#thinking limits

[mentalisttraceur]

Ideas are Icebergs

Lots of correct and good ideas tend to be just the very tips of broad and deep pyramids of thought and knowledge. They entail all the perspective gained from standing on huge scaffolds of interconnected justifying reasoning and experience, and all the nuances discovered while building those scaffolds.

Once that scaffolding gets big enough, we simply cannot hold all of it in our mind at once. The best ideas we can reach are necessarily the ones which are too big to fit in our current thinking limits: you can gradually climb higher than you can jump at once; you can gradually explore an area bigger than what you can see or visualize at once.

Many ideas, once reached, can be used without their scaffolding. You can just think with the idea and benefit from it. This reinforces the idea and its rightness, but at the same time frees our mind to gradually forget the scaffolding. So someone can have a great idea but be unable to defend it, and the wiser the idea, the more likely it is that efforts to quickly recreate the scaffolding on the spot will actually produce something wrong.

So when looking at an idea, either in your own mind or in what others say, remember: like an iceberg, most of it is below the surface.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

I only post about video games here if it has value beyond the video gaming itself.

So having said that:

StarCraft 2, when played "competitively" (even just on the ranked ladder online, not necessarily professionally) is the single most intense mental exercise I know of.

Things like Rubik's cubes or chess or go, or advanced math problems, or holding in your head everything needed to design or understand a complex software architecture or design or algorithm, or a martial arts spar, or playing a musical instrument at peak ability, or simulating experiences and cognition, etc - all that pushes various different thinking limits too.

But StarCraft 2 1v1 ladder play, when you actually go at it as fast and effortfully as you can... Holy shit. It's anywhere from five to sixty minutes (depending on how well you and your opponent play) of non-stop brain firing on all cylinders.

There is always something more you could be doing, always more things you could be checking or keeping track of.

The game will consume and reward any improvement in multi-tasking or information processing or strategic judgment or world-modeling (of the game state) or mind interferometry (of the other player) or just raw speed and precision of movement that you can feed it.

Near as I can tell there is no ceiling. You can keep getting better forever, and you will still be able to get better at doing it, even if you do end up better than everyone else. Of course that is not unique - lots of games, and most deep real-life skills, have no ceiling.

It's the combination of simultaneous and urgent demands, the complexity and variety, and the lack of obvious ceiling, all together, that I find unique.

Now maybe there are other games like it and maybe other people get the same level of intense deep and broad mental challenge in other things.

For example, I predict that once developed far enough, and if approached with the same deliberate focused activated intensity, "humaning" can open up that rich unceasing explosion of challenge.

So there are probably other ways to get mentally exercised as intensely or more, perhaps even in the skills I mentioned earlier as not doing that for me. StarCraft 2 1v1 ranked ladder play just happens to be the most intense one I have had.

I do think I am onto something with the whole "if approached with deliberate focused activated intensity" comment though. I think part of why SC2 is so mentally intense for me is that I go into it feeling like it has to be.

But in the other hand, I think I am only able to feel that way because with SC2 I can see beyond my ability - I cannot do as well as I know can be done. Also SC2 only became this way for me when I saw by example just how fast it could be played.

Looking back, I have had moments of similar intensity when humaning. But only when things seemed like urgent theats or problems. But usually those were done as soon as impression management damage control was done, and only the most immediately relevant cognition flows of at most a mind or two had to be mentally handled.

Oh and when I got attacked by that dog five years or so ago - but again I won that too quickly, so the state lasted for literally at most five seconds. And there was so, so much less to that problem space. One human and one dog bodies' worth of anatomy simplified down to just the movement mechanics and vulnerabilities, the dog's mind, the one human observer in the room who literally did not even get around to moving in the time before it was over, background proceeding of peripheral perceptions for signs of people in the nearby rooms doing anything relevant.

That sounds like a lot, and maybe it is, but it is mostly interlinked in these smooth cognition flows that handle it all, while SC2 involves so much more that has to be individually and discretely mentally accounted for.

StarCraft 2 feels like it demands more of my mind than any of those situations, but most importantly - and this is the huge thing - it demands it for much longer periods of time, unrelentingly.

The hilarious thing is that a huge number of people play way better than me. I'm actually pretty damn sucky. So I suspect there is some way to just play it with way less mental effort and intensity and focus.

