This is a linkpost for https://arram.substack.com/p/youve-been-pressing-that-button-your
One of the inventors of Neurolinguistic Programming said that in his practice as a psychotherapist, he had noticed that he could tell what other schools of therapy his clients had experienced before, because of the concepts they used to talk about themselves. And, he said, it wasn't just their vocabulary, those theoretical entities were actually there. Just by undertaking therapy in some tradition, the ontology of that therapy was created in the client. So, he thought, why not simply make up whatever entity he thought would help? And that was one of the things that led to NLP.
Whatever theory you study yourself through, you may find. But would it have been there if you had not searched for it, with a manual in hand telling you what to find? You can convince yourself of a lot in 3000 hours.
Maybe. See if you still think it's true after 10k hours.
(I say because after that much meditation I think multi-agent models are getting at something real, but the models are confused in major ways that I would have a hard time claiming that they're "true".)
Epistemic status: first-person phenomenology
I've combined meditation and parts work (like IFS) and the results are, well, bizarre. I taught myself to notice little mental threads that run like computer programs and just drop them:
“Amazingly, when I mentally labeled them as ‘part’ they disappeared like a soap bubble popping. When I discovered this I started furiously typing notes on my phone. After a few minutes I noticed a lot of tension around typing, looked at the part that was typing, said ‘Part’ and it dissolved so thoroughly that the phone fell out of my hands and my head slumped forward.”
This feels like putting down a rock I forgot I was carrying, every single time.
I know I'm seven years after Kaj, but it's a complete victory for multi-agent models of the mind from where I'm sitting. I started digging into historical mentions of the mind as multiple and found examples going all the way back to ancient Egypt and through the entire history of clinical psychiatry.
A lot of groups take the mind as many for granted, but I wanted to write a clear explainer that's very accessible so I wrote the linked essay.