We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment

I'm not sure that I could ever be so confident in anything as you are to be stating so unequivocally how the brain works given the track record of previous attempts to model brain function and the current state of neuroscience.

It's a shitty time. I don't know how old you are, but I really hope 30 years from now I meet you somewhere and we can look back and see that the world has moved on. I'm trying to keep a promise to myself that I'll keep trying.

Sometimes I think we're closer to that future than we think.

Since fight/flight behaviour is regulated by the amygdala and basal ganglia, you can say:

Anxiety stems from our amygdalae getting started up, because they sense a threat where none is, and effecting inappropriate behaviour thereafter.

Actually, the threat is often correctly sensed, it's just the behaviour (running away, attacking, feigning death/freezing) that's not useful in the modern world.

The therapeutically interesting question is how to change that.

Compared to the rational parts, those emotional mechanisms are much deeper and better wired to the rest of the brain. At the same time they aren't very sophisticated. Some people refer to them as "reptilian complex".

We can't adjust emotions directly and in general we have to wait much more time (think: weeks, sometimes months) to let new ideas like not being afraid of something sink into the subconscious.

But knowing and accepting that makes it possible to grow.

Neural networks are a simplistic model of how our brain works, not the other way around.

Why so you say that? Or knowledge of the brain is still very very dim and rudimentary, and ANNs are simple mathematical models (inspired by brain neural networks, to be sure) to fit parameters to data. It's a bit naive, in my view, to assert such a simplistic answer to a very hard question without conclusive evidence for anything.

While I can't imagine what you've been through I have spent a lot of time pondering over what it'd be like to be a woman.

I sometimes think our culture's binary approach to gender creates a sense of imbalance and alienation for those people who do not fit into the binary. It saddens me that these people see no other choice but to loathe their sex, and make such drastic and medically questionable efforts to transition to the binary other.

I think there must be a way for people to learn to love how their bodies are, even if that sex does not necessarily match the cultural mandate of the "corresponding" gender. It's a hard fight, but it's a fairer fight to fight the culture, rather than one's own body.

By what mechanism? Evolution doesn't come about by sheer will.

Maybe it's interesting to examine the possibility of permanent non-existence, but the really fundamental change in perspective occurs when we understand that maybe nothing matters, and then recognize that we are still subject to reality, and do our best to help.

If you really believe in the value of watching your mind, then you should do it full time.

Yes, it certainly is conceivable that people will evolve to "live in the moment". But arguing that those who don't do so have mental illness and/or anxiety is a bit much. That's like saying people who "live in the moment" will be taken care of by natural selection because they won't learn from their mistakes and they won't see things coming until it's too late.

First of all, it's a strawman - just because you're focusing on the present in general doesn't mean you're unable to look at the past or future, and just because you're focusing on the past/future in general doesn't mean you're unable to enjoy the present as well. In other words, even if you're "living in the moment" overall, you can still recall mistakes and avoid repeating them, and you can still have foresight. And even if you reflect on the past or consider possibilities of the future, you can still be neurotypical.

Second, even if these things were all mutually exclusive, what evidence suggests that one of the group's genes will be removed from the gene pool? I know plenty of people who forget everything and also struggle thinking 1 step ahead in tic tac toe, and I don't see them struggling to keep their genes in circulation - they just have a different pool they choose from (other "near-sighted" people). Similarly, I have quite a few friends with anxiety, and they do just fine, because they date other friends of mine with anxiety.

> If you're willing to spend some time watching your mind, you'll realize that it already stops all the time, it's just a matter of noticing this, thus strengthening its absence

And if you're willing to spend some time watching your mind, you'll realize that it already starts back up all the time. It's just a matter of noticing that your mind is inclined towards thinking, and strengthening the presence of thoughts in your mind.

The previous paragraph was not meant as a serious argument. Again, I am not arguing that "living in the moment" is bad or that we should avoid it or anything like that. The point of it was just to demonstrate that the argument needs more to back it up.

The capacity to adapt to a new environment means different things in the context of day-to-day struggle or millions of years in a stable environment.

Homo sapiens sapiens is +/- 200 000 years old and has demonstrated an incredible adaptability but good luck evolving gills if oceans would rise 20 km in the next 25 years.