I have always been prone to exponential skill growth curves. I kinda suck at things, usually for years, until eventually I grind and stumble my way into finally getting a feel for the problem space and the skills and the cognition needed, and at some point it tips over and I start improving really rapidly. Then a few years later people assume I'm natural or talented or have always had a knack for it.

But anyway, I'm either still in what I suspect is the sublinear part of my SC2 skill growth curve, or just getting out of it. We'll see.

So there are probably ways to play, at least at my weak level, that do not provide that exercise, and we could probably find something else that does.

And also, I am not sure how much of the cognition I train up playing SC2 is actually transferable to other, more practical matters.

Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing that in the decade since it came out, I have basically found nothing else that exercises the mind the same way.

[mentalisttraceur]

One of my more esoteric (and potentially pointless) casual mental "exercises" is trying to simulate being a mind piloting two human bodies at once, looking at each other. Two visual streams, two senses of being in my body and feeling it from the inside. Sometimes I go further and try to have the two stimulated bodies touch.

It's an extremely tenuous state, I only pull it off for moments, and probably only incompletely. It is possible that there are hard physical brain limits on my cognition in this regard.

But if there's anything I've learned in life is that the feeling of pushing into thinking limits is always a good indicator to keep going - it always has some sort of practical benefits eventually.

[mentalisttraceur]

I became a "utilitarian" basically entirely because I applied my empathy as universally as I could, and my empathy was powerfully compelling to me.

Because I kept trying to integrate the future and stretch my thinking limits to balance as much empathetic compassionate care as possible.

I initially developed a very deontological style of thinking, as I found principles that would prevent what made my empathy suffer. But I could not ignore cases when I could see applying those principles produced consequences contrary to those principles. I cared too much to just let my principles self-defeat like that.

Then one day I looked out from the shape my mind now had after years of this struggle, and saw a valid interpretation of the words of utilitarianism I had not seen before, one that fit that shape really well.

[mentalisttraceur]

An example of what I mentioned in my last post (asymmetrically staying silent due to consideration that the other side does not give):

The whole push towards "use preferred pronouns" has grown and accumulated many unethical additions around the ethically good core of being compassionate and sensitive to people whose gender experience does not line up with gender norms.

Yet I mostly hold back on saying things because I can imagine potential ways that complex nuanced arguments beyond my thinking limits might conceivably ethically justify the current spiral.

But I constantly push my reasoning about ethics issues, integrating the future as far as I can, integrating the ripples of effects as widely as I can, trying to empathetically simulate all possible experiences of everyone who might be effected however indirectly as much as I can.

Meanwhile there is thousands of people demanding apologies and consequences any time someone expresses anything more nuanced or complicated than what they can parse as enthusiastic unqualified and unquestioning agreement.

Like "can I still use 'they' as a gender-neutral generic pronoun for everyone even if the person has started preferred pronouns?"

And it's not like it is just kids and teens and other immature people who still have time to grow before they have power - by now it is also people in decision-making positions all over the modern social landscape.

People like that are liberated by their willful lack of understanding or compassion to run around effecting things through sheer force of numbers, repetition, and outrage with a moralistic veneer.

Meanwhile I refrain from posting things like this because I have just enough vision to know that it is possible I'm wrong in some far-reaching nuance or lack of mental scope that would undermine my conclusions.

Or I delay posting things like this, until I can prune it of anger and condemnation.

For the record I am in favor of using people's preferred pronouns - if it's important to the person and hurts them to not do it, seems right to make the effort by default.

And if that wasn't part of your idea-fitting, if your automatic cognition had already collapsed the possibility of me being in favor of that, if you think the above is somehow sufficient mind interferometry evidence to conclude that, then you are part of the problem I am talking about.

I do assert we should have one or more truly gender-neutral universal pronoun(s) that can be used for all people regardless of their preferences, that it is not automatically misgendering nor bigotry to insist on such a thing, and that some people finding that offensive is not good enough of a reason to prevent the availability of such an extremely beneficial language feature.

[mentalisttraceur]

I just want the ability to fuse with more and more other minds, absorbing them into myself* and thus increasing my thinking limits without bound. Is that really too much to ask of the world?

* it would be more like a partnership, I swear! I wouldn't overwhelm and consume you, we would just... reach mutual understanding, consensus, and totally consensual integration after some interplay of our now melded cognition. It would be great and you'd totally love it.

