Epistemic status: I’m definitely onto something but don’t take my word for it.
There sometimes seems to be a tradeoff between confidence and humility. That apparent tradeoff comes from a subtle assumption, which is common yet false: that your experience and mine are supposed to be the same. Rudyard Kipling knew this:
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, yet make allowance for their doubting too.
If, indeed. If we could do that, that’d be great. But how?
Consider these five expressions:
They’re all expressing a concern that the person is trying to screw you over. That part of the sentence doesn’t even change! What I’m going to say also applies to other second-halves of the sentence: “going to hurt me” or “lying” or “asking me to doubt myself” or “hiding something” or “overoptimistic” or “not on my side” or basically anything. I deliberately picked a contentious situation—one where it’s hard to talk without encountering issues. It’s contentious not just because of the tension in screwing-over, but because they refer not just to the other person’s behavior but their intent.
These phrases all express the same concern, but they express it in vastly different ways. They’re radically different speech acts—nearly as different as “what do you think about getting married?” is from “will you marry me?”. This isn’t just about the words, although words can help us understand how confidence and humility are not opposites but how you can have both or neither.
No transcending of a duality is complete without a 2×2:
Let’s talk about each of these different kinds of speech acts in turn.
This one is all confidence and no humility. In general this speech act is a claim, but in this context of talking about someone’s intent, this speech act is an accusation, which invites defending—or, if the accuser has sufficient social power, capitulating. Where the others are “I statements”, this one just tells it how it is. Except of course I don’t actually know how it is, I only know how it seems to me. This is especially true with statements like this one, which imply something about the other person’s intent.
» read the rest of this entry »The verb “trust” basically can’t be conjugated in the imperative case, in my view. When people attempt to trust, the means by which they achieve this tends to be something more like “pretending” or “ignoring” or even “compartmentalizing”. And that’s a move you can make! But in my view if you do such pretending without realizing, then you’re confused, and I’d rather be honest about what’s going on.
When I hear people saying things like “trust this” / “he should trust me” / “I know I should trust…”
…I ask “but do I trust?” / “but does he trust?” / “but do you trust?”
I aim to get people in touch with the sense of what they can tell for themselves. Not trust as a thing that you try to declare or choose. And I orient towards the question of how that trust might be built.
Unpacking each of these examples:
If someone says “trust me/this”, I will comment to them something like “hm, well, conveniently I do trust that, although I wouldn’t pretend to if I didn’t” or I’ll say something like “well, I don’t currently trust that, but here’s what I would need in order to trust it…”. This is always only a guess—someone might be able to satisfy the letter of that constraint, but something would still feel off to me, at which point I’d go “huh, I still don’t trust it. interesting.”
If someone says “he should trust me”, then I’ll inquire eg “why do you think he doesn’t already trust you?” / “what do you think he’s concerned will happen?” / “what do you think you could do to earn his trust?” …and if someone protests that they’ve already done what they needed to do to earn his trust, but he still doesn’t trust them, then I’ll highlight that it’s not up to them what earns his trust, it’s up to him.
If someone says “I know I should trust…” then the whole reason this is coming up is because they don’t have what they need to trust whatever this is. So to some extent I’ll investigate where the should is coming from—have they been memed into thinking that trust is a virtue, in the abstract? And I’ll investigate whether that trust can be built, or if not, what to do about it.
“Trust” and “distrust” come through experience. It’s part of my basic sense of things. In other words, when someone says the world is a particular way, I can tell how much I trust their word by the extent to which my sense of the world changes as a result. When someone says they’ll handle something, I can tell how much I trust their followthrough by the extent to which it then seems to me like it’ll be handled without my needing to manage it. When someone says “that won’t be an issue”, my trust is the degree to which I am in fact no longer concerned as a result of them saying that.
the ground is kind of cold on my bare feet
but I trust I can handle it and this does not produce an objection
I don’t choose to trust—I listen and observe that I do trust
I listen and observe, and I may observe that I trust, or I may observe that I do not trust.
