Introspection

scuddera24th August 2020 at 8:00pm

2020 philosophy 

Julia: What do you think about Introspection (♋︎) as a functional tool?

• I love this question
• why? 
• More Chunky Analysis:
• Are things unchangable?
• Is there a cost to IS e.g. "missing the living"

• fundemental questions
• What is ♋︎? It is a type of looking
• what is looking? what is it looking at
• the looking is done by the "I"
• the thing that is looked at is the "I"
• Is the "I" real?
• No! but also Yes. see below
• How is IS different from regular thought
• in a simple sense the "I" look at itself is circular while the "I" looking out is normal thought and is unidirectional (e.g. thinking about a grape)

Ok what am i saying: Ok so ♋︎ is the "I" looking at itself, this is circular.

• What happens?? like what is going on
• Why do we introspect?
• What is the "I"

I think these questions are informed by the central axiom that ♋︎ is circular.

• ok example of ♋︎: I wake up and feel like things are bad.
• Has ♋︎ happened yet? sort of? Theres kind of a bare ♋︎ i think.
• Ive learned not everyone has this. Like you can have more or less access to your inner state. For example when you (julia) dance, you have a very fine tuned sense (or more than most people) for the physical and emotional responses you have. I assume that in some sense you dont have to work too hard (maybe not but at least I assume it feels possible instead of impossible)
• There are experiences that are harder becuase we have less experience or they are more complex or whatever. IN the case of waking up and feeling bad we do this all the time but there is a hierachry of ♋︎.
• Hierarchy of ♋︎
• I think this is just important to mention becuase the level of depth of ♋︎ can determine the quality ;) of ♋︎
• surface ♋︎ seems to me to be a glorified form of best guesses. In this way it kinda doesnt count imo. E.g. you wake up feeling bad, you think "oh i might be hungry" and maybe eating makes the bad feeling go away (or drinking water or masturbating or calling a friend lmao) but your really just applying a technique to a problem that is beyond you.
• but you migh think at this point like " wait but isnt that all introspection, making a guess and then seeing if it solves the problem or 'fits'?" 
• Another way of looking at surface ♋︎ is like as barracding a metaphorical door, instead of locking it with the proper key. Its not even that your doing the wrong thing its just like approximate soloutions to a problem that is too complex to solve.

Ok what am i saying: 

• non-deep/surface ♋︎
• You have a feeling/experience
• you look inside but in an intuitive way, almost automatically
• you use the data your brain has collected to make a predicition about what it all means
• X: I wake up feeling bad, I drink water. Works.... I think?
• Y: I meet a friend for lunch but feel like i want to vomit. I drink water. It works..... I think?
• this predicition is messy and noisey– it doesnt really KNOW it just TRIES
• alot of the times this works
• in X the problem is so layered and complex the amount of time it would take to find the "true answer" the "ultimate cause" is just too much and so we try things out to see what will work. A lot of the time we can make this work becuase dehydration, for example, happens all the time and you can develop a pretty good idea of when it might help a situation. Its also so low cost that you might as well do it for any problem where you think it might be a cause. 
• Sometimes it doesnt
• In Y most of the quick fixes are just bandaids — eh I think i need to flesh this out more but idk im just gonna move on
• so like is surface ♋︎ not acutally ♋︎ ?
• i think no, its not actual introspection becuase it doesnt take into account the system its within. 
• the steelman of surface ♋︎ is that most reflexive thinking works well enough. Even with complex examples like feeling nausea during an interpersonal interaction, you can have a reflex developed that works pretty well:
1. I feel nauseous 
2. It might be dehydration it might be anxiety
3. Oh i actually am also feeling a bit of fear?
4. Why might I be feeling that?
5. either a) i know what it is b) i cant figure it out 
6. usually the next action no matter a or b is: let me use this coping mechanism: "hey I need to go to the bathroom" , deep breathing, etc.
• This is mostly like a healthy form of looking inside and wondering whats going on.
• sometimes its the best thing possible in the situation but sometimes it is problematic

So yeah the real thing i think we want to get at is the times when surface ♋︎ fails and i want to argur that it is becuase like deep ♋︎ is what surface ♋︎ is pretending to be but in pretending to be deep ♋︎ the surface ♋︎ can fuck u up

• Cicularity
• All ♋︎ is circular, surface ♋︎ just ignores this fact.
• When i wake up feeling shitty (i keep resorting to this ex. to make it simple and broad)
  and I spend a minute looking inward my 'I' is looking at what my 'I' is doing, namely it is feeling shitty
  I see different things and those things can match patterns I have in my head and then i can apply other tools in repsonse to that pattern i see. e.g. the shitty feeling is kinda like the feeling before i need to cry maybe i should think more about that. or the shitty feeling feels like a groggy aimless feeling maybe i slept weird and didnt get good rest, etc. etc.
• this inward looking however, does not occur in a vacuum, the looking itself affects that which it looks at So your looking i know this is really abstract i think i need better analogies but im gonna push through
  becomes a thing that is a part of the thing you were looking at, which in turn is the thing that looks. 
• So surface ♋︎ basically ignores the fact that the looking has an effect. I think this creates a lot of the problems that i read into your OG question. 
• problems resulting from not acknoledging the ciruclarity
• one is downward spirals. You think about how you are feeling/thinking and find yourself not moving foward. This feels deeply wrong becaause it is an unknown inherently scary
  . " What is going on!?!?"
• in this example the circularity opens downward like a cone. You have a feeling you notice through ♋︎and you think "why?" but when you dont see answers or the answers are scary you feel like you have looked and somehow gotten father away from that which you are looking at
• anxiety/panic obfuscate what is happening
• Another is a fatalistic attitude
• when you ♋︎ and just find more wierdness/confusion or you find nothingness (where there should be like explanantions, causes, etc) 
• another is relatated to the downward spiral as im writing this im feeling like the downward cone is a really central part of this
  

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