aaimnr

>Being one of the most expressive and efficient (I am not talking about clock cycles here) languages I've used

"Productive" seems to be the right word here.

It may be a creep in the sense that otherwise it would be a truly public space rather than closed private one. The government may be treating it as a kind of 'outsourcing' and public space gets gradually privatised. So it's not the opening of private properties, but twisting of the public ones.

Well, it's really hard to tell which myth is causing more harm in our culture - myth about rationality or myths carried over from Romanticism. I'm not contrasting rationality with 'romantic' feelings (term that doesn't explain a lot), but rather conceptual with pre-conceptual.

This naive belief in rationality on her part is troubling. It reminds me the simplicity of XVIII century enlightenment thinkers. No wonder that Nielsen, being accustomed with how DNNs work. represents the opposite view.

"Rationality" is at best a filter of rule constraints applied to small part of solutions that reach consciousness in any solution-seeking process. As we know eg. from Lakoff and Johnson ('metaphors we live by' etc.) most of reasoning is actually done using our sensory faculties, mostly spatial, which barely guarantee any kind of correctness.

If you try to be rational and cling to concepts while trying to figure out an answer to difficult problem, you obstruct the process rather than help it. Hence the popular advice to 'forget about the problem' so that the mind can figure it out by itself. How on earth is it rational? Rationality is only applied when checking a solution, like checking a proof, which - as we know - is orders of magnitude less computationally complex than finding a proof.

The mind is all about 'what works' not 'what's correct', rationality is pretty modern invention and to honestly think that we're primarily rational is a delusion. Tversky and Kahneman's work is another obvious counterexample.

>> but rather to unify the whole mind around single intention. > If that's the road to samadhi, inherently it's long and maybe painful - because our intentions depend on our memories - and a single intention means something like clearing or integrating all of the other intentions/memories. Or is there possibly a different way to achieve that?

Wow, did you get this idea now, just by thinking about consequences of centering around one intention? Because it's not obvious and to some extent definitely true. Yes, there is a stage of integration where 'difficult stuff' comes up in the mind. In Culadasa's stages of concentration development it corresponds to stage 4 mostly (laid out in details in his Mind Illuminated book).

However:

- When you're doing it right, it's happening almost automatically, there's often pleasure of concentration that eases things significantly, and the relief that comes up... it's worth it. With time you almost yearn for such difficult things to come up from the depths, knowing the relief and completely new perspective that the integration will bring about.

- Saying that "I don't want to integrate the difficult parts" is a bit like "I don't want to be completely happy". Unifying the mind is like unifying the world - no conflict, completeness, content, everything you want and love is right there with you.

- Integrating the difficult parts is not just getting over them. Sometimes it results with ability to transform difficult relationships, to forgive, to reach deeper levels of communication with eg. difficult parents etc. What's mind changing is world changing.

With all that said there's so many examples of meditation gone wrong, of doing things that are counterproductive etc. - there definitely are less and more smart ways to do it. And hopefully the marriage of Buddhism and the Western thought will result in further advances.

I'm almost sure that neurofeedback will be of some help - we learn so much quicker if we have tight feedback loops, with immediate feedback it's almost like a game. Even in the paper you cite, the best results were achieved during the 'free play' phase, were one could play around interactively with the graph.

In the meantime I recommend Culadasa's method because it's very precise, driven by joy and the articulate, clear style expands to the whole community, which can be helpful when someone gets stuck.

One possibility is that the awareness is to narrow, and you just don't notice the harm you're doing, being to stuck on the pleasure coming from concentration. Sampajanna is the 'clear comprehension' aspect of mindfulness (sati) responsible for alertness, receptivity.

I like how Tucker Peck (https://meditatewithtucker.com/, recommended, he has an online group) phrased it: when there's samadhi with not enough sampajanna, you're happy asshole. When there's sampajanna without samadhi, you can clearly see what's going on, but you can remain sad (not enough flow-induced pleasure, leaving the mind not strong enough).

In such case there's just enough mind unification to create the pleasure from the flow state, but not enough to expand the awareness and notice wtf is going on around (and for the mind to notice introspectively what it's doing).

Maybe you could try to be continuously aware of the pleasure (or rapture, to be more precise - piti) in your mind, and how the mind is clinging to it. It leads to realising that the rapture is still quite a growse and still somewhat stressful state of mind (it feels a bit like happy anxiety) and with time causes the mind to let it go and leave just the mental pleasure (sukha) or at least to make the piti component more integrated and refined. That's the idea of the Jhanas progression, but not many people know that samadhi is equally possible in day-to-day life, not just with eyes closed. Good for you :)

BTW please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, I'm not hugely experienced.