Why do we ever think otherwise? Why do we think we could choose it?
» read the rest of this entry »Framing on this write-up:
“guys I’m really confused, this weird thing keeps happening
and it seems really good so I try to make it happen more
but like WHAT is even going ON!?
…anyway, here’s a decadesworth of trip report”
I’ve recently read an obscure book called Synergetics, which was written in 1976 and is a fascinating book. It talks about a few different modes of human consciousness, which in order of increasing complexity & functionality are Identic Mode, Reactive Mode, Uniordinal Mode, Multiordinal Mode, Synergic Mode.
They describe the Synergic Mode as follows:
There is available to every human mind a state of advanced consciousness and well-being that is exciting, vigorous and incredibly beautiful. It is characterized by an expansion of awareness, by an enhancement of rationality and by a remarkable phenomenon called think-feel synergy. This state is called the synergic mode of function.
The word “synergy” means, literally, “working together.” In medicine, it has long been used to denote the working together of two or more drugs, or of two or more muscles acting about a joint. Applied to the human mind, “synergy” denotes the working together of the enormous variety of functions that comprise the mind, producing a new whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts.
When the synergic mode turns on, the mind lights up. Perceptions grow more vivid and acute, with “flash-grasp” of complex situations a not infrequent occurrence. Thinking becomes faster, more accurate and remarkably clear. Often thought-trains race along several tracks at once. Actions become more apt and multipurposed, with a high gain-to-effort ratio. Emotional tone ranges from cheerfulness to enthusiasm, with a harmonious blending of thought and emotion that is highly exhilarating. Abilities long dormant or even unsuspected are activated as the wave of synergy surges into the hidden depths of the mind.
I have a couple critiques of the articulation, but I’m very confident that whatever the hell they’re pointing at is something I have experienced numerous times, on my own and with others, and that it’s not just any old flow state.
I am utterly baffled as to what the implications are of this. It’s clearly hugely significant. The potential of this mode of being is what motivates most of the work I do, and is the context for much of my writing.
The Synergetics folks had an interesting and inspiring model for how to “stabilize” your system into this mode, but it’s clearly incomplete or they would have gotten a lot further in the half-century since the book was written (as it is, their scene basically vanished with no trace except this Synergetics book). The scene I was part of in Waterloo 2012-2020 also had a model of what this is and how to stabilize it (using different language) and it was also clearly incomplete or we wouldn’t have experienced the kinds of oscillations and going-in-circles we did (described below).
In mid 2020, I figured out one piece of what we were missing (which I call NNTD, the “non-naive trust dance”—here’s the story of that differentiation) but I have no idea whether that’s approximately an adequate patch or whether there’s another missing piece—or a dozen!
One thing that makes it hard to investigate is that I don’t have access to what was working in Waterloo. I’ve got a lot of pieces but I’m pretty sure there are still wisdoms I’m missing, and I’m working on finding and integrating those.
In this post, I intend to ramble about what I know and don’t know about this Synergic Mode, as an experience I’ve had. I’m basically thinking out loud here. I’m saying the obvious (including just the obvious unknowns from my vantage point).
This is a long post, structured as follows:
In mid-2012, I met some people in Waterloo who were on a mission to create a new kind of culture they described as “collaborative”, a word which also means “working together”. I was immediately very into it, and joined the weekly meetings of 8-15 people. The meetings would often get off to a slow and even tedious start, but then most weeks, by about 90 minutes into the 2h meeting, we had cultivated some collective space that matches the description of the synergic mode above—obviously very compelling! We would often connect in smaller groups for an hour or two after the meetings, still feeling that glow and openness.
» read the rest of this entry »I have a commitment that I made pretty strongly nearly 7 years ago, and then 3.5 years ago I sort of released it for myself, and even though I don’t particularly think anybody is holding me to it, it feels wise to formally release it. I would say I released it for myself in 2020 the moment I had my non-naive trust dance insight, but since it was a social commitment it feels right to withdraw it from the social sphere too. It’s good, in general, to follow through with commitments; it’s bad to keep pretending to be committed if it’s no longer alive. In this case I would say I realized that the commitment was both self-defeating (as in I could serve its purpose better by dropping it than by keeping it) and in some sense impossible as stated.