> It doesn't need to continue like this forever. It just means that, as opposed to earlier, the people in whom thought is too strong and uncontrollable are now the ones whose genes are removed from the gene pool, through mental illness and anxiety.

Mental illness and anxiety aren't necessarily genetic in nature and I am not quite sure there's such a thing as « genes being removed from the gene pool » in evolution (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/misconcep_0...).

I'd also point out that thoughts of the past always occur in the present as well.

And remembering something is not like replaying a movie, but every time you revisit a memory you change it a bit based on your current state.

Remembering is an active process.

We tell stories about ourselves and call it our identity. Often, we believe so strongly in our identities that we've killed for them or have been killed for them.

One person can have one identity where they're a failure, then through therapy, they change their story and become happier. Same events, different story.

There's also the cultural story: we descended from these people, we share an intellectual lineage with those people, these are the past events that are important, and this is what they reveal about us, etc.

Saying "built to" is a pretty strong statement. Constructing narratives about the future is one thing the human mind can do, and is clearly advantageous. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else is another.

There are groups of people who don't do taxes at all, but you probably don't want to live among them.

It is the fact that... how much in taxes do we have to pay until enough is enough? Our paychecks are taxed. Our toilet paper and food is taxed. Everything in life is taxed and even our deaths, at least our estates, are taxed.

We weren't born or built to do this. This is an enforcement upon us that we agreed upon and we continue to do in order to live in the "social contract". We continuously feed this unending hungry greed money machine and "this is the way it is."

Of course, there are people who "live off the grid" and found their way to pay nothing. There are also rich people who prefer to pay other people to find loopholes in order to avoid paying taxes too.

And a spear.

Perhaps you're the type of person that's in a meditative state all day, living in the moment. Perhaps you were just so good at predicting that you developed the habit of living in the moment instead of in your imagination because you understood how futile it was to entertain such non-sense.

We do have mechanisms in our brains that live in the moment all the time. Our brain is a conglomerate of brains we've inherited through evolution. The ancient parts of our brains can hijack our neocortex at the sign of danger or discomfort(adrenaline rush), sexual arousal, empathy, etc.

Everyone has different experiences and different levels of understanding of there lives. From my experience many of my acquaintances suffer from not living in the moment. They are off entertaining from fantasy or problem and might endanger someone with their body(bumping or walking into someone). Or the worst case someone absorbed with anxiety or depression about what's going to happen next in their lives and a feeling they have no control over the outcome.

I'd say most of my knowledge about our brains comes from the machine intelligence research of Jeff Hawkins. His research of the neocortex I'd say supports this prediction heavy model of our brains.

>> That's simply not true. Evolution and historical knowledge are intertwined with our RNA/DNA more than we know.

These are two very different kinds of informational processes:

- the one done by evolution, using genes and other non-conscious supra-individual "devices": (1) does not produce information that can be shared horizontally (unless you're a bacterium) through communication, (2) is not processed consciously in communication, aka "you don't talk about it and analyze it collectively in conversations" (unless you're a scientist talking about evolutionary biology) and (3) it does require individuals to break-out of the moment and think a bit deeper on shit, even if this may have the side effect of making you less attentive and sometimes makes you seem insensitive bordering on either psychopathy or autism depending on your social skills (or an "evil ego-centric not-living-in-the now intellectual" for less sophisticated minds)

- the one done by individuals, using their brains, either consciously or not, and usually in data formats that can be easily encoded in language for people to be able to talk about their visions of the future and "infect" others with them; this is the realm of memes and visions and most of the interesting shit happens there

Also, the article mentions some pretty deep insights when talking about depression, anxiety etc. Imho there's quite a lot that could be done in psychiatry and positive psychology through more "future-vision focused" therapies. Yeah, it's dangerous shit to play with, we know what happened when Hitler did "future-vision therapy" on a whole nation and it went wrong... But it's a tool with great potential, that requires you to break-of-the-now a little bit. And yeah, generally the powerful tools that result from "breaking-out-of-the-now" tend to be dangerous, like nuclear weapons and nuclear power (not "thinking in the now" sane person would develop technology that requires millenia-long waste disposal planning), but we're sure gonna be glad to have these tools once we start moving around the universe more...

