Exploring Kodawari

A podcast and blog exploring the meaningful path of kodawari.

Category: Mental Frameworks

Metacognition: The Bird’s Eye View of the Mind

By

On December 4, 2021

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 10 minutes
metacognition

Metacognition is, in the words of the man who coined the term John H. Flavel, “cognition about cognitive phenomena”. The prefix meta means “beyond” or “above”, and metacognition happens anytime we have awareness about our learning, thinking, and other cognitive processes. But on a deeper level, metacognition involves meta-awareness—truly detaching from the mind to get the bird’s eye view from above.

Metacognition is a scientific term coined by the American developmental psychologist John H. Flavell in 1979. Since then, many scientists have researched how it works. They explored how to define it and ways to exploit it in education, therapy, and other areas of life.

For example, metacognitive therapy—similar to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)—uses metacognitive strategies to detach from thoughts and emotions. In one of the founders John D. Teasdale’s words, “thoughts are seen as passing events in the mind rather than as inherent aspects of self or as necessarily valid reflections of reality”.

But more generally, the metacognitive view of the mind is the ability to step back and watch your mind with curiosity. Mathematician Eric Weinstein calls this view from above the metacognitive perch, revealing our minds to be more like a collection of modules rather than a unified and consistent operation. In this sense, metacognition plays in the same ballpark as meditation and mindfulness.

And as a mental framework, metacognition will be one of the more crucial concepts for Exploring Kodawari. On the practical level, metacognitive thinking makes us better learners and teachers. But on a deeper level, it gives us the chance to more honestly understand ourselves so that we can lead better lives.

Metacognition Definition

In its most encompassing definition, metacognition is the ability to think about thinking. One need not have a zoomed-out awareness of the entire mind to be metacognitive, and they can still be lost in thought. Metacognition is, therefore, any level of cognition above other cognitive processes. It can even occur subconsciously when you implicitly strategize about how to learn, think, or solve a problem.

In this sense, metacognitive knowledge refers to all of the data points and patterns that we learn about the workings of our minds. It can be in the moment or a reflection about how the mind worked in the past. But as an umbrella term, metacognition is having thoughts about thoughts. And metacognitive skills allow us to strategize based on this information.

But there are levels to metacognition, and as you build more awareness, you get into the territory of mindfulness and meta-awareness. While metacognition is in many cases synonymous with self-awareness—something like knowing you are a good visual learner—meta-awareness is the explicit and conscious monitoring of the contents and processes of your mind in the present moment.

So metacognition can involve meta-awareness, but it isn’t strictly necessary. But before getting into meta-awareness, let’s first explore the relationship between metacognition and learning.

Metacognition And Learning

Through metacognition, you can evaluate your thinking and learning processes. You can develop insight and awareness into the strategies that foster optimal learning and use it to your advantage. But without metacognition, many people reflexively use popular learning strategies and assume they will work.

But the famous Dunning-Kruger Effect shows that people who perform most poorly on exams tend to have the most confidence in their knowledge. Put differently, the most incompetent people paradoxically feel the most competent—they lack the metacognitive ability to see their incompetence. But metacognition allows you to take a more honest inventory of your mind, and you will learn to feel the difference between shallow knowledge and deep knowledge—you will have a more accurate awareness of what you know.

And this skill is also critical for teachers. When teaching, you can get your students to use metacognitive strategies with self-reflective questions. You can ask them to explain how they solved a problem or give them a survey to assess how well they know something.

Metacognition And Language Learning

As one personal and basic example, I always thought I was horrible at learning new languages. Five years of Spanish throughout middle and high school left me with almost no ability to speak the language. I got high scores on the exams, but they only proved that I could hack the memorization process. But I couldn’t hold a conversation in Spanish, and the knowledge quickly disappeared.

But eight years later, when I first met my now wife Yankı, I began learning her native language of Turkish. Coming from English, learning Turkish is significantly harder than learning Spanish. But I was extremely successful in learning Turkish. And I think the biggest factor was having a deeper understanding of metacognition.

On top of having eight years to become more self-aware, I was also more conscious about learning processes. My younger learning was more implicit. But years later, I could more consciously strategize from the metacognitive perch.

So I did research and tried many different methods, watching my mind as it attempted to absorb the language. I used Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Babel, Pimsleur, and found pdfs of old textbooks.

And being metacognitive during this process revealed to me that the textbook “school” approach to language learning did not work for me—at least not if I wanted to use the language in the real world. Instead of spending the majority of my time on grammar rules, I let my brain learn the rules more implicitly through conversations and audio methods like Pimsleur. And I could feel the structure of Turkish forming in my brain.

And for me, once I have a structure/framework for something, I can add new information to it quickly. Specifics aside, the point is that I used metacognitive awareness to design a learning method for myself. Everyone learns differently, and with metacognition, you can find your ideal approach.

Meta-Awareness And Mindfulness

If a proper metacognition definition needs multiple layers of awareness, the higher levels would include meta-awareness. With meta-awareness, we aren’t just implicitly aware of thoughts, sounds, sensations, etc—we consciously notice our awareness in the present moment.

If you imagine arriving at meta-awareness in layers, the first layer is to get control of your attention—to no longer be lost in thought all the time. Mindfulness practices like focusing on the breath can help you to stabilize your attention.

But this kind of awareness, while focused, is not yet meta-awareness. Focusing on the breath or another meditation anchor is the metaphorical flashlight of our attention. It is narrow and focused on one thing. But true meta-awareness is switching our attention from a flashlight into a floodlight. We open up our awareness to be above awareness itself, to light up, with attention, all aspects of present moment awareness.

In this state, which is synonymous with many definitions of mindfulness, we can explicitly note the current contents of consciousness. When you notice that you might be lost in thought or swept up in a chain reaction of emotions, you can become meta-aware by taking a short mindful pause. You can even do this when you are overly focused on one thing—being deep in focus is not the same as being meta-aware.

With meta-awareness, you can regularly check in with yourself by asking a question like “is my attention where it needs to be right now?”.

Metacognitive Therapy

Metacognitive therapy, which is similar to mindfulness-based therapies, relies on the concept of cognitive detachment to change how a client relates to their thoughts and emotions. Someone who is suffering from depression, for example, would learn to shift from thinking “I am depressed” to thinking “I am aware of my depressive thoughts”.

Like mindfulness, the first stage is to step back a layer to become aware of our minds. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the 1970s, defined mindfulness as “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment”. So besides being aware of the mind, one must also find a way to view it without judgment.

And both metacognitive therapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) rely on a similar shift in cognition. By being aware of thought patterns as they arise—instead of lost in them—you can interrupt the automatic processes that usually lead to negative states like depressive episodes.

Such a shift is not a magical cure, but it can make a world of difference in how severely negative thoughts affect us.

Modular Model of Mind

In our article on the modular model of the mind, we explored the idea that the unified feeling of our minds is an illusion. We might feel like one personality—especially when we’re not paying attention—but it is more like we have multiple subpersonalities. These modules are not clear-cut and physical like a computer but are, instead, domain-specific cognitive systems that evolved through natural selection. Evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick says:

“A key assumption of the evolutionary perspective is that the human brain contains not one monolithic ‘rational decision-making device’, but rather a number of different decision-systems, each operating according to different rules.”

douglas kenrick, The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making

Messy Modules

The science of mental modules is fascinating, and knowing it can help with metacognitively recognizing thought patterns. But from the perspective of self-awareness and self-improvement, you don’t have to study your modules as precisely as a cognitive scientist or evolutionary psychologist does. Applying the evolutionary lens of adaptation and domain-specific motivations will certainly help, but a less strict model of messy modules is sufficient.

When you detach into metacognitive space, you can watch your mind from the bird’s eye view and develop a personalized system for naming modules. Like metacognitive therapy, you relinquish identification with these modules—these patterns of thoughts and motivations—and learn to just watch them.

Our inner modules can be selfish, dishonest, and contradictory to other modules, and if we are lost in their thought patterns, we risk blindly acting them out. And without metacognition and self-awareness, we will find ourselves lying and misleading others to explain away our behavior—after all, we are more like the press secretary of our minds than we are the president.

So taking evolution by natural selection seriously should make us more humble towards the workings of the mind. When we have humility and curiosity towards systems within our bodies and minds, we can assume that we are supposed to have competing modules in our brains that try to bid for our attention. The bird’s eye view allows us to become familiar with our modules so we are not ruled by them as much.

