One thing to remember when talking about distinction/defusion is that it's not a free operation: if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before. That is something that demands effort and energy. Sometimes, you need to store a lot more bits. You cannot simply become superintelligent by defusing everything in sight.
Sometimes, making a distinction is important, but some other times, erasing distinctions is more important. Rationality is about creating and erasing distinctions to achieve a more truthful or more useful model.
This is also why I vowed to never object that something is "more complicated" if I cannot offer a better model, because it's always very easy to inject distinctions, the harder part is to make those distinctions matter.
Yeah. Probably the reason why e.g. the experience of a raw sound and the interpretation of that sound are fused together by default, is that normally it's only the interpretation we care about, and we need to be able to react to it quickly if it carries any urgent information. I made a similar observation in the essay that Abram is referencing:
Cognitive fusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you suddenly notice a car driving towards you at a high speed, you don’t want to get stuck pondering about how the feeling of danger is actually a mental construct produced by your brain. You want to get out of the way as fast as possible, with minimal mental clutter interfering with your actions. Likewise, if you are doing programming or math, you want to become at least partially fused together with your understanding of the domain, taking its axioms as objective facts so that you can focus on figuring out how to work with those axioms and get your desired results. [...]
Cognitive fusion trades flexibility for focus. You will be strongly driven and capable of focusing on just the thing that’s your in mind, at the cost of being less likely to notice when that thing is actually wrong.
Yeah, totally. I think I want to defend something like being capable of drawing as many distinctions as possible (while, of course, focusing more on the more important distinctions).
One of the most distinction-heavy people I know is also one of the hardest to understand. Actually, I think the two people I know who are best at distinctions are also the two most communication-bottlenecked people I know.
Nitpick:
if you distinguish two things that you previously considered the same, you need to store at least a bit of information more than before
Not literally. It depends on the probability of the two things. At 50/50, it's 1 bit. The further it gets from that, the more we can use efficient encodings to average less than 1 bit per instance, approaching zero.
In our community there are people who make a lot of distinction in the uncertainty via putting different probabilities on different claims but fail to distinguish levels of abstration.
In plenty of cases it's not necessary to do fine distinctions, in others it's essential for reasoning clearly. It's worth to be able to go to fine distinctions where the occasion needs clear reasoning.
You can think of growth mindset as a deidentification, basically identical to that example of Anna the student except done by Anna about herself rather than by her teacher. "Yet" is a wedge that gets you to separate your concept of you-so-far from your concept of future you. "I'm bad at X" sneaks in an equivocation to imply "now and always."
Ah, good example!
For me, this illustrates how obviously useful and defensible a fusion can seem -- "I am bad at math" can seem like just an empirical fact, and generalization from the past to the future seems like a very defensible heuristic. Nonetheless, using "Yet!" to drive a wedge as you describe turns out to be quite useful.
Sure. I think we could add a lot more detail (and subtract a few mistaken neurological notions from his system), but his basic idea still makes sense today:
He refers to 1-3 together as "the silent level" and places emphasis on trying to properly distinguish, and access, the silent level.
I'm not sure whether 4 included the internal monologue, or only actual speech. If not, it seems like Korzybski must not have thought in words. (Note how "thinking" is placed as part of the silent level, in #3.)
The internal narrator is only one form of thought.
One meditation technique is to quickly label each passing thought (it's called "noting" I believe). At some point you can begin to label the narrator process itself and see it separate from your other thinking processes ("voice" I call it, though it becomes wordless at that point).
[Edit: nevermind the Focusing link actually mentions the labeling. Though I recall Focusing was more about depth of analysis, not fast, high frequency labeling]
Thanks, I particularly found the mapping of terminology to other disciplines insightful. I find it really frustrating how terminology is often either very different or subtly different in different areas, often with very little work to provide unified connections as you did here.
I added a sentence about this on the Bucket Error page, as it seems pretty important for people visiting that. Feel free to modify.
Not to be nitpicky, but I'm a bit curious about your claim:
In traditional argumentation terms, this mistake is "equivocation" -- treating two things as the same when they are importantly different.
My impression was that equivocation typically refers to cases with articulated words, and bucket errors refers more to more abstract cases where the issue is a bit more in concepts than in the stated vocabulary. I'm curious if there is a decent definition of equivocation out there to make it a bit more clear what the specific boundaries are.
Similarly, I'm curious if other readers here agree that equivocation is the same thing as "bucket errors". If so, I kind of would like to replace ongoing discussion of "bucket errors" with equivocation instead.
I'm curious myself because I'm sure I'll want to refer to the concept in the future, but am not sure which word to use. I've used "bucket error" here, recently, for instance.
My impression was that equivocation typically refers to cases with articulated words, and bucket errors refers more to more abstract cases where the issue is a bit more in concepts than in the stated vocabulary. I'm curious if there is a decent definition of equivocation out there to make it a bit more clear what the specific boundaries are.
I don't disagree, but I'm assuming that the brain uses some signals to model what's going on, and by calling bucket errors "equivocation" I'm treating that internal symbology as a language. So, yes, we can make a distinction between buckets and equivocation by making equivocation all about externally articulated words. But to the extent that equivocation can happen in anything we can treat as a sort of language, I feel justified in grouping them together.
