The Chamber of Guf | Hacker News Reader

The Chamber of Guf

slatestarcodex.com

100 pointscrunchiebones19 comments

This is the intra-individual equivalent of clickbait headlines. Alexander speculates that memetic virality mechanisms are also at play within the individual mind, but if you don't have Incest OCD or whatever, you're probably more strongly affected by, say, the dogwhistle people claiming to find "dogwhistles" showing that politicians are secretly racist or whatever in every public statement. Or, here in South America, people blaming every political event on the CIA.

Wait, people in SA are still blaming everything on the CIA? Here in Puerto Rico we have long accepted latin culture sucks, I thought blaming everything on the CIA was a far-left thing by now.

Please don't take threads on off-topic flamewar tangents and especially not with slurs like "latin culture sucks". (I realize it's more complex when talking about your own culture but that makes no difference to the flamebait effect.)

I'm a little bit confused by your comment. Are you suggesting that an alternative to intrusive thoughts / OCD is erroneously find dog-whistles in the news?

Kragen seems to be suggesting a parallel, not an alternative. If you are strongly attuned to something, the same mechanism that would amplify these thoughts when they occur spontaneously would also presumably extend to reading spurious "deeper meanings" into the actions of others.

That's right, and in the case of memetic contagion, the attunement can be an emergent collective phenomenon rather than just an individual preoccupation.

I think the nature of intrusive thoughts is a bit different from memes or other contagious ideas. Intrusive thoughts are persistent in part because of the "semi" paradox required to ensure you're avoiding a thought. eg, in order to not think of a pink elephant, some process in your brain must be checking for a pink elephant. This process is by some definition thinking of a pink elephant. People who are more prone to OCD-like thinking will obviously have even more trouble with this task, since they are less successful at terminating a train of thought than the average person.

In the sort of memes you're describing people are actively doing their best to (sometimes falsely) find dog whistles, or secret CIA involvement. The emotional rush that comes from suspicion or outrage is wholly different than someone with OCD failing to terminate a train of thought.

The meditation practice pointed to is fascinating, one can get 'attuned' to that part of the mind and it's like a never ending acid trip. Everything experienced and reactions to those experiences jumble around in the mind at a very very low level. The attuning process 'amplifies' this brain activity and coheres it into actual thoughts, using existing pattern and shape recognition pathways to conjure up visualizations.

Creativity seems to revolve around laying down 'trails' through the wilderness. The jumbled mess by itself isn't terribly interesting, it's the application of pattern and craft that does that.

It was once explained to me as a dam vs a swath. You will never successfully disentangle/stop the madness and constant flow of thoughts(good,bad) but you can sort of detach and tread water to watch the current.

I didn't see the part about visualizations and to my knowledge they are considered a distraction to the practice of meditation and not to be sought after. I was actually thinking the opposite for the cause of the perception of "the chamber of guf" that it results from the suppression of the default mode network and the decoherence of other organizing factors in the mind. To use the metaphor of the article, you ask the Angel to stop promoting just a few of the thoughts and instead just leave the door open so you can listen to their murmuring.

I have become conscious during dreams that I would describe as "being in a river of disjointed thoughts and emotions" -- the experience is exactly like I was witness to the many thoughts being considered/happening in my brain rapidly and simultaneously.

It is much more intense than normal dreams and I usually wake up within a few moments, and there is never a narrative like normal dreams -- just an awareness of many concurrent thoughts in quick succession.

Are you refering to hypnogogia? That usually happens right before falling asleep.

Nope, though I am familiar with that, too. At least in my experiences with hypnogogia I have some "control" or at least a feeling of control over what is happening to some extent. Or maybe it is better to describe it as being a more sequential experience than the other one I am describing.

Maybe if one is to stay conscious during hypnogogia for longer than I ever have they would experience a similar thing? There just always seems to be some bias in hypnagogia steered by and experienced by my consciousness in first person. In the other experience it is really more like I am an outside observer.

Do you mean that you have had a lucid dream¹?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

I have also had many lucid dreams -- I used to practice lucid dreaming.

This is like a lucid dream but there is no narrative or control over what is happening -- only awareness. It is really most like being in the center of a river of thoughts, briefly experiencing them as they rush by.

Colorful analogies aside, many people find it tremendously reassuring (and surprising) just to recognize that these thoughts can be a form of OCD. my favorite book for patients is this one by Lee Baer, a bit outdated on the science but the clinical discussion is right on: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452283078

This seems very much inline with much of Carl Jungs work and a lot of the western esoteric literature where there is a big emphasis on acknowledging and objectively analyzing the ‘bad stuff’.

In British English, "guff" means either a fart, or "trivial, worthless talk". e.g. people might say "stop talking guff" or "if you filter out the guff, what did that politician's speech really mean?".

"filter out the guff" is itself a recognisably standard phrase.

This also works in the context of the article; considering the selector as a filter to "filter out the guff" impulses.

The chamber of guf is open, the door to both the beginning of the end of the world is open at least.

---> Somebody had to reference Evangelion here....

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