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Sitting in a dark room right now. Will report back.

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I'm interested to know how your experience differs from those of the perennially-interesting Matt Lakeman:

https://mattlakeman.org/2020/12/08/the-24-hour-do-nothing-challenge/

https://mattlakeman.org/2020/11/08/the-blind-alone-and-confused-for-24-hours-challenge/

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These are fascinating reports and I'd love to conduct a similar experiment at some point. (While I did the dark for a while last night, nothing special came of it and I wasn't really conducting a real experiment).

Lakeman's experience does seem to point to something interesting related to the idea Scott's presents above, which is that it doesn't sound like he approached anything close to "bliss" whereas if he had taken that 24 hours and divided it up into 72 daily 20-minute meditation sessions focused on his breath, he very well might have. Just being in a dark room isn't enough, cultivating a practice of attention is.

In my personal meditation practice, I've certainly had some experiences of sitting in the dark that were quite rapturous, including the experience of interesting visual phenomena. But almost any meditation teaching I've encountered is quick to point out that these kinds of experiences aren't the goal of mediation.

Also anecdotally related to Scott's article, I have recently experienced a significant increase in my appreciation for the beauty of the mundane aspects of life– something I attribute at least partially to my mediation practice. If Andrés' theory is correct, is there a sort of sliding scale perhaps? Whereas previously I'd only find beauty in the Symphony, now, while I'm not yet seeing ecstatic beauty in a metronome, I can find it in (for example) a single leaf. Perhaps this has to do with my ability to sustain attention on the leaf.

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Sustaining attention on a specific object will not allow the mental modules to relax so its tough to switch the modules off if you are actively using them.

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Can someone check on Thomas? He hasn't reported back and I'm starting to get worried. Sitting in a dark room for over 8 hours can lead to loss of consciousness. Some have even reported seeing alarming visions about close friends and family. I hope he made it out alright.

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::is not sure if that's a joke about falling asleep::

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Surely it's an overstatement to call the level of effort "superhuman", given the frequency with which people seem to reach it. Difficult or unusual, perhaps.....

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Perhaps the 'super' here is just in the sense of transcending our usual distracted state, rather than hyperbolic 🤔

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A more generous and useful

Interpretation.

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In "Waking Up", Sam Harris attributes (citing his Buddhist and Hindu sources) the bliss attained by meditation to ego death, having your sense of self drop away and thereby relieve you of the attachments and yearning usually associated with your mental processes. I wonder if that's a conflicting explanation or a different perspective on the same thing?

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Different kind of "meditation".

Buddhist theory usually distinguishes between "special insight" practices, which lead to surprising discoveries about the nature of your "self", and "concentration" practices, which baaaaaaaaasically get you really high. Sam Harris' book is about the first; Scott's talking about the second.

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My Gelug teachers warned against falling into both the extremes of nihilism and the extremes of bliss, because both those polar "states" create strong attachments. I'm not saying that there aren't teachers that seem to emphasize the bliss the aspect of meditative practices — Jack Kornfeld comes immediately to mind — and, yes, Buddhism encompasses a lot of diverse sects and teachings — but seeking out bliss is discouraged by the tradition I followed.

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Does your tradition do any pure concentration practices in a non-bliss-seeking way, or just avoid them entirely? I used to practice Soto Zen, where we avoided them entirely for the reasons you're saying. I've heard they're quite common in the Theravada world, though.

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Would you call following the breath a concentration practice? I would, but I'm not sure if others would. I also took some meditation training from Nyingma teacher. It was all guided visualizations of meditation deities. I found it very difficult at the time, and I gave up, but then I found a different way to do the visualizations and I was able to achieve the stated goal of the meditative practice (and had some non-blissful results).

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All of these schools have roughly the same goals and techniques but some work better than others.

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I have never seen the term "ego death" used in any Buddhist texts. "Ego death" is probably a western corruption/distortion of the term of Anatta (Pali, meaning literally "no self"). The Gautama Buddha taught that if we meditate and examine our thoughts and feelings (the processes of our consciousness) as they arise, with some training we can learn to observe our observer processes observing our thoughts and feelings — and because we won't be able to locate any unchanging, permanent self we can detach ourselves from our illusion of self-hood. But that's not quite accurate either, because Buddhists acknowledge that there is a self in the relative sense as the product a bunch of dynamic processes of consciousness. We just don't believe that it exists in an absolute sense as a permanent unchanging entity.

In fact, my Gelug (Tibetan) teachers warned us not to use the term "ego death" because that could potentially lead us down a nihilistic path that could result in serious psychological harm (including suicidal thoughts).

Also, bliss is not the goal of meditation. That's not to say there are a bunch of bliss-head meditators out there, but one should not seek out bliss. If it happens, well, that's just another impermanent state of mind that we shouldn't become attached to.

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"actively seeking" or wanting bliss engages the motivation system, the thing we are trying to relax, so seeking anything will keep the system engaged preventing further letting go. A better way to think about it is letting go of the unpleasant stuff and all that is left is the pleasant stuff.

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Wouldn't the biggest issue with using ego death here simply be that you were attempting to understand a complex physical experience through a basically Freudian framework for explaining the working of the mind?

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That makes sense. But is it really a Freudian framework? Was Freud the first to obsess about the ego? I don't know.

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My understanding is that it's his invention, at least in this context (the word ego being somewhat older as the Latin word for oneself).

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Oh the concept existed long before Freud. As the Self.

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It's long been a bugbear of mine that we use the Freudian-derived term, both when referring to meditative practices and break-through psychedelic experiences. The Id, Ego and Superego subdivision has just stuck in our vocabulary and I don't think it was fit for purpose even when it was conceptualised and, indeed, we've found no "thing in the world" that corresponds to it. There is a danger in separating the "ego" from the rest of the "self" in that, in popular usage at least, it's sort of become a grab-bag containing all of the things we don't like about ourselves – pride, greed, "selfishness" (whatever that means). As far as I can tell there is no separate sub-entity or homunculus where these qualities reside in the mind called the Ego and I think it's time we do away with that particular construct.

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Yes, good question, how do I find the thing I am looking for with the thing I am looking for. So there is a recursion problem, but parts of mind can see other parts, its called "mind watching mind" in some buddhist texts. The self has many components to act on the stimuli, why the stimuli has value to me, how it relates to my goals, what I should do on it. So ego is but one component of the overall module of self.

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Great comment, beautifully put. Small nitpick: There are a thousand Buddhisms out there that depart on stances on an-atta, it's hard to accurately say "Buddhists acknowledge..." or "we just don't believe..." without being reductive (similar to saying "Christians believe the sacrament is literally the blood of Christ")

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Very true! I'm just saying I haven't seen bliss as being one of goals of meditation listed in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta or any of the Mahayana texts. I may be wrong, (a) because I haven't studied the Satipaṭṭhāna in years, and (b) my instructor had me read it from a Mahayana critical perspective, and he may have been biased in the way he explained things to me. There is a lot of references to bliss realms in the Mahayana and Vajrayana teaching but they are always in relation to metaphysical discussions/arguments made in the three texts of the the Trikaya. I don't think these bliss realms were supposed to be attainable by us beginner bodhisattvas.

And I will go out on a limb here (hoping it doesn't break) and make the claim that the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path underlie and unify all Buddhist teachings. Other than that there can be immense divergence in views and practices. ;-)

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There is a spectrum of arousal, much like a spectrum of hot and cold, on the one extreme is high arousal that feels very unpleasant, your triggered to act and your body is screaming do something, the bliss that arises from meditation is from the removal of stress, its not active or euphoric more like middle of the spectrum not too hot and not too cold, not overly aroused and not sleepy.

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The self is a module that spins up to interpret stimulation, and you can see it happening in deeper states of meditation.

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Hm... Anata in Japanese means "you"

Maybe unrelated but an interesting coincidence?

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When I was young I was in a symphony band and a marching band. When in the middle of performances i often felt at one with the group. All other childish ego driven thoughts disappeared. Same with dancing at a rave (where I didn’t take drugs but joined in the mass of dancers).

The bad side of this historically humans in groups aren’t always the best.

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Sam Harris describes this well, the sense of self is another mental module or construct used to help us navigate in the world, and when mind gets quite one realizes its not stable it spins up, it processes the stimuli, then it goes into resting mode.

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It's been a while since I had a session in a floatation tank, but I remember it as basically a cheap and quick shortcut to meditation. And blissful, in the way those first few seconds under the duvet after waking are, before you remember why you have to get up.

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I'm curious. I've never tried a floatation tank but I'm tempted. Is it really any different than floating in a regular bathtub at home (mine is pretty big!)?

