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I think this is a great observation; a few thoughts on “cognitive security” (aka “somatic security”):

We seem to have various “roll for disbelief” interrupts we can inject into our nervous system to prevent connecting with a person/idea/stimulus, e.g.
- we can add latency to an incoming stimulus to break phase-locking
- we can ‘turn away’ from the sensation / bring attention elsewhere
- we can generate another sensation in our nervous system which is dissonant with the stimulus (“focus on the judgment”), or hold priors that do not allow the stimulus to resonate
- etc

I suspect each different mechanism for disconnection has different consequences, and some are probably better (less distorting, less intrinsically unpleasant, more generous to others) than others

I could see a model where there’s maybe a dozen of these mental moves / signal processing strategies for disconnection, and most people are missing some of them. There could be a genetic component but I’d guess they’re mostly learned from other people. Parts of modern psychotherapy seem to focus on teaching clients disconnection techniques (“boundaries”). Philosophy has a few high-grade techniques which produce minimal distortion, which is really most of the value of the field-as-tradition

Sensitive people can sometimes infer which interrupt a conversation partner is using, which can lead to a red queen’s race. The fairer sex seem to have some ASICs dedicated to this…

Important to note that some of these moves are probably pretty numbing/blackpilling if used frequently; ‘not knowing’ all the available moves could be wholesome. But that’s also kind of a luxury; if you’re in an adversarial memetic environment (and we are in the middle of the adversarial memetic singularity) you might not be able to afford to be too choosy with what disconnection technology you use. But just like resistance training needs to balance push & pull, I’d guess emotional training does too

One thing I suspect is that “hookup culture as the coliseum of emotional combat” has to be an absolute filthy Petri dish of “roll for disconnection” mental moves; throwing young people in the deep end where they’re forced to learn how to make sex meaningless seems pretty horrible for both genders

Perhaps in the future we’ll have multi-modal guardian LLMs trained on language, vision, brain patterns, etc running on our body area network, and they can help identify when we should “roll for disbelief”