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The outside and the outside view
The outside view from rationalism. You try to look at a system from an impersonal perspective, treating yourself as if you were a third party.
Robin Hanson. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
Robin Hanson. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html
The outside view allows you to reason about yourself. It itâs refinement it may attempt to abolish the self all together, as with Zen Buddhism.
Lust for knowledge, single-minded and hot, is what drives us into the void
Lust for knowledge, single-minded and hot, is what drives us into the void
When you imagine other people, you compress thhem to a relatively simple set of interlocking motivations. When you imagine yourself... itâs complicated.
The simple model of others is often more predictive than the complex model of self.
The simple model of others is often more predictive than the complex model of self.
So you try to model yourself as the other, but you canât. You put on a mask and look in the mirror. Inexorably you still see yourself. Itâs Gödelian. Eventually you learn to imagine yourself only as the man who wore that mask, you forget you have it on.
You are no wiser for this
You are no wiser for this
And nothing is ever outside enough; with each exit you make, you look for another, grander, more exterior. Someplace colder, Iâve got to get to someplace colder.
When everything is frozen, it will stand still, and Iâll be able to see it in its totality.
When everything is frozen, it will stand still, and Iâll be able to see it in its totality.
The outside view is a vector in mind space, and if you follow it you see horrible things, which then become merely part of the landscape, an alien and non-linear landscape, void-soaked and thalassian
The motif of harmful perception: things we see that change us forever, not for good. Borges and Lovecraft intersect here. In Lovecraft, a glimpse of the outside drives you mad. Gynarlethotepâs followers, or the sight of a shoggoth.
In Borges, the Zahir obsessed you, the book of sand haunted you, tlon overtook you and the blue tigers mulitplied and consolidated, violating your ability to comprehend number and mathematics.
You become what you behold. When you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you. If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something, it is in the end hard for him to be anything else
