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Kaj Sotala

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22 Oct, 9 tweets, 3 min read

Oof. I was today years old when I realized that _none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me_.

I don't mean that as in "realized intellectually", I mean as in "realized emotionally so that in any shame-tinged memory that I can think of, the other person decomposes to their inner pain and what they did to me in reaction to that pain and it's obviously not really about me".

So I was doing a lot of meditation / parts work today and came to an early experience where I thought dad didn't care about how he made me feel, and then that got juxtaposed with later memories of how he obviously did care and OH at that moment he just didn't realize how I felt.

Then later I ended up at an unrelated incident where a close friend said something that hurt and then I realized that wait, her words had nothing to do with anything that I'd said in the first place, she was obviously just projecting an unrelated trauma on me.

And then when I saw see her inner pain and words come apart, something clicked and suddenly I could see _everyone's_ inner pain and words come apart and then that generalized to _everything_ and all kinds of memories started coming up to get reinterpreted

I don't know if this is going to last but I've been having a lot of old content spontaneously surface and transform in the last few weeks for whatever reason so maybe it might

@nickcammarata

Also I read @nickcammarata tweet this and had sat down to work on it when this happened. Which he was inspired to post through @sam_havens 's link so those two probably get partial credit, plus was trying to do Nick's self-love thing in general too here.

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1318326660769357834

And it feels like it's the self-love that's the critical component here? Like I remember a shameful memory, then *first* I project compassion at the me in the memory, then that kind of shifts it into a third-person perspective where it becomes apparent what happened.

Update: went to bed, then woke up, was groggy and wondered "does still work", then concluded yes as I found more old memories to re-interpret. Some of which had been forgotten for probably over a decade, but came up now that they had a chance to be healed.

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More from @xuenay

Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

21 Oct

Just realized that me always having had a hard time picking a favorite movie/book/whatever has been an instance of being out of contact with my body/felt senses.

In retrospect it's kind of obvious: my thought was usually "things are good on so many different dimensions, how could I possibly ever rank them?" Like this novel might have good world-building but the other one has better characterization so how can I tell which one is better.

Which I now recognize as an instance of the classic "I don't trust/have access to an intuitive judgment of this, so I want some explicit algorithm that lets me make a rational decision" source of paralysis.

Read 8 tweets

Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

5 Oct

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Thank you making the possibility of that state this explicit. Now I'm motivated to get there as well.

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Initial stab at this: what's my first reaction if I imagine myself in such a state?

Parts start piping up with objections. Saying "you don't deserve that", "what would [person] think", etc. So one of the steps: get familiar with & address those objections.

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Another issue: what would it feel like in practice? This is often one of my problems directing metta at myself: who/where is the "me" I should orient it at?

But could work at it from other direction. "You don't deserve it" also implies a me. How does _that_ feeling manifest?

Read 16 tweets

Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

2 Oct

Some emotion/trauma stuff claims that things like blocked emotions manifest as muscle tension, so that you are subconsciously tensing particular muscles in order to block yourself from feeling something or doing a particular thing. Now why would this be necessary?

Ideomotor theory proposes that the mental representation of an action causes the action to happen. For example, as I consciously think about writing the rest of this sentence, the thought of carrying out that action is translated to a set of motor commands to do so.

But what if my sentence is bad? Suppose that the thought occurs to me to say something offensive that will get me in trouble. One part of my brain generates this thought, a second part notices this would have a bad consequence. What can the second part do?

Read 14 tweets

Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

28 Sep

I generally like how I feel after I've done metta (loving-kindness meditation) "right", but I find I often have self-centered motives sneak into it that make it hard.

E.g. if I'm sending metta to a friend, I might hope that they are happy because I like it when people around me are happy. "Be happy, because that will be nicer for me!"

Also, just imagining someone happy makes me feel safe and then my focus starts alternating between the feeling of safety and the loving-kindness. The safety feels more appealing, but doesn't translate to longer-term satisfaction the way that focusing on loving-kindness does.

Read 5 tweets

Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

28 Sep

One of today's papers: Sinking In: The Peripheral Baldwinisation of Human Cognition. Cecilia Heyes, Nick Chater & Dominic Michael Dwyer. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2020. cell.com/trends/cogniti…

Some theories have proposed that humans have evolved to experience some stimuli (e.g. snakes, spiders) as more potentially frightening, so that a fear for these entities is learned faster than a fear for more neutral things. E.g. evpsych proposed "fear modules" for these.

However, research suggests that rather than "the fear system" itself having innate biases towards picking up particular kinds of fears, humans are evolutionarily biased towards paying extra *attention* to things like spiders and snakes.

Read 11 tweets