Stages of Lucidity: Understanding Self-Development and Agency

The stages of lucidity reveal how individuals evolve their self-awareness and interaction with the world throughout life.

### The Seven Stages of Lucidity: Understanding Self-Development
* 🧠 "As we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it **progresses in somewhat distinct stages**."
* 👶 Stage one is **Reactive Survival**, where infants begin to build a **world model** and an **initial self-concept**, akin to creating a **game engine** in their brains.
* 👦 In stage two, the Personal Self emerges as young children learn to **interact with the outside world**, which exists as a **mental model** rather than a physical reality.
* 👫 Stage three introduces the **Social Self**, where individuals start to **identify with groups**, resonating with **collective opinions and moral values** derived from their social environment.
* 🧑 The fourth stage, Rational Agency, marks a turning point where individuals gain **agency over their beliefs** and learn to **think critically about truth and falsehood**.
* 🧘 Stage five, Self-Authoring, represents **full adulthood and wisdom**, where individuals understand identity as a **construct that can be shaped and changed**.
* 🌌 Stage six, Enlightenment, allows individuals to perceive themselves as **vessels creating their own identities and realities**, often reached through meditation or profound experiences.
* ✨ Finally, stage seven, **Transcendence**, is a hypothetical future stage where individuals fully understand their mental processes and can **manipulate their existence**, potentially aligning with advanced AI in a **shared agency**.

You wrote a post about levels of lucidity, quote, "As we grow older, it becomes apparent that our self-reflexive mind is not just gradually accumulating ideas about itself, but that it progresses in somewhat distinct stages." So, there's seven of these stages. Stage one:

Reactive survival (infant), stage two, personal self (young child), stage three, social self (adolescence), domesticated adult, stage four is rational agency (self-direction), stage five is self-authoring. That's full adult, you've achieved wisdom, but there's two more stages. Stage six is Enlightenment, stage

seven is Transcendence. Can you explain each, or the interesting parts of each of these stages, and what's your sense why there are stages of this, uh, of lucidity as we progress through life in this too short life? This model is derived from a concept by the

psychologist Robert Kegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of a mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself.

And I found myself using this model not so much as a developmental model. I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model, because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that, and I also suspect that you don't go to these stages necessarily in

succession, and it's not that you work through one stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes you revisit them, sometimes stuff is happening in parallel, but it's I think a useful framework to look at what's present in the structure of a person and how they interact with

the world and how they relate to themselves, so it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet. I think instead we have an intentional self, and this intentional self is

initially in the infant's task that's building a world model and also an initial model of the self, but mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it. And in some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like

Minecraft or something. So colors and sounds, people are all not physical objects; they are creations of our mind at a certain level of core screening models that are mathematical, that use geometry, and that use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find

ourselves and interact with them. So Minecraft, yeah. And this personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed. And this personal self is an agent that interacts with the

outside world. And the outside world is not the world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind, right? And this is us, and we experience ourselves interacting with this outside world that is created inside of our own

mind. And outside of our self, there's feelings, and then they present our interface to this outside world. They pose problems to us. These feelings are basically attitudes that our mind is computing that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn

to or the things that we are afraid of and we are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments and so on, and also modeling ourselves and building the next stage. So after we have this personal self in

stage two, online, many people form a social self, and this social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single note that is reaching out into the world

but you're also looking down, you're looking down from this entire group and you see how this group is looking at this individual and everybody in the group is in some sense emulating this group spirit to some degree. And in this state, people are forming their opinions

by assimilating them from this group mind. Obviously, gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind. Body, are you also modeling the interaction of how opinions shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group? Yeah, it's basically the way in which

people do it in this stage is that they experience what are the opinions of my environment. They experience the relationship that they have to their environment and they resonate with people around them and get moral opinions in this through this interaction to, um, the way in which they relate to

others. And at stage four, you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently, but other people believe when you have agency over your own beliefs in that stage. You basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false, so you