[mentalisttraceur]

Before you embark on a genuine pursuit of mental growth, make sure you are ready (as much as one can be ready for such a thing) to deal with new suffering that you have not yet encountered.

Seriously. You might think being smart and capable is all that, with achievements and recognition. It does have advantages, and helps protect and heal and strengthen self-esteem. But beyond a certain point...

Beyond a certain point, growing as a mind means entering a personal hell. It is growing too big for the cage that is this life. The cage doesn't loosen. The cage can't loosen. The mental growth that I have experienced has had these fun results:

My thoughts are too "wide", too many angles and associations active at once, to the point that speech linearity is a constant problem.

I have such large chains of inferences and bodies of evidence and knowledge forming my conclusions that now trying to convince or explain my ideas causes me to experience working gridlock most of the time.

My understanding exceeds my thinking limits to the point that I often can't make progress because I'm aware that I'm not able to hold all of my relevant ideas, knowledge, and heuristics at once: like trying to carry too many things in my hands, in the dark. I know I am not holding something important, but reaching for it usually causes another thing to "slip" out of it. The brain gets better and the grasp widens just a little bit if I constantly push, but it's exhausting, but to do anything less is to know I'm wrong.

A lot of the conclusions of my reasoning that I could once readily explain have been wired into automatic and often not-quite-as-conscious thinking, so sometimes I have a cognitive habit or intuition that I remember was hard-earned through much evidence and thought, but I have to basically re-discover, re-prove, and re-articulate from scratch the justifications for things that I've been building on top of for years.

I have grown the skills for reshaping my own mind so much that my entire perspective on that is basically alien to the average person, impossible to word without several gated truths most are still "outside the gate" on; I can so often clearly see, once I know a person well enough, what cognition they could train and how, the way they could benefit themselves and the world by habituating certain ways of thinking, but it is inaccessible to many, in ways that make trying to convey it directly counter-productive.

As it concerns empathy and compassion - actually caring about the world and other people/minds, I have only exposed myself to ever greater levels of profound distress over the predicaments that we all find ourselves in.

Existential crisis. Already had one? That's okay, there are many different, unique ways to reach existential dread and despair, and in my experience exploring one rarely prepared me for the others, except in so far as it forced me into opportunities to train deeper coping skills.

Insufficient language.

The horizon of what I know I can't or don't know, or can't think, has for a few years now grown faster than my knowledge and thinking limits. I think they're intrinsically connected, such that any growth of the latter grows the former more.

I've had to start learning to be certain on-demand as a psychological tool, because in most issues that involve accounting for people, from my vantage point certainly as a genuine intellectual position is indefensible to the point of being unethical.

Understand, this is my unique experience. I don't know if yours will be the same. Maybe the problem isn't even mental growth, but my psychology which just wasn't prepared for growth that normal people handle just fine. I don't know. I probably can't know, not ever really with certainty, per point 10.

Don't get me wrong, it's fulfilling, and I think given the choice I would eventually push further. But I cannot stress this enough:

Were it not for my growing skills at not being emotionally distressed over genuinely bad things, at maintaining positive cognition in the face of genuinely real and immediate problems, I would be rendered non-functional by what I've built my mind up to do. As is I seem to experience nearly daily frustrations and distress that most people don't ever seem to, if I don't steer my mind correctly.

But who knows, maybe everything I experience is common and normal. Then again, if you can idea-fit anything sensical and relatable to you onto my words, that's the conclusion you'd be tempted to draw.

Doesn't matter. See, I don't actually care if I'm special or unique in mental growth. Or rather, I'd really like to believe that I'm not above average at all. If you really get it, then I think you'll understand this the most. Because the alternative, the possibility of really, genuinely being somehow qualitatively better that most other people, is not a pleasant thing. It is terrifying, lonely, and dreadful.

TL;DR: If one day you magically have the option to wish for profoundly increased intelligence, don't forget to wish for profoundly increased coping skills first.

[mentalisttraceur]

Seeing significant patterns in random noise and agents with intent as likely causes of complex things are the kind of cognition that makes absolute sense given that normal life trains those things and makes them adaptive.

In the real world we operate in (which is what our minds empirically train our sense of logic on), true randomness is vanishingly rare, and complexity that is both significant and yet still within our thinking limits to trace usually has human intent behind it.