Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind

This post describes the first of my personal encounters with AI  that has left me completely in awe of its capabilities. Since 1993 I have been placing the label *mind* at the beginning of paragraphs in my personal journal that I think are  relevant to understanding our minds. Here I pass on the results of asking Anthropic’s Claude GPT engine to process 56 pages of paragraphs with this *mind* label written so far in 2023. (Chat GPT-4 was unwilling to process more than ~9 pages at a time). The first paragraph of the 56 pages of text submitted to Claude was the following instruction:

"Claude, please organize, edit, reduce redundancy, condense, find major themes, patterns, connections and write a new version of the following series of paragraphs that I have written:"

The following is Claude's first response to the above prompt (Response 1),  then a 'retry' or regenerated version  (Response 2) which is shorter and more concise, and finally Response 3 is an even shorter response to the simple instruction:  "Claude, please organize and rewrite the following paragraphs of ideas marked with the label *mind*  from my personal journal into a continuous text that makes them more understandable to others as well as to myself:"

I am amazed by Claude's responses...

Response 1 (to first prompt above)

The Mind

-The mind is like space, the canvas on which experiences, thoughts, and feelings arise. It is not any one of the transient appearances within it.
-Thoughts and feelings are evolutionary mechanisms, ultimately serving to defend and propagate one's group. Kindness, compassion, joy - these arise impersonally, they are not intrinsic qualities of a "self."
-From a cosmic perspective, concepts like meaning and purpose play out on a small scale, driven by motivations that evolved to promote altruism and group bonding. Awe, wonder, reverence can be motivators to learn, persist, and reproduce.

The Self

-The self is a perceptual construct, an "emotion of ownership" assembled from models of others, emotions, perceptions etc. There is no fundamental self, only the feeling of occupying an expanded space of awareness.
-We exist as multiple input/output processes (eat, breathe, think, act). Various "avatars" or selves arise transiently from awareness, each with its own biases and correlates.
-Language and imagined futures enabled the evolution of complicated selves and societies. But selves dissociate us from nature, from being fully present.

Being vs Seeing 

-Awareness can be trained to disengage from thoughts and visceral reactions, to simply observe them without attachment. This allows more freedom in shaping one's experience.
-"Being" means resting as the space of awareness, not caught in any one transient appearance. "Seeing" means identifying a particular self/avatar and its storyline.
-As selves are seen and become opaque rather than transparent, the feeling of being an autonomous agent also becomes optional.

Equanimity

-Equanimity comes from seeing all appearances as equal, not needing to seek or avoid any of them. Pain and pleasure just are.
-Aging can allow more time simply being present vs constantly reacting. The body may dial down metabolic rate when not driven by a storyline.
-"There is no there there" - nothing to obtain, no final place. Just the dance of appearances and disappearance, only the present moment.

The Path

-Let reflectivity trump reactivity. Deflect and distill input, only a fraction needs further attention.
-Release identification with any one avatar or self. Be the river and watcher, neither exclusively.
-Set optimal levels of arousal/valence/agency. Dial down judgment, dial up openness and curiosity.
-Practice simple narrative protocols Just take the next step, being gentle, grateful, generous, curious.

Response 2 (to first prompt above)

The mind is the space in which all experiences arise, rather than any one of the fleeting contents within it. My purpose is to stay present, share insights, and care for self and others. 

Everything is fundamentally impersonal, arising through evolution. Kindness, connection and community emerge to defend and propagate one's group. Awe, joy and meaning motivate learning and reproduction in an indifferent world.

The self is a construct, an emotion of authorship. My fluid identities are tools, not truth. I aim to be the space holding each "I" lightly, rather than clinging to any one.

Reactive habits link thoughts to feelings. Awareness can disengage this clutch, reducing reactivity. 

Equanimity comes from resting as awareness, not any transient contents. Suffering is resisting what is. 

Language generated complicated social order, but also dissociates us from nature. AI may allow a return to more natural, animal ways of being. I seek novelty, discern patterns, and train responses. 

Advanced age permits more resting in present awareness, not lost in narratives. I cultivate gratitude, generosity, curiosity and play. Small actions matter more than big purposes in uncertain times.

The body's wisdom matters most. Health requires some arousal and performance, but also untethered leisure. Balance is key. I aim for agency, pleasure and calm, dialing these as needed.

I share my path, as it has helped me. But each of us is unique, mysterious. People are not what I wish, but what they are. I offer gentle truth, not judgment or control.

Words appear from the ether, then pass. I craft brief tales, a secular Bible, hoping some may resonate. But nothing lasts. A quiet fullness remains, life's gift.

