#cognition habitualization

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the biggest improvements I had with the "constantly triggered" problem, about a month ago or maybe closer to two now, was realizing that:

parts of my brain's threat-prediction and how I reflexively run scenarios are the integrated singlet's equivalent of an "abuser introject";

with most abusers, the right solution is not to argue, it's to state your boundaries, ignore their bullshit, maybe leave the situation, and be ready to defend yourself if they escalate to attempted harm - so if the introject is an accurate model of the abuser, you shouldn't argue with the introject either;

to the extent that the brain is trying to prepare for conflict with this person, an optimal abuser introject is at least as capable and persistent as the real abuser, and keeps coming up with the next argument, the next rationalization, the next difficult-to-overcome move that the person might do - so fighting with the inner model of the shitty person is just prompting your brain to escalate;

if your brain still thinks it needs to predict or be ready for an external threat, that's not going to go away no matter how many times you convince/beat the version of the threat in your head.

So this really made it instantly clear for me that my habit of mentally running scenarios of arguments/fights was literally doing more to implement flat copies of the most triggering people I could think of in my own brain, whose whole function was to shittily come at me in my thoughts in every moment such a person possibly could. Also made it clear that it was often no longer productive, because nowadays I have better solutions.

This clarity gave me the last piece I needed to quickly habitualize myself to just acknowledge it as my brain detecting a potential problem from a potential shitty person, maybe feel some gratitude, but otherwise move on and ignore it instead of engaging in the relevant arguments or scenarios in my head.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

Under-defined question.

Taking omniscience to the logical limit, you kinda wouldn't need to navigate it or anything else ever again, you would just know both the solutions and possibly your next steps.

But I suppose you mean a more... scoped knowledge, perhaps just access to all facts - all things that are true/happening.

Similarly, navigate what aspects of it? There's so many possible angles, ramifications, challenges, dilemmas.

---

At first it would be very trippy. I'm assuming worst still-manageable scenario here, to make it maximally interesting - knowledge pouring in at every flick of every thought. All of my thoughts that should merely graze abstract concepts about the world suddenly start erupting with detail and expansion, as inevitable and instant and inescapable as the sensory data of thousands of eyes and fingertips and all the other possible senses converging to examine every facet of that thing.

So I'd probably be catatonic for a while, or if I'm lucky merely really struggle and make immediate efforts to safely minimize all need to be anything external. Like a huge dose of hallucinogens, it would be very easy to slip into delusion, simply by losing track of everything.

(I suppose it's worth disclaiming that I have more than average proficiency with some meditative mental skills. In particular, "don't think about elephants" is actually really easy for me, I barely even had any piece of elephant concept flit through my mind, as I was thinking of and writing this example - like, we'd need to measure thinking about elephants in the smallest perceptible increments of time and individual cognemes, that's how little I thought of them. And that would be really helpful with any difficult-to-control omniscience - you really don't want to be figuring this shit out after you're already Knowing everything about elephants at the mere thought of them, saturating your mind and tumbling uncontrollably into more Knowing by association. You would pick it up "on the job", but it might take more time than you have.)

Your long-term memory, logical skill, and habitualized cognition is your only lifeline here, because if you could know everything there is to know about someone else's current experience, but you have only one person's worth of conscious attention, working memory, and scope, how do you know you're not them? How do you not forget yourself and get lost in someone else's experience stream the moment you slip into turning your omniscience onto them? If the omniscience includes full vivid sensory/experiential knowledge, you could at any moment experience being them as vividly as they do, just as vividly as you experience being you.

Well, you have one other fortunate escape hatch - you slip out as easily as you slip in. They are shackled to their experience stream, their senses, but you

can perceive and experience all there is to perceive and experience - even if you totally lose yourself, they or you will think something in reaction to something that turns your attention elsewhere, and suddenly you have senses they don't, you're not them anymore, you peel off, and as you notice the peeling you are reminded that you are at least more than just them; and

still have your physical senses... somewhere, if you can quiet your mind and find them.

Like an infant learning to make sense of the world, but now luckily with full adult faculties, you can learn this reality as you did your first one. You will learn to shift your attention until you are good at finding the split between your meandering now-omnisciently-unconstrained experiencing and the experiencing of any other mind that you merely omnisciently perceive into. At spotting the forks in the road where your attention and theirs turn to different things, de-syncing your experience streams once again. And I don't think this would take very long, because unless your cognition is exactly the same in response to all stimuli, sync will only happen very briefly, when you first accidentally indulge/slip into fully knowing someone's current experience. Thinking things that cause desync and noticing desync will eventually be quick and reliable, as natural as turning your head to look elsewhere.

