Tag: psychology

Reading Time: 14 minutes

nihilism, infinity, ouroboros — Infinite Ouroboros

Anyone who has struggled with existential issues has probably bumped into the problem of nihilism, a philosophy that seems to influence so much these days. Nihilism comes in many forms, but on a zoomed-out level, it more or less states this: against the infinity of the cosmos and the absurd nature of human life, there is no intrinsic meaning or value to be found.

People have various reactions to that claim, ranging from an instinctive flinch away to a full-on agreement. But both ignoring nihilism and succumbing to it are bad solutions. The better path is to fully contend with nihilism—to intellectually give it its due—with the goal of overcoming it and connecting to a deeper instinct of meaning.

Nihilism and Camus’s Question

There is no question that a huge portion of life contains darkness—everyone faces death, suffering, and malevolence. Philosophers like Camus described the human condition as being absurd, going so far as to say the fundamental philosophical question was suicide:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
Albert Camus, the myth of sisyphus

That is quite the intense framing, but it cuts right to the core of whether life has meaning, or at least enough to balance the darkness. Many people answer such a question by believing in an eternalist philosophy. Whether through a God, a cosmic plan, or some other abstraction, they make meaning definite by removing it from the unreliable subjectivity of humans.

Others avoid truly questioning the meaning of life through distraction and pretense, tacitly ignoring questions about life, suffering, and meaning. And to be fair, it’s not easy to honestly contend with the dark side of the human condition, especially without some kind of grounding in religion or eternalism. In that case, pulling at the thread of meaning is risky—if the whole thing unravels, you’re left with suffering and meaninglessness.

But can we really avoid Camus’s question? It might feel better in the short term to ignore questions about absurdity and meaning in life or to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. But in my view, we ignore wrestling with nihilism at our own risk, as the nihilistic chickens usually come home to roost.

The Prickly Intellect

Opposite those that ignore the darkness are the “intellectually rigorous” people that take pride in honestly admitting to it. When faced with the question “why is there meaning to human life?”, they stare into the abyss of infinite regression and realize that only a religious answer can create axiomatic meaning. So for them, the only intellectually rigorous conclusion is that there is no inherent meaning to life—many find a sense of comfort in the honesty and consistency of this nihilistic conclusion.

And as we argued in our podcast episode on nihilism and the meaning crisis, an honest person should struggle with nihilism because it gets certain things right. In its cosmic, existential, and moral manifestations, nihilism has valid concerns that you should not carelessly toss aside. One should engage with nihilism and struggle with its arguments, but with a catch: you should do so with the goal of overcoming it, of finding a deeper and more sustaining sense of meaning in the process.

Because at the end of the day—and no matter what nihilism gets right—it seems like suffering only gets worse when nihilistic philosophies propagate. Nihilism might be more intellectually consistent, but perhaps the intellect should not be the only source of truth. As the spiritual teacher Ram Dass said, “the intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master”.

So this article will briefly explore the history and philosophy of nihilism along with how it manifests in today’s society. Following that, it will explore ways to define meaning outside of the religious framework, a meaning that can help you overcome nihilism in an honest and durable way.

What Is Nihilism?

Nihilism, coming from the Latin nihil (meaning nothing), is the philosophy asserting that there is no basis for values and meaning in life. The term became widely popular after its use in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Father and Sons, and it represented a kind of radical skepticism towards epistemology. If there is no God to give meaning to things, how can we be sure about knowing anything? You can find the same Latin root in the word “annihilate” which helps explain nihilism’s influence on anarchist political groups and revolutionary movements.

For some, annihilation meant terrorism and violent revolution. But the annihilation aspect of nihilism need not be physical—it could also mean extreme skepticism towards knowledge and values. This epistemological nihilism annihilates knowledge structures by pointing out that knowledge and truth have no fundamental grounding—nothing stops you from infinitely asking the question “but why is that true?”. It is reflected in a lot of postmodern philosophies popular today.

But the skepticism inside of nihilism has a long history, one that particularly synced up with the Englightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Enlightenment concepts and scientific thinking led human beings to question everything, including the fundamental axioms of their culture. Besides epistemology, other popular branches of nihilism include political, moral, and cosmic.