Similarly, I'm curious if other readers here agree that equivocation is the same thing as "bucket errors". If so, I kind of would like to replace ongoing discussion of "bucket errors" with equivocation instead.
I'm curious myself because I'm sure I'll want to refer to the concept in the future, but am not sure which word to use. I've used "bucket error" here, recently, for instance.
I'm not sure. It might be useful to have a separate term for "equivocation broadly construed" (verbal equivocation + bucket errors + buddhist identification + psycotherapy's fusion), and then use the more specific terms when you want to be more specific. Each term has, at least, slightly different connotations.
By the way, one thing I only addressed very briefly in the essay: they way "fusion" and "identification" are normally explained, one would think that they primarily/exclusively refer to equivocation between some X and the self. I think this is due to a confused ontology. For example, a central example of fusion is getting caught up in anger, so that angry actions seem necessary. De-fusion would be moving from "Frank is an idiot who needs to be punched in the face" to "I am feeling angry at Frank right now". This is obviously a map/territory sort of distinction, plus a temporal distinction. Yet it often gets explained as a self-vs-other distinction. I think this is a result of an overzealous application of object-vs-subject. To make the map/territory distinction, or even the temporal distinction, one must "take the anger as an object": sort of "see it from the outside", create a token in working memory which refers to it. Psychologists then make the leap that because we can call this "taking the anger as an object", and the opposite of "object" is "subject", it must have been "taken as subject" before.
And that's not even total nonsense? Taken as a definition I'm OK with it: "Taking something as subject means it's a fact about you, but which you haven't generated an internal symbol for yet".
But I think people then confuse it with somehow moving a symbol from self to non-self status, like, treating the anger as something inside you vs an outside force. This is also a thing. Maybe even a thing that's worth throwing in the same cluster! But IMHO, it's a much more complicated phenomenon. I don't think I want to take it as the defining feature or even the central case of a cluster.
I think buddhists are doing almost exactly the same thing, with "identification". (At least, american buddhists.) The way the phrase is used, you identify with something, rather than identifying two things with each other (such as map and territory). Is the state of no-self one where all symbols are moved out of the "self" box, and into the "other" box? Or is no-self a state where facts about the self can be fluently symbolized? (So that the gap of time between being angry and noting "I am angry" is very small, making anger easier to appropriately respond to.) The first sounds like a psychological trick: disassociating to reduce suffering. The second sounds like an actual cognitive skill.
I recently tried to figure out Korzybski's General Semantics again. I think I gained some insight into what Korzybski and followers were so excited about, and thought I'd try to write a brief note about it.
My "aha" moment came from reading the wikipedia entry on General Semantics, which includes the following:
General semantics postulates that most people "identify," or fail to differentiate the serial stages or "levels" within their own neuro-evaluative processing. "Most people," Korzybski wrote, "identify in value levels I, II, III, and IV and react as if our verbalizations about the first three levels were 'it.' Whatever we may say something 'is' obviously is not the 'something' on the silent levels."[11]
[...]
Although producing saliva constitutes an appropriate response when lemon juice drips onto the tongue, a person has inappropriately identified when an imagined lemon or the word "l–e–m–o–n" triggers a salivation response.
This seems like a very Buddhist use of "identification". It reminds me very much of Kaj's explanation of insight meditation. Korzybski is trying to get us to "respond appropriately" by differentiating rather than identifying. He writes that differentiating "introduces a most beneficial delay" between stimulus and response. Identification and differentiation seems like exactly what Kaj is talking about with "fusion" and "defusion".
In traditional argumentation terms, this mistake is "equivocation" -- treating two things as the same when they are importantly different. Equivocating between two things forces us to respond in the same way to both. For example, if no firm distinction is made between "liberal immigration policy" and "democratic values", then one must accept or reject both at once.
In order to point people at the general idea of making distinctions, these traditions naturally point at some important distinctions people are neglecting. Korzybski famously touts the map/territory distinction as one of the main things people often equivocate, pointing out that (even if you explicitly endorse the existence of a map/territory distinction) it's easy to make mistakes by thinking an element of your map necessarily corresponds to some reality in the territory. Much was made of this in Eliezer's Sequences.
But Korzybski really wanted to point to a lot more distinctions than this, as evidenced by the reference to "levels I, II, III, and IV" mentioned in the quote above. Level I refers to the territory ("happenings" as he called it), and level IV refers to explicit verbal description; the intervening levels refer to various levels of intermediate processing between the two. But there were many more distinctions as well. Again quoting from the wikipedia page:
Suppose you recognize one student—call her Anna—from a prior course in which Anna either excelled or did poorly. Again, you escape identification by your indexed awareness that Annathis term, this course is different from Annathat term, that course. Not identifying, you both expand and sharpen your apprehension of "students" with an awareness rooted in fresh silent-level observations.
Other traditions have pointed to other distinctions as their central examples. Buddhism has a number of favorite equivocations to point at, including the tangled mess of equivocation that is "the self".
Each important distinction has a number of important implications. Pulling things apart allows us to address each differently. I talked about a number of illustrative examples in Separation of Concerns. The more things we correctly differentiate, the more freedom we have to optimize.
I think a lot of the content of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a set of important de-identifications:
Like the map/territory distinction, these distinctions can be gateway drugs to the general "make distinctions" thing.