Also uses the word "excavating", maybe he read a bit of Foucault.

You ask how you can be sure that a person can change their identity? Your question already presents a mechanism that naturally doesn't work. What is implicit in what you're saying is that changing somehow involves taking something out and putting something completely different in. As in taking out one set of desires and replacing them with some other desires. That is certainly not what happens.

To change some of your desires is to understand them and understand how they arise. That's very related to how you talk to yourself and what expressions you use and where they implicitly lead you. That is the way you speak imposes a certain view of the world, what it consists of and what is possible within it. (That's not to say that you would suddenly be able to fly but there is a whole human domain that you might start discovering from the inside as a human being rather than looking at yourself from the outside as a collection of organs).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29783833

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If I had made a similar (probably much shorter) list about programming languages it would include Go and Pascal as mind-expanding languages.

I think the danger in this focus on technology now is that it is so easy to dismiss anything at all that ancient Greeks or whomever said as not even simply wrong but even trivial and unworthy of being studied.

Of course I used to dismiss most earlier writings as well. What could they possibly teach me, after all everything is so advanced now? This kind of attitude being widespread and I think entailed in most modern science talk (as an unspoken and easy conclusion that mostly never becomes explicit) is part of the reason we struggle with the same issues as you say.

I think trait curiosity works similarly with other traits that people can fall into the trap of ascribing to themselves. For example, telling others that you are hard working, never giving up, always being there for people or whatever. Once you start repeating to yourself and to others such statements you can in a sense 'lock yourself' into it. You get into situation where you start thinking 'well, a curious person in this situation should do this, I better do it or else I'm not curious'. I think this is the difference in outcome in trivial pursuits as you say.

On the other hand it's very difficult to be curious about something you really know nothing or very little about. It really makes little sense to be curious about cryptography or quantum computing if you struggled with high school algebra and never made any serious effort to improve your skills and understanding.

Of course none of this is to claim that there is no such thing as pursuing knowledge or ideas without seemingly any external motivation. The way it looks from the inside I think is usually you have to have some idea of what you're doing and you want to see if you can apply this to something else. Counterintuitively, here you're trying to see if something that should be considered different is in fact some slight modification of what you already know. So it's usually not "let's learn something completely new because I like to learn things and am curious" but "let's see if I can reformulate this thing that looks unknown to something that I know". This is the creative part where you are actually learning. The process of reformulating or restating something with a language that you understand and you've built for yourself, bringing in the new idea, often not explicitly stated to be connected with what you know, is what gives you the kick.

At any given point all you have is your singular experiential point of view -- you're reading this comment, coding, chewing your food, remembering a childhood memory, having sex or whatever. That any of this has any correspondence to anything beyond the fact that you are experiencing it at that moment is an assumption. Only then you might start reasoning about the contents. And the contents are of course subject to any brain-in-a-vat objections you might make.

Obviously you cannot live at all if you start questioning your experience at that level. But the point I'm trying to make is that that singular point of view, whatever you are experiencing, is literally all there is. Nothing ever happens, as far as you (or anyone) is concerned, that is different from a personal experience.

To continue to exist at all of course, I don't think there is any other way than what you describe, to start acting based on whatever it is that you are experiencing. But you have to take that initial step and I think being aware of it can lead to a somewhat different understanding of why you feel what you feel and in particular how culture works.

I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.

(That is regardless of whether you can quote research to the contrary. That is, statements that some people in some cases given some environment in a given moment or period could not pass some bar that some researcher has set.)

Your goal is to discover the person standing in front of you by allowing yourself to see them as a fully capable and imaginative human.

The other thing is to acknowledge that everyone is at some stage in their life. They have realized some things and others not. You want to know how they see the world and how they interpret what happens to them. Usually here you'll discover that they make some rigid assumptions about the world whenever they are mentioning some issue. And usually that issue has something to do with their relationship with other people or with the way that they view themselves.

Within all this is of course you as the listener. If something is making you uncomfortable in this process you should be very honest with yourself what that is. There are of course cases where people are very deeply entangled in their own world and I don't think in those cases it is beneficial for either of you to participate in the conversation.

To add to the previous point, I think realizing that there is a lot to be learned by allowing people to share the way they think with you. I think you would be surprised by what people are willing to tell you if you allow them and the kind of deep relationships you can form that way. It's also very surprising to realize that most issues that people have beneath a very shallow surface of circumstances are really almost the same. And they mostly have to do with the way that they talk to themselves about what happens to them.