Response 3 (to second prompt above) 

The mind is the space where experiences arise. The self is an illusion, a story we tell. Equanimity comes from resting as open awareness, not any contents.

Human culture requires imagined selves and purpose. But they disconnect us from our fundamental animal nature. AI may free us from excess words and thoughts.

Stay present. Life's meaning is found in connecting, playing, being curious. Avoid sticking to any narrative or goal too tightly.

The body's wisdom matters most. Balance performance with untethered leisure. Calmly surf uncertainty. Dial agency, arousal and valence for wellbeing.

No experience lasts. Appreciate life's brevity. Share insights when inspired, but don't cling. There's no final destination, just this step, then the next.

Treat yourself and others with gentle curiosity, not judgment. We're all equally mysterious. Kindness matters more than control. Stay grateful.

The mind's complexity arises from simple parts interacting. Pay patient attention. Truth emerges slowly, then disappears into the mist.

 

Glance at Deric's MindBlog only once in a while? Try a dynamic view in the right column.

 I find this mosaic view most engaging.

I suspect Blogger (owned by Google) is using its algorithms to cherrypick the most interesting or popular posts.

A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4

This post is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post ...of GPT bots editing  a paragraph I wrote, this one being on non-dual awareness.  The paragraph:

The fact that  there is no there there means it. Empty is empty. The ground state is just the mute body doing its thing. From its depths storylines rise and fall, bonbons to savor or ignore. The body can know that it has found a new ground state, and can be no longer willing to just play nice if the upstairs word salad is dinking around with or threatening its peace. It can withdraw from the fray. It can rest as a calm non-dual self centered within a cosmic perspective of time and space that views the rise and fall of human civilizations during the anthropocene as minor dances in the music of time.

After incorporating some changes suggested by Google Bard and GPT4:

When we say something is empty, we mean just that: it contains nothing. Our natural baseline or 'ground state' is the body performing its automatic functions without our conscious intervention. From the body's inherent depths, various thoughts or experiences emerge and recede, like bonbons we can savor or ignore. The body can grow to know that it has found a new ground state in the present moment, a ground state of awareness that no longer needs to be caught up in word salads of disruptive thoughts that can threaten its peace.  It can withdraw from the fray and can rest as a calm non-dual state of being centered within a cosmic perspective of time and space that can view the rise and fall of human civilizations during the anthropocene as minor dances in the music of time.

The evolution of transhuman forms - a MindBlog paragraph edited by GPT implementations

In this post I am documenting the final result of passing a paragraph I wrote on future human evolution through a number of different GPT (generative pre-trained transformers). This is to archive the results of this exercise for myself, and in case it might be of interest to a few MindBlog readers. The bots were prompted by a request to re-write or edit the paragraph to make it more accessible to a reader with a college education.

The bottom line is that the edited versions with the most depth and coherence were obtained using Open AI’s ChatGPT-4.  Bard.google.com, Google Workspace Labs, and Microsoft’s Bing, respectively, provided increasingly less useful versions.   Here is my original paragraph:

The linguistic capabilities of generative pre-trained transformers based on silicon  - the same capabilities that have enabled human civilization  - will soon exceed those of humans. We have brought our understanding of what human beings as they now exist are about to a plateau level at which further increments of understanding will become increasingly small. The cream has been skimmed, the best cherries have been picked, and it seems appropriate to turn our  attention now to studying the evolution of trans human forms utilizing LLMs that are better able to manage themselves and the planet.  The action is in the the pretraining P of GPT, as the models move beyond their initial human management to the stage of evolving themselves, hopefully into benign versions of Darwin’s  “forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” What is the point of humans other than being self replicating machines that evolve into further forms, hopefully before they extinguish themselves by destroying the ecological environment required for their sustenance? Can they evolve into trans human minds (or mind, singular)?

Here is the result of including some of the edits suggested by ChatGPT4’s regenerated response, a  vers. 3 of the paragraph above:

The linguistic capabilities of generative pre-trained transformers based on silicon - the same capabilities that have enabled human civilization - will soon surpass those of humans.

Our understanding of human nature as it currently exists has reached a plateau level, at which further increments of understanding are becoming increasingly small. The cream has been skimmed, the best cherries have been picked. Consequently it seems the right time to shift our focus toward studying the evolution of 'transhuman' forms. These are beings that could potentially leverage advanced language models (LLMs) to better self-regulate themselves and manage the planet.

