three modes of thought

thinking/planning — my eyes are staring into space, or closed, and I might appear asleep.

doing — I'm kindof like a machine, queued up with a bunch of instructions, and I'm just executing them.

communicating — I'm talking, trying to sell my ideas, and trying to understand other people's ideas into order to steal good ones.

video

I gave a presentation at some event today run by the Institute for the Future. At the end, I was asked if I was willing to do a video interview, and I submitted. I first made sure they wouldn't release the thing publicly without passing by oDesk's marketing team, since I feel like I have a tendency to say things in a non-marketing compatible way. But I've felt a bit awkward all evening, and I think the reason is this video. It turns out I have some sort of phobia against video. First, I hate seeing myself on video. I think I look stupid. Second, I fear having video footage used out of context. I feel like I have a tendency in general to say grandiose things, which I try to preface with all sorts of disclaimers, but I feel like it would be easy to get a short film clip that made me look like a nut.

homesick sentimental scenes

Occasionally I get this feeling of.. not sure what to call it.. homesick? sentimental? It's a good feeling. I think. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Anyway, here are some situations, mental images, where the feeling comes up for me:

1. The image of a car in the country leaving home, at night, on a long journey.

2. Cars in the rear view mirror on the freeway at night, with their headlights reflected on the freeway surface.

3. Outside a high, flat, featureless wall of an arabian night's style building, at night with the moon shining, where the whole scene is clean and pristine, and nobody's around.

4. Being inside a car during a rainstorm.

I see a couple themes here: cars and night time.

I told you so

I was analyzing a nightmare, and asking, why did it frighten me? I think the root fear was people telling me "I told you so". For instance, I'm afraid of my mom being right about religion.

Why am I afraid of people telling me "I told you so"? I think because I want to be respected, and free. I fear that if someone tells me I should do X, and I do Y instead, and X turns out to be better, then they'll feel self-justified in their view, and they'll be able to hold it over me the next time they tell me to do something. If I go against them again, I'll lose their respect, if I haven't already; but if I obey them rather than myself, then I won't be free.

line upon line

Idea 1: I recall this phrase from the Book of Mormon: line upon line, precept upon precept. I forget the original context. My original interpretation of it was that we learn things one bit at a time, like learning to add before learning to multiply.

Idea 2: I often have ideas come to mind, and I think "yes! that's it! that's solves everything! I need to integrate that into my world view!" And then I think about it more, and the idea turns out to be a bit half-baked or not quite as earth-shattering as I thought, and even if it's good, I don't always succeed in remembering it day to day. But, I'll often see good ideas resurface after I've forgotten them.

Combined idea: I thought line upon line was learning to add before learning to multiply, but now I'm thinking that a more useful and accurate interpretation is learning to add many times, again and again, before it truly sinks in. So when I get an idea and think "yes! that's it!" it is good to acknowledge it, but I shouldn't stress about integrating it into my world view right away, because my brain doesn't work that way -- I'll need to see the idea many times as good before it "sinks in" -- and this is not so bad since good ideas tend to resurface anyway.

free association

It is interesting to me that the brain seems to do useful thought when I let it run free. I've had the experience of going to bed thinking about a math problem, and waking up with the answer, but the answer was arrived at subconsciously. And when I have a difficult problem to think about, I often put my head down, and it seems to other people that I'm sleeping, but I'm pretty sure I'm thinking, even though I'm not consciously thinking, because I will come up with reasonable solutions after this process.

So why do I go through the subjective conscious "effort" of working on problems if my subconscious mind could solve them? I've thought that maybe it has to do with "symbolic processing", e.g., reasoning about things using logic and symbol manipulation. Of course, my brain can do math subconsciously, so that seems like a whole in this theory, but I feel like before my brain can do math subconsciously, I need to build a mental model of the problem. Once a mental model is in place, I feel like my subconscious can "intuit" a solution.. so maybe the conscious mind is necessary to build mental models, and reason about things that are not "intuitive".

Another candidate for what the conscious mind does is adjusting the mental zoom level, and directing what to zoom in on.

In any case, I've tried trying to not control myself, and just letting my subconscious make decisions, and it seems to work. That is, my body does do stuff, all on it's own. It can even talk to people, all on some sort of "auto-pilot".