Mental Sandboxes

There is a concept in cybersecurity and software testing known as a sandbox, and it syncs up well with metacognition. A software sandbox is an isolated environment where you can safely open a file or run a program without affecting the system. Even malicious code can safely execute in the confines of a sandbox, avoiding damage to the host device or network.

Similarly, there is a metacognitive strategy of building a mental sandbox as a testing environment for ideas. You can maintain your beliefs, values, and opinions while still genuinely giving other ideas—even contradictory ones—the chance to be correct. You can even steel-man your opposition (the opposite of a straw man) by making the ideas stronger than when they arrived.

When we identify too strongly with our thoughts and opinions, emotion takes over, and we reflexively reject opposing ideas. But with metacognition and a mental sandbox, we can learn how to more gracefully play with ideas. With this approach, intellectual honesty and curiosity are more important than being right or avoiding embarrassment. And a bonus to absorbing opposing ideas is that you more quickly realize when you are wrong.

People who do not know how to play with ideas like this—who cannot entertain multiple opinions at once—risk becoming ideological puppets, lacking the metacognition to see what is pulling the strings. As Carl Jung said:

“People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”

Carl jung

Camping And De-Camping

Once we learn that we can safely and gracefully test out ideas in the mind, we can embrace the metacognitive strategy of camping and de-camping. I first heard the concept from mathematician Eric Weinstein, and for me, it takes the concept of the sandbox one step further. In addition to entertaining another idea or opinion, we also camp in that perspective.

In politics, for example, we can camp in the opposing perspective for enough time to truly see the world from that viewpoint. Camping in a different perspective temporarily changes our values, prior assumptions, and what information we consider relevant. It also helps cancel out bias, which is not just bad thinking—bias is how the brain processes too much information. We cannot see without ignoring, and where we camp determines what we highlight and ignore.

So the metacognitive strategy of camping and de-camping between multiple perspectives is crucial for maintaining intellectual honesty. It will give you a greater understanding of other people and a more skillful approach to communicating ideas. It also makes me more humble—I have fewer opinions and make sure to test any strong ones from opposing camps.

Gooey vs. Prickly

We tend to be strict about other people being intellectually consistent. We easily spot their flaws and contradictions—especially in political topics—with a “gotcha” type of motivation and pleasure. But when someone points out our hypocrisy—or that of someone on our “team”—we flinch away and deny or excuse it. We allow more gooey thinking in our blind spots while being prickly about other people’s blind spots.

But practicing metacognition with an emphasis on intellectual honesty and flexible thinking induces humility. You are more graceful towards inconsistencies in other people’s thinking because you regularly see them in yourself.

So metacognition has taught me to value gooey and prickly thinking. Prickly thinking means that we make sure our thoughts and opinions are logical and consistent. It helps us build accurate models of the world and have opinions that make sense, fit together, and stand the test of time.

But a gooey thinker embraces tension and inconsistencies in the mind. Valuing gooey thinking means that we don’t view our mind’s ability to contradict itself purely as a design flaw—perhaps it is a feature. Being gooey and embracing contradictions might be the key to how we can solve problems, be creative, empathize with others, and camp/de-camp.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott FITZGERALD

Gooey Prickles And Prickly Goo

Of course, this concept depends on the situation. I tend to be stricter about logical consistency for simple truths. But it is often with the deepest truths in life that we have to embrace a more gooey approach to thinking. It also brings to mind a quote by the famous physicist Neils Bohr:

“ There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

Neils bohr

Watching your mind will show you when you are being prickly and when you are being gooey. And you will spot the same shifts in other people, hopefully in a less judgemental way.

Prickly philosophy is intellectually rigorous and likes everything chopped up into neat categories. It readily reduces phenomena into smaller components and hates logical contradictions. But gooey philosophy embraces vagueness and does not mind blurring categories together. And the truth is that we all contain and need both of these approaches.

As Alan Watts says, in talking about how both prickles and goo are mutually dependent: “life is not either prickles or goo—it is gooey prickles and prickly goo.”

And when we shift our awareness to watch the mind from the metacognitive perch—the bird’s eye view—it is much easier to embrace and work with our messy minds.

Metacognition: Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this article gave you a solid introduction to the psychology of metacognition and how it can be useful. On the scientific side of this topic, there is much to learn about the brain’s attention systems, self-awareness, and optimal learning. It also shows more rigorously the existence of metacognitive levels. As psychologist Tomasz Jankowski puts it, “one meta-level can become object level for a higher next level and so on”.

And on the meditation side of things, the topic intersects well with mindfulness and self-improvement. When we spend more time observing from the bird’s eye view, we become familiar with our mind and its messy way of functioning—as Susan Greenland puts it, “minds are a bundle of multifaceted and sometimes contradictory, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs”. Metacognitively recognizing this truth of the mind makes us more graceful towards ourselves and others.

And finally, if we use metacognitive strategies to cultivate meta-awareness, we have the chance to live a more consistent and present life.

Scientific Resources

Mental Models And Critical Thinking

By

On May 13, 2021

In Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 7 minutes
Critical thinking is using mental models

More important than learning what to think is learning how to think ( critical thinking). So in this article, we will examine one approach that’s been useful to us—that critical thinking is learning how to use mental models. Mental models are the frameworks that we use to simplify and understand the world. And building a robust toolbox of these is a great way to think more clearly and make better decisions.

At his trial, Socrates apparently uttered the famous words that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. It means that we should strive to understand ourselves in order to have a deep and meaningful life. This includes examining and being critical of our thinking.

And one way to get better at critical thinking is to build up a database of mental models.

Mental models help us by reducing complexity in the world. We can’t pay attention to everything, and models help show us what is important—they block out the noise and boost the signal. At Exploring Kodawari, we refer to them as mental frameworks, and you can view our growing list of them here.

But in order to improve our critical thinking, we must first understand how mental models work. So this article is a kind of “meta” mental framework explaining what models are and why we need so many of them.

Mental Models And How They Help With Critical Thinking

Mental models are representations of how human beings think. They can be loose concepts with a wide utility or very narrow concepts for specific applications. But in all cases, they help us understand the world by highlighting certain information within it.

Mental models also highlight the connections we see in the world. For all intents and purposes, the world is infinitely complex, and mental models allow us to let go of most of that complexity so that we can pay attention to the relevant bits.

Without mental models, we would be completely overwhelmed—we wouldn’t have a hierarchy of what to pay attention to. With them, though, we have a better chance at figuring out what’s important and how to act.

While each model by itself is biased, critical thinking is having multiple models that compete against each other. This helps us to cancel out that bias by seeing reality from as many perspectives as possible.

Heuristics

One way of understanding mental models is to understand heuristics. A heuristic is a fancy term for what is commonly called a rule of thumb. These are rules or models of reality that are easily learned and broadly accurate. By definition, they are not completely accurate and they do not work all of the time.

So heuristics are approximations of reality that allow us to be more efficient with our thinking. They lower our cognitive demand by blocking out the complexity of each individual situation and focusing on the broadly true pattern.

For a heuristic to be good, it either has to be true most of the time or has to have a bias in the direction of safety. For example, the rule of thumb to treat every gun as if it’s loaded might be literally false most of the time, but still pragmatically true enough to prevent horrible gun accidents.

And mental models are like heuristics in that they don’t have to be completely right—they just need utility. As British statistician George Box once said, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”

As long as we are aware that heuristics can bias our thinking, they are safe to use. And when we have to make fast decisions, they are really our only choice.

Compressing Reality

When an image or sound file is digitally compressed, information is strategically removed in order to create a smaller file. Due to redundant information and limitations in human perception, compressed files can be many times smaller while retaining almost the same fidelity.

And a good mental model is similar—it simplifies reality by removing unnecessary information and focusing on what is useful. This overlaps with the psychological concept of cognitive schema. Schemas are how our brains interpret and categorize information in the world. For example, a chair and a beanbag have little in common objectively, yet our brains see them both through the same schema of “something to sit on”.

Like heuristics, schemas/frameworks/models are about utility. Our brains did not evolve to objectively understand the world—to find the ultimate truth. Instead, they evolved to build models that are true enough. Like digital compression, successful cognitive models simplify reality by maintaining sufficient complexity—that is, they are true/accurate enough to remain useful.

As soon as they are not useful, we either have to use a different model or update our model to accommodate new information.

Your Toolbox For Critical Thinking

We’ve already said that because of bias, critical thinking requires you to have multiple models (or categories of models) that see reality from different perspectives. For example, a biologist might rely too heavily on evolutionary models (incentives, hierarchies, niches, etc) while an engineer might rely too heavily on systems thinking (feedback loops, emergence, critical mass, etc).

