On Bayesian brain models, what explains the feeling of surprise? How can this be like a non-conservative field? How could salience and magic tricks work like this? What explains why psychedelics feel more real than real life? What other cheap tricks are there in writing?
The mere feeling of enlightenment is what you get when the author raises something to salience/surprises you with something that wasn’t salient to you in the moments before. But this is like a non-conservative field in reward modelling. An author can simply make things that are normally obvious unobvious, then reveal them, then repeat the cycle infinitely. Actually enlightening essays or ideas will be surprising regardless of prior attentional motivation. So even a summary of Hanson or Hazlitt’s theses will surprise. For this surprise to turn to enlightenment, this heightened salience must (1) persist after reading, though the reader need not know this (cf. The books ive read have made me) and (2) this heightened salience must make them respond more aptly to reasons in future.
The corollary of this is unfortunate. It means the actually enlighten their readers in expectation, the author must have a sense of which things are systematically under-salient.