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If well made, it has water density of your body and water and air the temperature of your skin, which makes it quite a lot different from a home bathtub (unless you heat the water to exactly the right temperature, air as well, and put a ton of salt into the water). It gives your body a sensation of floating with nothing touching your skin and you can effortlessly relax.

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Thank you for the description. I will definitely have to try!

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Good description- I tried floatation once and didn’t have any visions or transcendent experiences, but just floating in that warm salt water let all of my muscles relax. I would compare the feeling afterward to having had a nice massage.

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Interesting; in Tom Clancy’s The Cardinal of the Kremlin, a flotation tank was used as a torture/interrogation device. I did not consider the possibility its use might be nice instead/as well.

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Yes. There is a qualitative difference.

You can imagine a bath tub big enough to float in it without touching the sides. You can imagine it being full of epsom salts, so you float without effort. You can imagine the water and air being at body temprature so you don't sense the temperature. You can imagine the dark, and the quiet.

But once you're actually in it, your brain races for 15 minutes like a car in neutral with the accellerator floored... and then switches off. And something very unlike a quiet bath happens.

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Thank you, it seems really intriguing, I will try!

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This didn’t happen for me- I remained very much in my own head feeling pretty normal. But it was physically very relaxing and I’d like to do it again. Maybe my brain will do something interesting with next time? It certainly did feel like that *could* happen.

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Fantastic way to describe - the car in neutral metaphor is exactly what I got

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As someone having experience with both, extensive meditation and floating, I can clearly say, floating tanks get you deep, but it felt like just 50% of what I get when I meditate intensively

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This is very insightful when it comes to art, especially music. (I am now reminded of that one time I managed to sit through the entire Disintegration Loops without diverting my attention. It was... IS immensely moving and beautiful, but I've been unable to recreate the experience ever since.)

However, does it really solve the Dark Room Problem, or just restate it? It introduces "inattentiveness" as a cause, without explaining where it comes from. Isn't "inattentiveness" the same as, or an example of, "inbuilt biological drive"? I mean, ever since I've learned the theory, it was obvious to me that the simplest way to counter the tendency to seclude yourself and do nothing is to introduce a set point of the amount of new stimuli that the brain expects to encounter. (Might be my "lived experience" speaking here, I apparently have ADD, which means a whole life with a brain repeatedly forcing me to drop what I'm doing and seek something else.)

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Yes, I think the biggest hurdle is to teach your brain to expect dopamine from a dark room or metronome. If you're always doing something, your brain will predict you would be doing something, so doing nothing but focusing is a prediction error.

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I see it very much in accord with the dark room problem. If something absorbs your attention (a jhanic or other concentration meditation, or solving an interesting problem, or building Legos, or having sex), you forget other "set points" or "distractions" or "urges" (same things in this context) for the time being.

This is evolutionary useful since it allows you to stay more concentrated on a potentially really important task instead of getting distracted all the time by feeling hungry or whatever. It is also enjoyable because when other set points stop clamoring for your attention you are finally free to enjoy sitting in a dark room. Without concentration, the dark room would mostly just highlight the intensity of all the set-points knocking on your minds door, which is often experienced as unenjoyable (eg as boredom or restlessness).

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Hmm. This is a much better explanation in terms of innate biological drives alone.

I guess that might have been the whole point of the post, and I was just confused by Scott's phrasing, with the "perspective" in the third paragraph appearing to me to be a counterpoint to the "usual workaround" (seemingly implying it's unsatisfactory) in the second, rather than to be providing yet more direct support for it like it actually does.

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Concerning beauty: I found this study very helpful:

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/47/9397.abstract

They come up with a quantified measure for the entropy/predictability of musical stimuli and show kind of inverted-U-shape relationship to how much people liked those stimuli. So very predictable and very unpredictable songs were less prefered to intermediate amounts of complexity BUT the very predictable ones (i.e., metronome style) were still preferred over the very unpredictable ones (i.e., acoustic noise). This could very well be just a measurement artifact, but it could also mean that low high predictability still has value in that it reassures you of your well running world model, that is able to perfectly predict this boring tune.

Concerning the dark room problem in general: My take on it was always, that given the ever changing environment that we grow up in, when your goal is to minimize prediction error, it is just not a very good strategy to always seek a dark room since you won’t be able to update your internal world model properly and will inevitably experience more not less PE on the long run, once you leave the room. We have learned this relationship and build up a kind of meta prior about how being in a momentary state of no PE at all is not helpful on the long run. In order to get rid of this meta prior, one would have to make a lot of experience that teaches you otherwise (no PE=predictive of low PE in the future), i.e. meditation training and feeling good afterwards.

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Very interesting thank you!

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This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin talks about this - can't recall if he cites that study or not, but he talks about various examples of how specific pieces of music play with expectations. I've also seen the idea that it is a mix of predictability and unpredictability mentioned in Picture This by Molly Bang and in A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

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>This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin talks about this

That was a really good book, but I read it probably over 10 years ago. I should crack it open again. Sitting on my shelf next to the Lawrence Lessig books.

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If you liked This is Your Brain on Music, you gotta checkout Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks!

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2nd both of these recommendations.

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Your mental modules minutely reward you for actively predicting or constructing a model of the external world that closely matches the external world so there are other studies that show slight dopamine firing when predictions are confirmed.

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If the goal is to establish an uber-drive, then biological drives as set points seems like kind of a cop out. Maybe I seek food because I predict I won't be hungry and have a drive to minimize prediction error, or maybe I just have a drive to seek food when hungry. Occam's Razor says the latter.

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Occam's Razor might not say that if you are trying to explain the whole mind. Why do you have the drive to seek food when hungry? How does that work? Why does your hand move when you will it? Why are autistic people sensitive to stimuli like clothes touching their skin? If each of these has separate answers, then the answer that answers all of them with fewer presumptions is the simpler one - and as far as I understand, that's what this theory does (I believe Scott explains it in the review of "Surfin Uncertainty" on his old blog).

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Just commenting to second this.

The Sun going around Earth is pretty simple, until you have to account for the other planets.

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Like D N, I would see it the other way round, at least once one generally accepts the predictive-processing theory. Then, given that any theory of the whole mind has to account for the biological drives anyway, it strikes me as an elegant unification to interpret them as „predictions“.

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Yes indeed! So far the posts on SSC & ACX about predictive processing theory seem to me to be unintentional "nerd sniping". The theory is a tantalizing mystery, offering a feeling as if insight is just out of reach, and that maybe the problems with the theory can be solved with clever analysis, e.g. by shifting the mystery into an unknown attention mechanism that ordinarily perfectly counterbalances the problems in the theory except maybe in weird extremes that could give us insight into meditation, or, as in some comments, by going extra meta about minimizing long term prediction error in our predictions of short term prediction errors in our predictions about satisfying desires.

Meanwhile it looks to me like the actual biology gets swept under the rug as an inconvenience to the theory. Why we get hungry is already known; blood sugar drives changes in the levels of insulin & ghrelin and other hormones, for which there are many receptors directly in the brain. We know that's enough to stimulate hunger. Then people execute behaviors they learned to associate with relieving hunger. It's just reinforcement learning. We don't have any need for the "epicycles" about minimizing prediction error.

Similarly, the Dark Room Problem doesn't even exist under a standard account. Sitting quietly in a dark room doesn't satisfy our drives. That's why we don't feel compelled to do it. Done. No mystery to solve, no sense of insight gained, it'll never be the topic of discussion among intellectuals.

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This times a thousand.

For what it's worth, I've been wanting to mention my own unease with the intensity with which people have embraced this theory, and the utter lack of any skepticism or even argumentation in the comments (it feels a lot like putting your weight down on a precariously balanced rock when crossing a stream, it is easy to imagine future neurologists looking back at these discussions with the same disdain we ourselves feel towards freud), but felt like it wouldn't be well-received. I'm glad to see at least one person is skeptical.

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Ok, but how does the brain do movement, decide on which drive to follow, etc. The drive theory also has a lot to explain and especially around disorders (which are a way to take apart the problem of mind). I am no biologist so I am quite curious if there's a drive based (or biology based) theory of mind that explains full mind functioning - not just hunger. And I am not just trolling for your time, I am genuinely curious to find an alternative to the surfing uncertainty idea.

The last sentence in your comment is just an ad hominem, do avoid please. Everything else you wrote was a worthwhile addition to the discourse, shame to ruin it.