So having a toolbox of multiple models, including those outside your specialization, helps you find the right tool for the right job. Or at least, because different models highlight different patterns, you’ll find a model that best fits your goals.

Plus, having more schemas/models also means that you can learn and retain information more quickly. This is why I prefer the term framework. Like Charlie Munger says, frameworks give you a place to hang information:

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.  You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.”

Charlie Munger, A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom

Just like your skeleton gives your body a structure, mental frameworks structure your knowledge in an organized way. And the more frameworks you have, the more organized and useful your knowledge will be.

Making Them Personal

Just because you read about a mental model, it doesn’t make it “yours”. To really own a model, you have to integrate it into your mind through personal experience. Otherwise, the model is just a shell—a name without enough depth. But this changes once you make it personal.

Personal models become deeply rooted in your mind. It evolves from a name to a complex network of connections and examples.

For example, I use the mental framework of the modular mind almost every day. This model says that, even though we feel like a unified mind, we are actually comprised of multiple “modules” competing for our conscious attention. It has a long and complicated scientific history, but the main takeaway is simpler: you have subpersonalities inside your head and many of them are shortsighted and selfish.

So with this model, critical thinking is realizing that certain thoughts are not even your thinking at all. Yes, they come from your brain, but the modular mind reminds us that evolution makes us think things that we don’t have to believe.

But just understanding the psychology of it is not enough. You have to also sit down and notice this mental framework in your own life. You have to subjectively feel how your modules try to control you. And this is true of all models—if you don’t make them personal their utility will be mostly limited.

Categories of Mental Models

As a person just looking to think more critically, make better decisions, and generally improve themselves, I’ve found that broader categories of models are often more useful than specific ones. You can use specific frameworks, but sometimes the larger category gives you enough perspective.

So here are some broad categories of mental models and a short description of how that framework can be useful.

Evolutionary Framework

It’s easy for human beings to feel like they are somehow separate from nature. But the evolutionary framework reminds us that we are a product of nature—gradual change due to evolution by natural selection. And this applies not just to our bodies but also to parts of our psychology.

Psychological traits that occur universally across cultures are good candidates for being adaptations. Certain cultural practices work this way too—you can think of culture as “idea software” that evolved to run on the hardware of the brain. When we learn to view ourselves through the evolutionary lens, a lot of our behavior and motivation make way more sense.

This doesn’t mean that evolved behavior is good just because it’s natural (the naturalistic fallacy). Instead, it’s a way to understand ourselves so that we can be more consistently moral.

Hedonic adaptation, the modular mind, and consciousness are all mental models that fit into this category.

Logical Fallacies

Logical fallacies are the classic thinking traps that our brains can fall into. We are especially susceptible to these in arguments and debates. While fallacious arguments might appear legit and persuasive on the surface, they contain logical errors that invalidate whatever is being argued.

A logical fallacy may be committed on purpose (deceptive) or on accident (just sloppy thinking). But the point is that either way, an argument based on a logical fallacy is false—although a claim can still be true even if its reasoning is false.

So logical fallacies are great mental models to learn about and notice in your thinking. They highlight the common patterns of how we tend to be sloppy with our thinking, and being familiar with them will improve your critical thinking skills.

Some popular examples of logical fallacies are ad hominem, the slippery slope, and the straw man. Aim to learn them and notice them in yourself and others. This will definitely improve your critical thinking skills.

Physics

This category refers to general laws or concepts from physics that we can personify in our human lives. One example is inertia. Inertia states that an object will resist changes in velocity and direction unless acted on by an outside force. And this principle of motion also applies to individuals and organizations.

Relativity is another powerful physics concept that we can export into our thinking. You don’t have to understand Einstein to realize that our frame of reference biases us. For example, if we’re in a plane at cruising altitude, we don’t realize that we’re going nearly 600 mph. But an outside observer would notice this immediately. And this effect occurs in our social lives as well. Critical thinking requires that we be aware of how relativity biases us.

Engineering Frameworks

Engineering frameworks are similar to physics (because engineers rely on physics to build things). But they tend to involve concepts that reveal themselves in more complex systems.

For example, emergence says that sometimes lower-level parts create unexpected higher-level phenomena. And often we can’t even reduce that higher-level emergence to truths from the lower-level domain.

Another engineering principle is feedback loops (A causes B which loops back to A). A classic example of this is when you place a microphone next to its speaker, quickly resulting in a high pitch screech (positive feedback). Positive feedback loops run out of control whereas negative loops (like a thermostat) maintain equilibrium.

These types of frameworks apply not just to engineering systems but also to ourselves and the organizations we create.

Conclusion: Critical Thinking Is Critical

Critical thinking is not just knowing what to think but knowing how to think. It is understanding more consciously how the human mind learns and makes sense of the world. And because mental models are how we do this, learning them more consciously will allow you to think more clearly and make better decisions.

So if you want to get better at critical thinking, consider adding more and more mental models to your toolbox. Study them and make them personal. Over time, they will help you to live a more balanced and consistent life.

Mental Model Resources

The Modular Theory of Mind

By

On November 9, 2020

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 8 minutes
modular theory of mind

According to the modular theory of mind, we have numerous subpersonalities inside our heads that compete for our attention. While learning about them can be disturbing, it also provides greater freedom. As science writer Robert Wright says: “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

For most of us, consciousness feels like one unified experience moving through time. Yes, our minds and personalities have different sides—and they can change over time—but the whole time it’s still us.

But if we accept the famous words by Heraclitus—that “the only thing constant is change”—then what about us endures through time?

This problem of pinning down one’s identity—or for that matter any object’s identity— is fascinating and can take you in many directions. For me, it brings to mind the ship of Theseus thought puzzle or the paper “Personal Identity” by philosopher Derek Parfit.

But for this article, I want to challenge the concept of “us” from a different perspective. Specifically, I want to challenge our felt sense of unity with the modular theory of mind—the idea that your one mind is actually multiple minds. As the psychologist, Douglas T. Kenrick puts it: “We are all multiple personalities, with several different selves insides our heads.”

And many of our subpersonalities are foolish, selfish, and even evil sometimes. Worse than that, we often mindlessly act out their desires. But it doesn’t have to be this way, at least not all of the time. Paired with mindfulness and meditation, this theory of mind allows us to become more familiar with our inner modules. And familiarity leads to more psychological freedom—we can observe our inner selves instead of blindly following them.

It sounds crazy to our common sense, but this modular theory of mind is both grounded in science and observable through introspection. And while we probably can’t control what thoughts we have, adopting this modular model allows us to at least upgrade the relationship between thoughts and actions.

The Modular Theory of Mind

The general hypothesis that the mind is made of modules—distinct structures with specialized functions—goes back to the 1870s when scientists correlated specific brain damage with specific speech disabilities. For example, damage to the Broca’s area meant that one could not form words but could still understand them. And damage to the Wernicke’s area created the opposite problem.

But many of the ideas from that period went too far and have since been debunked. While the brain does localize some functions, it does not have clear-cut physical modules and there is not a precise one-one relationship between locations in the brain and cognitive abilities.1

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

But modularity can still exist in a looser psychological sense, and here it found some support from the psychoanalytic traditions. For example, Sigmund Freud, who synthesized and popularized concepts of the unconscious, thought of the individual as an integrated collection of subpersonalities. For Freud, the mind was like an iceberg: the tip above the water is conscious awareness while the majority below the water is the unconscious. And our subpersonalities—centered around memories, emotions, and motivations—live in this unconscious realm and try to influence our behavior.

Carl Jung took this further by splitting up the unconscious into two categories—the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. This realm of the collective unconscious, filled with instincts and archetypes, is a kind of ancestral wisdom universal to all humans. The cross-cultural similarities of mythology and religious imagery are considered evidence for the collective unconscious.2

In a subjective sense (and in their own psychoanalytic realm) the theories of Freud and Jung are quite powerful. But because of the technical limitations of their time, they lack some of the rigor and empirical evidence required by modern cognitive psychology.

Cognitive Modules

But by the 1960s, the idea of a unified consciousness was more successfully challenged by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in their split-brain experiments. And by the 1980s, the modular theory of mind officially returned with philosopher Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind. He emphasized that the brain does not have distinct physical modules like a computer but instead has what he calls cognitive modules. As Fodor puts it:

“Roughly, modular cognitive systems are domain
specific, innately specified, hardwired, autonomous, and not
assembled.”

Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind

The modular theory of mind is also compatible with evolutionary psychology, which approaches human psychology with the framework of adaptations and natural selection. So just like our bodies and physiology evolved as a collection of domain-specific adaptations, so too did our emotional and cognitive abilities.

Douglas Kenrick also thinks that cognitive modules go hand in hand with an evolutionary approach to psychology:

“A key assumption of the evolutionary perspective is that the human brain contains not one monolithic ‘rational decision-making device,’ but rather a number of different decision-systems, each operating according to different rules.”

Douglas kenrick, The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making

And even if those rules might not seem rational on the surface, Kenrick says that they “demonstrate rationality at a deeper evolutionary level”. For him, cognitive modules are “domain-specific decision-rules that, on average, would have resulted in fitness benefits”.

Kenrick’s study showed that people’s decision making changed in predictable ways depending on which cognitive module he triggered. Some of the modules he names in the study are social status, self-protection, mate acquisition, mate retention, friendship, and kin-care.

Messy Modules

It’s important to emphasize that even these cognitive modules are not precisely distinct. Our bodies and minds were not designed by engineers but rather evolved naturally over time to fit our environments.

“Often, admittedly, these domain-specific systems may emerge by utilizing, co-opting, and linking together resources which were antecedently available; and hence they may appear quite inelegant when seen in engineering terms.”

Peter Carruthers, The Innate Mind: structure and content

So the safe way to view the modular theory of mind is as a system of messy modules—a loose collection of overlapping inner selves. Evolution takes advantage of already existing structures so it makes sense that the physical brain—and our psychology—evolved in a messy way like this.

Plus thinking of modules as messy will make it easier to adopt this mental framework as a means to self-improvement. For me, the purpose here is not to be on the cutting edge of science. Rather, it is to ground the subjective activity of introspection into something more solid.

Because introspection and meditation can roam too freely when not framed by science. And having a sense of the mind’s modularity—and the natural selection that drove its evolution—gives us a head start in understanding the subconscious motivations that influence us.

Mindfulness: We are not our modules

Even though contemplative traditions often use pseudoscientific language, it doesn’t mean that they can’t play nicely with science. And I’ve found that the evolutionary lens—and specifically this modular theory of mind—gets along particularly well with meditation.

This is because meditation is all about becoming wiser towards the patterns and contents of consciousness. And while it is possible to change those patterns—to control the thoughts and emotions that arise—for most of us that’s not on the menu. Instead, the goal is to realize that we are not identical to them. We can maintain psychological freedom in their presence.

Emotions and Modules

In his book Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright devotes a whole chapter to mental modules. He talks about the adaptive modules and how they evolved to improve our Darwinian fitness. He also cites the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby to describe how our modules are triggered by emotions and feelings (which themselves are triggered by the environment).

And unfortunately, the takeaway is that we are not the CEO of our minds. Our sense of unification is an illusion, and we do not have the control we think we do.3

But again, we can learn the patterns. We can learn to subjectively feel when certain emotions are activating certain modules. For example when we are feeling jealous in a relationship—triggering what Kenrick calls the “mate-retention module”—we can know ahead of time that our judgment is being biased. We are not seeing clearly and should wait before we act out our thoughts.

And if modules are too dry of a concept, you can think of them more in the psychoanalytic term of subpersonalities. In this sense, getting to know your inner array of personalities allows you to familiarize yourself with them like you would a person—actually the Tibetan word for meditation means “familiarization”. And as you do this, they will have less and less power over you.

“Here there be dragons”

Cartographers in medieval times had a practice of writing “here there be dragons” to designate unknown areas on their maps. This is because in mythology dragons commonly represent the unknown—death, destruction, and chaos. And fitting in with Jung’s collective unconscious, they would even draw illustrations of serpent-like mythological creatures on their maps.

So it doesn’t surprise me that meditation teacher Jack Kornfield also uses the language of dragons to describe some of our inner modules. They are often triggered by fear, fly into our minds suddenly, and can take control of our thoughts. And without mindfulness, we might not even realize that this is happening.

But another common theme in mythology is that if you can name the dragon—what is referred to as something’s “true name”—it loses its power over you. And there is a technique in meditation, called noting or naming, that does just this. The goal is to observe the mind and find appropriate labels for the dragons that arise.

And since we’re not doing science, we can name these dragons whatever we want. As you sit and meditate, you can notice the constant array of thoughts bidding for your attention—“do this, eat that, put that person in their place”, etc—without getting lost in any of them.

“In non-identification we stop taking the experience as me or mine. We see how our identification creates dependence, anxiety, and inauthenticity. In practicing non-identification, we inquire of every state, experience, and story, is this who we really are?”

jack kornfield, Non-Identification

Because according to Jack, the very act of naming something by definition means that we are not identical to it. Strong feelings of jealousy, desire, anxiety, or anger can arise in the mind—sometimes even in the body—and we can watch them from somewhere else. With names, we recognize them quickly, bow to them, and thank them for their opinion. After all, from an evolutionary perspective, they exist to protect us. But with naming and space, we can decide with wisdom how to act.

Sometimes the opinions of these inner modules are valid and require action. For example, if you’re in the forest and fear of a possible predator triggers the self-protection module, it’s probably worth acting on. But these situations are rare in our modern world, and too often the modules are triggered by the type II error of a false positive. They are specialized for specific tasks and have limited views.

This means that most of the time the modules don’t need action—they just need acknowledgment. So get to know your mental modules. Even if you decide to act on them, at least you won’t be ruled by them.

Additional Resources

The Value of Beginner’s Mind

By

On August 26, 2020

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 6 minutes
beginner's mind

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”

Shunryu Suzuki

Aging, like many things in life, is a double-edged sword. No, I do not mean the physical aspects of aging, as frustrating as that can be. Instead, I mean that the psychology of aging—how the brain’s pattern recognition systems evolve—comes with pros and cons.

These are the categories and heuristics that we form and continually update in order to understand reality. We need these, and the positive thing is that we can sharpen them up as we age—we can make them more encompassing, consistent, and reliable.

It is as if we create a conceptual map of reality—a map of categories, personality types, expectations, intuitions about danger, etc.—which we use to offload our thinking and quickly analyze the world.

But there is a downside to this process. As we gain life experience and wisdom, we also lose something else: novelty.

In the presence of novelty, we are open to many possibilities. We have humility and awe at the uniqueness of what’s in front of us, and we don’t assume that it will fit into an already formed category. Novelty captures our attention to be fully in the present moment.

It gives us what the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki calls beginner’s mind.

Beginner’s Mind

Finding freedom is a recurring theme in meditation. This freedom can be expressed in many ways, but I think the most encompassing framing is a freedom from attachment.

It is our clinging to things—to views, desires, states of emotion, etc.—that begins the feedback loops of suffering. We wish for the external world to be a certain way, and we suffer when it is not. Or when we actually get what we want, we quickly realize that we are still clinging to yet more desire.

But as we let go of attachments, we find more freedom and less suffering. We see and accept reality as it is.

And beginner’s mind is such freedom—freedom from the past. It is the quality of seeing something as if for the first time. It means we no longer cling to our knowledge, experiences, opinions, or expectations. We have fresh awe and appreciation at the miracle of what’s in front of us.

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”

Rachel Carson

As we age we learn and adapt. We form heuristics—rules of thumb—in order to more quickly analyze reality. We notice various causes and effects, and we expect the same patterns to continue. We also learn about different personality types and what to expect from them. And perhaps most important to our evolutionary past, we learn what assumptions will keep us out of danger.

This knowledge is not necessarily wrong, but it is also not free. In our clinging to mental models and assumptions, we often overlook the genuine uniqueness of the present moment. The mind wanders because it assumes that the present is probably more of the same old stuff.

But by definition, the present moment is always novel. It of course resembles patterns from the past, but every moment is still a brand new coming together of matter, energy, and consciousness. Beginner’s mind—and the meditation practices that cultivate it—help us to truly connect to this fact. We don’t allow the past to cloud the present. All of our past knowledge could be wrong, so we choose to see things as they are in the present with fresh eyes.

And when we see the present moment as a novelty, we give it our full attention. We cultivate a state of open-mindedness and appreciation toward reality.

Solving Problems

There is also a practical aspect to beginner’s mind. This is to say that even if the meditation/spiritual approach isn’t for you, beginner’s mind is a fantastic tool for solving problems.

We’ve all experienced the feeling of being stuck on a problem. This could be a life decision—do I take that new job or not—or it could be something creative like writing an article. Either way, a difficult problem will often leave us stuck in the weeds. The harder we push on it the less it budges.