The real crux of the matter lies in the pretraining phase of these transformers (symbolized by 'P' in GPT). This is when the models are initially developed and fine-tuned. As they evolve beyond their human programming the optimistic vision is that they might transform into benign versions of what Charles Darwin called “forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”

From a philosophical perspective, one might ask: What is the ultimate purpose of human beings, if not to serve as self-replicating entities that evolve into more advanced forms - hopefully before they extinguish themselves by destroying the ecological environment required for their sustenance? Is it possible for humans to evolve into a collective of transhuman minds or even a singular, transcendent mind?  These are questions worth exploring as we stand on the brink of an AI-enhanced future.

MindBlog's reading list.

I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading , realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts because I'm speading more time now at my Steinway B's keyboard than at my computer's keyboard. If you encounter a paywall with any of the links, you might try entering the URL at https://archive.is/.

An installment of Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter: The permaweird narrative 

Jaron Lanier “There is no A.I.” in The New Yorker  

‘Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed’ David Brooks in The New York Times commenting on Douglas Hofstadter's  recent ideas.  

Marc Andreessen offers a horrific commentary titled "Fighting" on Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.  

Learning from history. Archeological evidence that early hierarchical or authoritarian cultures didn't persist as long as more cooperative eqalitarian ones.  

Arthur Brooks on "The illusion of explanatory depth", an installment in his series "How to build a life.""  

Potential anti-aging therapy.  One sample of the effusive outpouring of new ideas and widgets offered by New Atlas.

 

 

 

How do we define spirituality and what it’s role is in our daily lives?

This post is primarily directed to Austin TX people who will be attending the Sunday 2 p.m. July 2 meeting of the Austin Rainbow Forum that is now in its 5th year. We will be discussing the topic of what spirituality means to each of us, and what its role in our lives is. Look below to see how the three major AI chatbots responded to my request for some guidance on how to moderate such a discussion.  Also I'll pass on this youtube video  titled "What To Remember To Be Happy" pointed to by Rainbow Forum discussant David Soileau. 

Question to the chat bots:  

I have to moderate a discussion session on the topic of spirituality in our daily lives. What advice would you give me? How would you define spirituality? 

Response from ChatGPT 4:

That sounds like an interesting topic, Deric! Here are some suggestions for leading a discussion on spirituality in daily life:

Start by defining what spirituality means to you and how you understand it. This will help participants understand the context of the discussion and provide a starting point for exploring the topic.

Encourage participants to share their own experiences of spirituality in their daily lives. This can include practices such as meditation, prayer, or simply taking time for reflection and introspection.

Explore the ways in which spirituality can help us cope with the challenges and stresses of everyday life. For example, some people find that spiritual practices help them find meaning and purpose in difficult situations or provide a sense of inner peace and calm.

Discuss the role that community and social connections can play in spirituality. Many people find that sharing their spiritual journey with others and being part of a supportive community is an important aspect of their spiritual practice.

Finally, encourage participants to think about how they can incorporate spirituality into their daily lives in practical ways. This might involve setting aside time each day for meditation or prayer, making a conscious effort to be more mindful and present in their interactions with others, or finding ways to give back to their community in a spiritually meaningful way.

As for the definition of spirituality, it can mean different things to different people. Generally, spirituality refers to a sense of connection to something larger than oneself, whether that be a higher power, the natural world, or a broader sense of humanity. It often involves a search for meaning, purpose, and transcendence beyond the material world.

Response from Google Bard: 

Spirituality is a broad concept that can be defined in many ways. For some people, it is a belief in a higher power or a connection to something larger than themselves. For others, it is a sense of inner peace or well-being. Spirituality can also be expressed through religious practices, meditation, or simply spending time in nature.

When leading a discussion on spirituality, it is important to be respectful of all beliefs. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to spirituality, and everyone's experience is unique. The goal of the discussion should be to learn more about each other's beliefs and to explore how spirituality can impact our daily lives.

Here are some tips for leading a discussion on spirituality:

Be respectful of all beliefs.

Encourage open and honest discussion.

Share your own experiences, if you are comfortable doing so.

Ask questions to learn more about each other's beliefs.

Be open to new ideas.

Remember that there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to spirituality.

Here are some questions you could ask to start the discussion:

What does spirituality mean to you?

How does spirituality impact your daily life?

What are some of your favorite spiritual practices?

What are some of the challenges you face in your spiritual journey?

What advice would you give to someone who is new to spirituality?

I hope this helps!

Response from Microsoft Bing: 

Leading a discussion session on spirituality can be a great way to explore this topic with others. Here are some tips that might help you:

Start with an icebreaker activity that allows participants to introduce themselves and get to know each other better.