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Movement planning is complicated and involves some dedicated circuitry (such as central pattern generators and the vestibulo-ocular reflex). We know it's not all one thing. Most specialized movements (e.g. sports, dance, writing, playing a musical instrument) are learned by practice and the motor plans are executed by habit, often too quickly for error-correcting feedback to play a role. For slow, deliberate, unpracticed movements, something kind of like predictive processing is at work: proprioception and other senses tell you where the body is, your drives and higher-order desires tell you what to seek/avoid, the combination of both sets of information in your working memory gives you basically an imaginary version of how you want the body to move, and then very roughly speaking your motor neurons execute that motor plan.

Contrast this with predictive processing, which begins by eliding the biological complexity, then posits that the top-down stream predicts that the body will move in a particular way. Critically, the "prediction" has unclear origin, as it is necessarily a departure from the lower-level sensory data it's supposedly based on and also (explicitly as part of the theory) unrelated to any motivating values or drives such as desires/fears.

BTW, an "ad hominem" is a fallacy of the form "The speaker is bad, therefore the speaker's claim is wrong." So there was no ad hominem.

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Thank you very much for the thorough explanation - I will look into the separate circuitry of reflex movements and how this discredits the predictive processing. Is there no chance for a more unifying principle than "some things work differently than others, and a body is just a lot of different systems in one place that all have different principles from the ground up"? Should that then not be investigated?

"Ad hominem" in the way that I use it is that you attack the person making the claim - it turns the spotlight of the discussion from the topic to the speaker. Your comment was great until the unnecessary "it'll never be the topic of discussion among intellectuals" which means that anyone discussing it is not an intellectual. In fact, predictive processing is one (I assume small) stream among professionals, and is definitely discussed here - I'd call many people discussing it here intellectuals. If you said "experts" - that might be true, I do not know what experts in the field think and this'd be a valuable insight. But I treat everyone here as an intellectual, they would hardly be reading posts about predictive processing if they were not. Just my feedback about your writing style - everything else was great, just that part gave me pause.

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Ah. The referent of "it" in "it'll never be the topic of discussion among intellectuals" was meant to be "a standard account", the same account that the rest of the paragraph was describing. I'll rephrase for clarity: A standard account will not become the subject of discussion among intellectuals, such as those here, because unlike predictive processing theory, a standard account does not offer a mystery to solve or a sense of insight to gain.

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Oh, apologies, I did not read it like that - didn't come to my mind. Thanks for clarifying and being a good conversation partner - much appreciated!

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A thought that I had a while ago and sorta fits this topic: I enjoy many types of music, especially when I am doing something else. My favorite genre though is symphonic metal, but to this I only listen deliberately. And I think the reason is that this epic style of music, with so many instruments and so much going on so fast, can fill my entire brain in a way no other genre does. Combine that with the predictability inherent to music and it's clear why I find it so enjoyable.

My wife, on the other hand, can't listen to symphonic metal at all. She doesn't have a problem with hard music per se, but symphonic metal apparently is "too much" (her words) for her.

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Exactly my experience of Coltrane, although trading instrument count for note count

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ASMR occurs when you get extremely focused on one thing such as a quiet noise single noise or small movement, and it is *extremely* pleasurable. I feel bad for people who don't experience it. When it happens, my vision goes blurred and things sound like I'm in a tunnel, and I'm not thinking anything but just focused on hearing the scratchy voice or scratching sound that triggers it for me, which becomes amplified while I focus on it and all other sensory input fades away. And the result is an incredible feeling set of warm cascading tingles from scalp to spine. Sadly, it's fleeting and almost impossible to call up voluntarily. But I always experienced it even as a kid ( effort it had a name or I knew it happened to other people). I used to go into a trance watching a cashier's hands scanning items, or someone turn pages of a magazine or newspaper. The feeling is like what you imagine it must be like to be a purring cat, on MDMA.

Anyway, that'd an example of deep pleasure from focus on some minor thing that isn't and shouldn't be pleasurable in and of itself. And you don't need to be a trained yogi.

Still, to me, there is *nothing* as pleasurable as the hard and involuntary laughter that comes from an unexpected joke or funny thing happening. Humor is truly the most sublime of pleasures. And it comes from the unexpected, from a physical or verbal or social transgression that was unexpected and makes you laugh. To be truly really really funny, it has to be unexpected.. So that's a pleasure that's the absolute opposite of what you described...not regular, not predictable, not focused.

Pleasures exist on both ends. On one is the bliss of ASMR or meditation or a massage...quiet, focused, predictable. And on the other is really funny humor and rollercoasters, things that shake you up and thrill you.

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In my experience, humor works best when your brain makes a sudden connection between things that seemed unconnected. The thing is, a joke only works if you"get" it, and does not work if you don't, even if someone explains it later. Which means it has to be something like a correct novel prediction (and our brain evolved to value novel correct predictions over regular correct predictions).

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Sure, that's true for an actual joke. But lots of things are funny that aren't jokes. Like someone having a physical mishap -- tripping and falling or bouncing off something -- where they don't actually get hurt. Physical mishap type funniness is probably one of the most basic and universal forms of humor and doesn't require you to get anything. It's the surprise and thing that's not supposed to happen, but then turns out okay. Most philosophic or comedian explanations of humor I've read describe something funny as an unexpected transgression (social or physical) that's then made okay. So the experience is sort of like a jolt of surprise followed by relief, which is why I likened it more to a rollercoaster.

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Data point: I don't find physical mishaps funny; I don't remember seeing a video of someone tripping or otherwise hurting themselves only lightly and doing anything other than frown with concern. I don't understand why other people find it funny, either.

There's no moral component to this statement, to be clear - I'm just mentioning it because you referred to this form of humour as "most basic and universal", which may yet be true (I don't want to claim otherwise! It seems pretty wide-spread, much to my confusion), but it might be interesting to you that some humans don't have it at all. :)

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I get this with shakespearean tragedies where I get big giddy grins similar to humor from just managing to comprehend it at all in real time. Although there is a fair amount of humor even in the tragedies.

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Can confirm that on MDMA _breathing_ can be an incredibly pleasant sensation, in a way that's really hard to describe. Gently stretching on psylocybin is also a treat, and perhaps a reason why yoga and psychedelic culture have so much overlap.

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Running on LSD! I never felt so attuned with my body. (And I hated running and jogging when I was in non-altered state. It was just excruciatingly painful and boring.)

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Answer: Tuning out all sensory input and all attachment to the world in order to enter your own private, interior state of bliss.

Question: What is wireheading?

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The term was coined by Larry Niven in his Known Space stories. I'm not sure if the definition has changed over the years, but in the Known Space stories, wireheads had electrodes inserted in their brains that stimulated their pleasure centers. They were always portrayed as addicts who'd kill themselves with pleasure by ignoring food and their basic life-support needs. Later on in Known Space they developed tasps that could jolt someone's pleasure centers remotely. Illegal, but great for practical jokes all the same.

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Nowadays we, especially the rationalist community, use it to mean any kind of shortcutting straight to the chemical process of happiness or life satisfaction, skipping the parts that would mean you actually 'deserve' to feel good or whatever. Electrode-to-the-pleasure-center is just the most central example of this.

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Am accurate portrayal then, since experiments have confirmed that 'wire-headed' rats will also ignore food and water when given the alternative of stimulating their pleasure centres directly.

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But would humans do so? Has anyone wired up electrodes to their pleasure centers yet?

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Yes. It ended pretty much exactly the way you'd expect.

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I would be really interested if you could link me to a primary source for that : A few years back I tried looking it up, and I recall not finding anything good (except synthetic retrospectives 50 years later).

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I strongly object to that last sentence. An infinite flat featureless desert is compressible but not beautiful. I haven’t read much on the subject, but my knee jerk EvoPsych/Econish alternative is that beauty motivates hunter-gatherer nomads to choose one terrain instead of another, or one mate/ally instead of another. So we like green landscapes with rivers instead of barren Martian hellscapes. We like Melisandre with the amulet instead of without it. These things don’t seem reducible to compressibility.

When my mom used to drag me to a Congregationalist church service, where I was very bored, I would stare at a particular pipe on the organ or a particular point in the woodwork until my entire field of vision faded to a gray blur. Totally focusing on a metronome doesn’t seem like it would be that hard, if I started small with 5 minutes and increased it by 25% each time.

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I think this misunderstands what Scott meant. An infinite flat featureless desert is *already compressed*, perceptually. That is, upon knowing what it is, you already know every aspect of it. Because of that, you cannot go explore it and find better ways to compress it, because it's already maximally cognitively compressed - in "infinite flat featureless desert".

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A rugged desert with rock formations, sand dunes, and other broken terrain is not compressed in that sense, but it remains unattractive.

