"You find out how to disable pieces of yourself. Then one day you find that you've disabled too much. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion or even with beliefs, except for whatever beliefs spurred you to start deleting pieces of yourself."

you're trying to describe a very common experience using uncommon (and frankly, bizarre - "disabling pieces of yourself"?) language to make yourself feel special. sorry, but that's what many will see when they read through this stuff.

cassandra had a set of dispositions or preference schemata that inclined her towards analytical thinking. because she found herself in an art-loving or math-hating milieu, or because of some chance encounter with an estimable art enthusiast, or because of any number of other random reasons (cool kids liked art, cool boys hated mathy females, her favorite tv character was an artist, the meanderings of her imagination led her to revere the intuitive artiste, etc.), she acquired a new conflicting preference schema. using some 'meta-preference' schema, which is probably best understood as a probabilistic attentional weighting system (susceptible to the vicissitudes of the immediate environment/arousal circuits, etc.), her behaviors aligned more closely with the new schema than with her originals. this is a very common phenomenon. literally every well-calibrated social individual does it constantly and unthinkingly. i deliberately opted out of gifted programs and math contests because my friends attached negative value to it. i didnt deliberate on the matter at the time, and i was completely unaware of the 'preference calculus' going on in my unconscious, but eventually i habituated myself to thinking and behaving "differently", at least when socializing. is that self-modification? is that 'disabling of the self'? maybe, but conscious reflexivity wasn't required and the involvement of 'purposiveness' is questionable.

conscious reflexivity, or thinking about thinking, tempers and impoverishes emotions by activating associational networks that are only tenuously connected to remembered or imagined experiences with affective weight. you can 'purposively', assuming you have the necessary preference schemata, redirect your thoughts towards your immediate experience (or the mind's focus of fancy, as the case may be), so i question whether the layered 'reflexivity' you're describing leads ineluctably to 'emotional detachment'. it certainly doesn't in my case. moreover, almost every champion of 'rationality' and 'dispassionate reason' i know has a very bland and uncomplicated personality, at least to most outside observers (including me, and i play the keynesian beauty contest for a living). that's, you know, one of the stereotypes about 'rationalist' types. you're free to choose descriptors favorable to your cause, of course, but it is my duty as a reader of "overcomingbias.com" to point out their not infrequent absurdity.

<3 robin and jef.

eliezer, with all due respect, jef's brief description of iterated reflective experience was more elucidative than yours.

i'm amused that you responded with contempt and anger to a perfectly well-intentioned comment after making the post you just made. get your shoeshine box, yudkowsky.