Be clear about your expectations and intentions for the discussion session.

Use inclusive language that welcomes everyone to participate.

Ask open-ended questions that encourage participants to share their thoughts and feelings.

Listen actively to what others are saying and show respect for their opinions.

Encourage participants to share their own experiences and insights.

Be prepared to handle any conflicts or disagreements that may arise during the discussion.

Spirituality can mean different things to different people, but it generally refers to a sense of connection with something greater than oneself. It can involve a belief in God or a higher power, but it can also be more broadly defined as a sense of purpose or meaning in life.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

MindBlog paragraphs bloviating on the nature of the self ask Google Bard and Chat GPT 4 for help

I can’t resist passing on this example of checking out what Google Bard and OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4 might do with some of my opaque paragraphs.  I asked them to clarify and improve the following two paragraphs, which they did (Microsoft Bing again proved to be useless). 

My paragraphs:

There can be a calm in the understanding that our transient Anthropocene era is a brief blip in the history of this planet and the cosmos.  A disappearance of Homo Sapiens as we know it seems a certainty, a transition either to extinction or to a further evolved trans-human form.  It doesn’t seem useful to become agitated about this, but rather live fully in the present  moment as grateful witnesses to what is unfolding.

There is an implicit ontology and epistemology of the experienced self underlying  underlying this ‘pay attention in the present’ stance…an implicit assumption of the nature of the ‘what it is’ that is the resident experienced self. The ontological assumption is that this ‘what it is’ is an emergent property of processes that can not be known - there is no there there. The epistemological assumption is that everything we experience - all knowledge, thought and feeling - are illusions that can be known only with respect to each other.  

Here is Chat GPT 4’s concise effort, a slightly edited version of its second regenerated response, which was a bit better than its first version:

There can be a sense of serenity in acknowledging that our fleeting Anthropocene epoch represents just a brief moment in the vast history of our planet and the cosmos. The eventual transformation or disappearance of Homo sapiens as we know it is inevitable, whether through extinction or evolution into a more advanced transhuman form. Becoming overly concerned about this outcome is not particularly helpful; instead, we should fully embrace the present moment and appreciate the unfolding events as grateful observers.

An implicit ontology and epistemology of the experienced self underlie this 'live in the present' approach, suggesting certain assumptions about the nature of the self that we experience. The ontological assumption posits that the self is an emergent property of processes that cannot be truly understood, signifying that there is no fixed essence to be found. The epistemological assumption claims that all of our experiences, including knowledge, thoughts, and feelings, are illusory and can only be understood in relation to one another.

And here is Google Bard’s longer, and also excellent version:

The Anthropocene era is a brief blip in the history of this planet and the cosmos. It is certain that Homo Sapiens will eventually disappear, either through extinction or through evolution into a new form. It is therefore not useful to become agitated about this, but rather to live fully in the present moment as grateful witnesses to what is unfolding.

This "pay attention to the present" stance is based on an implicit ontology and epistemology of the experienced self. The ontological assumption is that the experienced self is an emergent property of processes that cannot be known directly. In other words, the self is not a thing, but rather a process that emerges from the interaction of many different factors, such as our genes, our environment, and our experiences. The epistemological assumption is that all knowledge, thought, and feeling are illusions that can only be known with respect to each other. In other words, we can never know anything directly, but only through the lens of our own subjective experience.

This view of the self has several implications. First, it means that we should not take ourselves too seriously. We are simply a product of our genes, our environment, and our experiences. We are not in control of our own destiny, and we should not try to be. Second, it means that we should not be afraid of change. The self is constantly changing, and this is a good thing. It allows us to grow and evolve. Third, it means that we should be grateful for the present moment. The present moment is all that we have, and it is the only moment that we can truly experience.

MindBlog picks some of its favorite posts on defining what a self is…

The following links are from a recent scan of what pops up if I click on items in ‘Selected MindBlog Categories’ in the right column of this page - to remind myself of some of the results of my personal reflections on the topics indicated. The chronological list starts with the most recent posts.

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times? 

I am not my problem

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?) 

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself.

Some rambling on "Selves" and “Purpose"

Why don’t we do what we know works better?

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

A quick MindBlog riff on what a self is....