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I mean, is it unattractive or is it boring? And if it's boring, is it because it's incompressible? Ie. there's no recognizeable structure in the arrangement of the dunes? I think in general, people who can recognize structure in the sand dunes and broken terrain will also be people who don't find the desert unattractive.

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It's unattractive.

>>> An infinite flat featureless desert is compressible but not beautiful.

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To reiterate, my claim is that it's unattractive because it's boring - either trivially compressable (flat sand) or uncompressable (random broken terrain). I'd expect people who can compress the random terrain, such as geologists, to not find it unattractive.

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I think deserts are beautiful. Aesthetically I think it's my favorite kind of biome to look at. I don't think this is a rare opinion to have.

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Bolivian salt flats tho.

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Your key point here around beauty is that beauty = better for biological drives though, as green is an indicator of fertility and the amulet an indicator of wealth/power/fecundity/sexual availablity (whatever the ability to acquire jewelry in that particular context indicates...). If we accept the initial point Scott makes though, then conceptions of beauty can be disregarded here (and Scott is probably wrong to use the concept of beauty unless he is imagining a heightened mediative state as a need) as what he is describing here is bliss not a constructed recognition of the underlying potential of something to fulfill our needs or desires.

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If you haven't seen game of thrones, Melisandre is a sexy sorceress who turns into a 1000 year old hag when she takes off her amulet.

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What about a distant forest (too distant to have individual trees distinguishable, with terrain like hills/mountains the only deviations from pure green)?

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A plausible explanation for my love of minimal dub techno

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It's hard to talk about the jhanas without getting dragged into a tedious discussion about nomenclature and what jhanas are, and aren't, so let me be the first to kick that off by introducing the term 'access concentration'. I think this is the minimised uncertainty state you're looking for. If you can just sit and concentrate on the object of meditation for a prolonged period of time with no distractions it feels really, really nice and you'll carry this blissed out feeling with you for a few hours afterwards.

If you sit like that for long enough - and most people have to go on a retreat to make this happen - you'll probably be able to access the first jhana. And different people have different experiences, but many seem similar to mine which is that the jhana is very weird and very intense. I usually feel, for example, jolts of energy running down my hands and into my arms, and it feels a bit like I'm being electrocuted. It feels like I can't breathe, and it feels like I'm falling. Lots of people find it hard to sleep the first couple of times after accessing the jhana.

It's not clear to me how this fits into the model of the brain as Bayesian predictor. Or any cognitive model at all. Suggestions welcome!

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Have you done much reading on Piti and how to control it? Your experience of "electricity" and the like are well documented in the literature on the Jhanas, and there's a lot of good resources on how to manage and play with it :)

If you're unfamiliar, Piti has fivefold characteristics. Wikipedia has an easy overview:

"As the meditator experiences tranquillity (samatha), one of five kinds of physical pleasure (piti) will arise. These are:

Weak rapture only causes piloerection.

Short rapture evocates some thunder "from time to time".

Going down rapture explodes inside the body, like waves.

Exalting rapture "makes the body jump to the sky".

Fulfilling rapture seems to be a huge flood of a mountain stream."

They use "pleasurable" as the descriptor, but in my experience of teaching, many people become very overwhelmed with Piti, and it becomes a heavy obstacle to progression. Mastering and playing around with that energy then becomes their next objective in progression.

I'd be willing to bet that these five different experiences are largely affected by neurochemical and psychological substrates, I'd love to see future research dedicated to it...

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I had to look up piloerection - Safari spell check didn’t know it either. It didn’t mean what I thought it might mean.

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The first jhana can indeed be very turbulent. But the higher the jhana, the more it resembles the dark room (until at the very end even noticing a dark room would be too much...)

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> The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things?

> The usual workaround is

"Workaround" implies there's a problem to be solved. But that case hasn't been made. Assume everyone is gay. How come people keep having children?

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I was going to say the same thing. My take away from the first paragraph was that observation does not support theory, as humans at leisure do not seem to seek to minimise prediction error or free energy (to prove the case, if they normally did, why would rationalists exist? And why would the super-rich not just be permanently in a meditative state rather than involved in things?). It's almost as if the accidental sequence of events that created humanity didn't have a rational and simple purpose but instead by its very nature led to an inherently chaotic and inefficient brain.

As a result the question being asked seems open to being regarded as special pleading. It would be good to know how meditation works, but trying to get there from a model of humanity that doesn't seem likely to be accurate considering the evidence of human activity undermines the effort.

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Hu, why would the brain want to minimize prediction error?

There just was a post about the drive to discover. Isn't that kind of the opposite?

So if our brain wants to minimize prediction error and we also have a drive for discovery, then the first one comes from the brain and the second one comes from, hm, somewhere else?

Also, isn't learning all about getting in touch with stuff you can't predict - yet? It seems like a really bad idea on so many levels if we would be wired to minimize for this.

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Scott has previously talked about the "minimize prediction error" idea here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/

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I recalled that article (but thanks for linking it because I didn't feel like looking for it!), but it seems to me that it does a great job of explaining the way our perceptions are a mix of predictions and actual sensory data, it does a less compelling job (to me at least) of explaining why we should accept the premise that the brain is seeking to minimize prediction error as kind of it's fundamental base drive (or at least that's how I am understanding the theory).

It almost sounds like a "just-so" story...maybe the explanation is in there and I'm just not seeing (or understanding it).

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Ha, I wrote my comment while being offline and just saw this, I think what you say is similar. I think those are just two different things - the perceptions and minimizing as a base drive. But then maybe I'm just missing a link.

Actually I didn't see anything in the older post where Scott would argue for the 'fundamental base drive premise' and here it serves more as an intro.

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Thanks, I appreciate. I enjoyed (re-)reading that post. But I don’t think it answers my questions above.

There is a considerable difference between saying: a) ‘Our perception of the world relies on a mixture of top-down prediction and bottom-up data, and we really, really dislike if they are not compatible’ or even 'we make sure those two fit together somehow' + 'we are to some extend lazy or energy-saving, and in many cases this mixture of top-down and bottom-up ends up being more top-down than we would usually think’ and b) saying: ‘Our brain’s main driving-force is to minimize the effort that arises, when – actually what, when new data could cost us any energy in perceiving and understanding it?’

a) being closer to the model as I understood it from the 2017 post and b) being in line with: why the hell do people even do anything and not only sit in a dark room?

The first one, I can relate to quite well, and the second one, not so much. They also talk about different things, don’t they? One about how we perceive and interpret the world, and the other one about what the main driving forces for our brain and therefore our activities as human beings are.

I’m wondering about learning, which seems a biological imperative, and even as adults we are curious – okay, some more than others, but still. What about the mentioned drive for discovery?

Scott mentions biological set-points, but unless this set-points include ‘I understand literally everything around me’, I don’t see how this leads to curiosity and learning as a voluntary activity or driver. If the model includes set-points like ‘normally I’m fully fed and understand literally everything around me’, uhm, I’m not sure if this speaks for the model. Although it’s kind of fun to imagine such a world. Maybe we would be less driven individuals indeed.

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I've spent the last five years in Southeast Asia studying and teaching on Buddhist meditation forms (primarily Vipassana, but also others). I'd love to have a chat with you about it! Seeing your posts about your meditative journey have always been exciting for me.

I discovered the Jhanas pretty early in my practice and was deeply fascinated by them. I have a difficult time tapping into them out of retreat settings, but can regularly ascend through the second and third ones a few days into retreat. It definitely takes a lengthy settling into a proper and full seclusion; that begins with seclusion from the literal real world and all its busy-ness, and progresses to and through seclusion from deeply ingrained emotional and cognitive patterns.

And when you get that seclusion, that "dhyana", the corresponding hit of "piti" (that initial buzzy, light, clear feeling of sinking into deeper meditative states), it's an unparalleled experience. It's akin to ecstasy, minus all the downsides. It feels like the same euphoria, but fully natural and clear (and with no comedown).

And that's just the first Jhana. The further ones become progressively more profound and indescribable (as exemplified in the reading of any classical text on them, it gets very esoteric very fast).

I feel deeply, truly "myself" in those moments. I feel massively compassionate and open, creativity just explodes out of me, I'm patient and clear-headed and buzzing with aliveness. It's amazing and hugely profound, especially as a non-spiritual person for whom a long background in Christianity never really "clicked".

RE: experiencing absorption in other activities. Your choice of the metronome is an interesting one. Before Vipassana, my closest experiences with meditative states were all musical. I'd experience absorption in choir, amplified by the connection with other singers. I'd sink into them while practicing guitar and piano, when whole hours fly by (often accompanied by metronomes). They were never as deep as the states reached in Vipassana, but they were a taste, and they were a foundation I could relate the feeling two when my practice started.

