awareness by pushing it into things.

What happens if you just… notice that there’s space around you? Between your face and these words? Above you is a ceiling, or the sky. Behind you is… whatever is behind you. Just take a moment and notice.

Some people get stuck on a sort of zoomed-in version of this process. It’s like the focal point of their attention zips around like a laser pointer. So they notice the ceiling, and then the wall behind them, and then the distance between their face and the page… but they still get surprised if I mention their toes. Instead of relaxing awareness so that it springs to being vast, they end up sort of “pushing” it out with concentrated attention.

In case it helps: think of it like using your peripheral vision. If you look at a distant spot, like some particular part of a wall or a specific leaf on a tree, you can probably see the whole object without moving your eyes. The whole wall or tree or whatever. You’re doing that by taking in lots of your peripheral vision all at once.

Or how about looking at a vista? When you see a view from up high, like looking down at a forest, what’s so striking about it? It’s not just that you can choose a lot of little things to look at. For me it’s the vastness itself that stands out. What am I using to see the vastness? I use something like peripheral vision, or peripheral awareness. I see the bigness of it by taking it in kind of all at once.

I claim that when you’re taking it all in like this, you’re engaging a glimmer of living relaxation. It should feel like your breath wants to change. Not like when you get tensed up, and not like when you suddenly get tired and want to take a nap. Something else. Something calm yet inspiring.

On a very simple level, living relaxation builds just by practicing it. It’s quite normal to forget about your toes even though I just mentioned them a few paragraphs above. Why? Well, we’re used to switching to the tryhard/collapse oscillation. Living relaxation is like having good tone in our postural muscles: until we’ve worked those supports well, we’ll tend to slump into “bad posture” when we’re not focusing on doing something else.

…though I want to poke at that framing a bit. I say “bad posture” because it immediately conveys the main point I want to say. But it adds something I’d now like to remove. “Bad posture” isn’t bad. It’s what our bodies very intelligently do with the resources they have. We slump forward while working at a computer because without enough living relaxation, there’s no way to “unify the body”. There’s a tendency to focus on the task that’s kind of inside the computer, and to drop awareness of most of the body. So the body has to get good at managing sort of on its own while you work in a highly mental way. “Bad posture” here is extremely intelligent: it’s the body’s best adaptation to that situation. And it might be perfectly fine for the life you want to live!

That said, in my experience most people do in fact change their posture, and feel better for it, as a result of developing living relaxation. They change how they sit at the computer for instance. But that’s not because there’s some kind of “correct posture” that everyone should be doing. It’s that living relaxation expands your resources and capacities. So you don’t have to leave your body to fend for itself so much. It can be healthier even when you sit for hours hammering away at a keyboard.

(I mean, here I am writing a weekly blog! I’m very much speaking from experience here.)

Anyway, back to the main topic.

Living relaxation is a skill. It grows slowly over time. And like any skill, you grow it by meeting challenges close to the edge of your capacity.

A lot of “trauma processing” emphasizes what strikes me as soothing. Being gentle with yourself and letting your system come to rest.

I think that’s really good, particularly if people haven’t allowed themselves to rest. But when you’re not practiced with living relaxation, it’s very hard to tell the difference between resting while full of breath versus being breathlessly collapsed. So you can end up sort of slumped as a pile of nothing, talking about how you’re “healing” while you’re not able to climb out of bed or get a job.

(I don’t mean this dismissively. I’ve just seen literally this error mode so many times that it’s worth naming as a kind of warning.)

The first step has to be entering living relaxation. Yes, that usually requires backing off from the tryhard effort. Dropping into dead relaxation can help since it’s sort of “adjacent” to living relaxation. Hence stuff like getting a massage or taking a hot bath can be supportive.

But at some point you’ve got to switch to the vastness. The delight in being alive. The open-hearted experience of this moment. Reverence for the glory of being. Sometimes a spark of SNS excitement can help here! Sort of shaking off the dullness of dorsal vagal collapse.

At first, just finding living relaxation is hard enough. Getting into it, then losing it, then getting back into it again. It’s very much like building a muscle, only it might also be hard to find the muscle due to unfamiliarity.

But after a while, basically once you can hold the state at all, you’ll want to challenge it.