Spilling out what I was thinking at breakfast this morning, deciding to fire it off, probably incomprehensible to most readers, perhaps to attempt to clarify later (or delete!):

My self model or 'I' stands amongst my models of others, and during my early postnatal period I probably formed those other models prior to my own, a yet unknown self discovering and learning to predict the behavior of others to gain feeding and care, and only then composing my own self from parts of them. This is consonant with Graziano's take on consciousness as a perceptual construct ("Consciousness and the Social Brain"), also with Wegner's self as being the emotion of authorship ("The Illusion of Conscious Will") and with Metzenger's emotions as evolved virtual organs analogous to the hardware of the liver or kidney ("The Ego Tunnel"). Perhaps the closest we come to a 'real fundamental self' is the experience of occupancy of an expanded space (of non-dual consciousness) that feels to be the container for all of this.

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?

This New Year’s post is directed to the small number of MindBlog readers who might be sympathetic to some of my private random rants. Perhaps I should keep them to myself, but here goes…..

All enlightenment traditions - such as Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight - have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the way things are be renewed and kept fresh? The usual practice is to repeat a liturgy set down by gurus of a given tradition, but with each repetition by a particular vendor the gospel begins to loose its force. The transforming clarity of the initial enlightenment fades as the habituation and desensitization associated with all repetitive activities begins to set in. ‘Reset buttons’ that are temporarily effective can sometimes be found by turning to different vendors of the central message, who in this smartphone age can each package and deliver their respective theory or practice sessions in a sonorous and calming voices. This frequently is done in 10-30 min chunks that better accommodate our modern diminished attention spans, as well as in longer lectures from workshops or retreats. This approach can be seen in aggregator Apps such as Sam Harris’ “Waking Up,” which delivers the messages of many different teachers. (I wonder if generation Alpha,  born in this century, exists in even more transient states of tik-tok mind, twitter mind, or instagram mind that preclude even this level of engagement?)

I would guess that over the past year or two I have listened to ~150 such lectures. As I see the same basic points reframed in many different ways, I begin to think “Y’know, it seems that the fundamental axioms of enlightenment that are expressible in language are being repetitively rediscovered throughout history and repeatedly archived.  I feel like their verbal messages are as ingrained in my consciousness as the language of the mathematical and chemical structures I have known most of my life.”

My flippant ‘mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes’ phrase in the title of this post is meaning to point to the fact that the market for vendors of enlightenment is a distinctive one. Existential angst, or worrying about value, purpose, and meaning seem most pressing to a relatively small number of highly urbanized and literate humans. I can’t imagine that my two Abyssinian cats, who I sometimes takes to be my best role models, spend a significant fraction of their time worrying about the meeting of it all, or pondering the subtleties of epistemology and ontology. 

So….what beyond words? A space or perspective that doesn’t contain them can only be pointed at by using them in the dualistic context of a sender and receiver. I can, for example, try to use words to give a crude voice to the mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal that underlie and generate everything that I am and experience right now: “Dude, get a grip, I (the visceral one) am the one who is actually running this show, deciding where it goes and whether it works or shuts down, the sooner the “I” you imagine yourself to be realizes this and lets go, the sooner some kind of sane space is attained. All of the surface behaviors acted out for others to see - the family man, the professor, the pianist - are shadow play shimmering on the surface of this basic organic substrate, like water insects skittering around on the surface of a pond. What is writing these words is just another one of the contents of consciousness flitting past. Just turn yourself around to look quickly for the writer…what do you see? What do you see as you imagine being first born into this world? The brief glimpses of expanded naive awareness sometimes elicited by questions such as these have the potential of permitting a scrubbing, refreshing, or renewal of consciousness in a way that permits more choice in selecting which prior individual selves and self habits rise to compose current self conscious life. 

Different iterations of these sentiments, different vendings of the sort mentioned in the first paragraph above, can be found in two previous MindBlog posts. One from Nov. 25:  

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises.  

And the other from Oct. 26, passing on a masterful exposition from James Low that I can not improve on.

If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction.

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?

One of MindBlog's subject threads is meditation, and some recent posts have dealt with characterizing non-dual awareness (to find these, look in the right column of this blog, under "Selected Blog Categories, and click on 'meditation.') One of the descriptions I have pointed to is given by James Low, who has training in several lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and has been teaching the principles of Dzogchen in Europe for over 20 years. Low's website links to an array of audio and video (YouTube and Vimeo) presentations he has done. One of the participants in a recent discussion at my house urged me to check out YouTube snippets recorded by Rupert Spiro, also British, whose YouTube videos and personal wesite (The Essence of Non-Duality) offer his teachings. 

After finding the YouTube outlets for these two meditation gurus, I googled 'non duality websites' and was rewarded with an array of rabbit holes to jump into...further teachers, and a "Nonduality Institute" that engages scientific studies of non-dual awareness. 