But probably the most common and encompassing definition of nihilism—and the one most relevant to our personal psychology—is existential nihilism.

Existential Nihilism

Existential nihilism asserts that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. It overlaps with cosmic nihilism in pointing out the lack of purpose in the entire cosmos, but existentialist thinkers focused on the human condition and the existential anxiety we feel in our search for meaning and purpose.

And the absurd nature of existential nihilism is that even in a meaningless world, humans still search for meaning. Even those that have discovered the absurdity still can’t help but desire meaning and purpose. Some of my favorite television shows like Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, and Mad Men explore this tension beautifully.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Nihilism

“What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Nihilism has a strong connection to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1901 work The Will To Power, he warned of the advent of nihilism and the catastrophe that the European culture would encounter because of it. The highest values of the human intellect, in seeking truth and questioning everything, would end up destroying the possibility of value itself.

In Nietzsche’s words, people would discover that there was no “true world” in which to ground any truth claims. This discovery is the endpoint of the extreme skepticism that annihilates knowledge and values. Some cosmic versions of nihilism are passive, but for Nietzsche, this destruction was an active part of nihilism: “nihilism…is not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plow; one destroys.”

When you devalue the foundation from which all other values are rooted, nihilism emerges as the only honest way to view the world. In this view, no value system has a legitimate basis for existing since the foundation of any such system is arbitrary.

Nietzsche’s Solution

Despite his grim diagnosis, Nietzsche did not think of nihilism as an endpoint, and like many existential philosophers, he struggled with how to overcome it. To that end, Nietzsche spoke about becoming unique individuals who create values for themselves:

“We, however, want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Nietzsche seemed to believe that we could find meaning within ourselves by aiming at our unique potential. He said that people “fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly”. But if we have the courage to listen to this higher voice, perhaps it is possible to develop maximally into who we could be. And perhaps this aim creates enough meaning to challenge nihilism.1

Amor Fati

Besides ideas of becoming our unique higher selves, Nietzsche also embraced Amor Fati, the concept of accepting suffering and loving fate. It is an idea that was central to Stoicism, and Nietzsche summed it up as follows:

“That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

I think amor fati goes a long way towards embracing life and avoiding negative emotions like resentment that can tempt one towards nihilism.

Contending with Nihilism

“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”
Albert Camus

I think at one or more points in life, we must all confront the problem of nihilism. And how you approach that confrontation will largely affect the philosophy of life you end up building for yourself.

Embracing nihilism furthers the kind of destruction that Nietzsche warned about. And from what I can tell, ignoring it only pushes those thoughts into the shadows of the mind where they can more deceptively influence behavior.

Embracing Nihilism

You can embrace nihilism actively and passively, and both lead to problems. Passive nihilism is more of the cosmic nihilism gestured at by writers like Kurt Vonnegut—”we are just here to fart around”—and by shows like Rick and Morty.

Passive nihilists do not wish for destruction, but they also struggle to build a proper argument against nihilism. Looking back on my younger self, I could express my passive nihilism as a “what human concerns really matter in this giant universe” kind of attitude. And knowing some astrophysics about the eventual heat death of the universe did not help…

Passive nihilism might be less destructive, and its honesty towards the dark aspects of life can be weirdly comforting. But it created resistance against self-improvement, and as I aged, the comfort was slowly replaced with a sense of existential anxiety.

Active Nihilism

Active nihilism means you actually follow through on the logic of the philosophy to varying degrees. When taken to its extreme, the active nihilist might be resentful towards Being itself—they believe it would be better if nobody existed.2

For most, active nihilism fuels one to question all truth claims with prickly intellectual methods that make everything relative—a “there is no absolute truth” kind of philosophy. Skepticism can be healthy, but the nihilist’s extreme skepticism/relativism can be too easily used to justify immoral behavior.

To use the metaphor of a house, relativists point out that where you put the ground floor—your culture’s axioms—is arbitrary. Adherents to Michel Foucault and other postmodernist thinkers, in claiming that you cannot separate knowledge and power, would say that the ground-floor axioms of knowledge are mostly about those in power maintaining control over others.

