It's sometimes said that a Zen practitioner remains alert to the constant flow of life - so when circumstances change, they are more likely to be aware of the new context. Perhaps it's no accident that Zen has an unusual (for Buddhism) tradition of playful and witty personalities! This seems not unrelated to your idea of lucidity here.
However, I don't think this lucidity attribute exists in any context-agnostic sense. You may think that someone "has it" or "gets it" but that's just an illusion arising from the combination of two things: (1) they're playing the same or at least a proximal game to you (2) they "get it" in that domain.
In my experience, the closest you can get to this is an extreme form of empathy that asymptotes towards this lucidity but in actuality falls short, specifically in its duration. In other words, you can hold this empathy for awhile and climb the meta layer of understanding that specific game, but eventually you get worn down and either give in or worse become cynical. You wonder how someone can continue to play this game because it takes actual work for you to uphold.
The interaction between lucidity and context is interesting. Lucidity could be defined as the ability to understand and leverage context, analogous to how intelligence could be defined as the ability to understand and leverage facts.
Building off that analogy, it's easiest to discern if somebody is intelligent if you share the same set of facts. You are most familiar with what intelligence looks like if you've interacted with it before.
The smaller the intersection of facts (or context), the harder it is to discern intelligence (or lucidity). This doesn't mean that these traits don't exist in a context-agnostic sense, merely that it becomes harder to identify with less shared context.
The ability to let go of rigid perceptions and instinctive rise of reactive thoughts, being conscious of and adaptive to the fluidity of internal and external transformations, seems rare and ability related. However, Buddhism, and various cultures, cultivate such awareness, deliberate practice of meta reflection, and acceptance of multilayered nuanced changing realities. On the other hand, in rational fact-driven, materialistic, attachment/ownership/self driven societies, the multilayered, passing, unimportant, intangible is all too often lost. However, faced with complexity, scale, virtual, and existential challenges of rapid transformations, adherence to the modern mechanic control, stability and fact seeking, methodological anchoring will have to give way to meta reflection and self transformation…(:
I'm so glad I stumbled upon this essay today. Sometimes it is necessary to be reminded to ‘zoom out’ and see life as it really is.
The piece reminded me of Aldous Huxley’s Island, particularly its simple, repeated mantra: “attention.”
I imagine lucidity as the ability to pay attention at every moment of life, rather than getting ‘lost in the game,’ so to speak. It seems like a very happy way to live—detached in a spiritual sort of way, yet alert and ‘tuned-in,’ ready to enjoy life.
I’d be interested to hear if you’ve ever read the book, and if so, what you think of it.
I like the way you distinguished lucidity from the related concepts of wisdom, intelligence, and competence, and really enjoyed your conceptualization of life as a series of games.
(Also, I’m going to be involuntarily performing a ‘lucid analysis’ of every conversation I have for the foreseeable future.)
I haven't yet read the full text (it's now on the list) but I'm aware enough of its contents to recognize that the connection is astute!
As far as I understand, Island exists in contrast to Brave New World where science and technology are weaponized against the psyche of man. Part of this warfare is, as you identify, an attack on lucidity. The complacency from soma kills lucidity — no curiosity, no higher-order awareness, no ability to change life's games — as a tool of social control. After all, if the lower classes aren't aware of the games you're forcing them to play, they can't reject them. It makes sense that the parallel world in Island encourages lucidity as a factor of flourishing.
I'm very happy to hear that you enjoyed the piece and I hope your lucid analyses yield fruit :)
Love this, thank you. Shout out to Tyler Cowen for linking. In which social contexts is lucidity a liability? Brings to mind the whole smart VS happy contradiction. I imagine people who are more lucid generally have to do more “work” than non-lucid people? What’s the relationship between lucidity and happiness? How much does that matter?
Interesting though about drawbacks of lucidity. I think the primary way it could make you unhappy is if you're hyper-aware of your situation but unable to change it, which would be endlessly frustrating. In general, I think high lucidity would make you much happier than just a high IQ would, since it means you're more in touch with higher-order desires.
To answer your other question, I think lucid people could more easily get away with doing less work than non-lucid people, since they are more aware of the path of least resistance.
An analogy I like is that mental lucidity is like visual depth of field--how far can one "see" across a relevant set of thoughts to the stimulus. Like with sight, lucidity wanes with age.
Fair enough, in theory! But the landmark paper that originally produced this fact had participants rank their percentile, and over 80% of people ranked themselves above the 50th percentile. Roughly half of participants ranked themselves in the top 20%!