A lot of Buddhism(s) posit(s) that these deep Jhana states are our most natural state of being; we were perpetually in something akin to them in childhood, and we lost track of them as our mind became more clouded over with increasingly complex patterns and schemata (sankara, in the Pali terminology). For me, deep meditation states have often felt like a returning to childlikeness.

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(I wanted to edit this in, is there no way to do that in Substack?)

My favorite personal theory for why Piti arises in seclusion was given to me by one of my teachers:

Our mind in our normal form of operation is never truly "at rest"; it's always either processing the insane amount of information we're constantly bombarded with in the modern world, or disseminating that information during sleep.

In deep states of seclusion, our mind is *finally* given space to properly rest. In that state of rest, we finally have room for this previously deeply exhausted energy to emerge. Piti is that energy.

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It's very interesting, I was writing a comment at the same time [1], and chose the exact same childhood analogy to describe my experience. I've never met anyone who could relate and I'm not very knowledgeable (although I was attempting to do the focus-on-your-breath thing, which I think I got from reading about Vipassana).

Since you're someone who has pursued that path further I would be *very* interested in your perspective / advice. Does it get easier to achieve the states with practice? I don't know exactly what I experienced, but it sounds like there are kind of multiple levels. Even if they are hard to achieve outside a retreat setting, do you feel achieving them has benefited your life outside the retreat in some way?

I'd possibly be interested in pursing this much more seriously - I understand that these techniques really do do something, but I don't have a good understanding of what to expect from pursing it further (aside from maybe a difficult but ultimately very pleasant experience).

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem/comment/3401168

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Sure! Happy to help. The states do get easier with practice, as in it gets easier to reach ones you've reached before with further practice. Each stage (there's 8, traditionally) has its own unique challenges. But once you've "mastered" them (not a linear progression and can take a lifetime), you can essentially pass through them quite quickly. Several of the monks I've studied under claimed to just cycle through them in an hour or so (given they had proper time for seclusion).

They're viewed as an important branch of progression towards Englightenment in many (if not most) sects of Buddhism. They're often viewed as "stepping stones" or "signposts" along the path.

It's important to note that "Jhana chasing" can be self-defeating. The act of craving and wanting them often disarms them and prevents you from progressing. Much of progress depends on learning how to encounter and sit in them while exercising total non-attached equanimity.

I'd highly recommend three books for further learning. A few other commentors in the thread have mentioned them as well.

Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington (Great overall book)

Focused and Fearless by Shilah Catherine (Intro)

Wisdom Wise and Deep by Shilah Catherine (Advanced)

I'd also just recommend checking out the Wikipedia page on Dhyana/Jhanas and the links therein as a starter!

I'm considering starting back up my meditation coaching services, I put them aside during COVID, but I regularly encounter people who really want to dive in, and having personal guidance can make a huge difference. I'm not sure if "advertising" myself is appropriate/allowed here, maybe I'll post it in one of Scotts future "shilling" threads.

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Thank you for the detailed replies! I'll definitely check out those books, and I'll try to keep an eye out on the future thread, although I suspect I'll want to spend a while practicing the basics before attempting the more advanced things.

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Sorry, to address your last question about it being affective outside of retreat: yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that those experiences were hugely profound and changed how I viewed my mind and its capabilities (and how I took my normal mode of operation for granted), and in the sense that the feeling of clarity persisted for some time after the retreats

No, in the sense that if I don't carry on a regular practice or attend retreats regularly, I lose the benefits. For this reason (among others), I do not recommend that people view meditation as "curative" for any intense mental maladies unless you're able to absolutely dedicate yourself to a regular practice.

I can't list how many Westerners I've met out here that viewed meditation as the cure for their anxiety/depression/etc., to relapse weeks after retreats they'd attended (or to even be retraumatized/aggravated during retreats).

Meditative practices in Buddhism were also always meant to be complemented by other things (the eightfold path). I think you can experience similar benefits without following the eightfold path exactly, but don't expect those benefits to stick around if your practice wanes completely

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I experienced one of these altered states and have a very simple explanation. Basically, the level of sensitivity to stimuli may be inversely proportional to the level of stimuli.

First, I got into the state by meditating for 5+ hours in a row, with the goal of not being distracted by any conscious thoughts (and I eventually basically got there).

Everything afterwards felt intrinsically extremely intense and interesting in a profound way that is probably impossible to describe (but the effect was a peak-experience, not anything subtle). The best analogy I have is that the mere existence and visual appearance of things was amazing in a way that I probably had experienced as a young child (who find many ordinary things intrinsically fascinating) but forgot was possible.

I could also describe it as the opposite sensation from shell-shock or burnout. After an excessively stressful experience sometimes the world can feel less real / important - this was the opposite of that where everything felt super-real. This obviously also fits with the stimulation hypothesis. Such a mechanism also makes sense from a practical / evolutionary perspective.

There's also a likely reason why these states are not easy to achieve - conscious thoughts probably are a type of stimulation that affects this input sensitivity. I'm someone without any normal running (mental) dialog, and even then getting my mind quiet to such a degree was maybe one of the hardest things I've done and took 5+ hrs. Without tons of effort, just sitting in a dark room would probably normally just lead to being lost in thought.

Despite the extreme difficulty I'm often tempted to repeat the experiment, it would be a no-brainer if I thought achieving such a state would get easier with practice (anyone else have relevant experience?).

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Based on my limited experiences with meditation I would say it's the opposite of prediction. You don't expect anything - you just are. I guess one could rephrase this as: without prediction, no predictive error.

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Interesting… do you think scott is referring to predictions that are somewhat conscious in nature? I was under the impression that in this context predictions are a completely subconscious process.

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I'm not sure this theory does arrive at the same place as Schmidhuber's. It seems like mediators get to a place where compression is unnecessary, otherwise the metronome would get boring if not at first, then after a while. Unless even the most basic sensations are somehow infinitely compressible? However, in the sense Schmid was using it, infinite compression seems impossible.

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The same sound repeating over and over allows you to compress along the time axis, maybe?

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"The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. "

Why is this at all a reasonable supposition? A much more reasonable model is that the brain is maximizing the propagation of your genes, because that's what evolution selects for.

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Well, there's no reason you would expect it to be true, but on the other hand, the evidence doesn't support it either.

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The brain definitely is maximizing the propagation of gene survival. But that explanation doesn’t answer the question scott is attempting. Here he’s concerned with the mechanics of the brain, the ‘how?’, whereas you’re answering the question ‘why?’, and maybe also ‘what?’

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Further clarification:

"Maximization of chance of gene survival" is the evolutionary principle at work for the selection of mind designs, not a description of what the brain that has resulted from evolution is actually doing to carry out it's work. (think for example: My brain might decide to commit suicide which is obviously an evolutionary mistake, but it's the kind of thing that the "how" of our brain allows to to happen)

"Minimizing prediction error" is a statement not on an evolutionary level, but on an algorithmic level. It's an attempt to describe the functioning of the brain that has evolved, what the evolutionary process has actually produced and how it works.

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> My brain might decide to commit suicide which is obviously an evolutionary mistake, but it's the kind of thing that the "how" of our brain allows to to happen

I'm an unemployably disabled computer programmer, whose genes are in essentially no danger of being propagated further. If I had committed suicide at a young age, more resources would have been allocated to my siblings, who are more successful than me. This could be seen as a win for most of my genes.

Suicide in a hopeless situation is a useful trait to have, genetically speaking, if it improves relatives' chances of success. Not just resource conservation; suicidal rescue also comes to mind (e.g. throwing yourself at a predator that was chasing your offspring). If evolution were an active process, I would expect it to find a nice spot on the Pareto frontier where parents commit suicide the exact moment they are no longer helpful to their offspring's survival. Suicide aside, built-in finite lifespans are an example of this too; an immortal being would compete indefinitely with its own descendants, adding "mutational drag" and ultimately impeding the ability of the species to survive changing conditions.

Uh, wait, we were talking about meditation. Got a little sidetracked...

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Perhaps it would have been clearer if he had linked to some of his old articles, but these are familiar suppositions that Scott has explored in great detail over the years.

e.g.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand-friston-on-free-energy/

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"suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? "

It seems very strange to me to assume that the brain would only minimize the prediction error. Surely this is one of a relatively large number of objectives for the brain and the Dark Room Problem is not surprising at all?

