Having the thought “I should do X” does not logically imply that “I do X” is true. Not even a little bit. Nor does having that thought *cause* you to do X. Ever. No matter how hard or how frequently you think it.
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You have the thought: “I ought to do X.” Then you zoom in on X. What is X? What would it mean to do X?
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You mentally simulate what doing X might entail. (“In order to do intermittent fasting, I’d first have to decide which meal to skip. One option is skipping breakfast.”)
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Now you have a mental model of what X is, applied to your own potential action. Ie, in an “egocentric” coordinate system.
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If X is literally a single motion, like lifting your arm, you can feel this representation as sort of a “ghost motion.” Before you move your arm, you have a kinaesthetic simulation of what it would feel like to move your arm.
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I claim it is *literally impossible* to move your arm without such a simulation. (The simulation may happen so soon before the motion that you don’t notice, but meditation makes it more noticeable.)
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I also claim that the “ghost motion” before moving your arm, and the “how WOULD I go on this diet” simulation are two instances of the same kind of thing.
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Both of these claims come from personal introspection, but the “simulated movement precedes movement” iirc has support from neuroscience. Also, studies show athletes improve performance from *mentally simulating* doing sports, and iirc pro athletes actually do visualize.
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The implication is that it is also literally impossible to go on a diet without mentally simulating *how* you would go on a diet *should* you wish to.
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It is obviously true, but not at all controversial, that you can’t go on a diet if you literally don’t know how. That’s not the point I’m making.
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The point is, since humans are not logically omniscient, that just because you know the declarative fact “Intermittent fasting consists of only eating in an 8-hour window” doesn’t mean you have *created the plan*
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“If I were to do intermittent fasting, when I woke up I would make myself coffee but not breakfast.” + whatever nonverbal simulation is necessary to “prepare to do it.”
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In the psychological literature these are called implementation intentions, and lots of studies claim they work better than baseline for forming new habits.
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When thinking “I should do X” actually causes you to do X, my hypothesis is that the “should” doesn’t cause action directly; it’s the prompt to *think about X*.
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I’ve noticed that often I don’t want to open my terminal window to start writing code. But if I ask myself, “If I *did* code the next part of this project, where would I start?” And once I answer the question, I *do* want to start.
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Simulating what you *would* do, *if* you chose to, creates a menu of available actions that you literally did not have queued up in your conscious mind before.
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And now that you have the menu in front of you, your (fast, intuitive, maybe-dopaminergic) reward-seeking mechanism *is drawn to one of these options*, which enables you to take them.
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It is literally impossible to *override* an algorithm’s reward function; that’s tautological! What an algorithm *can* do is certain internal modeling processes that change its perceived menu of available options.
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Now, what happens if you have the thought “I should do X” (or hear someone else say “You should do X”) and you *don’t* simulate what that would mean if you were to do it?
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At best, it remains a mere verbal phrase that you can recite but you do nothing further with it. “In one ear and out the other.”
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At worst, you interpret “You should do X” to mean “Instantaneously cause it to already be the case that you are doing X.”
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This is literally impossible. You can obey a “should” quickly in clock time *if you do the simulation*. Musicians following a conductor’s baton can follow instructions virtually in real time.
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(Actually, musicians probably don’t calculate the “egocentric coordinates” on the fly; they probably built the map from “sight of conductor” to “hand motions” through practice, and have a special-case cached map they can retrieve near-instantaneously.)
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But you can at least *relatively quickly* transition from being told “please take the garbage out” to taking the garbage out. It can be a few seconds. It just has to include actually simulating *how* one takes the garbage out.
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Trying to believe a logical contradiction, I think, is *the* source of suffering.
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(This is a standard psychologization of Buddhism, it’s a tenet of Critical Rationality, and it also matches my introspective experience.)
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An untranslated “should” introduces a logical contradiction! It is saying “(cause it to be true that) you are doing X” when observably you are not doing X!
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This is why people can sometimes see criticism/feedback as an attack. Literally *all* criticism, if untranslated, is a commandment to do the literally impossible.
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But why would you ever fail to translate feedback? Most people, if they ask you to take out the garbage, don’t mean to say “do it literally instantaneously in a physically impossible fashion.” So why get defensive as *if* they meant that?
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One hypothesis: we have bad memories of people who expected obedience faster than we literally could obey at the time, or of demands that were literally impossible to fulfill even *after* simulating them.
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I usually use religious commandments as what feel like clear cut examples of instructions that are definitely impossible to obey and yet intended to be obeyed; but other people claim that’s not true, so I’m not sure.
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