---

Your next task, once you are good at not losing yourself in others, is to find yourself again. That's actually three tasks.

One is that you must rediscover, conceptually, that you are just a tiny little agent within the universe. No, are not everything, despite an infinity of raw sense data to the contrary. The distinction will be profoundly subtle. No matter how dissimilar to your normal sense data your new knowledge access is, no matter how abstract and thought-like it is, you will have full mental access to every single detail about the universe. Far more detailed and complete than your physical senses and internal introspection have ever been. At every moment and whim, everywhere you "look" with your newfound omniscience, you will have access to more, in some form or other, than your whole lifetime of senses.

And for every action you observe in the universe, every single choice a mind makes, your retroactively-weaving-a-self-narrative human brain faculty will have all the data it needs to craft a convincing subjective experience that actually yes, you did do those actions, you made that choice, because after all, you can know so vividly every single mental experience motivating that choice... you know each of those reasons more fully than you ever knew your own reasons for your choices.

(I hope you weren't running/driving/etc when the omniscience hit. The good news is, if you're able to have this thought, either your body and brain is still fine, or you don't might not need it anymore.)

Two is that at a conscious perception level, you must re-learn to notice and focus on your actual sensory data. Since I'm assuming the worst possible case that we could still manage (and because I think it would be hard to expose and process all that knowledge in a human mind in any other way), I'm imagining the omniscience is fully sense-like, to the point that making out your non-omniscience sources of sense data within a full universe vividly accessible as sense data would be... a challenge. If you're lucky, if you are to have a chance at all, the non-omniscience sense data it's qualitatively "elsewhere", still a separate channel, the way that when you stick your finger in water, the visual and the tactile and the temporature sensations are all technically coming from different mental "directions", and you're just subconsciously stitching them together into one, overlaying them.

And speaking of overlaying, three is finding yourself within your omniscience. If you're lucky, this is super easy, you just think of yourself or things immediately in/on/at/around yourself, and your omniscience goes there. If you're unlucky, your brain has to learn the correlations, and during the initial onset you've meandered your omscience gaze fuck knows were. If you're a down-to-earth person, you're probably still omnisciencing something on this planet. If this happens to me? We could easily be looking at Hubble Ultra Deep Field scales/distances of meandering by the time I remember/realize that I'm not the universe, I'm still just a human back on Earth, and I can't turn my omniscience back on myself until I first find my non-omniscience sense data. (There are some worse possibilities, where you can only navigate your omniscience of things in space like moving. Still manageable, you might just end up with a less useful subset of your omniscience, where you mostly end up just ignoring the physical part because you jumped to some random galaxy. Debatable if that's still omniscience - I feel like if I don't know which direction is this galaxy/planet/etc, it's not really omniscience anymore, but I see the sketch or a possible information theory argument to the contrary for finite minds trying to sort through omniscience, so I'm including it for completeness.)

The good news is, you've done this before. Your brain learned to overlay and synchronize and, crucially, distinguish, those senses, in infancy. You can probably do it again. I am fairly confident I could, and this confidence would keep me calm and collected despite the time pressure. Because if I'm lucky, I have a few days to do this, at most, unless someone waters my body in the meantime, whether that's IV drip, feeding tube, or just pouring water vaguely in the area of my mouth and hoping some swallowing reflex does the rest. And it would be so easy to lose track of time. On the plus side, if I'm not having much success, panic and frustration are both strong bodily sense data.

I would also attempt differentiating willful actions - ones which introduce big sensory differences, that I could use to help discriminate, and ones which are unlikely to cause physical consequences: blink, breathe, swallow, gentle slow finger movements, curl toes, flex muscles in-place. If that fails, there's always more macroscopic things. Splay out fingers, clench fist tight (risk of catching fingers on something and breaking them, risk of grasping something sharp and cutting/stabbing hand). Full body flail, if you like to live dangerously (realistically, if your body is already in a safe spot, and especially if it's laying down, the worst you're likely to do is a serious concussion - bad, but you'll have plenty of time and omniscience to cure the brain plaques that form before the Parkinson's or Alzheimer's takes you). The key thing here is that by the time you're a functioning human, you have muscle memory for these things - you don't need the sensory feedback loop to set them in motion, simply mentally moving to do them should be enough, and then you just have to listen.