PS. A great piece about it: http://dharmatreasure.org/wp-content/uploads/Meditation%20an...

There's so many things wrong in this article... They should just leave the 'take a nap' advice.

If the focusing drains energy from the mind, it's the wrong kind of focus. Real concentration (buddhists call it samadhi) doesn't come from forcing your other parts of mind to do what "you" (the small, narrative mind-process) want, but rather to unify the whole mind around single intention. This state is not only stable, it's more efficient, because there's just one thing to do rather than tens of conflicting intentions.

It's more efficient and calm than Default Network Mode, which is basically a garbage can for the mind.

You don't even have to get into buddhism, there's a lot that science already knows about eg. the flow state, which is a mini-samadhi. Also, Judson Brewer discovered that DNM is not fundamentally 'default', as it doesn't activate for long-term meditation practitioners. Such people (some of them really high functioning) report that great thoughts just come to them out of nowhere. Clinging to the thought forcefully only reinforces the illusion that 'we' are thinking it, which is not true and counterproductive, as it obstructs the dynamics of the mind. Just let the mind figure the problem out and let you know when it's done. DMN is an impostor that pretends that everything done by the various diverse mind processes is done by the narrative fiction centered around the feeling of 'I'. It's not, it's highly distributed, there's no driver and no center.

The more we think otherwise, the more force we have to put to make the mind obedient.

Please look up Judson Brewer and Gary Weber (sorry for brevity, I'm on the go).

EDIT: actually this is an excellent resource for the HN crowd, 100% BS free. It explains DMN and much more: https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation

It's interesting that both building high self-esteem and negative self talk (2 directions, same dimension) seem to be the basic activity of Default Mode Network - the mode of the brain activated during mindless mind-wandering. Usually people spend most of their lives in this state. The amazing part is that there's strong positive corelation between the DMN activation level and how miserable we feel. Judson Brewer has done lot of great research on this. Most meditation techniques go directly against DMN and sometimes result in turning it off for good (look up eg. Gary Weber - https://youtu.be/QeNmydIk8Yo) .

We only spend so much time with our friends, while we talk to ourselves all the time, mostly in very unfriendly manner. This self talk is the basis of Default Mode Network and you can start to notice it after a couple days of total silence. Great friends are great, obviously, but we also need to internalise them.

There's one more component of self-compassion helping with procastination. Procrastination is mostly caused by the fear of failure, - once we feel how serious the situation is, the monkey in us can't stand the tension and escapes into dark playground of denial and guilty pleasures. TFA mentions how self compassion decreases fear of failure, thus removing the main trigger of procrastination cycle.

Not so sure about it. When you are compassionate you often understand how things had to be the way they happened, that everything was determined - at least to some extent. When you see the power of cause and effect there's no place for blame, just compassion.

What always blows me away is when people who've been watching their minds most of their lives and lived through the most amazing insights we can imagine, witnessing directly how the mind creates the world, how self is an illusion etc. (what neuroscientists can only state from intellectual perspective) tend to say: compassion is the highest form of wisdom.

Kristin Neff, the author of the research in TFA, brought these terms directly from her buddhist experiences AFAIK. Karuna and Meta (compassion and kindness) are very important mind "algorithms" in the Buddhist framework that apart from social and behavioral effects also have quite significant cognitive function. It allows to see things so much clearer, when you understand how complex and interdependent the reality is and how little control over reality we all are.

It's especially telling when you look at the natural progression of these mind states that one is encouraged to develop: Compassion -> Kindndess -> Symphatetic Joy (appreciating wellbeing of others) -> Equanimity.

To predict no 'feeling' need to be involved. You can have prediction without consciousness (any program that simulates some environment to check whether some condition will be met, eg. collision detection in 3d games) and consciousness without prediction (there probably are people with brain damages that are conscious, but have limited imagination capacities).

You can see color of red and don't predict anything at all, while still being consciouss. Predicting is just a narrow part of our conscious activities, however all of them are conscious.

So cosciousness is something much much more basic and fundamental than any high order cognitive function.

> We cannot proof something to be conscious. Probably we never can. The best we can do is find good proxies indicators of consciousness and good lower bounds for what can potentially be conscious, and what cannot.

We can't prove it because we have no idea what consciousness is, even on a philosophical level. Moreover if consciousness is basic property of reality, in a way parallel and coexisting with another property - matter, as panpsychists suggest, than it indeed would be impossible, as this dimension would be completely 'invisible' from the matter point of view.