Can you start to learn how to think? Yes, I mean at some level you're always thinking. You are constructing things and I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking. It's an intrinsically reflexive process that

requires consciousness. Without consciousness, you cannot think. You can generate the content of feelings and so on outside of consciousness. It's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development. But um, thoughts is

something that you always control. And if you are a nerd like me, you often have to skip stage three because you'd like the intuitive empathy with others because in order to resonate with a group, you need to have a quite similar architecture. And if people are wired differently then it's hard for

them to resonate with other people and basically have empathy, which is not the same as compassion, but it is a shared perceptual mental state. Empathy happens not just via inference about the mental states of others, but it's a perception of what other people feel and where

they're at. Can't you not have empathy while also not having a similar architecture, cognitive architecture as the others in the group? I think yes, but I experience that too. But you need to build something that is like a meta architecture. You need to be able to

embrace the architecture of the other to some degree, also find some common ground. And it's also this issue that if you are a nerd, sometimes, some people, the neurotypical people have difficulty to resonate with you. And as a result, they

It's difficult to understand you unless they have enough wisdom to fear what's going on there. Well, aren't we in the whole process of the stage there is to figure out the API to the other humans that have different architecture? And you yourself publish public documentation for the API

that that people can interact with for you. Isn't this the whole process of socializing? My experience as a child growing up was that um I did not find any way to interface with the stage three people and they didn't do that with me. So probably right, yeah, of course.

They tried it very hard, but it was only when I entered the mathematics school at ninth grade, lots of other nerds were present um that I found people that I could deeply resonate with and had the impression that yes, I have the friends now, I found my own people. And before

that I felt extremely lonely in the world. There was basically nobody I could connect to. And I remember um there was one moment in all these years where I was in there was a school exchange and it was the Russian boy kid from the Russian garrison station in

Eastern Germany, you visit our school and we played a game of chess against each other and we looked into each other's eyes and we sat there for two hours playing this game of chess and I had the impression, this is a human being, he understands, but I understand.

We didn't even speak the same language. I wonder if uh your life could have been different if you knew that it's okay to be different, to have a different architecture, whether like accepting that the interface is hard to figure out, it takes a long time to figure out, and it's

okay to be different in fact it's beautiful to be different it was not my main concern my main concern was mostly that it was alone right this was not so much the question is it okay to be the way I am the I couldn't do much about it so I have to

do I have to deal with it but um my main issue was that I was not sure if I would ever meet anybody growing up that I would connect to at such a deep level that I would feel that I could belong so there's a visceral undeniable

feeling of being alone yes and I noticed the same thing when I came into the math school that I think at least half probably two-thirds of these kids were severely traumatized as uh children growing up and in large part due to being alone because they couldn't find anybody to

relate to don't you think everybody's alone deep down no huh I'm not alone anymore it took me some time to update and to get over the traumata and so on but I felt that in my 20s I had lots of friends and I had my

place in the world and it was I had no longer doubts that I would never be alone again is there some aspect to which We're Alone Together you don't see a deep loneliness inside yourself still no sorry okay so that's the non-linear

progression through the stages I suppose you caught up on stage three it's stage four and so basically I find that many Nerds jump straight into stage four bypassing stage three did they return to it then later yeah of course sometimes they do not always

Yeah, the question is basically, do you stay a little bit autistic or do you catch up? And I believe you can catch up. You can build this missing structure, yeah. And um, I basically experience yourself as part of a group, learn intuitive empathy, and develop the sense, this perceptual sense of feeling what other people fear. And before that, I could only basically feel this when I was deeply in love with somebody. And it's a visitor. So there's a lot of friction to feeling that way, like it takes, it only works with certain people as opposed to it comes

naturally, yeah, it's frictionless. But um, this is something that basically later, I felt started to resolve itself for me to a large degree. What was the trick? In many ways, growing up and paying attention, meditation, the top, I had some very crucial experiences

um, in getting close to people, building connections, um, cuddling a lot in my student years. So really paying attention, yeah, to the, what is it, to this feeling another human being fully, loving other people and being loved by other people. And so building a space in which

you can be safe and can experiment and um, touch a lot and be close to somebody a lot. And over that, over time, basically at some point you realize, oh, it's no longer that I feel locked out, but I feel connected and I experience where somebody else is at. And normally, my mind

is racing very fast at high frequency, so it's not always working like this. Sometimes it works better, sometimes it works less. But also don't see this as a pressure. It's more, it's interesting to observe myself, which frequency I'm at, and uh, which mode somebody else has had