Concerning aesthetic preferences, I had read that for web pages and landscapes (and I guess it generalizes to many other things!), there were two characteristics that played a lot: orderliness and diversity, both showing a maximum preference for intermediate values.

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It feels to me like a bad metaphor to use for any biological system, one (mistakenly) carried over from more familiar human-designed mechanical systems. We are very used to thinking of mechanisms as evolving to (or existing in, or oscillating around) states of static equilibrium, a the bottom of free-energy curves, because that is what our machines generally do. Most of our theories of mechanics, and even the mathematics we use to describe mechanical motion are centered on these ideas.

But biological systems generally operate quite differently: they are almost always dominated by dynamic equilibria, in which processes operating at different rates create and destroy quantities at the junctions between the processes and equilibrium is when the these quantitities don't change because the rates of creation and destruction all balance perfectly. Biological control mechanisms are usually focused on providing feedback from the quantities to the rates, and by manipulating the rates different states of equilibrium can be favored.

But this isn't the minimization of any free energy, or of any other static metric, so the whole metaphor that likens it to what a machine or typical algorithm does is conceptually flawed. I'm not even sure we have good intuitive mathematical tools for working with these kinds of equilibria -- the easiest math description is a bunch of coupled partial differential equations, roughly speaking the kinds of stuff you get in hydrodynamics, which, yuck -- and maybe that holds back theoretical biology. We need a Newton or Gibbs to discover some weird corner of math that can give us intuitive concepts and simple models for complex dynamic equilibria the way we have free energy, perturbation theory, and coupled harmonic oscillator models for complex static equilibria.

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"regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention." how can we wrangle this pattern into, say, our office work? to better hold our attention on something that is pretty familiar (and mostly boring,though some of it can be a little engaging) , yet has the occasional difficulty which mostly just feel frustrating ?

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I'm not sure that mental work can be of this kind (though physical certainly can); if a job is predictable enough to not contain many bits of information, it would not seem to be accomplishing much that wasn't already obvious.

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Some reference on this subject for those that are intersted.

This is a really good book on the Jhanas:

http://rc.leighb.com/index.html

Leigh Brasington is considered something of a lay expert on the Jhanas (he was a computer programmer for most of his working life, I believe), but you can also find really insightful stuff on this subject in the extensive teachings from the inscrutable Alan Wallace

https://www.alanwallace.org

For the rationalists amongst the audience, I can guarantee his edited book on Buddhism and Science as a fascinating and stimulating read:

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/buddhism-and-science/9780231123358

Finally - for those with a practical bent - you could do worse than follow the guidance of the recently deceased Culadasa in his seminal work, The Mind Illuminated:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mind-Illuminated/John-Yates/9781501156984

Although, from the perspective of an enthusiastic practitioner, don't expect this to be an easy journey. "Access concentration" is not achievable by everyone in a few months. I can vouch for that.

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Seconded on Right Concentration! Another excellent two books on the Jhanas are Shilah Catherine's Wisdom Wise and Deep and Focused and Fearless. Those three books were my initial guides and got me through a lot of my early practice.

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This sounds a lot like overfitting in machine learning: give the model a very reduced set of signals to learn from, it'll get really good at predicting them, and it's kind of "happy" there - it takes a bit of a shock to make it realize again that the world is more complicated. But the whole point is that the world outside (the one we don't choose) is the interesting one.

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This really hard concentration is actually really bad for you. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/

Concentration is a Western mistranslation of the Pali word "samadhi" that has pervaded our interpretation of meditation and mindfulness. You can indeed experience jhana-like effects from it, but they are false jhanas and will only lead to more turmoil. Like a pressure cooker.

What is required is light awareness, and plenty of relaxation. Meditation is not about focusing on an object to the exclusion of all else. It as about paying attention to your own self and learning from that. You can't do that if you're ignoring everything.

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Yes, the kind of rigorous concentration taught in the traditional Goenka schools of Vipassana have always bothered me (despite their general efficacy and them being my first introduction). It often drives people to full-on mental breakdowns, and it's totally unnecessary. Having a gentler approach actually enhances people's progress in my experience

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Can you explain a bit more what the difference is between the two approaches? Ever since I read that Atlantic article a while ago, I've been afraid to meditate at all. I have anxiety/panic issues, and the stories terrified me. Ironically, though, it seems that what many of these people experience is the panic states I have dealt with my whole life.

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Hi, yeah, can offer a bit of insight :) I'll write assuming you're very new to it

Vipassana is one of the oldest and most prolific forms of Buddhist meditation. Also known as "insight meditation", it uses meditation primarily as a tool to see deep within your conscious and subconscious mind, and to change your relationship to the structures therein, with the ideal end goal of freeing you from suffering (liberation).

Since Vipassana is a diving into those layers of consciousness, it's essentially releasing the floodgates of stored emotion/memory/trauma, putting you into a very susceptible state not too distant from a more conscious hypnosis state. As such, if you have unadressed trauma or severe mental issues (depression, anxiety, etc.) it can be very overwhelming.

For this reason, I very highly recommend that people who have either (a) anxious/depressive/etc. tendencies or (b) unadressed trauma learn meditation within a very structured and therapeutically centered format/environment, such as through an MBCT or trauma-sensitive mindfulness lens.

There's thousands of different manifestations of Vipassana, and every teacher will give a slightly different take on it. Goenka is arguably the most prolific teacher on the planet, and hundreds of worldwide Vipassana retreat centers are run under his approach. Most people who are introduced to Vipassana in the 10-day format do it through one of his centres.

They're great IF you're in the right mental headspace to handle a 10-day retreat. But they're incredibly rigorous: you're not allowed to do anything except meditate and eat for 16 hours a day. There's no mental health specialists on staff. It's a perfect storm for someone with heavy trauma to have a mental breakdown, and around 60% of people drop out by the end of the retreats, on average.

IF you're able to power through their bootcamp-style approach, it's an incredibly powerful experience. But I do not recommend it to newcomers, or to people who have major emotional/cognitive problems.

In order to give you better meditation advice, I'd have to know you better (just as therapy advice from a stranger is dangerous). But I'd recommend reading more about it before diving in. Books like Mindfulness in Plain English and Why Buddhism is True are a good start :)

Lmk if you have more questions/if I didn't answer that well

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Thank you so much for responding! I had been using the Waking Up app and was actually having really good results with it. But the articles mentioned people running into mental issues after using that app, so I got scared.

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To elaborate, if the solution was just to avoid intensive retreats, no problem. But Dr. Britton, the source of this research on adverse effects, reports these effects coming from a wide variety of practices, including basic mindfulness. I think you are right that I should do this with a trained person if I want to proceed, but in the meantime I'm just going to get back into therapy.

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There is also the option that all creatures that followed free energy reduction to its logical conclusion died out, leaving only those that act illogical.

Evolution does not always mesh well with logic.

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Beauty is about sending credible signals of being in a certain group.

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Can you explain this more fully?

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seconded, please indulge our curiosity, thank you

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I probably spend more of my pleasure time listening to symphonies than anything else, and it's not deep regularity that I get out of them. Complicated pattern in a sense, but not in the sense that a complex weaving is a pattern.

Sitting in a dark room does not appeal to me. I need outside stimulus. When I lie down in a dark room, i.e. at night, I need stimulus - like a book - to read until I fall asleep, even if it only takes 5 minutes.

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I would disagree that hunger is created by a prediction error. I think anxiety is generated by a prediction error and hunger is just a base impulse coming from the stomach to activate the feeling of hunger.

When you start to feel anxious because there is no food, that is a prediction error of predicting food in your mouth and not getting it.

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I've found out sitting (standing or lying is better, though) in the room that's quiet and pitch dark works extremely well as a "quick 15min recharger during a busy day".

Note it's VERY important for the room to be really pitch dark, and to suppress any sounds that could hint that something is happening. Headphones with brown noise, or just running water works well. Not fans - fan noise is too regular and brain filters it.

If the room is dark but not pitch dark, or a bit of sound passes through - your sensitivity gets maxed out instead, together with anxiety or whatever was bothering you before.

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Floating and meditation can be used to achieve the same benefit, ofc, but in my experience this method is both the most reliable/versatile and easy to set up (I've struggled to find the word that's more specific than 'recharge' because it helps with communication-heavy, math-heavy, grunt work and plain muscle work indiscriminately)

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> beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.

That could explain why modern architecture isn't beautiful as per those recent blog posts, since all the details have been compressed to just glass/steel/concrete cubes. Hell, maybe an architecture degree is enough "super human focus" on architecture to make that blissful

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While we don't know exactly how brain works and whether it optimizes any utility function, we do know a utility function optimized by the organism as a whole: the probability of passing on its genes. Sitting in a dark room doesn't really help with this task, so I'm skeptical that it should be considered beneficial/pleasurable by the brain.