This also holds across a wide array of traits like creativity, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, honesty, friendliness, and so on, dubbed the "Better-Than-Average Effect."
It seems like all of driving ability, and " creativity, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, honesty, friendliness, and so on" are all attributes that are complicated and can mean different things to different people. So someone can think "good driver" means "zero car accidents" and someone else can think "good awareness of edges of the car" and someone else can think "ability to drive from point A to point B in the minimum amount of time without getting a speeding ticket". And it could be the case that in the different dimension in which people are rating themselves, that 80% of them are in fact above the median, it's just confusing because they are calling these different things by the same name of "driving ability".
So I'm curious if we still observe this in cases where there is very little ambiguity about how to measure the attribute. e.g. would 80% of people think their BMI was below median for their gender/age? would 80% of people think they were above median in how fast they can run a mile (for their gender/age)? Do you happen to know if we see the same effect in such instances?
Nice thought! The meta-analysis I linked found a smaller effect for "ability" judgements than for "trait" judgements, so the effect you're describing probably exists to some extent (though both judgements were inflated).
I'm sure if you dug into the individual studies, many would have used more concrete measures (i.e. IQ instead of intelligence, BMI instead of fitness). Here is one result that appears to do that for IQ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224549909598400
"Lucid people aren’t dogmatic. Most ideologies are full of heuristics that non-lucid people rely on since they can’t actively evaluate different situations. Since they have eclectic life philosophies"
This one really resonated with me. On the other side, it puts them often in decision paralysis.
Wanted to read more on this topic, any references/suggestion? Thanks.
This is very good!
It's sometimes said that a Zen practitioner remains alert to the constant flow of life - so when circumstances change, they are more likely to be aware of the new context. Perhaps it's no accident that Zen has an unusual (for Buddhism) tradition of playful and witty personalities! This seems not unrelated to your idea of lucidity here.
Thanks for that context, Tim! It's always interesting to see different perspectives converging on the same concept.
Insightful and thought-provoking.
However, I don't think this lucidity attribute exists in any context-agnostic sense. You may think that someone "has it" or "gets it" but that's just an illusion arising from the combination of two things: (1) they're playing the same or at least a proximal game to you (2) they "get it" in that domain.
In my experience, the closest you can get to this is an extreme form of empathy that asymptotes towards this lucidity but in actuality falls short, specifically in its duration. In other words, you can hold this empathy for awhile and climb the meta layer of understanding that specific game, but eventually you get worn down and either give in or worse become cynical. You wonder how someone can continue to play this game because it takes actual work for you to uphold.
Thanks, I'm glad you liked the piece.
The interaction between lucidity and context is interesting. Lucidity could be defined as the ability to understand and leverage context, analogous to how intelligence could be defined as the ability to understand and leverage facts.
Building off that analogy, it's easiest to discern if somebody is intelligent if you share the same set of facts. You are most familiar with what intelligence looks like if you've interacted with it before.
The smaller the intersection of facts (or context), the harder it is to discern intelligence (or lucidity). This doesn't mean that these traits don't exist in a context-agnostic sense, merely that it becomes harder to identify with less shared context.
Beautiful insightful text.
The ability to let go of rigid perceptions and instinctive rise of reactive thoughts, being conscious of and adaptive to the fluidity of internal and external transformations, seems rare and ability related. However, Buddhism, and various cultures, cultivate such awareness, deliberate practice of meta reflection, and acceptance of multilayered nuanced changing realities. On the other hand, in rational fact-driven, materialistic, attachment/ownership/self driven societies, the multilayered, passing, unimportant, intangible is all too often lost. However, faced with complexity, scale, virtual, and existential challenges of rapid transformations, adherence to the modern mechanic control, stability and fact seeking, methodological anchoring will have to give way to meta reflection and self transformation…(:
Thank you Mos, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I appreciate your thoughts and extensions :)
Wow, you explained a phenomena I'd always broadly noticed with certain people but had never quite been able to put into words. Amazing!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm so glad I stumbled upon this essay today. Sometimes it is necessary to be reminded to ‘zoom out’ and see life as it really is.
The piece reminded me of Aldous Huxley’s Island, particularly its simple, repeated mantra: “attention.”
I imagine lucidity as the ability to pay attention at every moment of life, rather than getting ‘lost in the game,’ so to speak. It seems like a very happy way to live—detached in a spiritual sort of way, yet alert and ‘tuned-in,’ ready to enjoy life.
I’d be interested to hear if you’ve ever read the book, and if so, what you think of it.