So we might just give up for the night and get some rest. When we do this, something mysterious can happen the next day—as we dive back in, the solution often jumps out at us right away. How does this work?

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

John Steinbeck

The neuroscience of spindle events, bursts of fast brain activity during non-REM sleep, is one explanation for how this works. It also explains why Einstein is said to have taken many short naps throughout the day. Supposedly, he would fall asleep with a spoon in his hand and a metal plate underneath him to avoid deep sleep—as soon as his hand relaxed too much, the spoon hitting the plate would wake him up, hopefully to fresh ideas.

But subjectively speaking, the solution still arrives mysteriously. And often it’s a very simple solution that we just didn’t see before, something that was being blocked by our previous assumptions. While sleeping works for many people, for me ideas come most often while I’m walking outside.

In the spaciousness of walking and loosening my grip on the problem, a novel solution often comes to me. The wandering of the mind brought about a beginner’s mind that didn’t get stuck in the same ways. A lot of our past rules and knowledge are probably useful, but just one wrong assumption could be what keeps you stuck.

“When we are free from views, we are willing to learn. What we know for sure in this great turning universe is actually very limited.”

Jack Kornfield

This type of beginner’s mind is very similar to first-principles thinking, and it’s also why it can be so useful to ask someone else for help. They aren’t clouded and biased from spending hours on the problem, and as such solutions often come very quickly. Our previously published mental framework, The Null Hypothesis, is a similar tool for getting rid of these biases in order to properly solve a problem.

To practice beginner’s mind is to practice seeing a problem like your friend would. View the problem as if for the first time, because maybe you missed something the first time. When you aren’t boxed in, there will be many more possible solutions, and one of them might just be the right one.

Gratitude

Gratitude is another recurring theme in meditation, and it also intersects perfectly with beginner’s mind. This is because beginner’s mind cultivates a fresh and unique outlook on things, instead of taking them for granted.

Whether we are looking at our significant other or out in nature looking at a tree, beginner’s mind reminds us to slow down and see the details. We bring freshness to how we see, and that freshness invokes gratitude for the delicate intricacies of all things.

But this is not the default mode for our brains. The default mode is what is known in psychology as hedonic adaptation. Also known as the hedonic treadmill, it means that our bodies and minds always return to base levels of excitement and happiness. The first encounter with something pleasurable excites us the most, but in each subsequent encounter, the emotional impact on our nervous system is reduced.4

Hedonic adaptation is an especially easy trap to fall into in long-term relationships. In the beginning, you look deeply into a person’s eyes and can’t believe how special the moment is. It’s like time has stopped and you see the entire universe in their eyes. But then life happens—the body adapts, the mind adapts—and you stop seeing those moments with beginner’s mind. You tend to forget how precious it is.

So hedonic adaptation is a kind of glitch in our mind that robs us of our happiness and gratitude. But with a mindfulness practice, by specifically trying to cultivate beginner’s mind, we can get ahead of this glitch.

This is because gratitude is less about external reality and more about our internal framing. And with mindfulness, we can actually have some control over that internal framing. It’s a practice that we can get better at—breathing in the present moment and cultivating gratitude for where we are.

In a sense, beginner’s mind is learning to forget so that you can appreciate. Even if something is around you all of the time, you can always slow down and appreciate how special and temporary it is.

None of this is to say we should have beginner’s mind all of the time. We couldn’t survive if we always saw the world with such childlike innocence—often we should trust our knowledge and instincts.

Beginner’s mind is just a mental framework, a reminder, that encourages us to see the world with fresh eyes—to be present and allow time to slow down. Because sometimes you should be—and deserve to be—in awe and appreciation at the novelty of the present moment, whatever it is.

The Null Hypothesis: Why we should all have fewer opinions

By

On August 1, 2020

In Mental Frameworks, Philosophy, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 8 minutes
The null hypothesis of having fewer opinions.

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment”

Rumi

In the age of social media, sharing our opinions with others is easier than ever. And emotionally charged subjects, such as politics, fuel our desire to get those opinions out there. We want to join in and give our take on things—we want to feel relevant.

But opinions are tricky things, and we have to be careful. We don’t always understand how they formed and why we want to share them. And once we do share them, our instinct is to stubbornly defend them, even in the face of contrary evidence. But how sure should we be? How much about the complex world do we really understand?

In this article, I want to convince you of one opinion that I’ve grown to be most confident in over the last year: we should all have fewer opinions. This is a mental framework that I label as the null hypothesis, and it’s been a game-changer for me.

On a personal level, it will relieve the psychological burden of needing to signal—or have—an opinion. On a practical level, you’ll actually be right more of the time, since the few opinions that you allow yourself to have will be more robust. And on the societal level, maybe humility like this will create healthier and more productive conversations.

The Null Hypothesis

The null hypothesis is a concept from inferential statistics, and it’s a way to avoid experimental bias. The null hypothesis is a default assumption stating that there is no effect or relationship between two phenomena—in other words, having no preconceived opinion. If there does turn out to be some causal relationship, then the evidence will indicate that, and you’ll know that your null hypothesis is false.

Approaching epistemology in this way is known as falsifiability, and it’s a concept in the philosophy of science introduced by Karl Popper. The opposite of falsificationism is verificationism, which is a problem because of confirmation bias. If you set out to prove your theory true, you might believe it to be true for the wrong reasons. So the null hypothesis is a safety mechanism that defaults you to having an “empty” hypothesis, that is until the evidence clearly indicates otherwise. 2

In more general terms as a mental framework, the null hypothesis is the space between two (or more) opinions. It’s the quality of saying “I have not yet formed an opinion on that topic”. And perhaps you shouldn’t ever form an opinion on that topic, that is unless you are willing to put in the requisite research.

Even with a falsification approach to research, the strength of your opinion should depend on the depth of that research.

Because part of this mental framework is recognizing—becoming mindful of—the relationship between your knowledge and your opinions. The more robust your knowledge is the stronger your opinions can be. Too often, though, the strength of our opinions is more informed by the emotional charge of the subject. When we vocalize opinions from this place, we are only a few probing questions away from looking foolish.

So the null hypothesis is also a reminder that you should have a high threshold of knowledge and research—again research where you try to prove your preconceived notions to be false—before ever codifying a strong opinion on something.

But people rarely do this. Mindfully watch yourself next time you’re in an argument and you want to prove your point. You begin researching something, something you’re sure will make your opponent look foolish. Is your instinct to verify the position you’ve taken—verificationism and the problem of confirmation bias—or is it to try and falsify your already held opinion?

Especially during political disagreements, I too often catch myself being a verificationist. You might win in the short term, but it doesn’t mean you’re right.

Having the mental framework of the null hypothesis avoids this by keeping us in a space between conclusions. It is remaining agnostic until the data truly lead you to a conclusion. You will have fewer fights because you will vocalize fewer opinions. And the opinions that you do vocalize will be carefully researched, or at least their strength will be properly calibrated.

Bias

“Bias is the brain’s strategy for dealing with too much information”

MOLLY CROCKET ON VERY BAD WIZARDS

I think about bias in a few different ways. One version is the more obvious and conscious bias that we all have. For example, you might have a bias towards or away from certain foods and music genres. You might hate classical music, which would clearly bias you against writing a fair review of a newly released classical music album. These kinds of preference biases are easier to admit, and we usually don’t demand reasons for having them.

From these more explicit biases of preference, we can slide into a more implicit type of bias. These can still be conscious, but we tend to mask their existence—to ourselves and to others. The most obvious example of this is political bias. People mask their political bias by asserting “I am being completely objective”. To the extent that this is even possible, it’s rarely what people are actually being. And such a person must know on some level that they are more critical of one side than of the other.

But there is a more disturbing layer to bias, even more implicit, that should induce humility. This is a completely subconscious bias in which your brain decides what data to promote into your conscious awareness. This type of bias is what Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University Molly Crocket has called “the brain’s strategy for dealing with too much information”.

There’s so much data around us at any moment, and if we consciously received it all we would be overwhelmed. The brain decides for us—not surprising since 95% of our brains processing is subconscious—what information we become aware of. This is a kind of signal to noise relationship, and only certain information—useful information—passes the test.

And on top of that, there’s also the problem of interpreting that data. There is an infinite number of ways to interpret information, and the brain largely decides on that interpretation without us. So you should realize that you might literally see a different world than the person you disagree with.

