Self-distancing can help you make better decisions

> you don't have to identify with the thoughts coming out of the thinking-agent,

I really have hard time with this . What is the difference between thinking and perceiving agents. Both entities are doing thinking and perceiving. One seems to be passing some sort of value judgement on the other self. Why would some thoughts be "invalid". They are coming out of you for a reason, why should those reasons be ignored.

How precisely is the self( the one we are strongly identifying with) coming up with validity criteria for other self's thoughts. Surely its your own ambitions. right? eg: Ignore the thought of eating icecream.

Wouldn't this process create some sort of constant internal conflict where two self are fighting and passing value judgement on each other.

You're talking about a separate thing.

The "speaking agent", or the analyzing agent, is also the predictive agent, and the goal-biasing agent. These are all one "thing." That "thing" is the subsystem of the brain that gets woken up by activity on dopamine receptors, and attempts to model the world (with a bias toward predicting world-states it would like to see, and can make real by predicting a future that requires it to have enacted certain motor commands, which it then enacts to attempt to unify this prediction with reality. Further reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/book-review-behavior-t...)

We have drugs that lower the activity level of this subsystem—dopamine antagonists (i.e. antipsychotics) and, at a lower level, AMPA-receptor antagonists (i.e. anticonvulsants.) At high doses, these drugs produce a state called "delirium", where the affected person will just sit and stare at the wall (or whatever you put them in front of), doing something if they are coerced to, but otherwise doing absolutely nothing—not blinking, not changing their visual focus, not shifting due to discomfort. You can also get a state of delirium from brain damage, or in some forms of depression.

That is what I mean when I describe the effect of having your analyzing-agent cut out. "You" are still there—you are still conscious, and can still perceive the world!—but no thinking is happening. No predicting, no world-modelling, no goal-pathing or choice-weighing or executive-function-ing. You are a passive, judgement-less qualia sponge.

(Technically, this isn't even the "true" death of the thinking agent. These people can think; they can respond to direct questions, they can solve problems if you force them to do so with threat of immediate harm, etc. What's actually happening is that the goal-biasing is gone, so their perceptual-control agent is just attempting to predict the future that'll happen if it does nothing—and then unifies the motor-command stream with that future by doing nothing.)

(Amusingly, a Buddhist would say that a person in a state of acute delirium has attained enlightenment.)

Tried to get the primary source for the study behind the graphs there, links through to a paywalled study - so I can’t find the sample size, methodologies used, how the study was controlled etc... I’m not disputing anything - I am however cautious of drawing conclusions from articles / posts without proper citations and primary source data. Paywalled study: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0035173

It is promising however that this blog as a section on logical fallacies, without going through more articles I can’t comment if they adhere to avoiding them or not, still - good to see.

Sometimes it's not the content of a thought that is the problem, but the way a thought affects other thoughts. In other words, often the goal of controlling your perception of your train-of-thought, is to use the feedback mechanism of quieting and negatively-training ignored thoughts, to prevent and discourage your thoughts from spiralling (as in panic disorder) or to prevent thoughts detached from a referent (as in schizophrenia) or to prevent thoughts from over-staying their usefulness (as in OCD.) In each of these syndromes, the analyzing-agent is freaking out due to something, and the perception of the freak-out is painful for the perceiving-agent, just like having someone shout into your ear is painful.

As well, in some psychological paradigms that people tend to intuitively use (at least in Western culture), some thoughts that diverge greatly from the "motivational base" of other thoughts—thoughts that aren't coherent with the rest of the self—are deemed to be "intrusive" or "ego-dystonic." (This doesn't make as much sense when you model your self as containing multiple agents with distinct preferences, as in the Internal Family Systems model, but I digress.) In such cases, mindfulness meditation can be used as a tool to silence incoherent thoughts, since they often trigger a crisis of self whenever they occur (e.g. "I keep thinking about what would happen if I stabbed people; does that mean I want to stab people?" or "I keep thinking about stepping out into traffic; does that mean I want to die?" when often these are just the ramblings of an internal agent obsessed with not doing those things who really wants to make sure you're aware that the consequences would be bad if you did do them.)

In either case, there's nothing wrong with thinking certain thoughts. It's really just that your analyzing-agent thinks there's something wrong with those thoughts that it is thinking, and this makes it do very useless and annoying things (from the perspective of the perceiving agent), like repeating the same thought over and over, or being unable to focus on or interpret what's in front of it, etc. These are "bad" inputs to thought-perception, just like clashing, atonal noise is "bad" input to sound-perception. (It's really the thinking agent that notices that the perceiving agent is experiencing pain qualia due to its output, and who then decides to do something about it by modulating the perceiving agent such that the thinking agent gets less CPU-time to run. Other than autonomic stuff like breathing and hardware-accelerated stuff like forming phoenemes with the mouth, it's only the thinking agent that ever "does" anything at all. But it's helpful to model the things it does because of the preferences of other agents, as being done by those other agents.)

As I read this article, I thought to myself, "oh, this must be why we must make such good decisions, huh?"