September 1st, 2024

For what it's worth, I found myself pretty compelled by a theory someone told me years ago, that alien abductions are birth and/or diaper change flashbacks:

This is surprisingly underdiscussed; the only google result for "alien abduction as flashback to diaper change" was this which links to a forum post since gone offline (archive.org link).  But it seems like an incredibly obvious explanation that should be the default.  It also explains why the experiences are so similar around the world, even among people who hadn't heard the stories before!

Obviously not all alien abduction stories follow this pattern, but the fact that so many do seems to me very satisfyingly explained by this theory.  The fact that this makes sense to me may be taking as part of its evidence my own experience doing emotional work and finding (among other things) surprisingly large pockets of emotion and meaning stored in apparently-boring memories (like standing in my kitchen around age six, looking at a shelf... but feeling terrifyingly alone).  And helping other people do similar work, etc.  But flashbacks are in general well-studied.

So it seems to me that the only culturally mediated part here is how people interpret the experience after it happens.  You could imagine a culture where someone comes into work one day and says "hey guys, I had this trippy flashback last night to my nappy being changed! it was so weird seeing my parents all bulgy-eyed and grey".

An example of such a blindspot/confusion that I've been chewing on, that I haven't written up in full yet, is how reward is different from fruit, punishment is different from pain.  Socially-mediated consequences are different from inherent consequences.

Note that behaviorists, and (probably downstream of the behaviorists) also ML researchers, tend to actively conflate the two and treat "reward" as fundamental and then use phrases like "intrinsic reward" to try to refer to the non-reward thing.  But "reward" is not the fundamental one, it's built on fruit.

The difference:

And many people fail to see the difference between the two of these—so they fixate on social consequences and project them onto everything.  I suspect this is largely because so many of their critical consequences were social, at very young ages (<2yo, before they differentiated themselves, their parents, the world at large, such that they could tell the difference). So they learned to orient first and foremost to social consequences, and act so as to get reward and avoid punishment.

But we know from detailed investigation that the universe-as-a-whole does not reward or punish us the way other people do.  (the judeo-christian one-God-who-sees-and-knows-all can be seen as groping towards the recognition of that distinction, but still fails to actually go all the way there, which then has the unfortunate effect of reifying the idea that reality-as-a-whole does punish you!)

Karmically this has the effect of them creating environments that have much more reward/punishment, and also leads to them self-punishing in the face of non-social consequences, such as beating themselves up for failing to do something they cared about, rather than simply feeling the pain of the failure.