a dialogue between N and Mark, on reasoning and pre-reasoning:

[we use the example of "feet" a lot, but that’s just one example! we might have used hands, belly button, something. feet are a good heuristic thing to try, but it’s not a rule.]

[...]

I guess the next logical question would be [...]

Mark

Want to say something like I think there’s a pre-rational step that’s being missed

Say more!

Wdym by pre-rational?

Mark

You probably should pay attention to your feet a bunch or something versus trying to answer questions like [...]

maybe.

but something vaguely like that, maybe extensively

You think there's a frozen thing in the body that constrains reasoning and needs to be moved around a bit by correct placing of attention?

Mark

YES. but, a lot, not a little bit

Why won't reasoning work? The right answers simply won't pop up in my head or something?

Mark

reasoning for most people mostly happens in a "virtual machine" and there’s only a trickle from that down to preference changes, behavior changes, and goal changes, even if one comes up with "right answers." a failure mode is to keep collecting right answers indefinitely without them becoming a part of the "motivated seeming" of the world

In my mind reasoning isn't disconnected from behavioral change, ala critical rationalism

IME in any case where I see lack of progress, I can sort of clearly see why and what problems aren't solved yet

I've never been in a situation where my problem seems explicitly solved, but no behavioral change follows

Mark

That is true for some people, for some domains, contingently

In my mind reasoning isn’t disconnected from behavioral change, ala critical rationalism

do you mean all minds or just some minds, like your mind?

The latter, but I'd assume that they're reasoning incorrectly, i.e. missing important signals from the body or getting themselves in conceptual tangles without noticing

Mark

yeah

So maybe I got lucky with my mind, hehe

Or I'm just deluded

Mark

but incorrectly is a massive gradient, from extreme virtual machine to radical integration. almost everyone has a lot of confusions, at least at first

Do you have any reasons to believe that certain mental moves, e.g. look at feet, just plain don't work and are based on spurious data?

Mark

for some people doing that specifically will be the wrong thing to do at any given time. right thing right time in right order

that’s why there’s 500+ p/a practices, etc., etc.

Or, have you considered it?

Mark

considered what?

That they don't actually work

Mark

the meta-protocol is a schematization of error checking and meta error checking. it’s an ongoing consideration of whether such things don’t work

at any particular time for some particular person

I see, I see

But you don't have an explicit model that accounts both for the usually psychotherapy stuff and mental moves such as that, and can legibly translate from its language into their?

Or do you

Mark

sensory experiences sculpt the future propensities of the system. talk therapy is narrow sculpting that leaves out a huge range of possible experiences that can be used for sculpting

the mind is highly intertwingled such that feet are involved in reasoning, usually confusedly. gotta sometimes e.g. pay attention to the feet to use e.g. talk therapy, correctly

[...] how/why sensory experience of one's feet can be useful for sculpting one's higher-level behavior and goals and shit?

I understand the general idea

But I don't understand how experiencing one's feet could be useful for changing beliefs about the world

Feeling one's feet is very different from trying out new food and liking it, me thinks

In this sense feet seem irrelevant

To any major stuff

Don't understand how feet are involved with reasoning :(

Or can be

The way you talk about it is very different from the language/ontology I personally use to make sense of this area

Mark

one’s epistemic stack involves sensory experience of elbows, knees, voice tone, prosody, everything. all of it becomes the substrate for reasoning

Mark

to improve reasoning one sometimes needs to unpack some of the lower-level stuff that doesn’t feel "meaning-laden," like weird body sensations

So suppose a person feels their feet

And suppose she did it at the right time

What happens next?

An insight suddenly pops up in their head?

Or maybe weird sensations appear in some body part

Mark

they realize they were doing reasoning wrong, somehow, that was systematically biasing their conclusions. it’s usually not that direct but sometimes it is

usually it’s lots of small steps

that don’t seem to add up until the end

And when it's not direct, what happens is something like 'next time they do think, they're able to look at the problem from a slightly different perspective or something'?

Mark

that’s object-level, and that’s a thing too. but, meta-level, the reasoning system itself will work slightly differently, sometimes a bit worse before it’s long-run net better

Aight

And they could also maybe never experience anything meaning-laden throughout feeling their feet?

Mark

yeah, plenty of stuff stays non-meaning-laden, contentless [throughout]

But they find out that reasoning works a lil better (or worse) when they try it next time?

Mark

yup

Ohh

Fuck, these inferences are, indeed, hard to make

Mark

yes

Like unless the person is systematic, they might never notice the connection

Right?

Mark

even if reasoning works a little better, that doesn’t mean a conclusion is guaranteed to pop out in any particular thinking/feeling session, ofc

Yeah

Mark

Like unless the person is systematic, they might never notice the connection

yes exactly

You really need to put this into protocol

Mark

it’s ridiculously long-range/counterintuitive, all things being equal

It connects the right stuff

For me and probably certain people

Could it be that some people simply notice stuff like 'when I work out or do open awareness, I sort of can think better afterwards', and the model above explains why?

Mark

yeah

could you see if this existing section kind of says it:

"headyness"/"heady-ness"/"headiness"

I've read it, I think

And it didn't

Mark

How does one start noticing patterns such as this? (e.g. look at feet now, see more progress later)

Mark

I think need to study a ton of people from the outside, or need a methodological bootstrap, from the inside.

How could studying people work?

Mark

the methodological bootstrap, for me, was p2 plus the meta protocol.