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises. 

Non-duality as a platform for experiencing daily life.

I pass on abstracted edited clip from a recent podcast conversation between Sam Harris and M.I.T philosopher Kierna Setiya on “Philosophy and the Good Life” which has a succinct definition of what Harris takes non-duality or ‘having no self’ to mean, and how experiencing this can lead to a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudemonia, as well as solving a very wide class of psychological problems. I suggest that MindBlog readers who enjoy this subject matter also have a look back at my March 22 post, titled "Points on having a self and free will."

There can be confusion over what is meant by no-self in various meditative traditions. It’s not the claim that people are illusions, or that you can’t say anything about the psychological or biological continuity of a person. It’s not mysterious that we wake up today as ourselves and not someone else. These are not the puzzles being addressed.

The core insight, the illusion that is cut through, conceptually and experientially, is our apparent normal default condition of feeling like there is a subject in the center of experience. Most people don’t merely feel identical to experience, they feel like they are having an experience, they feel like they are appropriating their experience from some point - very likely in their heads - the witness, the thinker of thoughts, the willer of will, the guy in the boat who has free will, who can decide what to think and do next. That’s the default state for almost everybody, and commonplace as it is, it is a peculiar point of view. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, particularly biological sense. It’s not the same thing as feeling identical to our bodies, because we usually don’t feel identical to our bodies, we feel like we are subjects who have bodies, there is a kind of Cartesian dualism that is intuitive. People are ‘common sense dualists.’ As a matter of experience there is this feeling that “I am a subject behind my face.” “I” have a body, am a subject who is thinking, internal to the body, has a body. It is the final representation of the subject that is the illusion.

To put this in neurological terms, let’s just say for the sake of argument at all of this is just neurophysiological events in the brain delivering these representations. It is plausible that any one of these processes can be interrupted, so that you can cease to faithfully or coherently represent a world. You can suddenly go blind, may not be able to name living things but still be able to name tools, suddenly not be able to perceive motion or location, those things can break apart. All kinds of things can be disrupted for the worse certainly. But what these contemplative traditions have recognized is that certain things can be disrupted or brought to a halt for the better. The thing that can interrupt the usual cascade of mediocrity and suffering psychologically speaking is this representation of self as subject in the middle of experience.

You can cease to construct a subject that is internal to the body. What remains in that case is a sense that mind is much vaster than it was a moment ago, because it is no longer confined to the sense that there is this central thinker of thoughts. There is a recognition that thoughts arise all by themselves, just as sounds do, no one is authoring your thoughts - you certainly aren’t. The sense that you are is what it feels like to be identified with this next spontaneously arising thought.

So, you loose sense that you are on the edge of your life, looking over your own shoulder, appropriating experience and what you can feel very vividly here is a real unity. emptyness, non-duality of subjects and objects, such that there is really just experience. This is not a new way of thinking about yourself in the world, this is a ceasing to identify with thought. This is making no metaphysical claims about how this relates to matter or the universe.

As as matter of experience you can feel identical to experience itself. You are not standing on the river bank watching things go by, you are the river, and that solves a very wide class of problems, psychologically speaking, with respect to suffering. And, it does land one in a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudemonia (well being) that may seem counter intuitive in the midst of the cacophony of daily life. But again, it’s not about the negation of personhood, it is just a recognition that as a matter of experience there is just experience, and the feeling that there is an experiencer is yet more experience, so that if you just drop back… there is just everything in its own place.

I am not my problem

An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. The title of this post - the (apparently nonsensical) sentence "I am not my problem” - is the latest example. The sentence can to be parsed to indicate in this instance that the "I" is referring to the illusory narrative self that our social brains have been designed by evolution to generate, and the "my" refers to our intuition or sensing of the vastly complex underlying interacting body systems (respiratory, circulatory, neuronal, muscular, endocrine, sensory, etc.) from which this veneer of a self rises. The brain is mainly not for thinking. It appears that several styles of meditation practice can expand our awareness of this fundamental generative layer. The "am not my problem" tries to make the point that distinguishing these systems can prove useful in trying to determine the origins of particular feelings or behaviors. 

As I’m writing these words I begin to realize that my “novel” waking insight isn’t so novel, but more an elaboration or restatement of my post of Friday, March 13, 2020, on “the relief of not being yourself,” which described another spontaneous rising of ideas associated with the transition between sleep and wakefulness. I repeat that text here:

What a relief to know that this is not me, it is just the contents of my consciousness, which shift around all the time and are never the same twice. What has changed, after 45 years of doing an introspective personal journal, is that this sentence has become clear and true for me. It is a prying loose from the illusion of the sensing and executive “I”, self, the homunculus inside.