The Laurel-Yanny and the Gold Dress-Blue Dress internet sensations were a perfect example of this kind of subconscious bias, but unfortunately, most people didn’t get the humbling message that we are not in control of our brains.

Hidden Motives: Why we share our opinions.

Speaking of not being in control of our brains, there is a book that I want to point you toward that further develops this concept. In fact, one of the authors of this book, during the Q&A section of a Sam Harris podcast, gave the same advice of having fewer opinions.

The author was Robin Hanson, and the podcast was about his recent book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.2

**Click here to listen to our podcast interview with Robin from 2021.**

“In summary, our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games. When big parts of our minds are unaware of how we try to violate social norms, it’s more difficult for others to detect and prosecute those violations. This also makes it harder for us to calculate optimal behaviors, but overall, the trade-off is worth it. Of all the things we might be self-deceived about, the most important are our own motives.”

 The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

What is the elephant in the brain? Similar to the elephant in the room, it is the often unacknowledged and awkward truth about how our brains really work.

We might feel like we are transparent to ourselves, like we are in charge and understand ourselves. Putting the question of free will aside, we feel this way because we tell others—and ourselves—why we do certain things. But if 95 percent of our brain’s activity is subconscious, how can we be sure that we know ourselves?

The relevant take-away from the book is that our brains hide information from us and manipulate the reality we experience. We—that is the conscious/speaking version of ourselves—might feel like the president in charge of our brains, but in reality, we are more like the press secretary. And your job as the press secretary is to give acceptable reasons for why you do things. As Robin Hanson said on the Making Sense Podcast, “You don’t actually know why you do things, but your job is to make up a good excuse”.

You give these excuses to other people in your social circles, but you’re also giving them to yourself.

And we are rarely giving the real or primary reasons for why we do things. We self-deceive because it makes it easier to manipulate others—to send a signal of our prestige or dominance.

And we don’t only hide our motives—we also invent counterfeit reasons. This post hoc rationalization is illustrated in experiments by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients, but the same process happens more subtly in a normal whole-brain person. Our ego, our press secretary, evolved not to give the most truthful explanations for our actions, but rather the most plausible and prosocial ones.

The psychology highlighted by this book is honestly disturbing, and I personally interact with it in small doses in order to maintain my grip on reality. For me, the takeaway is to watch myself more closely when I want to vocalize an opinion. What are my real motives: solving a problem or signaling prestige? Telling the truth or signaling group membership?

The Relief of Not Knowing

“When we understand the truth of uncertainty and relax, we become free.”

Jack kornfield

Much like a press secretary always has an answer, our egos always want to say something, even if we don’t have relevant knowledge. It will dodge questions, change subjects, and pretend to know things. The motive, largely hidden to ourselves, is often to signal our intelligence and prestige to our social group.

Evolutionarily this makes sense—we don’t have time to research everything, and it’s safer to go along with groupthink rather than stand alone as an individual.

Another motive might be to reduce anxiety. The world is so complex, mysterious, and unpredictable. We don’t like this insecurity, and pretending to know things helps us to ignore it, to fool ourselves into feeling more secure. But being uncomfortable with uncertainty is a bad reason to have an opinion on something.

Before having a meditation practice, I was doing that all of the time. I had trouble saying “I don’t know” or “I guess I got that wrong”. I still catch myself being too confident or pretending to know, but I now aim at what Jack Kornfield calls “the wisdom of insecurity”. This is accepting the fact that life is chaotic and insecure—we can’t control things and we don’t know enough.

And it turns out that admitting this—not just verbally but really feeling it deep down—is a tremendous relief. It’s a relief because it’s the truth, and truth makes our minds more harmonious.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t have any opinions. The null hypothesis mental framework is simply a reminder to form opinions in a slow and thoughtful way—to stay uncommitted while you research and to be truly guided by the evidence.

Don’t confuse emotional charge with reasoned evidence. Maintain your curiosity and be open to changing your mind. Learn, as Oscar Wilde said about the value of a university degree, to “play gracefully with ideas”.

You do know things, and you might even be an expert in certain areas. The key is to have self-awareness about the depth of your knowledge and to calibrate the strength of your opinions accordingly.

Have a few strong opinions in a select few areas. Form many weak opinions, but be willing to let go of them easily. And on the rest, enjoy the relief of not needing to have any opinion at all.

What is Consciousness?

By

On July 9, 2020

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Philosophy

Reading Time: 11 minutes
what is consciousness?

“First, as far as consciousness is concerned, there is nothing, and then suddenly, magically, at just the right moment . . . something. However minimal that initial something is, experience apparently ignites in the inanimate world, materializing out of the darkness.”

Annaka Harris, Conscious

How do you know if something is real?

It may seem like a silly question, an academic game for philosophers. But when you contend with the question more rigorously, the intuitive answers quickly evaporate leaving you wondering what is real and important in life.

We know that we do not see the world as it truly is because the fundamental constituents of matter are subatomic particles—quarks and electrons from which our macroscopic world emerges.

But is our view of the world even an accurate estimate of reality? It might be, but there’s no guarantee. Reality could even be an advanced computer simulation. According to Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, there is in fact a high probability that we are in a simulation.

If that’s the case, then your consciousness—every aspect of your life—emerges from the computer processing of ones and zeros.3 The experience of mourning someone’s death, falling in love, or biting into a delicious piece of fruit would be emerging from the complex computer code of such a simulation. But we can’t yet prove this one way or the other.

The fact is that it’s hard to prove the reality of anything. But there is one thing in this universe that you can know to be real, no matter its true nature or where it exists in space: your consciousness.

“Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.”

Sam harris, The mystery of consciousness

Your consciousness could be code running on some advanced human (or perhaps alien) hard drive. Or it could be, as most modern neuroscientists would assert, some mysterious result of the complex information processing of your neurons. After all, humans have roughly 100 billion neurons that each make thousands of connections—there are up to a trillion synapses in an adult human brain.

But even if reality is a simulation, it wouldn’t affect the reality of your consciousness. This is because, by definition, consciousness is the first-person subjective experience of being you. No matter how consciousness is ultimately grounded in reality, your having an experience is the definition of consciousness. And it is also the basis for caring about anything in this life.

Consciousness

Like so many words today, the word “conscious” has a variety of meanings and can be easily misunderstood. And as we will see later, our intuitions towards it are not to be trusted either. Consciousness is not synonymous with wakefulness, alertness, or the ability to self-reflect. And it does not require complex thought—we can agree that a dog is conscious but probably does not reflect deeply on the nature of its experience.

As a base definition, consciousness is simply experience. This experience, no matter how simple, just needs to exist. This definition, famously given by the philosopher Thomas Nagel is his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, is the most encompassing and sensical one:

“An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.”

thomas nagel

If we have experience at this moment, then we are conscious—this we can know for sure. There are some theories, such as solipsism, which posit that you could be the only mind that exists. But there are better reasons to assume that other creatures with similar neural arrangements are also conscious.

And following that logic, we also have little reason to suspect that your kitchen table has consciousness. It does not have the same complexity as a brain and therefore probably does not have subjective experience. But in all cases except ourselves, we cannot know for sure.

Yes, consciousness does provide outward signs of its existence. People and animals show emotions while tables do not. And we can scientifically correlate damage to the brain with outward changes in consciousness. But from the outside, this is still not proof that someone or something else has consciousness.2

“The problem is that both conscious and nonconscious states seem to be compatible with any behavior, even those associated with emotion, so a behavior itself doesn’t necessarily signal the presence of consciousness.”

annaka harris, CONSCIOUS

An advanced robot could give every outward sign of consciousness—words, facial expressions, intense emotion—without actually having an inner experience. The complex programming of such a robot could mirror every detail of being a human, but the lights of consciousness could still be off. The philosopher David Chalmers calls this a “philosophical zombie”.3

But you know that you’re not a zombie. Even if everything else in your reality is not what it seems, you still have your subjective experience.

This definition of consciousness may seem vague, and it may seem to be lifting itself up by its own bootstraps. But experience is the most solid reference point for defining consciousness, and our confusion towards it merely reflects how mysterious this topic is. We simply do not know how an experiencing mind emerges out of the wetware of biology. But if you’re having an experience of reading this sentence, then you know it happened at least once.

Intuitions

Similar to many other scientific pursuits, our intuitions largely fail us when studying consciousness. These intuitions—shaped by natural selection— are fast and effective, and we need them to survive. We often experience them as a gut feeling, and they allow us to decide things without a complete understanding. For example, we often assess danger based on information that our brain acquires and processes subconsciously. These intuitions are life-saving, and it would be foolish to abandon them.