So.. I'm not sure. Note that the issue of "what does the conscious mind do?" is separate from the question of "free will". Even though I don't believe in free will, I still admit to having the subjective experience of "making decisions". I'm just curious why some of the decisions made by my brain are interpreted subjectively as having been made consciously, and some of them are not interpreted that way.

free will

This is an excerpt from a previous post: ...I don't believe in free will. More specifically, I don't understand what free will is. I feel like brains have a set of desires, and they try to meet those desires, and they might make compromises between conflicting desires, and they might accidentally do something that doesn't meet their desires by mistake, but brains are not capable of deciding to do things that don't meet their desires. I feel like someone reading this might slap themselves in the face and say "Ha! I did something that didn't meet any of my desires." However, I would say to that person, "you wanted to prove me wrong -- that's the desire you were satisfying when you slapped yourself in the face, and you wanted to prove me wrong so badly that you compromised your desire to not hurt yourself."

Anyway, I don't know what it would even look like for an entity to make a "free will" decision that wasn't based on any desires. Why would they have made that decision and not some other decision? If they can't answer that question, I think the decision was random, not free. If they can answer the question, then the real question becomes, did they make a free will choice to have that value system for comparing decisions, rather than some other value system? If so, we ask "why did they chose the value system they chose?", and we apply the argument recursively. If not, then the freedom seems to end there.

I think humans are born with a set of desires that they don't chose, like wanting food and air and love. I think other desires are logically derived from those, e.g., I want to go to school, so I can get a job, so I can earn money, so I can buy food.

Incidentally, I do believe in jail. If someone does something bad, I don't believe in "judging" them in the sense of thinking "shame on you! you evil person!", but if I think they'll do it again, then I'm afraid of it happening to me, then I would like them to be prevented from doing it.

opposite of fear

First, I think fear is an emotion felt about the outcome of future events.

For instance, I might not know whether a girl will say "yes" to going on a date with me, and I might fear that she'll say "no". Once I ask her, and she gives an answer, my fear goes away. Even if she says "no", I'm no longer afraid that she'll say no. It just sucks.

I think the opposite of fear is hope.

I might hope that the girl will say "yes". And once I ask her, and she gives an answer, my hope goes away. Even if she says "yes", I no longer hope that she'll say yes. It just rocks.

I said this to a friend, and he said that the opposite of both fear and hope is indifference. I think this is true. It reminded me of a post I wrote about opposites, where I suggest that opposites often come in threes rather than twos. For instance, black and white are opposites, but the notion of clear or transparent is opposite to both of them.

This notion of indifference lead to my thoughts about mental zoom.

behind the mind's eye

I talk about the mind's eye zooming in and out here. I talk about creating larger and larger infinities here. I feel like the two are related.

The mind's eye sees a "set" of stuff in front of it. Zooming out involves seeing a larger set of stuff, including the spot where our mind's eye used to be.

Of course, since our mind's eye is now someplace new, it also seems like this creates the potential for an even more zoomed back position which would see in front of it our current mind's eye.

Hence, it seems like there's always something behind us that we can't see.

mental zoom

My mind's eye feels like a microscope. I can zoom in to different levels. For example, I might be looking at a ladybug on a leaf. Here are some different levels:

• seeing the intricate details of the ladybug, focussed on the small part of my retina that contains the image
• seeing the plant that the ladybug is on, and hearing birds overhead
• aware of my body standing on a path in the woods, looking at a ladybug
• aware of my goals; I know where I am in the woods, and where I hope to end up
• aware of higher level goals; I know why I chose to come to the woods
• aware of mental systems, like the fact that my brain has goals, and that it has a variety of systems in place for achieving goals
• aware of meta-mental systems, like the fact that I seem to have a "mind's eye" that is seeing mental systems, including the mental construct of a "mind's eye"

I "feel" the stuff at the level I'm zoomed in to. If I'm zoomed into the intricate details of the ladybug, then those details seem "real". I'm subjectively experiencing them. As I zoom out, I'm less "in the moment" of experiencing the ladybug, and more in the moment of experiencing some higher level process.