There are some legitimate aspects to that way of thinking, but claiming that knowledge is either arbitrary or fundamentally about power misses the most crucial aspect of our reality: either Being continues or it doesn’t—either the house collapses or it doesn’t. So while it is true that you theoretically can put the ground floor of a house anywhere you want, houses built on firm bedrock with a high bearing capacity are more stable than those built on flimsy soil. And the same logic holds true for axiomatic claims and their load-bearing ability to sustain civilization.

But the active nihilism I observe today does not seem to care about how durable the house is, so to speak. It questions and destroys cultural norms and values without concern, perhaps even with a malicious delight. This overly active skepticism—”putting one’s shoulder to the plow” in Nietzsche’s words—destroys value after value without knowing (or maybe even caring) whether human societies can survive the absence of certain load-bearing values.

Certain cultural norms and truths should be questioned and destroyed, but I do not think that relativism and nihilism can ever be proper justifications. And the irony that living by an absolute truth of “there is no absolute truth” seems lost on the relativistic nihilists.

Being

“The knowledge that nothing matters, while accurate, gets you nowhere.”
Dan Harmon

For me, overcoming nihilism comes down to one fundamental assumption that we can find deep within ourselves: Being is good. The light of human consciousness is a mystery and a miracle, and to let that miracle succumb to the darkness would be a tragedy. But since life is filled with suffering and tragedy, we need meaningful reasons to sustain ourselves and our species.

So if we need to believe in meaning to sustain Being, then we should make it our life’s mission to continually seek it—that is justifiable bedrock for me. This kind of meaning, grounded in the belief of Being, does not come from outside ideologies or intellectually clever arguments, but from deep within.

Is Nihilism on the Rise?

Trying to empirically figure out if nihilism is on the rise goes beyond the scope of this article, but I do want to briefly comment on my motivation for writing on this topic. In my experience over the last few years, I began suspecting an implicit/passive nihilism influencing many people’s behavior. It is reflected academically in the postmodern traditions and culturally in the popular political ideologies that casually destroy long-held Western values—Chesterton’s Fence is relevant here.

Changing outdated, non-inclusive, and unfair cultural norms is important for progress. But it is also important to do so thoughtfully, humbly, and with a guiding motivation that Being is good—that we should continue the miracle of human consciousness. I think ideology is dangerous wherever it comes from on the political spectrum, but it is many of the leftist/social justice ideologies that seem to flirt with nihilism these days. While these ideologies claim to be guided by virtue and compassion, under the surface it seems like there is implicit anger, resentment, and even sometimes a nihilistic urge to destroy.

One hypothesis would be that failing to consciously contend with nihilism pushes it into our subconscious, where it can influence our behavior in more deceptive ways. Another hypothesis is that the anxiety of nihilism causes many minds to implicitly seek out its opposite: dogmatic ideology and totalitarian certainty. That second hypothesis explains why many political movements have taken on religious fervor.

I frankly do not know what is going on, and my opinions on this topic are still fairly open and curious. But my instinct tells me that the dogmatic and righteous-sounding ideologies popular today have something to do with nihilism. For some, the ideology might be a cover story for their urge to destroy. But the majority might not realize how self-destructive certain philosophies are—they believe the label on the ideology box without knowing what is inside. Whatever is happening is above my understanding, but my instinct detects growing nihilistic darkness in our societies.

The image of the ouroboros at the top of this article—the mythical serpent that destroys itself—reflects the infinite regression of nihilistic skepticism combined with the desire to destroy, even if subconscious.

Finding the Meaning of Meaning

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

On the one hand, choosing meaning over nihilism has an easy explanation: nihilism does not help you deal with the suffering in life. It either has no effect on suffering and tragedy or more likely, makes them worse. So for me, the intellectual reason for choosing meaning rests on the assumption that Being is good and that reducing suffering is also good.

But to understand what meaning is, I think we must move beyond the intellect. The intellect craves precision and consistency, but for me, meaning is an instinct that comes from non-intellectual parts of myself, including the body.

