Tbh, it sounds like you need to spend more time processing through stuff.

Like, even if you have separate and irreconcilable values around world saving and personal goals, you can still fuse parts that value personal goals with other parts that value personal goals. You just can’t fuse them with parts that value world saving, and vice versa.

No, that’s not fusion.

Here’s an initial report that I wrote, after first trying it out:

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So yesterday I tried applying [the Fusion technique] to an internal struggle I’d been dealing with for a while. There were what I’d been thinking of in IFS terms as two polarized parts, probably protecting the same exile, which I hadn’t managed to dig up. So, substructures of the same deeper structure. I focused on a felt sense of that overall structure, branching into two, what would be the value which they held in common, determining to fulfill it whatever it was…

And there was an answer but that answer was unacceptable, because of a third part, a third piece of structure… and realizing what that third piece was, brought with it a sense of relief and happiness, together with a felt sense of all three having belonged to a yet deeper structure, the third part just branching off from an earlier point than the two others. After that, the issue in question has felt substantially different.

It felt like a crucial mental move here was that intent of digging into the deeper value, whatever it was. Not trying to consciously optimize for any of goals of the parts on their own terms, but just… keep them in awareness, and ask for the deeper purpose. Because the surface-level goals of the parts not the real thing, so looking too closely at them would have distracted from the deeper thing they were pointing at.

Later the same day, I mused that I had successfully eliminated anxieties, but I was still missing a strong positive motivation for my life, something to live for. I had been recently thinking that some of my parts seemed to find meaning in the thought of having children, while others were opposed…

… so what would be the deeper set of values generating *that* conflict?

And it felt like the whole structure… twitched, a little. Got shaken. There was a glimpse of a deeper form below it… a feeling that *this* really wasn’t the actual question, that the real conflict was something completely different.

And now today, a discussion got me to look at the problem of my motivation from a broader angle. My age-old personal dilemma of AI risk stuff pulling me in one direction, and my sense of personal meaning in an opposite one, so that I could never really settle on a direction…

So I asked again, what is the deeper set of values uniting both of *those* concerns…

The experience was… weird. A feeling of going through my values and priorities. Old concerns and seemingly immutable constraints being evaluated and discarded as irrelevant. The whole notion of there being a conflict between two completely distinct priorities starting to feel wrong, a common purpose starting to emerge beneath them…

… and then, whenever I started thinking too much about the object-level details or finding a compromise between two conflicting concerns, the process felt like it got interrupted. To be resumed when I focused back on the underlying values, letting the process optimizing for _those_ continue its work.

It’s still going on. I think. I might just be imagining the whole thing. No idea whether I’ll feel totally changed tomorrow, or feel silly about this post and mostly just go back to feeling as always.

But it sure feels like _something_ has been happening.

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and here’s a later follow-up on the results:

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So two weeks back I tried something-inspired-by-Ziz’s-Fusion-thing and was like “this feels weird, no idea whether it lasts”. Actually I tried it on three different things:

1: [eggplant], but involved a particular thing giving me anxiety

2: Do I want kids? (closely connected with: do I want to pursue a romantic relationship with a particular person who does)

3: How do I reconcile doing personally meaningful stuff with wanting to save the world?

And these kinda feel fixed? Which sounds a bit weird, since only the first one felt like a thing to be fixed, the other two felt more like questions where I needed a decision/strategy rather than anything being *wrong*.

But “these feel fixed” still feels like the right description. What that means is that, I still don’t have a clear-cut *answer* to either of them, at least not on a conscious level. But it ceased bothering me that I don’t. And it feels like my subconscious might either have the answers – and just hasn’t bothered making them conscious – or be working on resolving them in a way which doesn’t require additional action right now. It feels like a number of felt senses around those topics have been shifting.

Also, I don’t know whether this is related or just coincidental, nor what is causing what, but – for a couple of years now, I’ve had an energy sensation around my forehead which has caused difficulties when doing some forms of meditation, and sometimes when doing IFS (because it keeps grabbing my attention). I got myself an IFS therapist and we have been treating the energy sensation as a part to be understood. I still don’t feel like I understand it, but it has been clearly relaxing, and that has made it easier for me to do Mind Illuminated-style meditation again.

And after it has been relaxing, it has felt like my mind has started doing stuff to actively reshape itself to suit my circumstances better. Like, I’ve had various blocks around work not feeling motivating enough (this was the original reason I got the therapist), but now my mind has started spontaneously generating mental images which make my work feel more rewarding. My housemate likes a particular board game that I thought was okay but wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about, but recently I’ve been starting to develop some mild obsession towards it. And other, harder-to-describe and eggplantier things in the reference class of “it would be useful if I liked doing this, so my mind seems to be restructuring itself to like it more”.

And I’m very unclear on how much of it comes from the fusion thing, how much of it comes from the energy block going away, and how much of it comes from TMI working better again, given that these are all temporally correlated.

Actually. Trading off millimorts for weeks of time was not a mistake, despite being in the context of a mistake. Because either the time or the fractional life would still have been spent on the same thing.

>”internal coherence is for the powerful. If you want it, there’s only one thing you can do, gain power”

You know, by a similar token, you can construct amusing straw-vampire-enlightenment as “There is no X, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”

Note, I stand by what I said, the “yin” half of this is just as important as the “yang” half, even for this “revenant” strategy.

(Some of this is vagueing about stuff described in blog posts that are work in progress.)