But we must also realize their limitations. Natural selection could not have anticipated the modern human philosophizing about the nature of mind. In certain domains, we have to let go of intuitions in order to think more flexibly.

In her book Conscious, Annaka Harris asks us to test our intuitions with the following proposition:

“People are conscious; plants are not conscious.”

It seems safe to say that this is a true statement, right? It certainly feels true. But upon deeper reflection, even this statement gets complicated.

We assume that people are conscious because they have a brain and a central nervous system, and plants do not. But as we said already, this is technically not evidence of consciousness. Still, our intuitions don’t really come from this scientific fact anyways—they come more from observing the behavior of an organism, such as its ability to react and communicate with other things in its environment.

But there are examples that challenge this. Locked-in syndrome is a terrifying condition in which everything except a person’s eyes becomes paralyzed, yet they still have full conscious awareness. Sometimes even the eyes are paralyzed. French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered from this and was able to tell his story through blinking only his left eye.

Imagine if his left eye had also been paralyzed—to the outside observer he would appear to be in a coma, even though he would be having a fully conscious experience on the inside.

There is a similar example, perhaps even more terrifying, known as “anesthesia awareness”. This is a complication with the general anesthesia given before surgery in which a patient fails to lose consciousness. Their body could still be paralyzed while some amount of awareness remains. Imagine being awake and feeling every aspect of surgery without being able to communicate anything.

The point with both of these examples is that consciousness can exist on the inside without any signs of it showing on the outside.

And on the plant side of things, there are behaviors that challenge our intuitions as well. There are examples of plants reacting to their environment, communicating with other plants, and even sharing resources with each other.

Do plants have memories? According to plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz, plants such as the Venus Fly Trap definitely have a form of memory:

“Plants definitely have several different forms of memory, just like people do. They have short term memory, immune memory and even transgenerational memory! I know this is a hard concept to grasp for some people, but if memory entails forming the memory (encoding information), retaining the memory (storing information), and recalling the memory (retrieving information), then plants definitely remember.”

Daniel Chamovitz, Do plants think?

And the ecologist Suzanne Simard, in studying forest ecology, has shown that trees have complex communication networks. In a 2016 TED talk, she described how two tree species use underground networks of fungi to communicate and share resources.

On top of this, Simard showed that mother trees were able to recognize their own kin. They provided more resources to their kin and curbed their own root growth in order to leave more room for the younger trees.

Does this mean that plants are conscious? It would be a far stretch to say that it does, but it’s less of a crazy idea after learning about their complexity. And it does challenge our intuitions about why we grant consciousness to some things and not to others.

Somewhere along the spectrum of increasing complexity (rocks, bacteria, plants, insects, snakes, mammals, etc.), there has to be a moment when the lights go on—when there is suddenly something that it is like to be that thing.

I don’t know where that moment is, and maybe it’s nowhere close to plants. Or maybe the premise is wrong. But the point of these examples is that we must be wary about trusting our intuitions on this matter so that we give the problem its due diligence.

Mind-Body Problem

To be a proper scientist, one must subscribe to the materialist perspective. This is the perspective of physicalism, meaning the universe is made up of matter which follows the laws of physics. This is the objective perspective of the universe. It’s extremely powerful, and it serves as the foundation for scientific advancement.

But studying consciousness objectively—mapping neurons and brain structures—will always miss something. Even if we learn next to everything about how the brain works, there would still be a gap between those facts and the first-person subjective experience. Seeing the color blue is not just a particular firing of neurons—there is also your experience of seeing the color blue. And you can’t reduce that experience to outside observations. This tension is known as the mind-body problem.

Epistemologically speaking, the mind-body problem highlights an impassable gap between the subjective and the objective. No matter how much we learn about neurons and brain networks, it still doesn’t explain how or why conscious awareness hovers above them.

This was the main takeaway from Nagel’s essay:

“If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

Thomas nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

The scientific method is designed to remove subjective bias. It is about shifting the perspective to be more objective—something is true no matter who is observing it. It assumes that the universe is made up of matter that follows rules, and if we follow the epistemology of science then we can slowly but surely uncover those rules.

So the scientific method can study consciousness, and neuroscience has in fact learned a lot about how the brain works. David Chalmers calls this mapping of the brain the easy problem of consciousness—not because it’s easy, but because its easier. But it still leaves us with the mind-body problem, what he calls the hard problem. Even if we completely map the brain, down to every last neuron, we still have not bridged the gap between objective and subjective.

“Unlike the “easy problems” of explaining animal behavior or understanding which processes in the brain give rise to which functions, the hard problem lies in understanding why some of these physical processes have an experience associated with them at all.”

ANNAKA HARRIS, CONSCIOUS

This explanatory gap is perplexing, and it’s no surprise that most religions have a different view of consciousness. Most of these are dualistic and involve some sense of a soul that is separate from the brain and survives the body. It might not be scientific, but reflecting on the mind-body problem does give one a greater understanding and compassion for the religious perspective.

But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There are other theories that attempt to do away with this problem by approaching it in completely different ways.

Panpsychism and Other Theories

Plenty of alternative theories for consciousness are wild and unscientific, but some are more rigorous and plausible than they seem. And when you consider some of the wild ideas that are now accepted truths in physics, like quantum mechanics, keeping an open mind is essential.

We wondered earlier about where to draw a line for consciousness—how much complexity is required for consciousness to emerge? And if you can recognize the distinction between strong emergence and weak emergence, then you realize that having to draw such a line creates the hard problem of consciousness—why does one side of the line have experience while the other does not.4

Philosopher Joseph Levine coined the phrase “the explanatory gap” as a way to showcase strong emergence and the hard problem of consciousness:

“The explanatory gap argument doesn’t demonstrate a gap in nature, but a gap in our understanding of nature.”

Joseph Levine, “Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap”

But some theories, such as panpsychism, do away with having to draw such a line in the first place. Panpsychism is the hypothesis that all matter, even atoms, contain some amount of consciousness.

There are definitely unscientific versions of panpsychism, but in theory, the hypothesis is plausible. Imagine if consciousness were a fundamental force in the universe such as gravity. Science values simplicity, and making consciousness fundamental removes the complexity around how it emerges.

The British philosopher Galen Strawson would assert that panpsychism is actually the most plausible theory if one wants to be a strict physicalist/materialist/naturalist. Because even though science has not figured out the details of panpsychism, epistemologically it solves the explanatory gap, the hard problem.

And panpsychism doesn’t claim that atoms or rocks think like humans—complexity is still a factor. Just like the gravitational force is proportional to mass, the experience of consciousness could be proportional to the complexity of a system. The “lights of consciousness” could become brighter and brighter as complexity increases.

And if you want to go further down the rabbit hole of alternative theories, then you can check out the work of cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman. This TED talk introduces his user interface theory of consciousness—the idea that our sense of reality is merely an evolved interface. In addition, Sam and Annaka Harris did an extensive interview with him in this podcast conversation.

Consciousness Is Everything

For the layperson who just wants to live a good life, why does any of this matter? I personally find the philosophical details surrounding consciousness endlessly fascinating, but probably they are not all crucial.

What is crucial, though, is to understand that consciousness is experience. And the utility of meditation is relevant here. It allows one to sit down and nakedly experience consciousness—to fully experience “experience”.

And it is the experiencing of life—in yourself and others—that serves as the foundation for all of your concerns. It motivates your moral and ethical positions in this life. You could say that a good life mission is to maximize the well-being of consciousness, wherever we find it.

Circumambulation and the Kodawari Approach to Life

By

On May 27, 2020

In Kodawari, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 5 minutes

“I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the centre. This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.”

CARL JUNG MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS

The concept of kodawari, essentially being the best you can be, is most often applied to the development of a craft. These are the projects—or career paths—that we get obsessed with and devote our focused energy towards. But as you zoom out, you might realize that there is a more encompassing mission that is driving you: the path of self-development. It is the drive to keep yourself constantly evolving towards an ideal. But this path is not a straight line—it is instead what Carl Jung called a circumambulation.

Circumambulation

Actually, most types of human development tend to circumambulate. My development in music has never been a straight line. Neither has my development as a person. Why is this? It’s because as you travel you also change. So you wouldn’t even want your development to map out as a straight line—it would mean that you never performed any course corrections along the way.

And course corrections are good. They indicate that your updated self has a better idea about where to aim. Because as you approach what you thought you were aiming at, you see it more clearly. You realize that your model of it was low-resolution—it didn’t account for some crucial details. But you have more wisdom now, and it forces you to update your GPS settings. Reality put some hard limitations on your previous path, and you have to aim somewhere else now.