In 2021, I published “Mindset choice” is a confusion, which is precisely about this. In it, I describe how while committing to a project can make sense, committing to a way of seeing the world (except as a very bounded temporary experiment) has within it some basic confusion or commitment to not looking and not listening to things that might counter that way of seeing the world. It may be a useful stepping stone, but that doesn’t make it not a confusion.
In 2017, I had a taste of a new experience of easeful flow, that I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to point at in Towards being purpose-driven without fighting myself. The same day I had that experience, I tried to distill my clarity into something that would help me keep it, and wrote up a commitment that I then performed as a small ritual that evening with my learning community as witnesses (I also ritually repeated it daily for months while donning some rings and a necklace, as an attempt to enact it). I still stand by the spirit of the content of the commitment, but the tone of how I approached committing now strikes me as entirely antithetical to everything that was precious about the experience I tasted and loved so deeply.
This blog post is both a formal renouncement of that commitment, as well as a case study in the whole “Mindset choice” is a confusion insight.
The text of the 2017 commitment read:
I hereby commit (and hereby act on the basis of such commitment)
• to take myself and all others I am in relationship with seriously
as centers of experience, understanding, and agency, and from there
• to take response-ability for generatively re-interpreting
oscillating tensions into creative tensions &
double-binds into opportunities for shared laughter, and thereby
• to be access-able as a resource to collaborators
towards caring for the ongoing survival and thrival of humanity
I hereby uncommit to that, not because it’s not a good way to live, but because it’s the sort of thing that a commitment is not a good way to approach (as far as I can tell). Keep reading for more of my thoughts on this.
The context for how I got here today was that I was re-reading The Guru Papers—one of my all-time favorite books, which interestingly I would have first read in late 2016, relatively shortly before the experience of freedom/liberation in 2017 that plugged into this commitment. Specifically, today I was reading the chapter on addiction, which describes the inner struggle for control between some sense-of-self-that-is-good-in-terms-of-social-uprightness/superegos and some sense-of-self-that-seems-selfish-or-self-centered. The “goodself” and “badself”, although these names are tongue-in-cheek and more refer to what they tend to call themselves; in fact, both have both wholesome desires and self-destructive patterns.
And I was reading about their take on Alcoholics Anonymous…
» read the rest of this entry »By request, a published resource elaborating slightly on my response to a question a friend asked in a groupchat:
A lot of advice is some variation on “express your feelings to not be haunted by them forever,” but what do people mean by ‘express’ here? On one end there is being alone in a room and naming the feeling silently in your head, on the other end is telling your married boss you’re crushing on them, in between is stuff like journaling or going into the woods to scream and writhe or talking it out with a friend.
One model is that the key is to “let yourself fully feel the feeling” and the relevant sense of expression is whatever moves you towards that. Another is that feelings are for taking action in the world so apply appropriate thoughtfulness and discernment to avoid being rash and stupid but ultimately figure out what this trying to make you do and do it, and that will be the relevant expression. Does anybody find this advice helpful and wanna try to convey what it actually means for me?
From my perspective, there’s:
I’m calling these loops because they all have a kind of feedback loop quality to them, even though the feedback is quite subtle. There’s a sense of something landing.
The first loop is about cultivating the sense of “I mean what mean“. Articulating something. Modifying it if it isn’t quite right. Trying again. Saying it out loud and feeling if it resonates. Getting to the point where you’re like “Yeah! THAT!”
Think of a time when you try to explain something to somebody, and they didn’t get it. Whether that was a model or a framework, or some emotional or relational thing or whatever.
» read the rest of this entry »Part 7 of the “I can tell for myself” sequence, picking up where Guru dynamics: “I can show you how to trust yourself” left off:
To the extent that the person in the more student-like role is able to stay in touch with their own direct-knowing even though it conflicts with what they’re hearing from the teacher-role person… now what?
I’ve studied in depth a handful of cases of this (firsthand and secondhand) which is more than most people but not a lot, so I may be missing something major here. These situations can come from the situation described in the previous post, where the student develops self-trust while already inside a container that they had previously been more naïvely surrendered to… or it can involve someone who already has sufficient self-trust to listen to themselves consciously stepping into a learning environment with someone else who also has a lot of self-trust.
In these contexts, where one person is the official or de facto authority in the space, what I’ve seen has tended to involve what-the-authority-knows being the sort of dominant view, with the other person’s knowings (where they contradict, which won’t be everywhere) getting a lot of questioning and suspicion, or treated as irrelevant. This is functionally a form of “oppressive culture”, even if it’s actively intending to be a welcoming culture.
And it turns out that the main approaches are basically the same: stay & pretend, say the unsayable, or leave. But they look a bit different in learning community than in a kind of default societal context.
I did a mix of all three of these when I had my own self-trust breakthrough in 2020, as I wrote about somewhat hotly just after I moved out and more spaciously 2 years later. That’s a great example of a context that was attempting to be welcoming everything but in practice didn’t know how to welcome many things. And there were many aspects of me that could tell they were uniquely welcome there, which is part of what made it all so confusing. And when I tried saying the unsayable there, it was difficult of course, but we were able to sincerely approach the challenge together to some degree. There was no “you can’t say this”, just a “you can only say this if it also accounts for this other thing that’s really important” which was around the edge of my ability.
» read the rest of this entry »Fourth in a sequence:
In the first piece, I distinguish between two kinds of knowing, one that I call “I can tell for myself” and the other that I call “taking someone’s word for it”. These are my approach to speaking in plain language about what’s sometimes called gnosis (as contrasted with perhaps “received knowing”).
In the second, I explore the many pressures from childhood, teenagerhood, and spiritual communities, that lead to people taking someone’s word for it even when it contradicts what they can tell for themselves, and how that leads to habitual ignoring of being able to tell for oneself. In the third, I explore the systemic double-binds of culture that shear peoples’ knowing from their honesty.
This post, the primacy of knowing-for-oneself, is more technical: to investigate the relationship between these different kinds of knowing, and make it clear how while words can be used to guide people into being able to tell for themselves, telling for oneself goes back further in evolutionary history, and that without it we wouldn’t even be able to take someone’s word for it.
If that already feels obvious to you, feel free to skip ahead to the next post: Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”
This section is a response to this comment by a draft reader (who was not my wife when she wrote this comment but is now) on the earlier posts:
My theory: taking other people’s word for it is the default way of knowing things (that we have to rely on when we’re children) and developing the capacity to know for ourselves (and to know when to trust our own knowing) takes more development.
Insofar as it might seem like “taking someone’s word for it” is the default, my guess is that it’s because the phrase “I can tell for myself” is already contrasting itself with something else. And it is the case that we aren’t born knowing how to deal with conflicts between what we can tell for ourselves and what others tell us. That’s something we have to learn, whether by cultivating it the whole time or by having a sudden waking-up experience as an adult where we realize we’ve been ignoring ourselves.
It seems overwhelmingly obvious to me that knowing for ourselves is the functional default way of knowing, and prior to taking others’ word for it in all ways: evolutionarily, developmentally, and experientially/ontologically. (However, in the same way that someone can have an unnatural and unhealthy habit that is nonetheless a default in some sense, people can develop a “default” way of knowing that involves taking others’ words for it).
First, about words. Since this is an essay, everything I’m saying is expressed in words. However, the knowing is not in the words. “I can tell for myself” knowings can be referred to by a proposition (eg “I can ride a bike”, “it is raining outside”, “my mom loves me”) but they are grounded in the other kinds of knowing: procedural, perspectival & participatory, to use Vervaeke’s model. And the ability to be able to tell if a given proposition is true/relevant is part of the sense of “I can tell for myself”, and is not itself made out of propositions, even in domains of logic or mathematics.
Second, about defaults. Consider animals. They can tell for themselves nearly everything they need to know. They periodically do some interpretation, perhaps of a mating call or a warning call, but it seems to me that this is still better understood not as “taking someone’s word for it” but simply “acting on the basis of what is implied by the sound”. They’re not forming generalizations or having “beliefs” about things elsewhere and elsewhen, on the basis of these sounds. But when the animals are direct-knowing, they aren’t thinking “I can tell for myself”, they’re simply knowing. They don’t have a “taking someone’s word for it” to contrast this more basic kind of knowing with.
Baby humans start to discern for themselves that they can move their limbs and see stuff, and that they’re hungry, well before they can understand language and be told anything true or false. They can tell for themselves that faces are important—and that some particular faces are extra important. They can tell for themselves that boobs are great. They can tell for themselves that having a dirty diaper sucks. And they can tell for themselves a lot of subtle stuff about the attention and vibe of the people around them—more than most give them credit for.
Third, about meaning. The only way we can take someone’s word for it is on the basis of what they appear to us to mean, which is a kind of knowing that is much more like the “I can tell for myself”. It’s just that we often take this part for granted. We usually don’t realize the active interpretive role that we are playing in being able to know anything on the basis of someone else making mouth sounds.
Having said all of this, yes, as humans we do need to rely a lot on taking other people’s word for it. Humans live in cultures, and there is no default human behavior absent a culture, nor a default culture for humans to live in. And in particular, our sense of social expectations comes in large part from the words of others, whether that’s an adult enculturating a kid or an employer enculturating a new hire. Sometimes this is benign. What I want to highlight is that every time we take other people’s word for something in a way that (seemingly) contradicts what we can tell for ourselves, we introduce a confusion into not just what we know but into the very means by which we go about knowing things and trusting ourselves.
It seems to me that even though we do need to tell kids a bunch of stuff and have them use those knowings even though they can’t yet tell for themselves, we could also do so in a way that 100% respects their experiential frames—not trying to force an override. We can point things out to people (kids or otherwise) and we can guide them into having experiences that will allow them to tell for themselves, and this is different from trying to force them to see something a particular way. (This is adjacent to how in coercion in terms of scarcity and perceptual control I talk of coercion as trying to force a certain behavior.) We can do this by acknowledging uncertainty, different perspectives, and where we missed things… and by supporting kids to back their own knowings when they differ from ours, even if we say “and right now I have to make the decision as the parent/teacher/etc, and this is the call I’m making”. However, attempting to form such a pocket of sanity in a larger culture that’s oppressive can have additional challenges. Somehow a kid would still need to learn in which contexts they can safely be honest about what they’re seeing.
As I said at the top, insofar as it might seem like “taking someone’s word for it” is the default, my guess is that it’s because the phrase “I can tell for myself” is already contrasting itself with something else. To some extent I chose it for that purpose, because a lot of the adult quest of developing and refining one’s knowing involves rejecting a bunch of stuff someone else told us when we were more impressionable but which we can now tell doesn’t hold up. Because while animals and newborns can tell for themselves, newborns have no idea how to integrate what they can know directly with what others tell them. This must be learned. How do I generalize what I can tell for myself, while acknowledging that it also seems to contradict what you’re telling me?
In any case, our societies currently mostly teach the opposite of that, in the way that they go about teaching us the cultural knowledge we’re supposed to have. And it’s important to convey this knowledge to people—that’s utterly central to what it means to be human. But at this point in history, it’s possible to convey most of the key cultural knowledge while also conveying how to sanely relate it to your own knowing. It’s not about the overt messages but about the relationship we’re trained to adopt between what we’re told and what we can tell for ourselves.
There are some pitfalls, however, when trying to create learning environments for people to develop this new capacity…
Next post in sequence: Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”
“Partswork” (usually “parts work” but it’s on its way to being one word like “cupboard”) is sort of a catch-all term for therapeutic or introspection approaches that involve orienting to yourself as having different parts, that have different desires, wants, needs, beliefs, experiences, perspectives, etc.
Speaking in terms of “part of me” is very common. I would be surprised to find a reader of this post who has never used a phrase like “part of me wants to go out tonight, but part of me wants to stay in” or “part of me distrusts him” or “part of me really just wants to finish this right now” or “part of me wants to do nothing but eat chocolate all day” or “part of me thinks nobody will ever love me”.
And this was the origin of Internal Family Systems therapy, the most famous form of partswork. When Dick Schwartz was working with his clients, he noticed them saying phrases like that, and started developing a theory of these “parts”. The term “parts” came from the common language of his clients. He then developed a powerful taxonomy of different types of parts (exiles & protectors (subtypes: managers & firefighters)) which relate in particular ways and have specific types of relationships with each other. In IFS sessions, it’s common for the parts to be given names (perhaps by asking the part what to call it) and to have fairly stable identities across different sessions over weeks or months.
People have different models of what’s going on there, and whether these parts truly “exist” or whether they’re just a useful interface or metaphor for relating with oneself. I don’t have a particular take on that—in fact, I’m not even entirely certain that those two views refer to a different world (Don Hoffman posits that all perception is interface). The parts obviously aren’t discrete in the way car parts are; they’re much more organic and intertwingled.
What I do have a take on is that you don’t need to reify or name parts in order to do partswork. You can—for big issues this can be really helpful. The IFS model is good and seems to track for a lot of people.
But it can also add unnecessary overhead, and make it hard to notice that the same principles of internal conflict apply on other scales as well.
This is particularly salient to me since my introduction to the importance of inner conflict wasn’t IFS, it was Perceptual Control Theory, whose parts are very tiny and in some ways ephemeral.
» read the rest of this entry »The following is a piece I wrote a year ago. A few months back I started editing it for publication and it started evolving and inverting and changing so dramatically that I found myself just wanting to publish the original as a snapshot of where my thinking was at about a year ago when I first drafted this. I realized today that attempts to write canonical pieces are daunting because there’s a feeling of having to answer all questions for all time, and that instead I want to just focus on sharing multiple perspectives on things, which can be remixed and refined later and more in public. So, with some minor edits but no deep rethinking, here’s one take on what coercion is. And you might see more pieces here soon that I let go of trying to perfect first.
Coercion = “the exploitation of the scarcity of another, to force the other to behave in a way that you want”
The word “behave” is very important in the above definition. Shooting someone and taking their wallet isn’t coercion, as bad as it is. Neither is picking their pocket when they’re not paying attention. But threatening someone at gunpoint and telling them to hand over their wallet (or stand still while you take it) is coercion. This matches commonly accepted understandings of the word, as far as I know.
A major inspiration for this piece is Perceptual Control Theory, a cybernetic model of cognition and action, which talks about behavior as the control of perception. I’m also mostly going to talk about interpersonal coercion here—self-coercion is similar but subtler.
If someone has a scarcity of food, you can coerce them by feeding them conditional on them doing what you want. This is usually called slavery. One important thing to note is that it requires you physically prevent them from feeding themselves any other way! Which in practice usually also involves the threat of violence if they attempt to flee and find a better arrangement.
In general, a strategy built on the use of coercion means preferring that the coerced agent continue to be generally in a state of scarcity, because otherwise you would be unable to continue to control them! (Because they could just get their need met some other way and therefore wouldn’t have to do what you say!)
» read the rest of this entry »Letting other people make their own mistakes is a very basic and underappreciated form of respect.
The main cause of failing to do this afaict is having an overzealous self-other boundary that includes the other person and then says “I would never make a mistake like that!” and then tries to correct their behavior with our own. bruh, they’re not you!
Letting people have their actual understandings (even when they’re misunderstanding you)
Letting people try an approach (even if you know/think it won’t work)
Letting people have their triggers & neuroses (even if they make no sense to you)
= all forms of acceptance & respect
» read the rest of this entry »
