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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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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I’m very confident that the Talmud (which i’m trying to learn cover to cover) describes behaviors as admirable which would be impossible or unwise to attempt (like sleeping 0 hours per night)
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Anyhow, I’m inclined to believe that there are, or have been, *any* people who demand the impossible, and actually meant that, not something more reasonable.
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But okay, if there *are* people who ask the impossible or unreasonable, why should that cause suffering? Why not just reject all impossible demands?
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To explain this, I have to posit some inherent limitation in what thoughts are possible, and that makes my model more complicated & so less credible, for occam’s razor reasons. Hmm. I’m stuck.
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“Some people demand the impossible” should lead to the update “demanding the impossible is a thing people sometimes do”, but I don’t see why it overcorrects to “all feedback should be interpreted as a demand to do the impossible.”
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Hypothesis 1: there is an incredibly prevalent, all-pervading meme, that instantaneous obedience is possible, and even that the function of language is literally to *cause* (with no intervening thought) behavior in another person. This is literally what B.F. Skinner said.
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Likewise there are things like Bernays’ Propaganda that claim that we can literally be manipulated directly by outside forces. There are popular Evangelical parenting books that say “delayed obedience is disobedience.”
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