What Is Meaning?

The prickly skepticism inside of nihilism wants to prove that meaning is empty if you cannot precisely define it. The intellect seeks to understand the world by boxing things into neat categories, especially when language is involved. A precise definition is great at telling you what something is, but to box something in is also to box it out. When you give something too precise a definition, you box it out of all the other possible manifestations.

And some words are too deep to be precisely one thing. We can still use the word, but we should know that the word is merely a label for an experience. It gestures at a concept that originates from places deeper than the intellect, including the body. The body is our primary connection to the world, and its signals are more honest than the deceptive nature of words and intellectual prickliness.

Our ancestors connected to meaning and Being through their bodies long before language existed, as did we during development. As Iain McGilchrist says in his book about our divided brain structure:

“The very words which form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience”
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

So if epistemological nihilism would assert that there is no ultimate meaning because all explicit knowledge must be defined in relation to other knowledge—like defining words with other words—then a good retort is that we can ground meaning in the human body and its experience.

To find meaning, then, we should not be tempted by the intellect to think of ourselves as abstract biological machines that happen to have an intellect. We are instead an embodied consciousness, and it is okay to be guided by the deeper embodied instinct towards meaning.

Meaning Is Surrender

“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”
Carl Jung

Another way to express meaning is to say that meaning is surrender, specifically surrender of the intellect. Meaning created by the intellect is misguided, and it tends to flirt with dogma and ideology. But the sense of meaning that comes primarily from our bodies is deeper and implicit. It manifests itself to us from outside of our conscious awareness, such as when something triggers goosebumps or tears. Meaningful signals from the body also convince me in crucial moments that love is a deeper value than anything else, even truth.

To believe in meaning, therefore, is to surrender to the signals of meaning that come from our entire nervous system. The instinct for meaning might be an evolutionarily adaptive guiding system that kept our ancestors properly oriented. In this evolutionary view, the instinct to do meaningful things, something we feel rather than think, might be what keeps us on a balanced path that sustains Being.

Meaning Is Pointing

For those whose intellect is still holding on, there is one other concept that might help you choose meaning over nihilism. I first encountered it in Kevin Simler’s article titled A Nihilist’s Guide to Meaning, which tries to more explicitly define meaning.

After similarly describing the implicit sense of meaning outlined above—meaning as a bodily feeling/perception—Simler tries to more precisely define meaning to be pointing:

“A thing X will be perceived as meaningful in context C to the extent that it’s connected to other meaningful things in C.”

In this formulation, meaning is all about connectedness. Something is meaningful if other meaningful things depend on it. Your life has meaning because other meaningful people and things depend on you. And in such an environment filled with meaning, having more connections pointing outward makes your life more meaningful.

This meaning-as-pointing concept is a narrative tool used in many movies, perhaps most famously in It’s a Wonderful Life. In it, we understand the interconnectedness of meaning by observing the effects of removing points from the meaning web.

“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

This conceptualization does not solve the infinite regression problem—you still have to assume some inherent meaning somewhere to get the meaning web up and running. But for me, appreciating this interconnectedness makes life more meaningful, and it’s far better than focusing on the dark abyss.

Nihilism: Brilliant Outrage

“Famously, there’s not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It’s not progressing toward anything, it’s a statement of outrage, however brilliant”
Alan Moore

The intellectual arguments for nihilism are strong, and emotions of fatigue and resentment towards life can make it all the more tempting. Especially if we think belief in some eternal/religious entity is the only alternative, nihilism appears to at least come with some intellectual honesty and consistency.

But I think the nihilist/eternalist dichotomy is false, and it is okay to find yourself somewhere in between those two poles. You can contend with nihilism and understand where it’s right without becoming a nihilist, and you can also connect to a more nebulous and mysterious source of meaning without being religious. Staying on a middle path like this creates a true-to-yourself meaning, one that will make you less tempted by the comfort of dogmatism or ideology.