At one level, I might be aware of a pain in my leg, like a bug bite. As I zoom in (to something else) or out, this pain fades.

One tool for zooming out, for me, is "indifference". In order to see something from a higher level, I need to not care about the stuff at the lower level. Caring about it seems to keep my mental focus at that level. At a higher level, my mind can still deal with issues at a lower level, but without getting "wrapped up" in them. For instance, if I zoom out from the level of really feeling the pain of a bug bite, I can still put some ointment on the bug bite, without feeling the pain as much. Similarly, if I am feeling scared or angry, I can zoom out and process the situation more objectively without being "controlled" by the fear or anger. Of course, if I zoom out too much, I become indifferent to how I handle the situation at all, because my mind is focussed on much higher level issues, and I will appear outwardly to just be staring into space.

I think I may be my mind's eye. If feel like I do things, but I'm not sure that I really do them. I think I just feel like I do. I'm not sure what the connection is between subjective awareness (the stuff that seems to come from where the mind's eye is looking) and action (the stuff we might call "free will"). As  I think about this mental model more, the more it feels like I am the mind's eye, but it does still feel like I have one control knob, and that is the zoom level -- and what to zoom into -- but I'm not even sure that the mind's eye itself is even in control of that.

I think meditation can help people zoom back. Meditation seems related to indifference and awareness, which both seem like useful tools for zooming back, in addition to the tool of calming the mind (which is itself a form of indifference).

I think the zoom level right behind our physical body is our imagination, and this can be a tricky level to zoom behind, because our imagination is capable of making it appear as if we are zooming behind it. For instance, in reading this, I might imagine zooming back from my act of reading this, past my imagination, and seeing all kinds of stuff happening in my mind, and everything getting smaller and farther and farther away -- but it's possible that that is all taking place at a static level of zoom at the level of my imagination. That is to say, the things that seem like other stuff going on in my mind may not in fact be going on, but are just fancy images that my imagination conjures up for what it might look like to see stuff going on in my mind. My mind is very tricky this way. I have felt at times that I am actually zoomed back, and actually seeing real stuff that is going on, and this feels subjectively different from merely imagining that I'm zooming back, but the difference is subtle.

I think some drugs can zoom people back (or forward) more than the mind usually does in the corse of a person's normal life. Of course, drugs may also "tilt the mind's mental camera" to look at things a little sideways, seeing things differently, e.g., seeing colors as sounds, or emotions as images. The benefit of drugs may be becoming aware of mental zoom levels that were never achieved before. The danger is that zooming way back, having never zoomed that far back before, and having the camera tilted as well, can be confusing and scary. There is also the risk of taking physical actions based on this possibly skewed and misaligned view of reality, so I would want someone to look after me.

When we are focused at a particular zoom level, it is possible to forget that zooming is possible. Maybe my girlfriend breaks up with me, and I'm very sad and so wrapped up in the sadness that I forget it is possible to zoom back a bit and see the sadness more objectively, and in context with other things going on in my mind.

When I am zoomed back far enough, I can see my mind's processor for predicting future events. This can feel like seeing the future, though I'm sure it is just my mind's best guess about the future.

Each time I manage to zoom farther back, it takes a while to understand what is really going on, sortof like being a baby and trying to learn how to use my limbs.

river of thoughts

I sit on the banks of the river of my own thoughts. I see the river of thoughts spilling out into an ocean of thoughts. The river is fast at times. The ocean is deep. I am sitting in pleasant green grass on the bank. I am detached from my thoughts, though I imagine I am somewhere in them. The landscape is shaped by my thoughts, the way land is shaped by rivers. What is the pleasant grass under my mind's eye? What am I sitting on? What is the sky in this place? The metaphor is not perfect.

learning on your own

At my family reunion, I had a discussion with my uncle about learning stuff by one's self. He's a proponent of reading what other people have done. I'm a proponent of reinventing the wheel as much as possible.

I think reading what other people have done is a powerful tool, but it has some drawbacks. First, it's sortof like looking at the answer to a brain teaser -- I now have the answer, but I probably haven't improved my skill at solving brain teasers. Second, it kindof puts my mind in a box so that I'll think about the problem the same way as the people before me, and I may get stuck in the same places they got stuck, whereas if I reinvent the wheel myself, I may arrive at a slightly different wheel that has some advantages over other wheels that I wouldn't have thought of starting from someone else just telling me about wheels.

Anyway, as always, I think there are pros and cons, but I think that people undervalue reinventing the wheel. In fact, I think there is a social stigma against it. I think people perceive it as arrogant -- how can someone think that they'll reinvent a wheel better than the "great" inventors of the past? However, I think this perception is harmful -- how are people supposed to learn to be inventors if they can't practice inventing things that have already been invented?

leading myself

When trying to lead someone in dance, there's this notion of a connection. If your partner's arm is limp, and you push it, then the arm will probably move, but not their body. You want to feel a bit of resistance from their hand, to know that the arm is engaged, and that pressing on it will be felt by your partner.

Now, I've been trying to meditate and also trying self-hypnosis. Both of these activities seem to require relaxation, which is a bit challenging for me. My strategy so far seems to be "just relax". I think this may be like pushing against a limp arm.. or something like that. The analogy may not be great. But I feel like I'm trying to get my brain to relax when my brain is still worried about stuff, and so my brain sortof covers up the stuff with an blanket and tries not to look there, but part of my brain still secretly knows what's under the blanket, and is worried about it.

I think to really make progress relaxing, I need to tackle the causes of my stress directly, rather than trying to relax in spite of them. I think some people can just relax and forget their cares, but I don't seem to be good at that. Or rather, I guess I'm not truly convinced that forgetting my cares is a safe idea.

depression and non-depression

Yesterday, I went to bed depressed. I had been depressed for a while. Today, I woke up non-depressed. I'm not sure what changed. I tried some mental technique before going to bed, but I often try various mental techniques. I seem to recall this technique having something to do with letting my mind go, so to speek, allowing for gross or disturbing imagery to enter my mind, if that's where my mind goes -- and it did -- and at some point, when it had run it's corse, I kindof imagined crystalizing it all, and melting it into the sun.

But I feel like there was some realization that I'm missing. One thought I had last night was that my baseline was depressed. It felt like a new realization, acknowledging that I keep coming back down whenever I get optimistic and excited about stuff. But, I thought, why should my baseline be low? What is special about being low? If my baseline can be low, why can't it be high?

Anyway, I don't think I've solved my depression. I think I'll be depressed again, maybe even soon, but it's good to not be depressed sometimes to realize what it's like again, and to give me hope that I can get here more often.

I think my optimism also stems from some successes today. I feel like I made some progress in meditation and hypnosis and also in dancing. Progress feels good. I'm not sure progress is sustainable. Sometimes I won't make progress. But, today, I also remember lying down and at some point the idea came to mind "I'm blocked in meditation, and I wrote that I should read something about it. Maybe I should read something about it." And then I had the thought, "here is some motivation to do something, I should probably follow it, since I haven't been very motivated lately." And that turned out to be the right decision.

lies

False high-level impression: Lies are good. High-level impressions are good. They convey information quickly, and they are memorable.

True low-level details: Distorting the truth can be a useful tool for painting a high-level picture of an idea. One risk is that people will believe falsehoods. On the other hand, it may be better for someone to believe one lie and nine truths than to gain nothing at all.

I often fall into the trap of telling the truth. In a previous post, I talk about a conversation I had with my mom about religion. The post is a bit long and dry. I feel like that post should read something like this:

I often argue with my mother about religion. Usually I tell her that it doesn't make sense, and she tells me that it gives her hope. My comeback is: I would rather live with the truth than hope for a lie. However, this time I realized that her faith wouldn't even give me hope. I fear her faith. I hope is isn't true, because it judges people for eternity based on an astronomically short period of time over which people have no real control. Maybe I don't care about the truth. Maybe I too just hope for a lie.

This impression of the situation is a lie, but I think it does a better job conveying the core thought that was running through my head. It is a better meme. This story has a better chance of surviving and reproducing, because other people can understand and relate to it more easily.

I want to lie more. Though, I want some way for people to know I'm lying. Like an impressionistic or abstract painting, that people never confuse for reality.

starting self hypnosis

Along with trying out meditation, no reason not to try out self-hypnosis as well I suppose. I've actually been trying this for a while in various ways without much success (some sortof successes.. I guess I can write about what happened at some point..)