Hopefully by the time I've figured all this out, I haven't even pissed myself. (On the plus side, that too is non-omniscience sense data.)

---

By the way, even if the omniscience spans time, even if all time exists simultaneously to you, that doesn't actually add fundamentally new challenges, it's actually still the same class of problem, there's just one more dimension for your attention to meander in (at worst, it increases the cardinality of an infinity of things you could forget yourself in, or if the universe is finite, it turns a nearly practically infinite set into an actually infinite one).

A few things bring you back to an arrow of time and let you temporaly localize your bodily "now".

First, thinking and experiencing is inherently an over-time sort of thing. A mind that simultaneously experiences all of its experiences across all of time is purely static, it's not actually thinking, it's not actually experiencing. It's a snapshot, a cross-section. It's the theoretical limit of taking shorter and shorter clips of an experience stream. Like all such abstractions, it seems like an intuitively sensical/real concept until you look closely enough.

At a bare minimum, even if raw experiences/qualia are truly infinitely "sliceable"/"thin" with respect to time, changes in experience are inherently sequenced, and thinking is a process, both sequenced and ordered. We have iteration from one mind state to another. If you are an experiencing mind, you have brought your own arrow of time. Even if your entire universe time span is simultaneous to you, even if your entire life exists at once within your senses, your experienced universe cannot simultaneous, simply because you are thinking. If you are a finite mind with omniscience, you are moving your finite attention and working memory over something larger than your in-the-moment mental capacity.

I think, therefore there is at least one time dimension and at least one arrow of time in that dimension.

Second, so long as your omniscient-across-all-time mind is linked to a brain within the universe, a really simple definition of in-universe "now" that follows from your subjective "now". What moment of in-universe time contains the implementation of your current mind state? (Or, more precisely, what slice of time contains this slice of experiencing?)

So finding the current moment within an omniscient awareness of all time is very similar to finding your physical body within an omniscient awareness of the entire universe right now. The subjective experience of the relevant qualia might be very different, but in the abstract it's the same shape of problem, and just as solvable/tractable in principle. You've got a well-defined, conceptually-simple boundary condition, and it's just a practical question of how much work it would take for you to trace/search the available knowledge awareness to find it, if the workings of your omniscience make that particularly automatic and intuitive or totally manual, etc.

---

Okay, so, finally, once I finished all that, I would run free like a child... that might mean I have to do the above process multiple times, if I get so into it that I just lose myself in one sense or another again. That's fine. Eventually I'll be really good at the finding myself, and at not losing myself to begin with. After all, these are all trainable skills.

During the learning phase I would not feel guilty about learning private things. Fuck that. Why would I? Should an infant feel guilty about seeing things and looking at things before they've even learned to consciously control their gaze? No, that would be bullshit.

Thankfully, I have... moderately good mental emotional control.

I talked about losing myself, but honestly the bigger risk and challenge for me would be avoiding triggering myself by turning my attention to all the horrors. There's so so so so much intolerable cruelty and suffering at any given moment in the world.

Thankfully, although I feel like my mental and emotional control could be a lot better about that kind of stuff, I think my toolkit is already a lot better than most have. More importantly, I have a lot of experience with exactly this - too much awareness and vivid apprehension of the possible and actual suffering out there. This ain't my first rodeo. I would handle this better than most, although I'd also sample and fully face more suffering with my omniscience than most would, to really understand and learn.

The other side of that coin is that there's a lot of pleasure and joy and kindness happening in the world. An equally incomprehensible amount. I'd need to make more of a conscious effort to get my traumatized threat-scanning ass to look at those things. I doubt it would capture me, but I could see myself losing a lot of time to it because said traumatized ass might find it very soothing. The risk is that I turn to it for self-medicating, like a drug, tuning in to happy wholesome kind warm experiences that people are having. The possible upside is that this might heal me like almost nothing can.

---

As I got better conscious control, I'd start eventually being very deliberate and restrained about turning my attention to the omniscient knowledge of others' private lives, and very deliberate and habitual about forgetting-by-not-thinking-about-it most such knowledge that I did consciously engage with, for a few reasons:

Compassion/kindness. I simply care about and value the wants and experiences of others.

I enjoy honesty. It's often fullfilling (or rather, contributes to some kind of moral self-image euphoria) and also really lightens my mental overhead. The less I notice/remember about the lives of others in ways they'd be negative about, the less surface area for needing to lie (even just by omission or misleading as-if-I-don't-know action).