To be clear, I am not pretending to have solved the meaning crisis by intellectually beating nihilism’s arguments. I am purposefully bypassing the intellect to ground meaning in personal experience. The nihilist might call this an intellectual foul that in no way proves an objective or ultimate case for meaning. But when you compare such intellectual skepticism with the undeniable meaning of things like crying at a wedding, crying at a funeral, getting goosebumps at the climax of a symphony, holding a baby, having an uncontrollable belly laugh with someone you love, wistfully reminiscing about a cherished memory—the list could go on and on—the prickly/brilliantly sharp arguments for nihilism seem pathetically small.

So don’t be afraid of nihilism—contend with it and intellectually understand it. But to overcome it, surrender your intellect, go home to your body, and connect to the obvious truth of meaning.

Metacognition: The Bird’s Eye View of the Mind

By Luke

On December 4, 2021

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 10 minutes

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

Metacognitive Model of Mindfulness (Tomasz Jankowski)
Meta-Cognition in Mindfulness: A Conceptual Analysis (Dilwar Hussain)
Metacognitive Awareness and Prevention of Relapse in Depression: Empirical Evidence (Teasdale, J. D. et al.)
Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day by Amishi P. Jha
Mindful Games by Susan Kaiser Greenland

Stoicism as a Philosophy of Life

By Luke

On July 28, 2021

In Philosophy, Self-Improvement, Stoicism

Reading Time: 12 minutes

definition of stoicism and stoic beliefs

The definition of Stoicism as a philosophy is not the same as being lowercase s stoical—it is not being immune to feelings and emotions. Rather, Stoicism beliefs guide us to down-regulate negative emotions and promote well-being. Stoicism is a philosophy of life that brings you into harmony with nature, with what is.

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, says “nothing can happen to me that isn’t natural” and later that “nothing natural is evil”. And in Stoic philosophy, this harmony with reality is the source of wisdom and tranquility in life, something much more valuable than even happiness.

**Click here to listen to the podcast episode that corresponds to this article**

Stoicism, founded in the 3rd century BC by Zeno of Citium, is one of the most influential philosophies from the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. And since the end of the 20th century, it has been undergoing an impressive revival.

The name comes from the “stoa” or porch in Athens where Zeno gave his lectures. Following Zeno’s death, Stoicism would continue to develop first under Zeno’s pupil Cleanthes and later under Cleanthes’s pupil Chrysippus. They and other Greek philosophers provided the more academic underpinnings of Stoicism, but only fragments survive from their writings.

Luckily, Stoic philosophy spread to other areas after Chrysippus’s death, most notably to Rome. Stoicism particularly resonated with the Roman aristocracy and according to Gregory Hays became “the real religion of upper-class Romans”. The most notable Roman Stoics were Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

But what is Stoicism?

This article will answer that less from the academic and historical perspective and more from the personal and practical wisdom of Roman Stoicism. The Roman Stoics had specific techniques for avoiding negative emotions and improving one’s life. Stoicism as a philosophy of self-improvement also fits in well with Exploring Kodawari’s approach to life.

But before giving the definition of Stoicism, let’s first highlight the importance of having any kind of philosophy of life to guide you.

A Philosophy of Life

In modern times, the word philosopher usually induces the image of a university department. University philosophers specialize in metaphysics, politics, logic, etc, and usually study those topics in a theoretical way. They might teach certain ethics and principles in their lectures, but it’s not obvious that they would actually live by them.

But the thinkers of ancient philosophy—especially Roman and Greek philosophy—had a different conception of the endeavor. They too had academic motivations for being philosophical—such as epistemology, logic, rhetoric, and physics—but they pursued those interests in the service of something else: a philosophy of life.

For them, developing a philosophy of life—a doctrine for living a virtuous and good life—was the entire reason for studying philosophy. Such a philosophy wasn’t purely abstract and theoretical but also practical and hands-on. A human being ought to live out their chosen philosophy to be a wise man and live with virtue.

And Ancient philosophers formed schools to teach their various wisdom to others. The Cynic school, developed by a student of Socrates named Antisthenes, promoted a monastic life of discipline and abstinence from pleasure. On the other end of the spectrum, the Cyrenaic school—one of the first Socratic schools— pushed for a hedonistic lifestyle. For them, the only truth they could know for sure was their direct sense-experience, making physical pleasure the ultimate good in life.