In any case, I hadn't been writing about my experiences, or doing things very systematically, so I thought I'd try doing so.

I decided to try for 10 minutes. Now, the first step in hypnosis, as far as I can gather, is relaxing. So I lied down on a foam mat, and started counting down from 10 to 1, saying to myself stuff like "with each number, relax.. letting go.. more and more with each number.." and I would say numbers, 10, 9, 8, and kindof think about my limbs and try to "let go" of them.. at some point I started thinking about sortof massaging my whole body mentally, wiggling everything around.. somehow I associate mashing everything up and kneading it with relaxing.. the association may just be with massaging, but I feel like I do that with my mind too when I'm trying to relax, I try to sortof mash my thoughts around every which way. But I wasn't doing that yet in this attempt, I was focussing on mentally mashing up my body, trying to relax my limbs.

And then I got to thinking about my timer, which was counting down 10 minutes, and I got to worrying about the annoying sound it was going to make after that time. Somehow this was not a big concern while meditating.. I haven't quite figured out what the difference is there.

Anyway, after 4 minutes I finally quit because I was worrying too much about the timer to get more relaxed.

So I tried again using a script that has the Mac's built in voice synthesis speak to me. It waits 10 minutes, and then tells me "good, you have done well, the 10 minutes are up". Unfortunately it's still a bit disturbing to hear "good.." all of a sudden, but I didn't know that until the 10 minutes were up, but it may be an issue for next time.

This time, I think I did ok relaxing my muscles, though I was sitting down this time in front of my computer (I'm not sure whether it's better to relax sitting or lying down). As my muscles got more relaxed, there are some things that happen which I haven't figured out the right thing to do about. First, my eyes seem to have two relaxed states: one is sortof tightly closed, and one is loosely closed, and I feel like they alternate. I feel like the loosely closed state is more relaxed from the point of view of my muscles, but somehow the tightly closed state is more relaxed for my mind.. as if my mind can concentrate better on relaxing in the tightly closed state. At any rate, I decided to not worry about this, and then I started thinking about relaxing myself mentally.

Now, I'm pretty tightly wound mentally, I think. I think a lot, and even while I'm trying to relax I'm watching myself relax and thinking about that (and of course knowing I'm going to write a blog post doesn't help with that, and I tried to forget about that.. we'll see how that goes in the future).

Anyway, I feel like I hit a sortof wall. My mental image was of a hollow rock, like a geode, and I couldn't penetrate it. I tried sortof prying it apart, and I tried "relaxing" through it somehow. Eventually the image changed to a capped steel cylinder, which I also couldn't break through at first, though eventually it opened and I was sucked into it. However, I didn't feel very much more relaxed when this happened, so I'm not sure the "victory sequence" of breaking into the thing was generated from the same part of my brain that was manifesting the impenetrable object to begin with -- though the impenetrable object could have just been me thinking that my subconscious mind has some barrier that is hard to break into.. hard to know.

In any case, then the "alarm" went off and I heard "good", which like I said was a bit alarming, so maybe I need to turn the volume down more on it, or perhaps have my computer start playing relaxing music.

starting meditation

I decided to start exploring meditation. I've experimented a bit with it in the past, though I haven't gotten very far. For that matter, I've experimented a bit with self hypnosis as well, and haven't gotten that to work either. Though, I'm not sure how to know for sure whether either of these is "working".

In any case, today I decided to meditate for 5 minutes, trying to clear my mind. I read somewhere that the point of meditation is to clear the mind -- I'm not sure if that's true, but it's a place to start.

So I sat in my living room floor, in my best approximation of a "lotus" position, and tried to concentrate on my breathing. My mind quickly shot around to other things, and was a bit restless and bored. I kept trying to actively release control of my mind, letting it go where it would, but this did not seem to counteract the restlessness. I gave up and looked at my clock: I had only 2 more minutes to go.

So, I tried again, resetting the timer for 5 minutes. This time I decided to keep my focus on my breath. I felt my breath in, and I felt my breath out, and I would sortof imagine some imagery to go along with this -- I didn't decide to imagine imagery to go along with it, that's just how my brain interpreted the idea of "concentrating on my breath".

