"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #12: Focusing

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On January 12 we naturally do Training Regime Day 12: Focusing which naturally relates rather strongly to Noticing, but also to several others;  in fact what I've been noticing, and am now focusing on, is a theme which is leading to a systematic revision of my mental model of my mental modeling, based most directly on Scott Alexander's Mental Mountains, about Unlocking the Emotional Brain:

UtEB’s brain is a mountainous landscape, with fertile valleys separated by towering peaks. Some memories (or pieces of your predictive model, or whatever) live in each valley. But they can’t talk to each other. The passes are narrow and treacherous. They go on believing their own thing, unconstrained by conclusions reached elsewhere.

Consciousness is a capital city on a wide plain. When it needs the information stored in a particular valley, it sends messengers over the passes. These messengers are good enough, but they carry letters, not weighty tomes. Their bandwidth is atrocious; often they can only convey what the valley-dwellers think, and not why. And if a valley gets something wrong, lapses into heresy, as often as not the messengers can’t bring the kind of information that might change their mind.

 I see that as key to Noticing as well as Murphyjitsu and TAP itself, as well as Focusing; in each case, we have an effort to make better use of limited communication between the "conscious self" and the processors up there in the little valleys. And I'm going to go on thinking in terms of story-spider swarms in Haidt's elephant visualized as an enormous inner-spider-managed puppet, but now I'm focused (Hmm....) on the threads that go from one spider-swarm to another. I do not want to think of consciousness as "a capital city on a wide plain"; not a city at all, but maybe a single haunted house with many rooms...There ought to be a fairy-tale in there somewhere, it's Charles Perrault's birthday. (And he said: "I myself am a labyrinth, where one easily gets lost." Me too, Charles.)  In fact I'm just going to to stay with consciousness as a story, an output of edits which try to retroactively reconcile the multiple narratives being constructed by separate spider-swarms. And there may or may not be only one Anansi-swarm to do the final edit to construct the Authorized Edition at any given moment; I don't think that's crucial to my thinking about consciousness. What is crucial is that a whole lot of applied rationality, of getting your actions to be better aligned with your goals etc, is a matter of getting messages to travel along those threads, with very limited messengers who need specific attention. Messengers like Sarah for Noticing's Sense-O-Meter, Marian for Murphyjitsu, and maybe even Spider-Duck.

  The special role of Focusing is to deal with the case where the threads of communication are not simply thin but misconnected: the case where some processing in a non-central swarm is giving you a headache or some other indicator of tension/pain/whatever, and you need to notice that. So sit comfortably and let your body talk to you...and when you get a feeling of something off, something that might be a misconnected story-thread you need to hear, try first simply to give it a label or combination of labels. 

Okay, as so often, I'll be trying this again. I get nothing nohow. Happy Birthday, Charles. (And Jeff Bezos.)