KvmanThinking's Shortform

KvmanThinking

This is a special post for quick takes by KvmanThinking. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Looking carefully at how other people speak and write, there are certain cognitive concepts, that simply don't make sense to me, the way that it "makes sense" to me that red is "hot" and blue is "cold". I wonder if the reason I can't understand them is that my consciousness is somehow "simpler", or less "layered", although I don't really know what I mean by that, it's just a vibe i get. Here are some examples:

I don't understand the concept of "internal monologue".
I don't understand the difference between "imagine", "picture", "think of", "think about", "consider", etc.
I don't understand the concept of "trust your gut/heart.", in a decision. If I am presented with 2 decisions, I do not percieve one of them as labeled as "gut/heart says 'do this' ". Sometimes I percieve one of the options as "jumps to mind instinctively as the Thing People Do In This Situation" or "the kind of thing a book protagonist would do" instead, but I don't know if either of those things are what people mean by trusting your gut/heart. Maybe they just mean to think about it.
I don't understand the concept of "choose to believe X". I believe stuff because I have a certain sensory experience. I cannot consciously change the probabilities my brain assigns to things. Maybe people just mean "act as if you believe X" but just have belief-in-belief type confusions.
I have never received a satisfactory explaination for the difference between "annoyed" and "frusturated", even though people do tend to insist there is a difference and they're not just synonyms.
I experience unusually strong placebo and nocebo effects (at least compared to others around me).

I feel a bit confused. I generally sort of just feel (and I don't know what exactly I mean by this) that there is less "structure" separating the "me" part of the Program The Computer-That-Is-My-Brain Is Running from the "not-me" part.

Does any of this make sense?

This tracks for me. I was explicitly taught, as a small child, to be ready to explain what I was doing at all times. Failure to have a ready and satisfactory answer to "what are you doing?" was treated as strong evidence that I was idle (or up to no good!) and should be redirected to do something explicable instead.

(And today, if a friend asks me "how are you?" as a sincere question rather than a casual politeness, it sometimes locks up my cognition for a few seconds as I scramble to introspect enough to come up with a good answer...)

4the gears to ascension1y

"act as if you hold a belief" and "hold a belief for justified reasons" aren't the same thing, the latter seems to me to produce higher quality actions if the belief is true. eg: * believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND they don't care about you now, AND you don't care about them, AND (you will act as if they care about you now => you will act as if you care about them) ] * vs believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND you care about them => they care about you)] * vs believing [someone cares about you if-and-only-if you care about them, AND you care about them if-and-only-if they care about you, AND you don't care about each other ever] in the first one your innate trust falls on they-care-about-you will be less reliable, your caring for them will have little hints anywhere you aren't a good enough actor, etc. if neither of you pick up on it, the first can emulate the second, and thereby produce a world where the second becomes a past-justified true belief. but if you're able to instead reliably make the second a *future-*justified true belief, then you can avoid the first collapsing into the third. (I'm eliding some details about what the uncertainty looks like between these beliefs and what it looks like if you're both uncertain about which of the three statements is true, which makes it a lot more complicated if you're particularly uncertain). if you have multiple conflicting beliefs you can hold for justified reasons (because what is true comes after the picking between the beliefs), then there can be situations where it's objectively the case that one can choose the beliefs first, and thereby choose actions. maybe your thoughts aren't organized this way! but this is what it seems to me to mean when someone who is being careful to only believe things in proportion to how

2Cole Wyeth1y

Yeah pretty much. Frustration is maybe also a stronger valence.