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What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the mac
by bitexploder 1mo ago
What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity.
Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.
We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.
You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.
Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
- selestify 1mo agoVery good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.
- eastbound 1mo agoDid you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
- bitexploder 1mo agoThe problem I have with modern therapy is it that it operates completely within the frame of oneself. They will very carefully walk with you inside of your own narrative, bringing you to a better place of operation within that framework of the self. Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say. As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion. A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
- viccy-kobuletti 1mo agoYou put very well into words why therapy felt off for me. I haven't been meditating for too long, but the perspective definitely shifts once you start turning the attention inwards, instead of following the narrative that the mind creates. My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
- N_Lens 1mo agoNonjudgemental self observation is table stakes. And I mean as much of the time as you can manage (Eventually all the time).