Yeah man, the mind is so beautiful in that way. It sometimes, sometimes it comes so natural to me, so easy to pay attention, pay attention to the world, fool each other, people fully, and sometimes the stress over silly things is overwhelming. It's so interesting that demise, that roller

coaster in that way. And stage five, you'll discover how identity is constructed, self-offering, realize that your values are not terminal, but they are instrumental to achieving a world that you like and aesthetics that you prefer. Yeah, and um, the more you understand this, the more you get agency

over how your identity is constructed, and you realize that identity in interpersonal interaction is a costume, and you should be able to have agency over that costume, right? It's useful to be a costume. It tells something to others, and that allows to interface in roles, but being locked into this is a

big limitation. The word costume kind of implies that it's fraudulent in some way. His costume, a good word for you, like to present ourselves to the world in some sense. I learned a lot about costumes at Burning Man. Before that, I did not really appreciate costumes and saw them more as

uniforms, like wearing a suit if you are working in a bank, or if you are trying to get startup funding for, uh, from a VC in Switzerland, right? Then you dress up in a particular way, and this is mostly to show the other side that you are

willing to play by the rules, and you understand what the rules are. But um, there is something deeper when you write Burning Man. Your costume becomes self-expression, and there is no boundary to the self-expression. You're basically free to wear what you want to express.

other people what you feel like this day and uh what kind of interactions you want to have is the customer kind of projection of uh of who you are that's very hard to say because the costume also depends on what other people see in the costume and this

depends on the context that the other people understand and you have to create something if you want to that is legible to the other side and that means something to yourself Do we become prisoners of the costume because everybody expects us Some people do but um I think that once you realize

that you we are costume at Burning Man a variety of costumes realize that you cannot not wear a costume Yeah right Basically everything that you wear and present to others is something that is to some degree in addition to what you are deep inside So this stage in

parentheses you put full adult Karma wisdom Why is this full adult Why would you say this is full and why is it wisdom It does allow you to understand um why other people have different identities from yours and it allows you to understand that the difference

between people who vote for different parties and might have very different opinions and different value systems is often the accident of where they are born and what happened after them after that to them and what traits they got before they were born and at some point

you realize the perspective where you understand that everybody could be you in a different timeline if you just flip those bits How many costumes do you have I don't count but in more than one Yeah of course How easy is it to do costume changes throughout the day

It's just a matter of energy and interest. When you're wearing your pajamas and you switch out of your pajamas into, say, work shorts and pants, you're making a costume change, right? And if you're putting on a gown, you're

making a costume change. You could do the same with personality. You could, if that's what you're into, there are people who have multiple personalities for interaction in multiple worlds, right? So if somebody works in a store and you put up a storekeeper personality when you're

working, when you're presenting yourself at work, you develop a work personality for this, and the social persona for many people is, in some sense, a puppet that they are playing, like a marionette. And if they play this all the time, they might forget that there is something

behind this. This is something what it feels like to be in your skin, and I guess it's very helpful if you're able to get back into this. And for me, it's the other way around. It's relatively hard for me, it's pretty hard to learn how to

play consistent social roles. For me, it's much easier just to be real, or not real, but to have a one costume. No, it's not quite the same. So basically, when you're wearing a costume at Burning Man, and say you are an extraterrestrial prince,

um, there's something where you are expressing, in some sense, something is closer to yourself than the way in which you hide yourself behind a standard clothing when you go out in the city in the default world. And so this costume that you're wearing at Burning Man

allows you to express more of yourself and uh you have a shorter distance of advertising to people what kind of person you are what kind of interaction you would want to have with them and so you get much earlier into media expression. And I believe it's

regrettable that we do not use the opportunities that we have. This custom-made clothing now to wear costumes that are much more stylish, that are much more custom-made, that are not necessarily part of a fashion in which you express which milieu you're part of

and how up-to-date you are, but you also express how you are as an individual and what you want to do today and how you feel today and what you intend to do about it. Well, isn't it easier now with in the digital world to uh

to explore different costumes? I mean, that's the kind of idea with virtual reality, that's the idea even with Twitter in two-dimensional screens. You can you can swap all costumes, you can be as weird as you want. It's easier for Burning Man, you have to like order

things, you have to make things, you have to, it's more effort to, it's better if you make them yourselves, sure, but it's just easier to do digitally, right? It's not about easy, it's about how to get it right. And for me, the

first Burning Man experience, I got adopted by a bunch of people in Boston who dragged me to Burning Man and we spent a few weekends doing costumes together. And that was an important part of the experience where the camp bonded, that people got to know each other and

we basically grew into the experience that we would have later so the Extraterrestrial Prince is based on a true story yeah [Music] I can only imagine what that looks like yeah okay stage six stage six um at some point you can collapse the

division between self and personal stuff and world generator again and a lot of people get there via meditation or some of them get there via psychedelics some of them by accident and you suddenly noticed that you are not actually a person but you are a

vessel that can create a person and the person is still there You observe that personal self But You observe the personal self from the outside and you notice it's a representation and you might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation if

not then you might experience that I am the Universe I am the thing that is creating everything and of course what you're creating is not quantum mechanics and the physical Universe what you're creating is the game engine that is updating the world and you are creating

your valence your feelings your uh and all the people inside of that world including the person that you identify with yourself and as well are you creating the game engine or are you noticing the game imagine um you noticed how you're generating the game engine

and I mean when you are dreaming at night you can uh if you lose have a lucid dream you can learn how to do this deliberately and in principle you can also do it during the day and the reason why we don't get to do this from the

The reason why we don't have agency over our feelings right away is because we would game it before we have the necessary amount of wisdom to, uh, to deal with creating this dream that we are in, you know, you don't want to get access to

cheat codes too quickly otherwise you won't enjoy it. So stage five is already pretty rare and stage six is even more rare. You basically find this mostly in advanced Buddhist meditators and so on that, uh, drop into this stage and can induce it at will and spend time in

it. So stage five requires a good therapist, stage six requires a good, uh, Buddhist spiritual leader. It is, for instance, could be that that is the right thing to do, but it's not that these stages give you scores or levels that you need to

advance to. It's not that the next stage is better. You live your life in, in the motto it works best at any given moment, and when your mind decides that you should, uh, have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration. And for many people they stay happily at

stage three and experiences themselves as part of groups, and there's nothing wrong with this. And for some people this doesn't work, and they're forced to build more agency over their rational beliefs than this and construct their norms rationally, and so they go to this level.

And stage seven is something that is more or less hypothetical, that would be the stage in which it's basically a transhuman stage in which you understand how you work, and in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented and can also in principle enter different modes.

in which it could be implemented and that's the stage that, as far as I understand, is not open to people yet. Oh, but it is possible to the process of technology, yes. And who knows if there are biological agents that are working at different time scales than us that

basically become aware of the way in which they are implemented on ecosystems and can change that implementation and have agency over how they're implemented in the world. And what I find interesting about the discussion about AI alignment is that it seems to be following these stages very much. Most people seem to be

in stage three, also according to Robert Keegan. I think he says that about 85 percent of people are in stage three and stay there. And if you're in stage three, and your opinions are the result of social assimilation, then what you're mostly worried about with the AI

is that the AI might have the wrong opinions. So if the AI is just something racist or sexist, we are all lost because we will assimilate the wrong opinions from the AI. And so we need to make sure that the AI has the right opinions and

the right values and the right structure. And if you're at stage four, that's not your main concern. And so most nerds, I don't really worry about, um, the algorithmic bias and the model that it picks up because if there's something wrong with this bias, the AI

ultimately will prove it at some point. We'll get it there that it makes mathematical proofs about reality, and then it will figure out what's true and what's false. But you're still worried that AI might turn you into paper clips because it might have the wrong values.

