Thread by @s_r_constantin

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan I mean, to the extent that you care about changing anything, it’s in some sense a “personal problem”, because you can only control your own actions.

I don’t usually see much “purchase” or usable value to be gained from the “cosmic horror frame.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan Whether you call it “broken” or not, we live in a world where perpetually going with the flow can land us in trouble. (Eg we can go broke, get sick, make mistakes that hurt people, etc).

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan A world in which all thought is unnecessary — I don’t know if it’s possible *at all*, but it’s a long way off. As COVID19 teaches!

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan And I am VERY confident that humans have STRONG built-in mental machinery that allows us not just to use reflective thought & focused attention & effort, but to enjoy all those things. There is a “gear” that you can activate to make thinking & trying feel GOOD.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan As I understand it, humans evolved bipedalism and big brains by going through a period of massive climate change, drought and starvation. We probably have psychological adaptations specifically for Real Bad Times that require us to change to survive.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan I spent a couple months this year trying to wholly shut off those adaptations in myself.

I had to quit, because my behavior in an increasingly “non-adaptive” state was causing intolerable consequences.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan Basically I concluded that there is something like “dukkha”, something unsatisfactory, about literally ALL responding to the environment. All paying attention, all goal-directed action, all *change* in response to situations.

So I tried to...not.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan And stuff started to go wrong. So I had to come back to a state of engagement/adaptation/“ordinary” thought.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan The thing is, engagement/adaptation/reasonableness/“active” mind/etc isn’t the eternal stillness and peace of “literally nothing is happening, forever”, but if you turn on the gear, it doesn’t hurt either. It’s fun and interesting.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan In fact I suspect the *most* fun in the world is had by people who have objectively nice lives (enough $$, good health, etc) and are in “engaged, active-minded” mode.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan If you’re “engaged/activated” you don’t have time to attend to the dissatisfaction of “something is left Undone, something Needs Change” because lots of things need change and you’re busy changing them. So you never get to the state of All Done, unfortunately.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan But you don’t notice this as a problem, your mind is full of other things, so you’re not tormented by it.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan “Something is Not Done and That’s Terrible” *is* a state of torment, and you can go into intellectual inquiries in a spirit of exhaustion, like, “if I finish this argument can I be All Done and just sleep forever?” Which is what I think Qiaochu is suggesting rationalists do.

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan and the trauma-theory philosophy is “just take that nap/cuddle right now; the intellectual argument won’t give you the peace and stillness you crave.” & I agree with that!

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan But...if you were getting into the argument because you wanted permission to turn off your brain, the argument wasn’t for you anyway.

Sometimes people ask questions from an *engaged* state, because they want to know the answers!

@jd_pressman @QiaochuYuan Sometimes I want to be awake and sometimes I want to be asleep.

I’ve found that being asleep 100% of the time is untenable.

“Rationality is cope” discourse erases the existence of mental states that are neither asleep nor sleepy.