What do I mean by aiming? It means that something is grabbing your attention, something is pulling your interest. This happens all the time in the physical world when an object entices us to reach for it. Our brains are fundamentally wired this way—to be attracted to or repelled by things. But with regards to your future self, the aim is not a discrete object. It’s more like a vague psychological concept of potential. You haven’t worked out the details, but you have an instinctual feeling of where you should aim.

Okay, so what might be the ultimate thing to aim at, to circumambulate towards?

How about aiming at who you could be? Hopefully, you are not completely satisfied with who you are. There are at least a few things you could probably do today to improve. But ultimate improvement—actually achieving your full potential—is an intimidating project. Where the hell do you start?

The Labyrinth of Circumambulation

The problem is that you probably don’t know where to start, but you have to move somewhere. So you start to move in a chaotic way as best you can. Then you make too many mistakes and get stuck. You have to make a course correction in order to continue. This process repeats and repeats, and eventually, you realize that the chaotic path is actually circling something. You can’t define it but you can feel a magnetic pull towards the center.

This is the psychological conception of circumambulation that Carl Jung wrote about. The word generally refers to the act of moving around a sacred object and is present in many religions. Psychologically, though, you can think of the path as being like a labyrinth:

The labyrinth of circumambulation
The labyrinth of circumambulation

Or as Jung described it:

“The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go in circles.”

Carl jung

Circumambulate the Center with Kodawari

Approaching a project or a craft with kodawari is one thing. It means that you are aiming at perfection and attending to the details. It’s a great starting point, and the momentum will encourage more and more kodawari.

But having a kodawari approach to life is the real goal. It means that you are applying this perfectionist energy towards the ultimate project of circumambulation. You are aiming at your ideal—who you could be— in a steadfast and committed way. You don’t know who you could be (or if success is possible), but you don’t need to justify the effort in some grandiose way. Respect for kodawari is enough, it can be your axiom.

In circumambulating, perhaps it is a leap of faith to insist that there even is a center. Maybe it’s all made up. Perhaps the center is a vague conception of who you would be if you developed maximally. But you can’t define it or penetrate it. You can only think about it, only move around it. You spiral around the center trying to see it from different angles—sometimes closer and sometimes far away. And instinct of meaning kicks in when you feel closer to the center. And when far from the center, you might feel ashamed of the mistakes that led you there. This is the path though.

The Temptation of Nihilism

Kodawari, as a life philosophy, can give you the discipline to keep going no matter what—to keep your sight set on the transcendent ideal. It is attempting to do your best at everything you do, even if you know ahead of time that you will fail. It requires optimism that, despite short-term failures, you will move closer to the center in the long run.

But optimism isn’t easy. The reality of our situation is that much of life is both mysterious and tragic: we don’t understand the universe or our place within it. And consciousness itself—your experience of understanding these very words—is fundamentally still a mystery. On top of that, everyone dies and will experience suffering along the way. Nihilism, on a small and large scale, is therefore always tempting us.

And serious people should struggle with nihilism. It’s a result of taking the deep questions about life seriously. When you’re willing to look at the world honestly—to look at your own mind honestly—it’s not always easy to find a happy conclusion.

But succumbing to nihilism—giving up on your ideal—only makes life worse. It leads to a life of distraction, and it is, unfortunately, the easier path. Because staying connected to that deeper part of yourself—the part that seeks answers and wants to live in a meaningful, honest, and ethical way—comes packaged with a certain amount of sadness. There’s true darkness in honestly contemplating the human condition, and you have to be willing to deal with that. It’s a more difficult path, but it’s infinitely more meaningful.

Kodawari as a Philosophy of Life

In our article exploring the philosophy of Stoicism, we stressed the importance of having a philosophy of life to guide you. And I’ve found that this kodawari philosophy of self-development is one option that is strong enough to combat the dark moments. Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, said this about one’s personal philosophy:

“Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth.”

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

So for me, the zoomed-out concept of kodawari is to apply it to circumambulation— to the quest of life itself. You engage with, instead of hiding from, the deeper parts of yourself that seek answers and truth. You want there to be a jewel at the center of the maze, but either way, you will assume that there is and take the quest seriously.

Even though the path is wandering, it is the honest attempt—knowing that you did your best—that can give your life meaning. What other choice do you have?

What is Kodawari?

By

On May 27, 2020

In Kodawari, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 4 minutes

“Well, here we are Mr.Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

**You can listen to this article’s corresponding podcast episode here.**

As a concept, I knew about kodawari long before I learned the word. My mental model of it was admittedly fuzzy, but as a performing musician, I definitely understood discipline and the relentless struggle towards an ideal.

Most musicians—at least those that weren’t coerced into music from a young age—can pinpoint a moment in their past which set them on their path. This was an inspiring event, such as a concert, that gave them a glimpse of the ideal. The music itself made them feel alive (perhaps for the first time), and the prospect of being able to make those sounds fueled their motivation.

As this often occurs at a younger age, you might not even understand what is happening to you. What you feel is more of an instinct that you are looking in the right direction—you are at the head of a path that will lead somewhere meaningful.

But as beautiful as these inspirational moments are, they aren’t enough. The fire created by that initial spark fades and needs more fuel, and the reality of life is that sometimes you can’t find that fuel. You need a different mental model, a discipline, that will keep you moving forward no matter what.

Kodawari is such a discipline.

I discovered the word kodawari in graduate school, and it stuck with me. In short, kodawari ( こだわり in Japanese) means the pursuit of perfection. It is passion, persistence, commitment, and attention to detail. But it is so much more than that. It is an entire concept whose definition requires at least a few paragraphs. It is so beautiful because, once you have truly connected to it, one word can be a placeholder for an entire world view.

The key to kodawari is that it is personal in nature. It is partially rooted in pride, but not the petty kind. It is the kind of personal pride that you feel when you are alone and you know that you tried your best. It comes from that deeper presence inside your head that watches you and knows when you are cutting corners. Whenever you ignore this discipline you feel weaker, and when you engage with it you feel stronger.

Such discipline is not rooted in some grandiose scheme to impress others or to achieve external validation. It is your personal standard, and it is how you foster self-respect. While you appreciate the beauty it creates along the way, you also realize that you never fully arrive anywhere.

We are, after all, prisoners in the present moment, and it is unclear where our path leads. Kodawari is not justifying your hard work and effort for the temporary external gains. It is realizing, as Kurt Vonnegut says, that there is no why. Or rather, the hard work—being the best you can be—is itself the meaning in life, the why.

So embedded in the kodawari meaning is the knowledge that perfection cannot be attained. Yet you pursue it nonetheless.

Sure, it is cliché to express the sentiment of “life is about the journey, not the destination”. And clichés do have a bad reputation for being shallow—unworthy of deep reflection. But the problem with clichés is that they are true, but people have forgotten why. They are overused and uttered in careless ways, rendering them empty.

So kodawari is the life philosophy stating that one should pursue perfection, even while knowing from the outset that perfection never arrives. There’s nothing wrong with the inspirational spark that sets you off in pursuit of your craft. You want to play the most beautiful music, cook the most delicious meal, and stop people in their tracks when they taste your wine. It guides your path, but it is also a carrot on a stick.

So instead, make kodawari itself your inspirational fuel. In one sense it’s practical—your motivation to work hard has to be deep if it is to survive your inevitable failures. And in a deeper sense, it can give your life meaning.

Perhaps this is the axiom—the leap of faith—which underlies my claim: the meaning in life comes from taking on the responsibility of trying your best. Because however good you are at lying to yourself, that deeper voice inside knows whether or not you worked hard enough.

And although you can enjoy the checkpoints along the way, the knowledge of kodawari is your real fuel. Arrivals and temporary gains cannot counter the tragedy and suffering in life. But kodawari can.

The kodawari energy is a leap of faith that tomorrow could be better than today if you do your best at something. It is optimism mixed with the knowledge that hard work is also required. Optimism without hard work is naive, but together they have enormous potential.

And kodawari tends to spread. It will spread throughout your own life, and you will inspire it in others. Begin by engaging with it in a small way. It could be a hobby or even something as trivial as washing the dishes. Attend to whatever you’re doing with full focus and persistence. You will enjoy the sense of pride at knowing that you were thorough and attentive to the details.

Seek out people who exhibit the kodawari energy, and foster it in yourself. Who knows how it will change you.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén