MENTAL MODULES

October 1st, 2020

Our own reasoning can play some fairly devious tricks on us.  It’s perhaps not hyperbole to say that we are in a constant state of conflict our elaborate talents of self-deception.  We reason our way back into bad behavior, and later look back with an almost amnesic astonishment at our own stupidity, impulsivity or mindlessness.  The question Why did I do that?  Seems suddenly unconvinced by the reasoning that premeditated our ill-advised decision.

Because that’s exactly what it often is: ill-advised reasoning.  Benjamin Franklin once wrote: So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

All he’s really saying is that the human mind is great at coming up with a good story about why anything is a good decision.  This story-telling ability, phrased in such a way, sounds eerily similar to a new technology that recently became available to a limited public called GPT-3.  Tinkered Thinking was fortunate enough to gain access to the limited access api of this new technology and did a few collaborative episodes with GPT-3.  In short, GPT-3 is really good at continuing any sentence that you give it.  It generates languages that sounds really plausible, and in many if not most cases it’s impossible to tell if something was written by a human or if it was generated by GPT-3.  For a more in-depth discussion of this technology, check out Episode 828: What is GPT-3.  

Now what’s very important to realize about GPT-3 is that it can ‘talk’ in any direction.  Give it a topic like “the future of humanity” and it’ll talk about gloom and doom, but re-prompt it with the exact same thing, and you’re very likely to get the opposite: GPT-3 will start spinning up a new perspective about how there’s so much hope for humanity and that we’ll soon populate the stars.  And in many instances of this generated text, there will be the semblance of reasoning. In short it’s very good at generating a believable and cogent story.  In one moment it can sound like an awful racist, and in the next it can generate a humbled and caring perspective.  If you remember back to high school English class and the assignment of writing a ‘persuasive essay’ you’ll perhaps recall the exercise of coming up with the argument for the ‘other side’ of the point you’re trying to argue.  GPT-3 is essentially excellent at this exercise.

Now in the context of our own self-deception and the logic that underpins it at different moments, it seems we too are quite good at this game.  In the brain, there’s a location that’s referred to as Broca’s Area, named after Pierre Paul Broca.  This area is located on the frontal lobe, usually on the left side, and it appears to be responsible for generating language.  It’s a bit strange to realize that we don’t use our whole brain to produce the things we say, and that it’s primarily the product of a small area.  Certainly we are using other parts of our brain when we do talk, but the fact that Broca’s Area exists makes it seem like our brain is more like a set of modules, and when we speak about something visual, it’s as though the language module and the visual module at the back of the brain link up.  It’s as though our language module can spin up a convincing rationale for anything, but it depends on which other modules have hijacked our own personal GPT-3.  We think about getting on a better diet, and Broca’s Area rattles off a bunch of very sensible reasons why this is an excellent idea, but then a day or so later, when the receptors that usually get a regular dosing of dopamine from the sugar we have so regularly, suddenly Broca’s area gets hijacked by the limbic system, and we start hearing an excellent rationale for why it’s a good idea to buy that lava cake that is on the menu.

Seen with this framework, it suddenly seems to make a lot of sense why so many people undermine themselves constantly.  The brain has a bunch of modules or modes that are in conflict with one another when paired together, but seem totally sensible if listened to one at a time.  The day trader buys the low, thinking it’s a good price and that the long game will be excellent, but then sells a day later when the price has continued to drop and the logic has changed because the feelings around the situation have changed and those feelings spin a much different story when linked up to our language module.  We convince ourselves twice in opposing directions and we fail to move forward because our rationale lacks consistency.  

This is why a practice like mindfulness can be so powerful.  Many people think meditation grants a person control over their mind, which isn’t necessarily correct or incorrect so much as it is just poorly worded.  In this context of self-deception, and rationale and language modules and it’s best thought of as an additional module - a mindful module.  And in this context, what it does is that it allows the mind to take a bird’s eye view of itself.  Instead of being constantly intoxicated by the cadence of our own moment-to-moment rationale and self talk, the mindful module regards that deceptive song in a larger context and pauses the process in order to commandeer that language module for a moment and say: wait a minute, this doesn’t really fit exactly, in fact, that reasoning is just plain bullshit.

Just imagine for a moment if you could accurately call your own bullshit.  How much more efficiently would you move toward your goals?

OPTIMAL OBSTACLE

September 30th, 2020

There comes a moment when a child who cannot climb the stairs gets just big enough to heave consortium of limbs up on to that first step.  After that, it’s game over.  At least for the chronically worried parent who must now track the movement of a child up and down a dangerous set of stairs.  The problem arises because the other steps are exactly like the first.  If one can be climbed, then they can all be surmounted.  But what if, for abstraction’s sake, we made the next step a little larger than the first, and the third a little larger than the second, and so on and so forth?

There would, imaginably be a lag between the time when a child can climb the first step and then get up to the second.  For a bigger, more formidable obstacle, we must grow a bit more.

The image here is simple, and the logic requires no stretch, but as a metaphor for the obstacles that we come across in life, we fail to apply the same requisite logic.  We’re somehow coddled into the expectation that adulthood should initiate like the first step in a staircase earned by age and default growth, and each step from then on isn’t harder than the last but merely a part of the grind, and this staircase will lead -inevitably- to some idealistic promised land of retirement or ‘making it’.  

This escalator grind may have seemed like a sustainable metaphor in decades past when someone could do reasonably well as a ‘company man’, but every hierarchical organization has a limit to the number of steps every employee can take.  Those who were or are able to ascend higher recognized either consciously or unconsciously a new level of problem to be solved. In the present day where the idea of being a ‘company man’ looks less and less sustainable, the underlying rubric of constantly needing to level-up becomes more and more apparent.  

Two issues hold people back on this adventure of levelling up, and the solution to one unlocks the solution to the other.  One issue is that we come up against an obstacle that isn’t an optimal challenge.  It’s just too big, and too difficult to tackle, and so we stay put and settle and stagnate.  

The other problem is that we stop growing by default.  This is perhaps the easiest way to demarcate the border between childhood and adulthood: the second begins when growth either stops or continues only through conscious effort.  

Children pick up languages with an ease that seems completely effortless, whereas adults struggle to gain even a modicum of ability with new languages.  But an adult can, of course, learn a new language - it just takes a lot of conscious effort.

The experience of learning and working through difficulties goes from being a bit of an escalator as a child… straight to the sheer side of a rock face to be scaled with a huge variety of effort and skills that must be acquired and invented on the fly.

But when this difference, and the way to deal with it is honestly confronted, when a person decides to consciously push their mind through the challenges of new difficulties, then the next large step before which most people stop and stagnate begins to reveal subtle handholds, a logic of solution and soon someone is standing atop a new level of life and experience, having made an optimal obstacle out of something that previously felt like an iron ceiling. 

LIVING THE STORY

September 29th, 2020

If you were to sit down and write your autobiography, would it make for good reading?  This requires answering two questions.  The more obvious one is whether you’ve lived an interesting life.  The other refers to how good of a writer you are.  It is imaginable that a boring life can be conveyed in a fascinating way.  But, of course, an interesting life makes for easier writing, and a great story can certainly make it easier to forgive bad writing.  Makes for a valid wonder: what’s easier, to become a great writer or to live an interesting life?

This begs a deeper question regarding what it means to live and ply one’s self to the task of making the most of one’s time.  A great writer need not necessarily live a fascinating life.  That fascinating life can be discovered within the practice and art of honing one’s own craft, and that’s generally a journey that doesn’t exactly translate into an exciting adventure story.  The obstacles and triumphs are of a more cognitive variety - the trial is more with the limits of one’s own self as opposed to the circumstances and vicissitudes of life.

The overwhelming majority of people simply aren’t going to sit down and write an autobiography. Everyone, however, is required to live a life.  That adventure is not up for debate, though the amount of adventure we infuse our life with certainly does receive a wide variable.  Some lead the same blandly content life, day after day and perhaps never notice how much more could be done with it.  While others, in a similar position get to a late point in life and realize how much more could have been done with the time alive.  And of course still others understand the fundamentally fleeting nature of life and seize as much of it as will fit within human grasp and wrench it in all sorts of interesting directions.    Whichever option it be, we are each writing our own story, written or not, but lived all the same.

