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: Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of "The Sense of Physical Necessity"), published by LoganStrohl on March 1, 2024 on LessWrong.

This is the third post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum Experiences and Getting Your Eyes On. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. If you're intimidated by the length of this post, remember that this is meant as reference material.

Feel free to start with "My Goals For This Post", and consider what more you want from there.

Having chosen a quest - "What's going on with distraction?" - my naturalist study began in earnest.

In "Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism", the first two phases of study that I discussed after "Getting Started" were "Locating Fulcrum Experiences" and "Getting Your Eyes On". In practice, though, I often do a combination of these phases, which is what happened this time. For the sake of keeping track of where we are in the progression, I think it's best to think of me as hanging out in some blend of the early phases, which we might as well call "Locating Your Eyes".

My Goals For This Post

Much of the "learning" that happens in the first two phases (or "locating your eyes") could be just as well described as unlearning: a setting aside of potentially obfuscatory preconceptions. My unlearning this time was especially arduous. I was guided by a clumsy story, and had to persist through a long period of deeply uncomfortable doubt and confusion as I gradually weaned myself off of it.

It took me a long time to find the right topic and to figure out a good way into it. If this were a slightly different sort of essay, I'd skip all of the messiness and jump to the part where my progress was relatively clear and linear. I would leave my fumbling clumsiness off of the page.

Instead, I want to show you what actually happened. I want you to know what it is like when I am "feeling around in the dark" toward the beginning of a study. I want to show you the reality of looking for a fulcrum experience when you haven't already decided what you're looking for. Because in truth, it can be quite difficult and discouraging, even when you're pretty good at this stuff; it's important to be prepared for that.

So I want you to see me struggle, to see how I wrestle with challenges. In the rest of this post, I hope to highlight the moves that allowed me to successfully progress, pointing out what I responded to in those moments, what actions I took in response, and what resulted.

To summarize my account: I looped through the first two phases of naturalism a few times, studying "distraction", then "concentration", then "crucialness", before giving up in despair. Then I un-gave-up, looped through them once more with "closeness to the issue", and finally settled on the right experience to study: a sensation that I call "chest luster".

To understand this account as a demonstration of naturalism, it's important to recognize that every loop was a success, even before I found the right place to focus. When studying distraction and concentration, I was not really learning to hug the query yet; but I was learning to perceive details of my experience in the preconceptual layer beneath concepts related to attention. Laying that foundation for direct contact was valuable, since "hug the query" is a special way of using attention.

I will therefore tell you about each loop. I recommend reading through the first loop ("Distraction") even if you're skipping around, since it includes some pretty important updates to my understanding of the naturalist procedure.

Distraction

I realized during this study that there are a couple crucial distinctions related to fulcrum experiences that I failed to ...