Epicurus had a similarly hedonistic school of philosophy that challenged the moderation of Platonic thinkers, although with more sophistication than the Cyrenaic school. Epicurean beliefs stated that one ought to extract as much pleasure as possible in life, but Epicureanism also taught enough self-control to avoid the pitfalls of overindulgence.

But most relevant to this article—and a rival to Epicurus—was the Stoic school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium. Stoicism began as a Greek philosophy but later evolved from these Athenian roots to become a life doctrine for upper-class Romans, including the emperor Marcus Aurelius. It is this Roman Stoicism that is most suitable to the modern individual looking to improve their well-being.

A Grand Goal in Life

The key to a philosophy of life is having a hierarchy of values and goals. What is worth pursuing in life? What do you most want out of your life?

And it turns out that answering these questions is much harder than it appears. Setting daily or monthly goals is easier, but stating your big life goals and putting them into a hierarchy is intimidating.

Why do your goals need to be in a hierarchy? Because if two or more goals conflict, then you have to know which one prevails. And at the top of such a hierarchy is your grand goal, or as William Irvine, author of the Stoic book A Guide to the Good Life puts it, “the goal that we should be unwilling to sacrifice to attain other goals”.

So there are two main components to a philosophy of life:

In the most zoomed-out perspective, what do you want out of life? Of all the goals both short and long term, which one is the most valuable?
What strategy will you implement in order to attain that goal?

Most people will freeze at the first question. While they have probably made a plan for their life—career, house, family, etc—they probably haven’t made a plan for how to live. And modern life makes this aimless life far too easy. As Irvine says at the opening of his book:

“Our culture doesn’t encourage people to think about such things; indeed, it provides them with an endless stream of distractions so they won’t ever have to. But a grand goal in living is the first component of a philosophy of life. This means that if you lack a grand goal in living, you lack a coherent philosophy of life.”
william ırvine, A guide to the good lıfe

Luckily, Stoicism has answers to both of those questions. But even if Stoicism does not become your philosophy of life, hopefully, you can see the value of having some kind of philosophy to guide you.

The Definition of Stoicism

The definition of Stoicism, at least the Roman version most applicable to ordinary people, is more ethical and personal. It helps an individual live a better life. The motivation for adopting it is nicely expressed by a series of questions posed by Gregory Hays in his introduction to Marcus Aurelius:

“The questions that the Meditations tries to answer are primarily metaphysical and ethical ones: Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we ensure that what we do is right? How can we protect ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life? How should we deal with pain and misfortune? How can we live with the knowledge that someday we will no longer exist?”
Gregory hays

These ethical questions especially express the definition of Stoicism from the Roman perspective. While the Greeks like Chrysippus spent more time on theoretical concepts such as logic and physics, these were not the focus for Roman Stoics like Marcus Aurelius. At the end of Book 1, Marcus even gives thanks to the gods that he “didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics”.

Tranquility

“Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’ “
Marcus Aurelius, Medıtatıons

With the philosophy of life framing, the definition of Stoicism can be summed up by stating its grand goal for living, tranquility.

Tranquility, or ataraxia in Greek, is a state of equanimity similar to the goal of Buddhist mindfulness meditation. It does not mean being immune to emotions (like the modern word stoical) or having neutral emotions. Instead, it means a kind of framing that contains the whole range of emotional experiences, one that puts you at peace with the world. A Stoic will observe their own life carefully and practice specific techniques for avoiding negative emotions and maintaining tranquility.

So the goal of Stoicism is not happiness—tranquility is something more subtle. A state of constant happiness, even though it’s probably not psychologically attainable, is also not something you would want. Life will have external challenges and setbacks. But Stoic principles provide an internal framing for these setbacks that prevents suffering and promotes joy. As Marcus Aurelius said:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
marcus aurelius, Medıtatıons

Stoic wisdom tells us that it is usually our reaction to a setback in life, not the setback itself, that causes suffering. Aiming at the goal of tranquility, especially of accepting what we cannot control, will provide a deeper sense of well-being amid life’s challenges. Stoics believe—and you can try their techniques for yourself—that positive emotion will automatically follow the acceptance of Stoic principles.

