Changing my mind about my mind

One thing I’ve changed my mind about is whether my mind will be capable of accomplishing everything that I think it’s worth accomplishing in practice.

Back when I was in high school I read about the Econ - about the perfectly rational decision maker. I believed that it was possible for me to become a rational decision maker through relentless intellectual self improvement.

But it turned out that I am limited, and not merely in the sense of bounded rationality where there or on the limits to my computation time or the information I have access to and can successfully represent.

I’m limited in a much deeper way where I’m initialized with this inane evolutionary value system that is incredibly biased. Unconsciously living out deeply emotional beliefs. Incapable of living out an alignment between emotion and truth.

The tools that I have to attempt to make good decisions - the scientific method, language and concepts, logic and reason - are broken beyond belief. My language imposes false binaries over every concept by default. Logic and reason break in the face of my fuzzy representations of reality. Hypothesis search and evaluation is too slow to leverage science against the most important beliefs.

The concepts that I have access to are a small fraction of what’s necessary to “understand” values, culture, and my own thought process. There’s the body of working memory limitations, abstraction limitations, limits on the number of metal transformation and operations I can make. These limitations are fatal to the goals that I had set for my understanding and decisions.

Once I released this belief my goals drifted higher and higher, and the change was cemented by the beauty and attractiveness of the possibility of higher insights.

Source: Original Google Doc