I like the way you distinguished lucidity from the related concepts of wisdom, intelligence, and competence, and really enjoyed your conceptualization of life as a series of games.
(Also, I’m going to be involuntarily performing a ‘lucid analysis’ of every conversation I have for the foreseeable future.)
Thank you for writing this.
I haven't yet read the full text (it's now on the list) but I'm aware enough of its contents to recognize that the connection is astute!
As far as I understand, Island exists in contrast to Brave New World where science and technology are weaponized against the psyche of man. Part of this warfare is, as you identify, an attack on lucidity. The complacency from soma kills lucidity — no curiosity, no higher-order awareness, no ability to change life's games — as a tool of social control. After all, if the lower classes aren't aware of the games you're forcing them to play, they can't reject them. It makes sense that the parallel world in Island encourages lucidity as a factor of flourishing.
I'm very happy to hear that you enjoyed the piece and I hope your lucid analyses yield fruit :)
Love this, thank you. Shout out to Tyler Cowen for linking. In which social contexts is lucidity a liability? Brings to mind the whole smart VS happy contradiction. I imagine people who are more lucid generally have to do more “work” than non-lucid people? What’s the relationship between lucidity and happiness? How much does that matter?
I'm glad you appreciated it!
Interesting though about drawbacks of lucidity. I think the primary way it could make you unhappy is if you're hyper-aware of your situation but unable to change it, which would be endlessly frustrating. In general, I think high lucidity would make you much happier than just a high IQ would, since it means you're more in touch with higher-order desires.
To answer your other question, I think lucid people could more easily get away with doing less work than non-lucid people, since they are more aware of the path of least resistance.
An analogy I like is that mental lucidity is like visual depth of field--how far can one "see" across a relevant set of thoughts to the stimulus. Like with sight, lucidity wanes with age.
Great analogy, thanks for that
~80% of drivers ARE better than average. But only 50% are better than the median.
Fair enough, in theory! But the landmark paper that originally produced this fact had participants rank their percentile, and over 80% of people ranked themselves above the 50th percentile. Roughly half of participants ranked themselves in the top 20%!
This also holds across a wide array of traits like creativity, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, honesty, friendliness, and so on, dubbed the "Better-Than-Average Effect."
[original driver study] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ola-Svenson/publication/222465512_Are_We_All_Less_Risky_and_More_Skillful_than_our_Fellow_Drivers/links/5c07b072458515ae5447ed2d/Are-We-All-Less-Risky-and-More-Skillful-than-our-Fellow-Drivers.pdf
[Better-Than-Average Effect meta-analysis] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Alicke/publication/337692412_The_Better-Than-Average_Effect_in_Comparative_Self-_Evaluation_A_Comprehensive_Review_and_Meta-Analysis/links/5e3afc44a6fdccd9658a748d/The-Better-Than-Average-Effect-in-Comparative-Self-Evaluation-A-Comprehensive-Review-and-Meta-Analysis.pdf
It seems like all of driving ability, and " creativity, intelligence, dependability, athleticism, honesty, friendliness, and so on" are all attributes that are complicated and can mean different things to different people. So someone can think "good driver" means "zero car accidents" and someone else can think "good awareness of edges of the car" and someone else can think "ability to drive from point A to point B in the minimum amount of time without getting a speeding ticket". And it could be the case that in the different dimension in which people are rating themselves, that 80% of them are in fact above the median, it's just confusing because they are calling these different things by the same name of "driving ability".
So I'm curious if we still observe this in cases where there is very little ambiguity about how to measure the attribute. e.g. would 80% of people think their BMI was below median for their gender/age? would 80% of people think they were above median in how fast they can run a mile (for their gender/age)? Do you happen to know if we see the same effect in such instances?
Nice thought! The meta-analysis I linked found a smaller effect for "ability" judgements than for "trait" judgements, so the effect you're describing probably exists to some extent (though both judgements were inflated).
I'm sure if you dug into the individual studies, many would have used more concrete measures (i.e. IQ instead of intelligence, BMI instead of fitness). Here is one result that appears to do that for IQ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224549909598400
"Lucid people aren’t dogmatic. Most ideologies are full of heuristics that non-lucid people rely on since they can’t actively evaluate different situations. Since they have eclectic life philosophies"
This one really resonated with me. On the other side, it puts them often in decision paralysis.
Wanted to read more on this topic, any references/suggestion? Thanks.
No references pop to mind! I may write more about that and related topics in future essays, I'm glad it resonated with you.