Stoicism Beliefs

In addition to the goal of tranquility, the definition of Stoicism can also be expressed through some of the fundamental Stoic beliefs. If you internalize the logic and connection between these Stoic beliefs, it will help you to understand the philosophy.

I do not think one has to become irrational or unscientific to become a Stoic, but accepting the premise and logic of these Stoicism beliefs seems a necessary prerequisite for attaining Stoic tranquility.

Determinism & Logos

Like all philosophies, Stoicism requires some underlying assumptions to make sense. The first is that the universe follows a rational and predetermined chain of cause and effect. This is supported by the concept of determinism in modern physics, which states that all matter in the universe—from the beginning of time until now—follows a chain reaction according to the laws of physics.

The Stoics thought of this determinism as a cosmic force that they called the Logos. Logos on the universal scale is synonymous with nature or God, and it organized the world in a coherent way. The universal Logos determined fate in Stoic philosophy, but on the personal scale, logos was the ability for the individual to think and reason.

“It was for the best. So Nature had no choice but to do it.”
marcus aurelıus

A second crucial assumption was that the Logos is good. To find tranquility against the challenges of life, one has to assume that the overall design, nature as a whole, is harmonious and good (not indifferent). In this view, bad fate is ultimately good if it advances the overall design of the Logos.3

Does that mean that we don’t have free will? The Stoics worked this out by emphasizing the control we had over our internal psychology. As Gregory Hays writes, the Stoics defined free will as “a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable”.2

Everything Changes

“Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom.”
marcus aurelıus

In sync with the determinism of the Logos, another Stoicism belief is the concept that everything is always changing. This echoes the famous words of Heraclitus that “the only thing constant is change”, including ourselves.

Marcus says that “there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it”. The emphasis on accepting change in Stoicism echoes Buddhist teachings that warn against getting attached to the externals.

That is because the externals are always changing, and it is unwise to anchor our well-being to something unreliable. Like Zen Buddhism, Stoicism emphasizes the transitory nature of everything so that we can learn to overcome our insatiable desires.

As we will see later, the concept of change also leads to the logical realization that we must accept our own change and eventual death.

The Dichotomy of Control

The first two Stoicism beliefs emphasize the overall design of the universe, the constant change of cause and effect. And in the face of that, Epictetus opens his Handbook with the following:

“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.”
Epıctetus

This concept is known as the dichotomy of control. It states that we should understand what we do and do not have self-control over. If we spend time worrying about external events that we can’t control, we will suffer. So it is much wiser to spend time on affecting what we can definitely control, namely our internal goals and desires.

William Irvine avoids the potential false dichotomy by reworking this into the trichotomy of control:

Things for which we have complete control
Things for which we have no control
Things for which we have partial control

Understanding the dichotomy of control is key to understanding the definition of Stoicism. It is the wisdom to know when we should fight and when we should surrender. When we struggle for something that we have no control over, we are wasting our time and do not have tranquility.

This Stoic wisdom echoes the Christian serenity prayer, which asks for courage to change what one can change, serenity to accept what one cannot change, and wisdom to know the difference.

Stoic beliefs and techniques logically conclude that we should focus our energy on things we do have control over, namely our goals, values, and character.

Framing & The Art of Acquiescence

If I were pressed to give a one-phrase definition of Stoicism, it might be “the art of acquiescence”. The Stoic beliefs are all interdependent, but this one specifically follows from the dichotomy of control.

The art of acquiescence is the wisdom—the skill—to gracefully accept that which you cannot control. If you can change the externals, then go ahead and do it. But if you can’t, you should focus your energy on accepting reality and framing it to prevent negative emotions.

And the Stoics did this by separating our perception into two functions. First is phantasia, the initial mental impression received by our senses. We don’t have control over this. But the perception of this, the hypolepsis, is the value judgment that we place on our mental impressions. And we do have self-control over this, even in extreme circumstances. The mindful pause is a relevant skill here as it will help prevent your automatic judgments.3

So framing is this discipline of how we interpret our life circumstances. You might not be able to prevent something bad from happening to you, but you always have freedom in how you interpret it. As Marcus says: “Choose not to be harmed —and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed —and you haven’t been.”