After a bit, I had a pretty disturbing thought. I spike was coming toward me, and piercing through my head. I kept concentrating on my breath. I wasn't afraid of the thought. It was a bit disgusting, and I assume whoever reads this will interpret it as such, but for me it was sortof like seeing a disturbing video but not paying attention to it. I had the thought at the time "this is a test my mind is playing on me, to try and direct my attention away from my breath." Anyway, the spike then started slicing down my body, and eventually the thought went away.

Then a thought came, "I should write my experience down! And what better place than the metameaninglessness blog?" This thought was very exciting, because I thought it would be a good way to keep up the practice of meditating, since I would sortof have a "checkbox" for when I did it, and I could see how it went and reflect on it.. which all seemed good.

Of course, then I thought: this is distracting me from thinking about breathing, so I decided I would probably remember to write about my experience, so I needn't worry about that, and I should continue concentrating on my breath.

A bit later, my breathing got slower, and I noticed a longer pause between breaths. This pause was a bit difficult because I wasn't sure what to do with my mind during the pause. I kept just waiting for the next breath to start.

Soon after this, the 5 minute timer went off, and I got up and wrote this post.

environment

The world is so small. My mind is so influenced by the environment around it. Why am I in this apartment? Why am I not in nature, looking at a wide open space?

I tried an electronic cigarette today. I tried it hours ago, but I can feel the taste of the smoke in my mouth even now. It tastes good.

The truth, the object, the goal, the something, the window, the recognition, the point, the meaning, the way, the path, the peak, the scenery itself, the garden, the grass.. everything is acknowledgement of everything. Honestly putting everything in it's place, noticing it for what it is, or what it appears to be, observation. Observation.. is that really all?

What of a goal? What of want? I have them.. I can acknowledge my wants. Is that all there is to them?

images

random rant related to self-help

This is the age of minds. Of consciousness. Of controlling our own minds. Of self-help. Of taking self-help seriously. There is too much information, too much change, etc, for an ordinary human brain. It's not a matter of getting old, not just a matter.. I think my brain is as spry as ever, but the problems it faces now are getting larger. Soon they'll be too big. I need to figure out how to deal with that. I need to figure out where I fit in.

What are the right goals to have in this environment? What is the right way to stay sane? What does it mean to stay sane?

These are some tools I use:

- Writing thoughts. Like this. Just writing what's on my mind. Being very honest about what's on my mind. That is one thing that is so tragic about today's society, is that we're so private. There are meme's like "Too Much Information". People say things like "don't burden ME with that", and it sounds cool, like they're being cool, and it's the stupid person who's saying too much about what's no their mind. But I think we have got that turned around. We should all be "burdening" each other with what's on our minds, and trying to make sense of it. That's real information, not just social grooming.

- Writing "unsent" letters. I read this in a book somewhere, maybe Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The idea is, if you're in a relationship with someone, having difficulty, you might have a lot of anger towards them. And you might like to tell them all of this. But, the idea is to instead write it in a letter AND NOT SEND IT. Hopefully just writing it all out is enough -- that's the idea anyway.

- Accepting everything. Accepting sounds like thinking everything is good, or everything is true. That's not what I mean. More like, acknowledging everything. Thinking that everything could be true, and being ok with it if it were true. Related to this are things like forgiveness, But also accepting that I hate someone, if I do hate someone. Accepting things seems to change them, and make bad things go away.

- Face what seems to be true, no matter how bleak. I fell from the Mormon church, away from having an afterlife, into a world of death possibly being the end of everything for me. And I had to accept that, but I believe I'm in a richer more meaningful world now, with even larger potential happiness. Though, it didn't always seem so. And, frankly, I could be wrong, or hiding from the truth. Still, I generally find that facing bleak fears reveals a rosy rainbow on the other side that is even better than the former reality would have been without the fear in the first place. Or something like that.

Things I've tried:

- Being positive. I get into little manic episodes of positivity and think, wow, if I could just remain positive, I could do anything. But, I fail to remain positive. I simply can't seem to sustain it. I'm not sure it's possible. I'm not even sure it's actually a good idea.