Comment by cromd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromd | Hacker News Reader

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(Note: I'm not sure if you're suggesting there is a "you" or not.) While I'm of course a mass of stuff that feels and thinks, I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs. I feel like that about half the time. The other half, I forget, and live "normally". I also don't feel like I'm part of some interconnected world organism or anything like that.

To the ~5 people I've described that to, they mostly show some kind of alarm, like they didn't realize I held such dangerous views. I guess in some people the same worldview might manifest as a sociopath personality that excuses reckless behavior, or a person with no drive that wastes their days away. In my case, I'm hypersensitive about harming people, I'm fairly risk averse, and I'm borderline obsessed with keeping high "productivity".

I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that. So I do find the narrative shifts from "I accomplished X because I decided to" and becomes "I spent time on X, and I'm glad that happened, it was fun, and I'm glad I find that fun".

I hope I'm not getting too off topic given the original article. Self/consciousness/free-will debates can go on forever, so my ideal outcome is somebody says "yeah, that is pretty weird, pretty magical, oh well!". But more often it's met with "ah, don't be so negative, you can control yourself, if you try!".

> I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that.

There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that you live in an environment that plays to your strengths, and that it’s somewhat arbitrary.

I have an aptitude for academic study and have always simply enjoyed it. Happily, I live in a society that rewards that. I’m also short, left handed and wear glasses. I would have fared less well in pre-industrial times. I’m extremely fortunate to have been born when and where I was.

> I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs.

I was curious about this. You mean it feels as if you are a little person sitting inside your skull, watching the "you" movie? Or you meant something different?

Yep, that's what I mean. And movie maybe implies too much action/drama/plot... Maybe it's more like a surveillance camera! I'd say it's just a general dampening of predictions, emotions, and explanations.

Instead of saying "I want my next job to be X", it's "I wonder what my next job will be". Instead of saying "I'm taking a walk to place Y", it's "I wonder where I'm walking to". Of course I can tell myself a destination, but statistically, I know it's far from certain. Looking backwards, instead of saying "You should have said hi to your neighbor", it's more like "I wonder why I acted that way". And it's not always in the direction of being helpless. Sometimes it's "I wonder why I'm exercising so much today".

At one point today, walking, I thought "I'm moving my left foot, I'm moving my right foot, my foot is touching the ground, it's weird that I don't usually think about this". That's meditation-ish, like watching the breath as a swinging gate, appreciating a normally automatic process for a bit. In my opinion, this goes beyond just breathing and walking, and extends into processes like writing and talking - words just kind of come. You can revise them and slow them down, but if you can step back, you might feel words just coming out of nowhere. Sam Harris, mentioned by others in this thread, has also described speech as being surreal in this way.

What do you think about the idea of meditation being about temporarily stop reacting to the movie? As if the watcher is often very involved with what happens in the movie, but during meditation he lets go of the the involvement?

That seems pretty valid. Not to make it overly analytical, but perhaps it's like meditation is a lab/training environment where you can press pause on the movie, look around in a 360 degree view, rewind a tad, press play again. But there's no urgent situation forcing you to be "very involved" as you say, and any goal-oriented processes can be paused. Kind of a mini-sabbatical - you know nobody is getting "paid" for the next 20 minutes, so it's not a big deal what happens.

Sounds a vaguely like depersonalisation, although I'm against this trend of pathologising every little thing that might be unusual about the human experience.

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