(Oh, and I dunno what's with this anti-NYT sentiments Americans have lately... as an European I find it the most enjoyable source of Sunday morning reading from the american press, once you learn to ignore it's obviously partisan political agenda and focus on the actual content.)

It seems to me it states pretty much the opposite, saying we spend >99% of thinking about more practical stuff.

The idea that historical knowledge is intertwined in RNA/DNA is not quite wrong but neither is it correct. There are indeed structural biases and priors which make learning things about nature easier (such as scale invariance or compositionality within the signal). Compared to animals however, human children learn slower because we seem to come with fewer such priors. A macaque will reach higher stages of an understanding of object permanence long before a human child. We spend the first few months learning to learn what needs to be learned. Some parts of the brain seem to be experientially independent but others strongly depend on experience, as for example, research into restoring vision has shown.

You linked to an article stating that while detecting the faster P waves seconds before is possible in animals, there is no mechanism or consistency in studies looking for the ability to detect earthquakes at longer timescales. This is poor support for the notion that knowledge is intertwined with RNA.

To the best of our current knowledge, language is key to human intelligence. When it comes to complex grammars, false belief tracking and the highest stages of understanding of object permanence, humans are unmatched. It's true that animal intelligence is underrated, pigs and chimps do track false beliefs but that is only at a basic level, since they fail to account for more complex deceptions.

The ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning is unique in humans but is strongly dependent on a series of situation dependent heuristics or schema codified in language. Deaf individuals suffer similar reasoning and linguistic deficiencies to hearing individuals with damage to eg Broca speech areas. In the delayed match-to-sample task, when deprived of their ability to engage a phonological loop humans are surprisingly not much better than monkeys, apes or dolphins ( < 10 mins) or even bees (seconds).

In learning a transitive inference task, humans take hundreds of trials compared to just over a thousand for a pigeon when given the same training regime. But when the relation is represented linguistically, it takes less than 5 trials to learn.

Animal intelligence is certainly downplayed and beyond our ability to handle complex grammars, there is no aspect of intelligence unique to humans. But that single alteration has made a world of difference.

The actual flaw in the article is that it too easily dismisses language to focus on prediction and inference. But prediction and inference is done throughout the animal kingdom and perhaps even outside of it. The complex sort of counter-factual reasoning unique to us is underpinned by language.

If you find yourself constantly angry or stressed or nervous about other people you should probably remove yourself from the situation, relax and let it go. If you aren't prepared for confrontation or are worried about the situation escalating then use the moments before you let it go to come up with other ways to potentially solve the problem. Get crazy with it, like making a bunch of untraceable fliers, or making a long anonymous post to some digital community related to the location or activity. Their are lots of ways to influence how people act in the long term, in the short term direct confrontation almost always works.

Situations where you're unable to remove yourself from the area to avoid someone are the worst. This is why performances on the subway piss me off so much, or people ranting about something. I've been making a point to directly confront anyone doing anything that makes me uncomfortable on the subway and tell them why it makes me uncomfortable and that they need to stop. Just today some women came on the train and started yelling about eating a plant based diet, how it was good for the planet. I agree with her and I'm on and off vegan, but it's NOT fucking cool to start yelling on the subway unless you're getting violated by someone or you're in danger. I snapped her with my spectacles repeating, "ma'am, would you stop yelling on the train", ending with, "You're making all vegans look bad." She did finally stop

In other words, they fail to take into consideration that reduction of challenge (e.g. through technological means) is also change in everyday behavior that deviates from the "orthodox" way of living, but nevertheless it makes life much better. We don't live how our bodies intended to live, and prehistoric behaviors are no longer practiced - but the fact that there is no need anymore to exercise this sort of behavior is a good thing, since the necessity to do so implied struggle, discomfort and scarcity - all unfavorable circumstance.

In short - living as nature intended implied struggle, and the cessation of that way of life is in many ways a result of removal of struggle, and not necessarily just some "unorthodox" living that allegedly puts our being under unnaturally high amounts stress.

My point: Yes, the contemporary lifestyle is stressful, and yes it is very different from the way we've evolved to live, but it's probably still much more comfortable and enjoyable than any aboriginal circumstance and prehistoric way of life our ancestors found themselves in.