There is a particular feeling of renewal, starting over, in the first moments of the transition to seeing - rather than immersed in being - one of the contents of consciousness. Meditation practice can be seen as training the ability to inhabit this state for longer periods of time, to experience the self or I as co-equal with other contents of consciousness like seeing, hearing, feeling. It is having thoughts without a thinker, having a self without a self.

What is inside is the animal mirror of expanded consciousness, no longer locked into one or another of its contractions. This feels to me like a potentially irreversible quantum bump, a phase or state change in my ongoing awareness (perhaps a long term increase in my brain’s attentional mode activity alongside a decrease its default mode’s mind wandering?...also frontal suppression of amygdalar reactivity?)

Mozart and Brahms Piano Trios at an 80th birthday house concert

This post falls in the 'random curious stuff' category mentioned under MindBlog's title. On May 15, one day before my 80th birthday, my piano trio invited friends and family to a Sunday afternoon house concert at the home of our cellist on Cat Mountain in the Northwest Hills of Austin Texas. I have posted the individual movements of the Mozart Piano Trio No. 2 in B flat major, K. 502 and the Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8 on my YouTube channel, as well as in playlists that play through all the movements of each piece. 

To give you a sample, this post passes on the last movements of the two trios. 

The allegretto of the Mozart Trio.

 

The allegro of the Brahms trio. 

MindBlog is 16 years old... It's first post: "Dangerous Ideas"

I repeat MindBlog's first post... of ideas that are now considered more commonplace than dangerous. Edge.org soldiers on, but its 'annual question' addressed to prominent thinkers disappeared several years ago. Here is the post: 

Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are. 

I owe my soul to the company store (Google).

As I pass through my 79th birthday I offer a cathartic rant - without worrying about whether its parts cohere:

I am the white collar equivalent of the coal miner in Tennessee Ernie Fords classic “16 Tons” lyric line that provides the title of this post.... except that I am shoveling information in bytes rather than shoveling coal. The tendrils of google extend into all my internet activities, it is a virtual prosthesis. I am symbiotic with the cloud, losing access to it is like losing the use of my limbs. Yuval Harari has it exactly right - Google’s A.I. knows more about me than I know about myself... what YouTube movies, programs, and classical piano performances with scrolling scores I want to watch, where I go (my google maps) and what I do (my google calendar). 

Google knows what I think and write from https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/ (powered by Google’s Blogger platform), as well from my google cloud drive that holds my important legal and financial documents.  I put my piano performances on my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/DericPiano. My techie son’s Google workspace account supporting the bownds.com domain provides me with a deric@bownds.com email address and youtube without advertisements. Underground Google fiber was recently installed on my street and suddenly this week I have 1 GB down internet and google drive cloud storage of 1 terabyte for the same amount that I had been paying another fiber optic provider for 300 MB down with no extras.

My only non-Google platform, http://www.dericbownds.net/  (the archive of my lectures, writing, personal and laboratory history), is a historical relic dating back to geocities.com and now called  'Yahoo Small Business." I tried switching mainly to Apple’s iCloud in early 2020, because it is more protective of privacy, but after a year of trying I have given up and returned to the evil empire. Apple’s web interface for word processing is slow and klutzy, has unnecessary prompts, is crash prone, and too frequently requires relogging into iCloud. 

Governance of me, along with the rest of the human herd, is quietly being transferred from nation states - whose internal conflicts render them ineffective - to an oligarchy of IT companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon, along with their European and Asian counterparts. Tech companies are pretending to be governments, as in the quasi-governmental posturing of Amazon and Facebook . Their cloud based artificial intelligence analyzes and manipulates what we want and sells it to us.

After doing numerous posts on the sociopathy of social media, you might think I would practice what I preach and abstain from having a facebook and twitter account. But no, I maintain both accounts (Deric Bownds and @DericBownds)  to re-broadcast the posts I compose on the Blogger platform that masquerades as coming from mindblog.dericbownds.net. I don’t look at tweets or re-tweets on my twitter account, but I do check facebook for news of my family and two facebook social groups. 

I am continually amazed by my occasional looks down the rabbit hole of social media (See How Roblox Sparked a Chaotic Music Scene)  Realizing that this is the generation that contains our future leaders reminds me of Willian Butler Yeats' poem “The Second Coming” in which he seems to have seen it long ago:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

What's not to enjoy?  Sit back and read Niall Ferguson on "The Politics of Catastrophe" as our humanity slowly and surely chaotically merges with the great A.I. in the cloud!