Even when you have partial control over external events, the fact remains that you will always have more control over your internal framing.

And a good framing is one in which we acquiesce to reality while also safeguarding what is under our control: our psychology, our soul. Marcus regularly reminds us to protect our spirit within from negativity and false beliefs. Framing ourselves as a victim or becoming resentful will always stain our character and make us suffer more.

This points at the most powerful reframing technique in the Stoic toolbox: viewing everything that happens to you, even bad things, as a blessing instead of a curse. It is summed up beautifully by Marcus at the end of Book 4:

“So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.”
marcus aurelius

Said differently—in fact, this might also be a concise definition of Stoicism—you should believe that things happen for you and not to you.

Mortality

All of these Stoic beliefs logically lead to the most difficult acquiescence: our own mortality.

If everything is always changing, as determined by Logos, then we must apply this understanding to ourselves. We must accept the small role we play in the larger design and the brief time that we have to play it. Marcus reminds us that death is the great equalizer—that after death, Alexander the Great and his mule driver became the same, “absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms”.

The Stoics also believed that people fear death because they are disturbed at how they mislived. Without a philosophy of life, they probably wandered aimlessly and didn’t attain valuable goals. But with Stoicism as a guide, one can be sure to have an aim, and they will almost definitely attain virtue and tranquility. And as Marcus says, doing so will ensure that our mind “accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.”

This means that the definition of Stoicism becomes personal to you and your conscience. Even if others don’t recognize it, you won’t fear death because you will know that you lived a good life.

“And if the others don’t acknowledge it—this life lived with simplicity, humility, cheerfulness —he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.”
marcus aurelıus

Stoicism Beliefs vs. Enlightened Hedonism

In some sense, the definition of Stoicism is really framing your life to be a hero and not a victim. As a philosophy of life, it is a way of understanding your mind and the world so that you can increase your gratitude and tranquility.

The Stoics even had specific techniques to induce these emotions, which we will cover in a future article. But the zoomed-out message from this article is that even if Stoicism is not for you, you need something to guide your life. Because without any philosophy, you will probably default to what William Irvine calls enlightened hedonism, the smarter and more planned version of hedonism.

“Furthermore, whatever philosophy of life a person ends up adopting, she will probably have a better life than if she tried to live—as many people do—without a coherent philosophy of life.”
william ırvıne, a guıde to the good lıfe

And lastly, you don’t have to fully convert to Stoicism to benefit from its wisdom. Like all religions and philosophies, I think you can dine à la carte and only take the bits that work for you.

So consider Stoicism as your philosophy of life. Or simply read about Stoicism from time to time—even this is enough to find nuggets of wisdom that will change your perspective on life.

Mental Models And Critical Thinking

By Luke

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 Luke

On November 9, 2020

In Meditation, Mental Frameworks, Self-Improvement

Reading Time: 8 minutes

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.4

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

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1994). Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization.
“The mind is a system of modules shaped by natural selection” by Peter Carruthers
“Consciousness and the Modularity of Mind” by Harry Haroutioun Haladjian
A collection of articles on mental architecture
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
How to Begin Naming by Jack Kornfield

Tag: psychology

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Metacognition And Learning

Metacognition And Language Learning

Meta-Awareness And Mindfulness

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Modular Model of Mind

Messy Modules

Mental Sandboxes

Camping And De-Camping

Gooey vs. Prickly

Gooey Prickles And Prickly Goo

Metacognition: Final Thoughts

Scientific Resources

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A Philosophy of Life

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Your Toolbox For Critical Thinking

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Logical Fallacies

Physics

Engineering Frameworks

Conclusion: Critical Thinking Is Critical

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The Modular Theory of Mind

The Modular Theory of Mind

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

Cognitive Modules

Messy Modules

Mindfulness: We are not our modules

Emotions and Modules

“Here there be dragons”

Additional Resources