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If you look carefully enough its not only the developer in you but anything meaningful or living in your life is done by someone other than what you usually ref
by lazydon 10y ago
If you look carefully enough its not only the developer in you but anything meaningful or living in your life is done by someone other than what you usually refer to as me. Normally, such phenomenon is mostly associated with ideas we get on waking up or during shower or exercise.
My observation is that whenever you do anything that's unscripted or unplanned - it's "someone else". Say - answering well an interview with questions that you never expected and had relatively less exposure to, writing a blog post when you plan to write something but then all the ideas rush in and begin to write themselves and so on. I'm from India and I find it hard to communicate with western people these ideas directly. A contemporary ideas that's closest is the Dennet's theory of Narrative Self. Essentially, this article is the author's narrative self trying to make sense of the overnight solution the got.
it was interesting when in article he says such ideas come to him sometimes not all the time - one thing he can do to improve this is to subdue this narrative self a bit. A very good video on this point is by Alan Kay in context of Inner Game of Tennis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos
- mbrock 10y agoI've noticed that there's a conflict between the needs for communication and explanations, versus the more "mystical" (intuition-based pattern recognition, hunches, habits) aspects of programming (and debugging). Also the thing when experience coalesces into aesthetic taste that makes wrong solutions just feel bad or ugly. (It's also very possible to develop intuitions and tastes that actually aren't based in reality, kind of like erroneous folk wisdom.)
- charlieflowers 10y agoThink about what happens when you decide where to eat for lunch. There's an internal process whereby you propose various images (hamburger? pizza? Mexican?). Something else "inside you" says, "Nah, that doesn't sound good. Hmm, maybe. Yeah, that!" Who are you asking? Who is answering?
- GuiA 10y agoI circumvent that by eating pizza for every meal. It is the only way I can truly know that I, am me.
- brianwawok 10y agoCan confirm. Eating pizza.
- Klathmon 10y agoI had a discussion with my friends many years ago that your comment reminded me of. I don't "visualize" things I think about automatically. I'd need to concentrate on trying to visualize pizza to see it and even then it's a vague visualization with no real defining features. When casually thinking about pizza I don't visualize anything. Some of my friends couldn't not visualize what they were thinking about. If they think of pizza, they "see" pizza in their head, and could even describe what they were visualizing in that instance in surprising (to me) detail. We found that we were pretty well split 50/50 with no obvious associations.
- DanBC 10y agoThere have been a couple of articles about aphantsia on HN. I'm having trouble finding them. Here's two https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894
- hacker_9 10y ago> My observation is that whenever you do anything that's unscripted or unplanned - it's "someone else" Depends how you view your brain and consciousness. If you consider your brain to be made up of many components, consciousness being one of them, then your inner monologue is a way of communicating you intent to those other components. These will then respond back as best they can, and the act of learning trains them to be able to give better responses in the future.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago> "I'm from India and I find it hard to communicate with western people these ideas directly." I'm from a Western country, and understand what you're saying, though I admit I did pick up on the general idea from Eastern philosophy. If you were interested in sharing the ideas with Western people, perhaps you could do so in the form of thought experiment? For example (and this is only an example, I'm confident this won't be the best example for everyone), you could point out how much of human life exists at the subconscious level. Nobody knows how the mind works, yet the mind works regardless. Nobody consciously tells their bodies how to process food, or repair itself after it's damaged, yet it happens anyway. Considering the myriad of processes that the subconscious undertakes, wouldn't it be fair to say a large part of what makes us 'us' exists at the subconscious level? That's not to say the 'narrative' side of our mind is not part of us too, but if that's all we know perhaps we're missing the bigger picture.
- elmigranto 10y agoThis is probably a bad example, since the same very thing happens in animals. Yet we like to think of ourselves as fundamentally different.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago> "Yet we like to think of ourselves as fundamentally different." Yes, we do don't we. Yet reality remains what it is. Perhaps by exploring with an open mind we can stop our preconceived notions from clouding our understanding.
- dvcrn 10y agoI have been thinking about this for a while now. Occasionally I get bursts where I am truly "myself" and start to realize what is actually happening before going back into observing the "someone else" doing things. Feels very surreal and at the same time "real". Like "this is life and not the other dude". I find it very hard to describe these kind of things to other people but your comment nails it. Though I am more curious how you can "turn it off" and be the one who does all the things all the time. Some people suggested meditation but I have yet to try.
- branchless 10y agoYou are two https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 I always come up with good ideas when relaxed, usually when not working on the problem (showering / running). God why are they working us to death?!
- 725686 10y agoWoody Allens' "I am two with nature" is not funny after this.
- tgamba 10y agoExactly. Without adequate sleep and time to engage in purposeless activity (e.g. walking) there can be no insight. But perhaps only creative minds come to understand this, which is why mediocre middle managers insist on long hours.