The Inner Compass, Part 3: Actions
Our core is the part of ourselves that involves our deepest feelings, interests, concerns, insights, sense of purpose, and more. The core is uniquely powerful.
Much of the core’s content is virtually unshakeable and profoundly emotionally salient. These perceptions can effectively motivate us to act and inform triage towards potentiating our action.
In the previous pieces of this series, I focused on perceiving the core and centralizing these perceptions in the process of deciding. Here, I focus on action and how it follows from deciding.
Acting - Potentiation
According to Conscious Realism (see “Perceive - Decide - Act”), acting is the mapping of a conscious agent's chosen action to the set of world states. It is the ontological process between a decision and changing the world/ourselves. This change of world/ourselves is what then conditions a change in perception (experience) (1).
When this process between decision and a change in perception doesn’t seem to happen entirely by itself or when we are seemingly unable to make it happen, what can we do?
Phenomenologically (as a matter of experience as opposed to fundamental reality), the relationship between decision and action seems best approximated by a conceptualization of potentiation. Potentiation here refers to situating all the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a decided upon action (or inaction) to actually occur.
To have an action occur from conscious choice, intention is one necessary condition. Depending on what the chosen action is, there can be any number of other necessary conditions.
A certain amount of time might be required. There may be a requisite range of neurological arousal. Certain cognitive skills or capacities are often necessary. Sometimes, we need the input of others. Our environments might have to be materially configured a certain way. Existing psychological or cognitive dissonance, inconsistency, or incoherence may need to be resolved. For virtually any action or inaction to be robustly stable in the midst of the vicissitudes of human life, there must be a strong mental association of the emotion of resolve with the action/inaction – more on this below.
For many experts on sustainable and meaningful productivity, personal change or professional achievement is conceptually simple. One needs only systems and discipline. However, this does not imply that creating these systems or cultivating discipline is easy.
Systems include many variables. What is the action? When and where will the action take place? What other structural conditions are necessary predictably to potentiate it? Many thinkers on this topic think that a person can only commit to systems that they believe will work. Critically, the person has to also believe that they have good reasons for believing that the specific system(s) will work. Thus, systems must be logical, empirically derived, and functionally comprehended by the actor.
Acting - Discipline
Discipline refers to one source of the motivation, drive, or energy that fulfills the intention to perform an action. Discipline requires the source of this energy be intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic. Intrinsic means emanating from the stable aspects of a person. Extrinsic means depending overly on the environment or on the unstable aspects of a person. In these cases, the desired action may only manifest reliably under unreliably reproducible conditions. Due to life’s varying dynamics, extrinsic motivation will not manifest as the chosen action over long time scales.
One of the most important things I have ever learned has to do with the nature of discipline. This insight helps one to both understand and enact all the above and associated thoughtwork. Discipline is a behavioral description, not an experience. When consistently defined, there simply is no such thing as “feeling disciplined.” What externally manifests as discipline, however, does have a unique first-person signature. It is a specific emotion: resolve.
Resolve is the feeling of commitment to an action or inaction. In its most extreme instances, this commitment can be practically absolute. Such commitment can survive even while it actualizes one’s death or some catastrophe. Some examples include: a mother who sacrifices her life for her child, a martyr who literally or figuratively sacrifices their life for some cause, a fanatic religious extremist who violently harms others at great scale because of their beliefs, or an extreme utilitarian who acts knowingly heinously while believing it to ultimately be a good thing.
This insight also helps to explain the phenomenon of radical transformation. What is it? Why does it occur when it does? Simply: first, one’s suffering becomes emotionally unacceptable. Second, it is clearly and keenly associated with one’s decisions and actions. Consequently, one commits to whatever new decisions or actions are necessary to change the suffering.
Assure Potentiation by Cultivating Resolve
The “trick” to discipline seems mostly about cultivating resolve about any action or inaction. How can one cultivate such strong feelings that one does or doesn’t “do the thing” no matter what? Especially in challenging moments? There seem to be only two parts to this:
Through metabolizing lived experiences, discover that you stably feel powerfully about something(s).
In the analogy, this is largely a matter of attuning to and being guided through action and inaction by our core/inner compass.
Realize that specific actions or inactions influence the something(s).
In the analogy, this is largely facilitated by creating or comprehending sufficiently accurate and relevant “maps.”
It seems possible to intentionally potentiate the first part:
Cultivate as much high-quality attention as possible.
This has mostly to do with variables often called “lifestyle.” Cognitive health is influenced dramatically by sleep, hydration, stress management, self- and relationship management, etc.
Engage with life and accrue emotionally salient experiences.
This requires that necessary kinds and magnitudes of high-quality attention exist during one’s experiences.
For example:
By following your core into some volunteer work, you experience intense feelings of compassion, empathetic grief, and perhaps anger.
Apply the necessary time and skills to metabolize these experiences.
This requires that high-quality attention of specific kinds exist over various timescales after emotionally salient experiences.
“Metabolize” means to fully allow for the experiences conditioned by an experience to occur. These include post-experience experiences that are emotional, intellectual, sensational, intuitional, etc.
For example:
While volunteering, you could not fully experience your feelings about your service while serving others. You find a quiet, alert hour or two to let these feelings fully occur. You discover this process also includes thoughts that seem to demand your attention. In the end, you are adaptively changed by the experience of these feelings and thoughts. You are more emotionally resilient, have greater capacity for compassion, are more skillful with grief, and more intellectually clear that you don’t actually know what exactly causes the upsetting phenomena (making you more humble, less opinionated, and more comfortable with acting in uncertainty).
Potentiating the second part seems mostly to have to do with knowledge: acquire relevant knowledge and facilitate its association with the precipitates of metabolized experience.
Some notes on knowledge: Generating such knowledge requires studying one’s own mind and studying how to apply insights about oneself. Great skillfulness is necessary. This process can be profoundly adaptively facilitated, or at least accelerated, by studying the knowledge others have created/discovered. However, studying the ideas of others is a metaphorically double-edged sword. Under certain conditions, virtually any human action can be conditioned by the influence of ideas, including profoundly harmful action. Great care must be taken when handling ideas – others as well as one’s own. More on this in next month’s post, which will focus on “maps” and their skillful application.
To my mind, potentiation can itself be fully potentiated. That is, one can situate all the conditions necessary and sufficient for situating the conditions necessary and sufficient for some action or inaction. Crudely:
Suppose that you cannot condition some action. This may be because you need to become a person you are not yet in order to condition the action. In this case, you can condition the self who can condition the action. This is potentiating potentiation.
More generally, the above two-part realization occurs. Second, the strength of feeling about the “something” is so great that succumbing to competing pains/desires is psychologically intolerable. Then, action that potentiates further potentiation will occur. Therefore, eventually, the potentiated action will occur. This point emphasizes human beings as fundamentally resourceful.
One critical caveat: this process cannot potentiate practically or principally impossible actions. At most or all scales, human beings have incredible influence, not determinative control.
A way to understand how our feeling about the “something” out-competes succumbing to fear or desire is in terms of perceived incentives. A perceived incentive to act is the sense that, if we act in that way, our experience will improve (however it might be that we register an “improvement”).
To overcome fear or desire, our perceived incentive must be in favor of the “something.” Emotionally, there has to seem to be more to gain by pursuing it than not. Similarly, there has to seem to be more to lose by succumbing to the pain of fear or desire than by transcending it.
If you have reasonably good ideas about what to do and how to do it, but are not yet acting, I suspect the problem is your perceived incentives. Resolve about that which matters most deeply to us generally does not grow when we experience strong competing motivations.
It is necessary to resolve these conflicts. To do so, in my theory and personal practice, it seems one must fully experience the motivations to act misaligned with one’s core while being able to withhold action. Similarly, one must act in alignment with one’s core. These processes occur over time and drive each other. A virtuous feedback loop can be cultivated.
If I had a hack-like workaround to become resolved about the content of the core, it is this: associate loving oneself and all others with this alignment – associate cowardice and self-and-other-defeating selfishness with living oppositely, in misalignment. In this way, our most salient, powerful, unassailably positive emotions come to be associated with the content of the core. More accurately, in my view, they already are; a focus on these feelings of love, generosity, creativity, etc. eventually leads one to one’s core-most impulses. So, it may be more accurate to say that these positive emotions come to be seen as associated with the content of the core.
Cultivate resolve, potentiate action, observe discipline.
Challenges in Deciding & Acting
Assume you are attuned to your inner compass. Some major challenges to aligned deciding and acting include:
Ignorance of the set of available individual and collective experiences. We cannot intend towards that which we are not at least dimly aware of. We will reliably fail to approach our most preferable experiences. We will reliably fail to avoid our least preferable experiences.
Ignorance of the set of one’s available actions. In this case, we are potentially “hamstrung” in the aforementioned approach or avoidance. We may select actions that are impossible to take. We may not select the best action(s) that are possible to take.
Insufficient awareness or insufficient processing of information about how we are deciding. Accurate knowledge of the set of possible experiences and actions is not enough. We can think we are deciding in one way but we are actually deciding in another. For instance, how we decide can reinforce either an abundance or scarcity mindset.
Insufficient awareness or insufficient processing of information about how deciding relates to action. We may be aware of our preferred experiences. We may be aware of available actions. We may be aware of which actions we are selecting and why. If we do not comprehend how deciding relates to action, action will reliably not occur. We must see how one action implies others. We must act so as to influence the variables that transform a decision into action.
Insufficient resources for potentiation, at least temporarily. We may know our preferred experiences, our decision(s), and how decision(s) relates to action. But we may lack access to one or another resource to fully potentiate the action. Our resourcefulness might not always be sufficient.
Simple cognitive load. Sometimes, the effort required to process information nearly or actually exceeds an individual or collective’s cognitive capacities. My readers may be familiar with this experience. In philosophy, there is a movement to call this ‘overwhelmingness.' There are at least three kinds of overwhelmingness. Each requires unique tools to assist the cognizer:
relatively high complexity,
relatively high complicatedness,
and relatively high ‘wickedness.’ ‘Wickedness’ is a combination of complexity and complicatedness. Wickedness demands more than the combination of tools developed for complexity and complicatedness. Wickedness requires its own unique cognitive tools.
More on all this in the next post.
Summary
Action follows from decision when the action decided upon is fully potentiated.
Potentiation can be an extended process involving many variables. Often, potentiation necessitates the creation and protection of systems about these variables. Furthermore, sufficient potentiation of a specific course of action can itself be potentiated. Most critically, this requires the cultivation of resolve.
If action does not occur once a decision is clear and aligned with the core, the problem is probably some competing perceived incentive. Dissolve this competing perceived incentive by associating it with one’s own and others’ suffering. Train yourself to survive the way it urges you to act in misalignment. Then, simply allow yourself to move as the core would have you. Recognize and reclaim your agency.
Until Next Time
Consider the clearest signals from your core.
What action(s) do they seem to entail?
What are all the necessary conditions so that the action could or would actually occur?
Which factors are already situated? Which are not? What would you have to do to situate the factors not yet situated?
Footnotes:
Hoffman, Donald. 2008. Conscious realism and the mind-body problem. Mind and Matter 6 (1):87-121.