This is where “firebending” comes into play.

Here’s the deal: most people engage SNS-type energy by contracting their awareness around whatever they’re trying hard to do. I see this all the time in the gym: people lifting a heavy weight by focusing on their thoughts and on the intensity of the sensation. They totally lose awareness of the people around them, the ceiling above them, the feeling of their clothes, the joy of being alive, etc.

That’s the breathless tryhard version.

If you want to train living relaxation, you’re probably going to do less than your body is technically capable of. You can’t lift as heavy, or as many reps. But you’ll get there! Just stay within your living range.

Here’s how it works: you start in living relaxation, and then you add a little bit of intensity. It’s probably way, way less than you’re expecting at first. See if you can keep your awareness vast, your breathing clear, your intention fluid and smooth and engaged.

After you do a little bit, check: did your awareness compress? Did you lose track of your surroundings?

It’s normal if you do. It’s no biggie. You get to try again. It’s like learning to juggle: you’re basically guaranteed to drop some balls while you’re learning. And that’s a good thing! It teaches you what the limits of skill are. Failure isn’t just the price of learning; it’s an absolutely critical part of learning. You want to fail sometimes, so you can feel how failure in fact happens, and so you can learn to address it.

Over time you can build up your capacity to move more and more “fire” without compressing your awareness. Living relaxation kind of “shimmers” but doesn’t collapse. Eventually you’ll probably notice how tryhard energy becomes explosive vitality when given resonant living breath. You can start moving it purely with intention instead of with compression.

It’s a really beautiful experience. I’m seriously not exaggerating when I say that this makes working out glorious. It feels really really good to move energy this way! It builds up your body’s ability to move energy in general. And it keeps your body safe while you’re working it very hard. So it’s kind of inevitable that you end up getting healthier this way.

Exercise isn’t the only way to build up “firebending” skill. It’s just the most direct I personally know of. It’s quite popular these days to “sit with” challenging feelings and try to “stay present” as part of “processing” them. I think such a practice is trying to do something quite similar to what I’m talking about. I just think it’s not as good at building capacity as is the physical practice. It runs the risk of sliding into fantasy and dead relaxation. It’s a powerful use case but not that hot at building energetic strength.

Whereas when I’m practicing firebending at a punching bag, I can tell the moment my awareness slips. My body starts getting discoordinated, or my wrist buckles. (I wear minimal padding and sometimes practice bare knuckle.) I get sloppy. If I breathe and expand again, often my body becomes coordinated again, and I can go a bit longer. I do not get hurt when training this way, despite going more and more ferociously over time.

And then when I pause, I notice the urge to “rest” like this:

…and I instead expand. I lengthen. I rest with breath. No collapse.

It’s extremely effective for building living relaxation.

Best as I can tell, the lion’s share of “trauma processing” amounts to lifting the “blown fuse” chronic freeze and “releasing” the “stored survival energy”. (Though like I explained in an earlier post, I think it’s more accurate to say that you “heal” by getting good at channeling that kind of survival energy, not by releasing energy like you might squeeze puss out of a zit.)

Key to lifting that freeze is having some way of channeling the intense energy underneath it. That’s what robust living relaxation gives you. The deeper your living relaxation is, and the more well-forged it is through encounters with the “fire” of effort with breath, the more intensity that can freely move through you. And then it becomes safe for your body to release the freeze response. It’s like building a lightning rod and connecting it with a strong ground wire.

I think that’s the gist of most “trauma healing”.

I look up above and see a lot of words. But it really does feel quite simple to me. I often summarize what I’m trying to say here as:

I just keep saying one thing: there are two things, and you make them whole by enclosing and holding them in one thing. Then they become part of that one thing.

The “two things” in the case I’m focusing on are the tryhard and dead relaxation modes. The “one thing” that encloses and holds them is living relaxation — something that initially feels like a balance of the two, but quickly becomes the context within which the original two just function better.

I hope this post gives enough of a guide that you can play with living relaxation yourself.

If you’d like any clarification, feel free to ask in the comments below.

And if you’d like mentoring in it, shoot me a message. There are lots of great programs out there on “regulating your nervous system”. But if you want 1-on-1 tutoring and like the martial spin I put on it, let’s talk.