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I completely agree, and the idea that the brain is just maximizing predictability seems very unlikely to me.

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Isn't the brain also growing stronger when learning? Seems like a strange move to minimize this. I'm not sure in which environment learning can exist without ever violating existing predictions.

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Human beings are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers!

C'mon guys, the essay is like 20 years old at this point

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Is there any research on values and attention?

Keeping your attention stably on an object likely requires being able to “write” to your own value function. If you can’t consciously control what your brain assigns value to, then it’ll naturally wander because the metronome isn’t gonna feed you or mate with you.

This made me wonder if ADD might be correlated with declines in public religiosity. If you never reift the concept of “good” and think about it directly, I can see how you’d likely have a hard time saying, in a specific situation, “this specific thing is very important”, and thus maintaining focus on it.

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"I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex."

What things are like sex?

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Pascal's pensee #139, in part: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."

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One of the most blissful places in the universe is inside an MRI machine.

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This reminds me of the enjoyment Richard Feynman had in sensory deprivation tanks as he describes in "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman". For those who are comparing concentration practices with insight practices, it seems to me that both do have the quality of refraining from conceptual involvment (ie perhaps prediction), either by single pointedness in concetration practice, or non-judgemental (receptive, accepting) attitude in insight practice.

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Isn't there a built-in curiosity module that actually forces you to do things which consequences you cannot predict? There was some interesting AI research recently about implementing curiosity for robots.

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The best vacations I have ever taken are the ones where I'm in a place where there are very few things to do, very few distractions, and nothing that needs to be done. Visiting family in a very rural place, where most of the time is just sitting on a porch and talking (or maybe not even talking) has been some of the most relaxing experiences of my life. My wife, who did not grow up around that environment or family, strongly agrees.

I can definitely see the potential in trying to recreate such an environment artificially through meditation or similar.

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I concur; especially as regards that "nothing that needs to be done" -- though perhaps especially for a woman, there was besides the "nothing of the endless routine demands of home" the even more-heightened pleasure too of what remained to be done (food, the group must eat) being shared with other women. Although I did not grow up within such a family, once I found one I took to it like a duck, although a slightly aloof duck. In memory all such days do indeed compress to one generalized good day, and to continue with the theme of compressibility, I can instantly recall lying on a bed in a sunlit, sheer-curtained room in that Sears kit house, skimming a Reader's Digest condensed book (four mid-century novels in one day!) picked from a shelf of pastel-hued same built into the wall, listening to the pleasant sounds of talk or Scrabble or bridge in the next room - and it is much like bringing up a video on one's phone that you took of the waves on the shore in hopes that you might revert to the moment later on, only at the time one was not so conscious of its significance.

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First jhana is basically comparable to a runner’s high. It can get more intense but that’s a good reference point, it’s a concrete sensory thing not a mysterious spiritual experience incomprehensible to a non-meditator.

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Back when you wrote about it before, I suspected the Friston-style “uncertainty reduction” had to work on the distribution of your general life experience, not on an arbitrary distribution (dark room, etc). So most people don’t experience much drive to minimize prediction of a dark room, because the brain knows that won’t generalize to the “world” distribution and thus won’t be helpful. Instead we mostly try to get better at predicting our real lives. But maybe hardcore meditators have successfully changed their real life distributions to contain such a large portion of dark rooms that the brain says “oh we see these inputs a lot, they must be important” and rewards them for mastering it. (And I can’t deny these stimuli-reduced zones would be easier to predict than most other things, so I bet it feels amazing.)

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Neil up there in Heaven going “GLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-“

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Wasn't it “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-“?

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Evidently there is a quiet room at the university - not a reading room, a *perfectly* quiet room for the measurement of sound, in the engineering building. People supposedly have weird reactions to it, some agreeable but not all favorable. Similarly, I was once on a cave tour in southwestern Missouri, and the young woman guide mentioned to the group consisting of my husband and me and a random little boy who had ridden up to the mouth of the cave on his bike, that she was going to turn off her flashlight and we would be plunged into as-near total darkness as most people ever experience, and warned that sometimes people find this disorienting and fall over, that this was not uncommon. It didn't seem likely to me that we would fall over and the three of us looked at each other with shy pride when she turned the lights back on and we were all standing normally. When we were finished, we got in our car and the little boy got on his bike to return to wherever his family was camping. I am sorry to report that I am so predictable that something about the addition of this unknown, cave-appreciating child to our otherwise childless day lent it a certain "impaled by beauty'' quality of the sort old Holden Caulfield felt when he saw his sister in her fuzzy pajamas. I have believed that aesthetics is as complex and important a subject as ethics, and I will be interested to read more about "Schmidhuber's theory". If it is to be simplified, I think it would reduce to something like "Life is always better than not-life", and that there would be good evolutionary reasons for this.

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Autistic stimming and the flow of videogames both seem relevant to this thesis.

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This description sounds a lot like what regular or problem gamblers describe as the "zone" they enter when playing. That especially true for people playing slots, where the repetitive acts and single focus bring them into a desired mental state where everything else disappears. Apparently this is so much the goal for many of them that some report being annoyed and disappointed when they win big, since it interrupts their flow.

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As I recall, minimizing prediction error/free energy, whatever, is a great model of learning, the accumulation of lots of errors resulting in better predictions, richer models, etc (Jeff Hawkins book on this is great, On Intelligence). But it strikes me as incomplete, because the brain also rewards you for the prediction error; dopamine follows novelty, otherwise known as stimulation, and the motivation to chase this had a name, no less: curiosity. Hell, turn up the dial as the personality trait openness to experience and call it novelty-seeking, which is maybe related to ADHD. Point being, the brain seems to be rewarding to sides of an equation, both being valuable to learning, development and ultimately survival. As much as people need peace, people need stimulation (and some more than most), and that piece seems to be missing.

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Poetry (the kind that rhymes and scans) is also a satisfying mixture of predictability and unpredictability. For two English words to rhyme, they have to be the same from the primary stressed vowel onwards, but different before that. So, when you hear a limerick starting "there was a young lady from Norway", you automatically register that 2nd and 5th lines will also end with "-orway" (predictability), but you don't know how the author will get there (unpredictability), which holds your attention. You also know the approximate rhythmic structure of each coming line, but you don't know what words will form that structure.

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Perhaps a fruitful, and less commonly explored avenue for insight into these meditative states, would be the monastic works of the Eastern/Orthodox monks.

There is a long history of "natural" meditation, as a precursor (and later in one's progress, antagonist) to one's spiritual meditation. Part of the natural meditative stage involves attention to breath, posture, shutting off of attention to what's going on around oneself, and ultimately even to one's own thoughts. One gets the image of removing opaque or translucent layers, and finding, behind them, pure light, which is taken to be God as immanent to the created universe and soul.

Part of the view that informs this practice was developed out of the Christianized neo-Platonic movements in the first few centuries CE, and their debates about the state of the soul after death. Maximus the Confessor is an authority here (though admittedly a dense read!), and talks extensively about a sort of "stability-in-motion", in which the soul, rather than becoming static (one thinks here of true Nirvana, or total dissolution of self) or going off to infinity (in the form of ever-novel experiences and change, as we have in this life) finds rest in a sort of cyclical habit, which he considers to be the most perfect reflection of the Divine way of being that a creature can attain to.

The relationship between "Eastern" (Hindu, Buddhist, etc) meditative practices/goals, and this form, has often been a topic of interest to me.

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Thanks for sharing, I found this really interesting

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Why do you keep using the phrase "full stop". It's a Britishism so it's confusing that you would use it. That's just what they call the period, and saying "period" is the equivalent expression without using weird ways that English people have renamed punctuation marks.

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I'm sorry for not mentioning Australia by name, but that's not really relevant here. It's certainly not the case that full stop is widely used by people who call a period a period, except maybe recently by people who heard and it repeated it without realizing it's the British name for period.

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I think it is spreading a bit in the US because it doesn't seem weird to me. Nothing wrong with it in my opinion. It sounds more colorful than "period."

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I've heard it used fairly often in US English. It seems more emphatic than saying 'period' at the end of a statement, meaning something like "My word is final. End of argument."

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Full stop was used everywhere there were telegrams (invented in America). Just like 'stop'.

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Like I said before, I can't come up with a rational argument against wireheading. If you can mentally hack your brain into deriving maximum pleasure from sitting alone in a dark room -- and that's a big "if", absent drugs or neurosurgery -- then I can't come up with any response other than "go for it". Yes, the world would be poorer for it, but you'd be so much richer that the tradeoff is well worth it.