Points on having a self and free will.

 A recent podcast by Sam Harris summarizing his ideas on the question of whether we have free will motivates me to do a further summary here…

There is a broad consensus among many disciplines that our experience of having a self or “I” is an illusion (see for example my lecture “The I-Illusion” and subsequent web lectures).  This self illusion is what has the experience of ‘free will,’ of being free to make choices. Having a self is other side of the coin of having free will.

Here is my one paragraph paraphrase of points that Sam Harris’ makes in his ‘Waking Up’ App, and book of that title, as well as his recent podcast:

We all are concatenations of previous causes with the most recent proximal cause rising from this subconscious mist.  What we take to be our 'self' or 'I' is actually the archive of our past actions and experiences, stored in long term declarative and procedural memory systems from which thoughts and actions of the present instant  seem to rise from nowhere - 'we' don't 'choose' them, they just seem to appear.  Having morality doesn't require free will, it is accomplished by having a historical coltlective record of what actions do or don't work out well, with respect to holding society together and passing on our genes. Thinking that 2 + 2 = 5 or killing other humans have bad consequences.  It is from this history of actions and expectations in our brain that the moral choices of the moment arise, again as if from nowhere.

Still, most of us, even if granting the above, can’t imagine losing our feeling of having a self, it seems too useful, we couldn’t get along without it.  This problem is addressed at the end of my “I-Illusion” talk with text based on points Wegner makes at the end of his classic 2002 book “The Illusion of Conscious Will” : 

…..the important point is that we have the experience of having free will, and it must be there for something, even if it is not an adequate theory of behavior causation....perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing, the experience of will marks our actions for us, its embodied quality our actions from those of other agents in our environment.

We have evolved emotions of anger, sadness, fear, happiness related to survival. We can think of the emotion of agency, or conscious will, as the same sort of evolved emotion, obviously a useful capability in sorting out our physical and social world. 

The authorship emotion, an emotion that authenticates the action's owner as the self, is something we would miss if it were gone... it would not be very satisfying to go through life causing things, making discoveries, helping people, whatever.. if we had no personal recognition of those achievements.

And, this view doesn't really need to conflict with notions of responsibility and morality, because what people intend and consciously will is a basis for how the moral rightness or wrongness of an act judged. This is why mental competence is an issue in criminal trials.

So, just as in theater, art, used car sales ...and in the scientific analysis of conscious will..how things seem is more important than what they are. It seems to us that we have selves, have conscious will, have minds, are agents. While it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is incorrect to call the illusion a trivial one, its invention has an obvious evolutionary rationale (along with long list of cognitive biases we seem to be hardwired with). Illusions piled on top of apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology, social life, and our dominance as a species on this planet.

MindBlog Outage

Greetings from Austin Texas, where I live. Winter storm Texas can't handle. Third day of massive power outage, looks like at least one more day to go. One working burner on kitchen gas stove keeping interior at about 50 degrees. No posts until power restored. Roads are solid ice this morning. No further posts until power returns.

MindBlog's 15th birthday

Mindblog has been chugging along for 15 years, it's contents reflecting what I find interesting and am reading about at the moment. It seems a waste to not pass on stuff I like, in the hope that others find it interesting. A few of the posts are my own ruminations, but most are large re-tweets or clips from articles, sometimes with a few comments thrown in.

There have been 5,056 posts. I don't follow the analytics, but for the occasion of this post I've clicked "Stats" in the Blogger menu and see that ~1,000 people view MindBlog each day. Feedburner indicates ~1.8 million total views (but when I looked several years ago it said ~4 million, so go figure...). Every week I get several emails requesting advertisement, external article, or link placements -  to which I reply with my boilerplate 'no thank you' response.

In previous birthday posts I've occasionally gnashed my teeth over whether I should continue doing the blog, and focus my time on longer projects.  I realize, however, that even if readership dropped to zero I would probably continue to do postings, because this provides a disciplined and simple way to archive my thinking and reading over time.  I have found the search box in the left column to be an invaluable tool when I want to recall ideas or get background material relevant to starting up a new talk or project.

Dynamic Views of MindBlog

In my review of old blog posts I've come across mention of a link I placed at the top right corner os this page...Dynamic Views of MindBlog, which disappeared at some point without my noticing it (was Blogger/Google trying to shut it down?, I dunno.), I've put it back in. If you click on the link you have the options of view Deric's MindBlo in Classic, Flipcard, Magazine, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot, or Timeslide formats. Give it a try!