Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Getting Your Eyes On, published by LoganStrohl on May 2, 2023 on LessWrong.

The first phase of naturalism is about identifying crucial experiences that you want to study in greater depth. It’s a lot like preparing slides for observation under a microscope.

This second phase, “Getting Your Eyes On”, is about heightening your awareness of those crucial experiences. It’s like getting your subject in focus by watching carefully while turning the adjustment knobs.

What does it mean to “get your eyes on?”

I grew up in Southern Indiana, on a farm with many acres of forest. Every spring, as soon as the May apples popped up, I’d go morel hunting with my family. Morels are brown wrinkly mushrooms that look very much like the forest floor, so hunting for them is a bit like playing Where’s Waldo, except that Waldo’s on a brown and green background, wearing brown.

But there’s a trick to it. You start out moving quickly, scanning the ground for your first mushroom. Then, when you finally see it, you don’t harvest it right away. Instead, you squat down and watch it for a full minute. Mushroom hunters call this technique “getting your eyes on”.

What I imagine is happening is that you’re training your perceptual systems to consider this particular arrangement of little grayish-brown wrinkles as “foreground”, rather than “background”. Your brain thinks that if you stare at something with full attention for a shockingly long time, it must be important. “Hey, eyes, this isn’t just another bit of deciduous detritus. It’s important. It’s salient. It’s the main thing I care about today.”

Like mushrooms, fulcrum experiences tend to blend in with the background. Before you train yourself to pay attention to them, they mostly just seem like another fleeting mundane experience in a forest of fleeting mundane experiences. They’re hard to study, because they’re practically invisible.

In naturalism, “getting your eyes on” is the process of shifting a fulcrum experience into the foreground of your life. It’s a practice that takes a previously ho-hum experience and makes it stand out, so that you notice when it happens and thereby gain the opportunity to observe it on purpose.

How To Get Your Eyes On

Start by setting out to notice your fulcrum experience just one time. You’ve probably noticed it before, as part of “Identifying Fulcrum Experiences”; but this time, you’ll have a slightly different goal when you notice: your goal this time will be to observe the experience closely while it happens.

For a day, or a week, try to set a small part of your attention to watching all of your experiences, as though scanning the ground for mushrooms. When you finally recognize something that looks like it might be what you’re after, slow way down in whatever you were doing (if you can), and pay a lot of attention to whatever is going on for you.

Phenomenological Photography

I think of this special kind of focused observation as “phenomenological photography”. Your goal is to take a “snapshot” of your immediate experience in a particular moment. Here’s how it works.

When you make a painting, you choose precisely which visual elements to capture, and which to leave out. But when you take a photograph with an ordinary camera, your camera doesn't know what your subject is. You may have aimed the lens at a squirrel, intending to photograph a squirrel, but you also captured the texture of the bark it’s standing on, the shape of the leaves, and the color of the sky. A camera has no concept of a squirrel. The shutter opens, light is recorded, and that is all.

To take a phenomenological snapshot, make yourself like a camera. Use your guesses about how your fulcrum experience will feel to aim and focus the lens, but then click to take a picture of everything in the frame. The shutter opens, and no matter what you’d plan...