It bodes well to reflect frequently and ask earnestly: how interesting is your time alive?

PERPETUAL FAILURE

September 28th, 2020

The goal is to fail, and to succeed means to realize you’re failing.  This is at the heart of a mindfulness meditation practice.  To simply notice that you are thinking, to realize that fact, is in some sense to become aware that you are not following the prescription of the practice.  Or rather that you haven’t been following the instructions.  But the very act of realizing that one has been lost in thought is to invoke the aim of the effort.  

The simple fact is that we are nearly always, perpetually lost in a rabbit hole of thinking.  And we are lost in this maze without even realizing it, as though we are drunk on the act.  A mindfulness practice pulls a person out of this narrow point of view, expanding it to include all that is going on.  We’re often lost in our own private rabbit hole of thought at the expense of noticing some fairly mundane things, like the feeling of breath entering and expanding our body, the sense of that body’s weight against the ground, the temperature, the pressure, the light or darkness that engulfs us, among an entire host of other simple aspects of what it’s like to be experiencing life.  

But these simple variables are often overlooked as we are lost.  And yet, the mere noticing of such simple variables can relieve our mind of much un-needed effort.

Strangely, it’s the act of downgrading the importance and prevalence of variables of consciousness that make our experience more aware of the moment.  The more focused we become on any one variable within consciousness, the less connected we are with the moment.  But the instant we downgrade the importance of this variable and become able to incorporate an awareness of a wider variety, the more in touch with the moment we become.

Mindfulness meditation, is in some sense, the practice of continually noticing how unimportant a single thought is in the grand scheme of things, and to realize it’s a failure to concentrate on such at the expense of so much else that is going on.  

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A LIFE TO LIVE

September 27th, 2020

Lucilius sat down, after a long and tremendously interesting life, to finally, and definitively write his autobiography.  Of course there was the issue of where to start - always problematic, because where does a story start?  Where does a life start?  Is it with birth, or do the seeds of one’s own story go far beyond that, beyond memory and experience.  Lucilius pondered these issues, holding the end of the pen to his lips in consideration, tapping the fingers of his free hand in nervous anticipation of the first words.

As he sat with a rising anxiety, staring at the blank page, a rusty memory brushed itself off and offered itself up.  Lucilius’ eyes grew glassy at the old sight of the unseeable time.  The memory set his mind off on a race, threading through his many unmeasurable adventures - his long life spanning across such a thick measure of time.  Eventually a smile grew on his face and he leaned in over the blank page and pressed the pen to paper.

He wrote: when Lucilius was a very young boy, he sat down to pen his autobiography.  Having a plump and worthy biography seemed like one of the most worthy goals he could think of, and having decided upon it, he figured he might as well do it himself.  But, as the young boy sat with pen poised to record his grand adventures, a problem arose in his mind.  Though he’d lived an excellent boy’s life, weaving himself into all sorts of trouble and fun, he could not find a place to start the grand record of his adventures.  But even more importantly, while reflecting on the little he did have on hand to record, he realized that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the thoughts and deeds he had to put down.  No, there was far more to be had, to be done.  The marrow of life was far from had, the bones had not even been cracked, indeed, he thought - even as such a youngster - that the hunt had barely begun.  Young Lucilius looked again at the blank page and felt and immense dissatisfaction, but with it, a hope, or more a verve to grab at a goal that would not come with mere hope nor want, but only by dint of long effort and pain, thirst and a desire to hunt.

Young Lucilius stood up and decided to abandon the effort.  There was no need to write down his life when there was so much life to live.

Lucilius stared at the sentence he’d just written.  He read the sentence over and over, and slowly the notion of it’s meaning sunk in.  He leaned back in his seat and stared off in middle distance.  He wasn’t dead yet, he noticed.

Lucilius got up from the barely marked page of paper.  He turned and left.  There was still more life to live.