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I used to practice secular meditation pretty seriously. I was eventually able to reach states I don't know how to describe except as pure bliss. There are different ways to achieve this, I'm sure, and I don't want to claim this was officially a jhana. Arguing about definition of some altered state is far less interesting than discussing the thing itself. That said, Scott's post very much does *not* jibe with my experiences.

The mental model of the mind I learned through meditation is that our conscious awareness is not the entire mind, but something of a staging area. The staging area is where things take on a valence: good, bad, annoying, pleasurable. It is constantly bombarded by physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions. It usually jumps between several different things. One technique you learn when you meditate is to place a single thing in this staging area (e.g. the breath) and exclude everything else. Once you can do this, you can observe the surrounding mental universe, kind of like how you can focus on things in your peripheral vision when you stare at a point. You can achieve some insights this way. Another thing you can do, though, is let that one feeling/thought/emotion in your conscious awareness *become* your entire world. If you have a pleasurable sensation, like a breeze wind blowing on your skin, you can now focus on that, and let that become everything. You experience of state consisting only of one thing: pleasure. Eventually, when you get really good, you realize that in the general subconscious background radiation, there's always a bit of joy somewhere. When you find it, you can place it in your conscious awareness, and experience a period of bliss.

This model and these experiences also made statements I'd previously heard from meditators make sense. For example "pain is not suffering": pain always exists, but if you don't allow it in your staging area, there's nothing negative about it. It's just some physical sensation trying to get your attention. It also explained how people with a lot of meditation experience could deal with a lot of pain without requiring anything supernatural.

I am very interested in reading comments from people who have had similar experiences and from those who have had very different experiences.

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Speaking of Andrés Gómez Emilsson, he will always have my undying gratitude for bringing severe pain and suffering to the attention of the effective altruism community.

https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales

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"Symphonies are beautiful, and we intuitively feel like it’s because they have some kind of deep regularity or complicated pattern. But they’re less regular/predictable/symmetrical than a metronome. Andrés thinks this is because they hit a sweet spot: regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention."

Manfred Schroeder makes a similar case in Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.* To be interesting or beautiful, something has to be almost predictable, but not quite. Either complete uniformity or complete randomness is less beautiful.

Mathematically, this shows up as power law spectrum, especially pink (1/f) noise. If you look at most pieces of music and plot the frequency of different (horizontal) intervals, they follow 1/f spectra. Small changes in pitch are more likely, but there are still a significant number of large changes in pitch. If you take randomly generated music using a 1/f distribution between notes, it sounds better than other distributions - but still not as good as actual music because there's more to music theory than just this.

*It's been about a decade since I read this book and I read it at about the same time as Godel, Escher, Bach by Mandelbrot, so there's a chance this was in that book instead.

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There was this video going around a couple of years ago, claiming that sb. measured brain waves of high-level meditators - like 10 000 hours + x of meditation - and found that some type of brain wave that ordinary people have rarely for a few seconds in special moments of bliss or special attention can be found in the meditators like all the time, whether meditating or not. Is this like total BS or something that is possible based on what we know about the brain? Feels strange to ask such a naive question in an area where I have very little knowledge, but I'd also like to know.

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I don't think music is pleasurable for the same reason meditation is pleasurable. I think when a baby learn to talk, when they notice a pattern in language that is pleasurable to them. If it wasn't pleasurable they probably wouldn't try to learn to speak. And babies like it when you talk to them.

As an adult it is no longer pleasurable to notice pattern in language. Maybe because you don't need it anymore. Or maybe if it was pleasurable then adults would just sit around learning made up languages all the time.

But a melody has so many patterns to learn, it is still pleasurable for an adult. Music is a superstimulus for language learning.

I made a comic about this http://spacespy.thecomicseries.com/comics/191/

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This doesn't explain why people enjoy hearing the same music repeatedly, though too much (wearing the pleasure out) can certainly happen.

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A baby will get pleasure from recognizing the same pattern in language not just the first time they recognize it, but the first few times it recognize it. The first time they recognize it might have been a mistake, so they need to recognize it a few times to be sure. Once they are sure they no longer get pleasure from it.

That's why people hearing the same music over and over, but get tired of a melody if they hear it too often. I tried to explain this in the comic, but maybe I did it badly.

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You're the author of the Accidental Space Spy? Awesome! I really enjoyed reading that way back when I discovered it. Thanks so much for making it. :D

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Thanks.

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Well Scott this is not an accurate depiction of the meditative techniques that give rise to

ekaggatā (one-pointed awareness) or what is known as "access consciousness", the first Jhana. Intense focus is not the instruction. Vitaka and vicāra involve aiming the mind at an object of awareness and once obtained, relaxing attention on the object which makes sustained attention possible. This gives rise to mind-body bliss, which fades to tranquility, that that fades to an equanimity. At this point the meditator can move through "formless mind states" by using the techniques for achieving advanced Jhana states. Neuroscientist David Vago (when he was at Harvard) did FMRI studies on meditators in Jhana states and found that most of the brain's sense perceptual apparatus' and the default mode network areas quieted to such an extent that remaining functioning was primarily thalamus, brainstem and cerebelum. Hence the phenomenal surround and the body fades away and the meditator is left in a womb-like sometimes dark, sometimes internally lit, non-material perceptual mind world. There is much controversy in all the Buddhist schools about the usefulness of Jhana practice. Ultimately they all agree it is just "meditative experience" and not "realization". Turning off the world is not a path to liberation from suffering as it described in the Buddhist teachings.

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I’ve sat in total darkness and silence meditation retreats for up to 14 days. I confirm the unbelievable amounts of bliss which are achievable through Jhanas and vipassana in such pristine environments. Happy to talk about it.

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When people get literally zero sensory input, they tend to start hallucinating; sitting in a dark room makes you see visual echoes and all kinds of random noise. So prediction errors don't exactly disappear when not much is happening...

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I never got why people were stumped by the dark room problem (from the reducing uncertainty angle). Do they not remember being afraid of the dark as a kid? A dark room is one where you could be surprised by anything at any time. Much better to scout around the area and learn so you will not be surprised later.

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I set a metronome to 15 beats per minute and then time my breathing 5 beats on the in-breath and 5 beats on the out-breath. I wouldn't call it blissful, but it helps me regulate my breath and reach a state of calm that I enjoy. There is also a state of near bliss that can be reached by abstaining from breathing. I thunk this is why free diving is almost addictive.

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Isn't the ultimate Dark Room just sleeping?

Most people love to sleep and it definitely minimises prediction error.

It's also another theory for the big pile of explanations for why sleep exists at all.

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I am curious in the author's epistemic status with respect to articles including this one.

The author seems to find others' accounts of temporary or in some cases durable euphoric states accessed through meditation practices credible.

The author seems to be curious regarding a neurological understanding of such states.

The author also seems to distance himself at one degree from the population of firsthand witnesses to such euphoric states.

Is there a past article in which Scott is willing to disclose any firsthand experience?

Is Scott blissed out but hiding it out of concern that the firsthand claim would harm his credibility?

A meditation dabbler sufficient satisfied with life as experienced that the further investment in more serious meditation seems like more hassle than it's worth?

A moderately disappointed meditator who nonetheless finds the experiences of other credible, who is looking for the factors that explain the differences between his experiences and others' experiences?

Granted, none of my business, and open to that feedback. But also, the background would help set an understanding for this article and similar.

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Yes, I keep getting surprised how Scott drops all skepticism when it comes to meditation and gurus.

It's not like the field is short on charlatans.

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Am I the only person who's really weirded out by this? On an intellectual level I don't like the idea of a metronome being better to listen to than a symphony, but even on a visceral level reading something about listening to a metronome being "better than anything you've felt before" makes my skin crawl.

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founding

I read this article, sat down to meditate, and a few minutes later was interrupted by a Verizon employee ringing my doorbell to see if my Internet was working fine.

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"If you sit long enough the monkeys will come down from the trees."

Who said that?

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Jane Goodall?

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Who said this about zazen practice?

"A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away"

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That works.

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I was joking about Jane Goodall.

The zazen comment was Alan Watts. Apparently he didn’t care to meditate.

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My personal definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true that I refuse to believe.

A book that I think is relevant to this discussion: Feeding Your Demons.

Its a translation and commentary on the work (myth? presence?) of a 12th or 13th century Buddhist nun.

I found it very helpful.

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founding

It's interesting to conceptualize things like 'eq