Like, it's so hard to notice it in yourself

Mark

wayfinding in methodology/theory space

How would it be easier to notice in others?

[delay]

Mark

i’m looking for the original Gendlin Focusing research study

Go on

Mark

they tried to figure out why some people made progress in therapy and others didn’t, and that’s how they isolated "focusing moves"

It has something about that

Yeah

I know

Doesn't seem like something that's possible for a regular Joe to do

Mark

and so my stuff, for example, could be considered a generalization of that original observation

Aight

What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?

Mark

Doesn’t seem like something that’s possible for a regular Joe to do

it is very freaky when it feels like "me or someone maybe couldn’t have figured out this important thing without outside stimulus"

very unpleasant, at first, at least for me

Does anything else matter, aside from looking when feel stuck?

Mark

What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?

has to do with deep contingent structure of any particular system based on experiences that person has had and prior attentional propensities

Mark

hard to explicate which is why personal global wayfinding can help

Wanna unpack 'prior attentional propensities'?

Mark

including possibly reads by people who are a bit farther on the journey

the experiences we have determine the structure of the system and the future propensities of the system

What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?

Wanna try unpacking the gears behind 'deep contingent structure of...'?

Mark

so the necessary order of refactoring of a system will depend on that causal history

What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?

Maybe with an example

Mark

it’s really hard to say. if someone ignored their feet a lot or spent a lot of time attending to their feet, at some point in their life. then, in meditation or whatever, they’ll probably need to spend a lot of time with their feet.

it’s like a collection of loosely coupled stacks, in the computer science sense. LIFO: last in first out, in terms of the order one needs to sort of touch stuff in to refactor

loosely coupled partial orderings

So from a subjective experience viewpoint, what mostly happens is just you staring at feet and nothing really happens while you're doing it

And you do it for a long time

Maybe regularly or at once

Mark

kind of. one can keep running navigational stuff like meta protocol, but there can be a lot of up-front uncertainty.

the "how" matters, too. things like top-down attending vs "letting feet come to you" and stuff like that. and might need to interleave many other things. could extend timeline if just forcefully tried to attend to something in a contiguous block. needs to be patient, gentle, curious, cautious, etc. etc.

Is it a linear thing? I.e. the less you looked at feet before, the more you gotta do it? What happens behind the scenes while you do it?

Mark

but yeah, it can take a long time before one gets a sense of whether "something’s happening" or not. it’s a very gradual increase in sensitivity and long-range wayfinding

i think it’s sublinear for any particular thing and superlinear globally

but still practically finite. a fraction of the time one has already been alive

^ don't understand sub/supra

Also would like to get an answer to 'what happens behind the scenes', if ok

Mark

so like if feet stuff was weird for five years, then maybe only need 500 hours of feet stuff and not five years of feet stuff

there’s a compression thing

but there’s still sort of a combinatorial explosion of pairwise e.g. feet interaction with other things.

lots of recursion

behind the scenes it’s like A comes into contact with B and yields A-prime and B-prime, and there’s like a huge number of these little interactions that have to occur and reoccur

What's ‘A-prime'?

Mark

A-prime is A but a little different

(prime, is that from maths?)

Mark

yeah

And A and B are beliefs or something?

Mark

beliefs, anticipations, synaptic potentials, something

Cool

And that happens unconsciously?

I assume

Mark

one can infer it sometimes from skeletal muscle changes, tingles, insights, and other phenomenological changes, but it can seem like nothing is happening sometimes for many hours

If something bubbles up to consciousness, then in what form?

Cool

Mark

insights, realizations, muscle tension changes, yeah

You have a list in the end of all stuff that could be useful to look through

Mark

yeah

Is there a way you can dissect that list? E.g. hands/feet usually are more useful, so try maybe starting with those first, but be gentle and self-aware etc etc

Mark

i think i give some rough heuristics somewhere

in various lists and more sections

Where?

Can't recall seeing that

Mark

extremities and stomach, not the head, are good places to experiment with, first. but too much can tangle further, etc,. etc.

Aight

Is there more info in those places in the protocol?

Mark

Is there more info in those places in the protocol?

i don’t do too much of this because it’s so personally contingent and blocky suggestions might cause people to ignore subtle stuff that’s not in my suggestions

Cool

Aight thanks

How can you notice that I need to e.g. look more at feet?

Is it something you infer from what I say and the types of problems I'm dealing with, for example?

Mark

If something feels stuck, wrong, etc., but usually hope to e.g. look at feet long before that.

Mark

Is it something you infer from what I say and the types of problems I’m dealing with, for example?

usually not object level problems, though sometimes, but general patterns, yeah

So in my case I don't feel like I'm completely stuck, more like 'it's moving too slow'. But I don't feel that I literally tried all I can and that my current way of dealing w stuff can't give me more progress atm

Is that why

You say that I should continue with what I do

And maybe eventually naturally exhaust the potential

Of what I'm doing?

Mark

Maybe!! But can be good to keep alternatives in mind, too, and maybe interleave a little bit, increasingly over time

But if I interleave, I won't be able to clearly notice that that's what's helping me

And I'll keep thinking that my method is working

Mark

There may be ways to do it while not confounding too much. Not entirely overlapping lead indicators.

But it’s a good point

Say more?

Re ways

Mark

you may notice different good things via your current way versus trying new things, making it possible to know where the good things are coming from

there will be some overlap, probably, but not complete overlap

Aight, cool

Thanks for doing this conversation!

Mark

you’re very welcome. thank you for your questions

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