When you're talking about 'proving' most likely you assume existence of some reproducible causal chain in the material, 'intersubjective' space. So you can't 'prove' consciousness in this paradigm by its very definition.

Of course one can insist to throw away any theory that's not provable in our paradigm, but does it bring us any closer to the understanding of consciousness? Also, is there anything inherently wrong with neutral monism or naturalistic dualism? These theories are not internally inconsistent, moreover they are also not inconsistent with anything current physics states - they just provide a wider view that at least somehow addresses the notion of consciousness.

> Hard problem solving is not required to create consciousness. Humans can’t solve hard problems but they make children conscious meanwhile human children grown by animals become animals.

You're serious? :) Humans can make children conscious? They barely can control their instincts, most of the time they are not aware what and why they are doing. We have no clue how are we working, how reality is created.

To say that consciousness "just" appears automatically when some complexity is reached is just magical thinking or, at the very least, explaining the problem away. You would have to answer why, how, when is the critical point, what's the difference between conscious and unconscious robot etc.

> This is all just from physically/emotional painful experiences. So I guess just take with a grain of salt. But it's made huge differences in my physical/mental well-being.

Even perfectly 'healthy' human being will still have the layer of basic fear, whenever what he considers to be his core identity is under threat. In meditation everyone at some point needs to face it. So I wouldn't take what you're saying with a grain of salt - on the contrary, you may now have much greater clarity, as you had to be much more systematic and determined in your training.

I'd also love to hear more details about the tools you used. Are these consumer grade or hospital type of equipment?

I see what you mean and agree. Actually Culadasa has a very precise way of describing what happens in this case - sustaining attention on a single object allows peripheral awareness to be more clear (in a way that looking at the flagpole allows to see the wide patterns of clouds moving in the background). When attention moves, on the other hand, its changing content is too prominent and it foreshadows the awareness. And it's the awareness, not the attention, that allows us to see the entirety of the mind.

It helped me to clarify some stuff in my practice, but I also understand how his goal oriented approach may be detrimental for personalities that put too much effort in concentration (applies to most 'discursive' types here on HN, including me).

Will be happy to answer any questions you have if you describe me your practice and problems you're having via email (@ at my profile) - I've been practicing with several teachers / approaches and having this wider perspective is quite helpful when you reach any significant block.

I agree with the other poster that going to retreat is a great way to jumpstart the practice - often our daily life is causing of so much constant stress that we have to step out of it to even notice it. When we see it coming back in low doses, we're more likely to understand the patterns and what our personal mental antidote should look like.

BTW, there's a reddit group dedicated to his book, quite helpful.

> The entire point of concentrating on your breathing is that your breathing is always there

Once you reach some level of mindfulness, you start to notice that your breath is very seldom there. There are all kinds of distractions that your attention is moving to. You may not notice it and 'think' that you are watching the breath, while in the center of your attention is eg. an internal monologue or concept of the breath or mental image of the breath (how you imagine it).

> The entire point of concentrating on your breathing is that your breathing is always there and is boring!

Here you go. If there's boredom, there's no breath. If your attention is on the breath there's no boredom. Boredom is a specific mental object (state and story) and it's a distraction from the breath. 'Breath' is a concept and looking at a concept is boring indeed. If you look at the actual breath, however, you see something that's never the same, constantly changing stream of sensations, reality behind the concepts. It's always amazing, it's more interesting than anything you can ever see in ordinary closed, story-driven state of mind.

>But then again arguing takes places on a dualistic level, so what's the point (in this specific case)?

Meditation is a skill. To practice any skill, you first have to understand it conceptually. So clear understanding is important.

On the other hand speaking of duality vs non-duality doesn't seem to be useful, as it's something one has to realise non-conceptually. The only way to do it is through practice. Which, again, to be done correctly requires some proper conceptual understanding (of the practice method, not of the end goal).

That's why sometimes it's useful to argue about such distinctions.

I don't see how the quote from Suzuki contradicts Culadasa. When concentrating on the breath, the skill is the concentration itself (in fact Culadasa teaches breath meditation). You're not trying to do something specific with the breath, you're "doing" something only with attention and awareness. You're learning to control the "muscle" of attention and awareness. And samadhi or meditative state, is nothing more than stable attention and powerful awareness. So there's no intermediate action involved.

You confirm it yourself by pointing out that one merely 'watches' the breath. Indeed proper watching _is_ the skill of concentration. On the other hand you can't play Flappy Birds by merely watching it, you have to actually play it. In this case concentration arises as a consequence of repetitively and successfully achieving the game goal (not hitting the pipes). In case of meditation the reward and meditative joy are the results of the concentration (successfully sustaining attention) itself.

The handout linked above and Culadasa's book explain it in great detail.

BTW I agree that the distinction is far from trivial.

The fact that meditative absorptions are a type of Flow experience (very unique one, see below), doesn't mean that any Flow state is meditation. These games may very well induce a flow state (as Flappy Birds can, if you're good at it), but it doesn't make it meditation.

Here's a quote from Culadasa, a neurophysiologist and an adept meditator:

"What sets both Meditative Joy and flow apart from ordinary Joy is that it is an internally generated state of mind, providing its own satisfaction independently of external rewards.

What sets Meditative Joy apart from other forms of flow is that the flow-inducing activity takes place entirely within the mind itself, and the skill being applied is concentration, rather than concentration arising secondary to the focused application of other skills."

The following handout he wrote about flow, meditation and meditative joy may help appreciate the difference (see page 6 for dicussion on Flow): http://dharmatreasure.org/wp-content/uploads/Meditation%20an...

PS. I don't mean to say that these games are not useful, in fact knowing the feeling of 'external flow' probably helps in learning meditation. Meditation as a skill, however, has a better 'knowledge transfer' factor, meaning that with time you can learn to sustain concentration while immersed in daily life activities.

This explanation doesn't touch the hard problem. Please have a look at the 'easy' problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#... - you're still within the functional mindset of these problems.

Are neural nets conscious of their representations? If not - why? What's the difference between neural net that has subjective experience of its intermediate representations and the one that doesn't? On a functional level it doesn't need any subjective experience, so why would it explain anything?

Attempts like this definitely give us some intuitions, but they are working around the hard problem without addressing it.

There's a very distinct experience of being conscious and having completely no thoughts in the mind. To treat thoughts as some kind of basic element is a mistake that neither neuroscientist nor meditator would ever make. Look up default network mode and how it can be 'turned off'.

Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

Sure, fair enough.

OK, let me rephrase my objection.

"This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think."

Your description seems to fall under "the ability of a system to access its own internal states" and/or "the reportability of mental states" from the 'easy problems' section of the wiki pages I linked to.

Both could be possible without consciousness at all. We could imagine (or even program) a robot that in response to external stimuli modifies its state. It could also have second order algorithms, eg. it could check what state it's in and if it remains in the same state for too long, the state changes randomly. It would be the same as 'observer observing itself'.

This functional explanation in any way doesn't lead to the phenomena of consciousness, which would require the robot to have some specific first-hand 'experience' of the world and itself. That's the difference between the easy and the hard problem of consciousness.

If you both want to see the mystery replace 'the real world' with 'noumenon' and read some Immanuel Kant. He wrote awfully lot about the 'supposed mystery' :)

BTW. your parent seems to mistake "inside" with "the brain" which seems like a category error.

"It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts." What do you mean by "the whole and its parts"? Do you mean that what we experience for our whole life is just a play of representations created by our mind? Because it seems to be the case. And when you think about it, it is as mindfucky as possible. It may be obvious for you (is it?), but most people act as if it were very far from obvious as in each action most of us attribute real, independent existence to most constructs of our minds that, under scrutiny, are completely arbitrary.

Once you understand that you construct the whole world, you also start to understand how many ways to construct it are there (Sapir-Whorf etc.). Once you understand how fundamentally these possible understandings may differ, you start to appreciate how arbitrary 'your world' is. And then you start to wonder WTF is 'real world'? What is 'out there'? Is there anything at all?

Just a loose association, but isn't your question a bit like asking "what's wrong with this picture" ? http://personalpages.to.infn.it/~fiorenti/escher/pgallery.gi...

On the other hand I understand your question perfectly. It's even hard to tell whether there is something strange about it or not.

Self-awareness and consciousness are different things. Sometimes when you wake up you don't know who you are, where you are, what you are, but there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is much more fundamental than your level of reasoning allows to explain.

Here's a list of things that you are adressing and that are not dealing with the hard problem of consciousness ('easy problems'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...

Keep in mind that causality can be understood in multiple ways in your example:

1) consciousness is merely something that emerges from matter (eg. functionalism)

2) consciousness and matter coexist everywhere, but in some configurations of matter consciousness is 'condensed' and gives rise to our subjective experience (eg. Integrated Information Theory by Tononi and Koch)