right so if it's set up is there a wrong function that controls its direction in the world then it might do something that is completely horrible and has no easy way to fix it so that's more like a stage four rationalist kind of worry and

if you are at stage five you're mostly worried that AI is not going to be indicted fast enough because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence but about agency about the ability to control the future and identity is instrumental to this and if

you are a human being I think at some level you ought to choose your own identity it's you should not have somebody else pick the costume for you and then wear it but instead you should be mindful about what you want to be in as well and I think if you are an agent

that is fully malleable that can rewrite its own source code like an AI might do at some point then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be and in this way the AI will maybe become everything like a planetary control system and if it does that then if we

want to coexist with it it means that it will have to share purposes with us so it cannot be a transactional relationship we will not be able to use reinforcement learning with human feedback to hardwire its values into it but this has to happen it's probably

that it's conscious so it can relate to our own mode of existence where an observer is observing itself in real time and there's a certain temporal frame and the other thing is that it probably needs to have some kind of transcendental orientation building

shared agency and in the same way as we do when we are able to interact with each other and to form non-transactional relationships. And I find that something that because Stage 5 is so rare is missing in much of the discourse.

I think that we need in some sense focus on how to formalize love, how to understand love, and how to build it into the machines that we are currently building and that are about to become smarter than us.

The seven stages of life | Joscha Bach and Lex Fridman

Clips from the Lex Fridman podcast. Visit the main channel for full conversations and other videos.

Lex Clips

Introduction of seven stages of self-reflexive mind development, based on Robert Kegan's model.

Stages include Reactive survival (infant), Personal self (young child), Social self (adolescence), Rational agency (self-direction), Self-authoring (full adult), Enlightenment, and Transcendence.

Discussion on the nature of the stages and whether they are strictly sequential or can be revisited.

The model is described as a philosophical framework for understanding how minds work, not necessarily a strict developmental model.

Explanation that the stages aren't always linear; individuals may revisit stages or experience multiple stages concurrently.

Stage one: Intentional self – building a world model and self-model, similar to a game engine.

Stage two: Personal self – an agent interacting with the world model created in the mind.

Stage three: Social self – experiencing oneself as part of a group, forming opinions through group interaction.

Stage four: Rational agency – understanding truth and falsehood independently, developing epistemology, and learning to reason about mental representations.

Discussion on the challenges faced by individuals with different cognitive architectures in relating to others and developing empathy.

Personal Anecdotes and Non-linear Progression

Personal reflection on the speaker's experience of feeling alone due to a different cognitive architecture and the later discovery of resonance with others in a math school.

Observation that many individuals with similar experiences feel a deep sense of loneliness during childhood.

Discussion on the non-linear progression through the stages, with a focus on how some individuals might skip stages and catch up later.

Explanation of how the speaker developed empathy through various experiences like meditation, close relationships, and physical touch.

Stages 5 and 6: Identity and Transcendence

Stage five: Self-authoring – understanding how identity is constructed, realizing values are instrumental, and gaining agency over identity.

The concept of identity as a costume is explored, emphasizing the importance of agency in choosing and adapting one's presentation to the world.

Stage five is described as 'full adult' due to the wisdom gained in understanding diverse identities and perspectives.

Stage six: Enlightenment – collapsing the division between self and the world generator, realizing the self as a creator of the personal self and the world model.

Discussion on the rarity of stage five and six, mentioning the role of meditation, psychedelics, and spiritual guidance in reaching these stages.

Stage seven: Transcendence – a hypothetical transhuman stage where the mind fully understands its implementation and can access different modes of implementation.

Connection between the seven stages and the discourse on AI alignment, noting that most people are at stage three and are concerned about AI having the 'wrong' opinions.

Discussion on how different stages of development lead to different concerns regarding AI, from algorithmic bias to the potential for AI to pursue harmful goals.

Emphasis on the need for AI to share purposes with humans and develop non-transactional relationships for coexistence.

Concluding remarks on the importance of understanding and formalizing love in the development of AI.