It would simply be much much much mentally lighter to not have to track what I know that I'm not supposed to know.

There's profound risk to exposure. Omniscience, or even the slightest fraction of it, even the slightest real capability to bypass conventional perception limits, is absurdly valuable. The greatest powers on Earth would be eventually interested if word got out.

I'd probably enjoy the challenge. All the skills it takes to be more effective despite being a knowledge-limited human are still edifying even after you're omniscient.

I'd have an infinity of better shit to focus on than the private details of others' lives.

---

Omniscience would give me profound peace of mind, resolution, and effectiveness w.r.t. medical issues. No more wondering what if anything is wrong. No more time or effort spent on figuring out how to fix it.

I'd call/walk into exactly the right doctors' offices and tell them exactly what symptoms/knowledge/conclusions/suggestions/requests/wants/demands they need to hear to do the tests/prescribing/referrals/treatment I need.

---

I'm pretty sure if I knew when I'd die or how I'd die, I'd be pretty chill about it, ditto if some disaster was looming.

The nice thing about omniscience is that it solves most of the stresses it could create. Can I do anything about it? Will this work? Oh wow I just know the answer (or at least can know all the things needed to figure out an incomprehensibly more confident/certain/likely answer than I could figure out otherwise). Great, then I'll go do the best of the things I can do, with the strongest imaginable confidence, motivation, and immunity to unconstructive negative emotions.

---

I would be, for the first time in my life, in any human's life, almost totally safe, except from risks I chose to take on (and maybe, theoretically, totally unsolvable risks like "oh fuck, there's the gamma ray burst of a supernova on an intercept course with the Earth, it hits in 16 years and there's nothing we can do", and situations where there's so many risks and threats that I cannot mentally work through my knowledge of them in time to act).

I don't know what that does to a man but based on my results so far, it would mainly make me far more effective and mentally healthier.

---

Over time I'd very carefully start using my omniscience to make things better in increasingly more observable ways. Secure and empower myself and those I trust/value, help and empower everyone I can as much as is safe, improve the world.

(The choice of how to prioritize individual-level help, and who to entrust with any resources or power for doing larger-scale projects, is probably where I'd be most inclined to fully utilize omniscience on the private details of others' lives.)

If at all possible, I'd want to share the reality of my omniscience itself. I'd want the world to at least eventually know. But maybe that won't be possible. (I'd want at least a few people who I could trust to know. That would almost certainly be possible.)

I'm sure I could pump out all sorts of cures and inventions and so on, I'd just need to keep it believable. But as the saying goes, "it's amazing how much you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit". Honestly this is the easiest part. Feeding people ideas and having intelligent discussions where I get a receptive and almost-there person to an epiphany is... really easy? At least for me.

I'd definitely eventually make whatever moves I could to stop the worst people, those who are doing the most heinous things and causing the worst harm and suffering. Most of this would have to be very secretive, but I'd give society opportunity to do their process as much as possible - serial anonymous tips to authorities, that kind of thing. Both because there's many reasons for why it's the ethical and society-friendly thing to do, and because omniscience still needs manpower to get anything done. Vigilantism would become infinitely more doable, but the ethics are the same - it's more of a last resort, a necessary evil for when society is incapable or unwilling to do any better option. Honestly this is just as much selfish as it is kind and noble - so I don't have to experience as much awareness of that abhorrent empathy-offending filth.

I would seriously consider sharing/replicating the omniscience itself, because obviously I can't be the best choice or only good-enough choice for such power. I'd use the omniscience itself to really figure this out. (Naturally, I would know if it's doable, and the omniscience would help a lot with figuring out if and when this is a good idea.)

And so on and so on....

I mean, the full range of everything you could need to navigate once you have omniscience is approximately infinite.

But basically I think the hard part is integrating it into your cognition. The rest is just applied ethics and mind steering/shaping skill.

if u were omniscient, how would u navigate that?

[despazito]

Idk I have such a fascination with people who coddle and baby wild animals (or even domestic ones). Maybe it's not that deep but I think in some ways it does speak to a lack of maturity in empathy, which sounds counterintuitive but I think its not unlike some forms of unhealthy parenting. It's a cognitive disconnect that perhaps the way you'd like to be treated does not always translate to what others want or feel comfortable with. That maybe your reality is not universal, and an inability to place yourself in another's shoes. People hear low empathy and assume it means distant and unloving, but it can also look like lovebombing or over imposing oneself on others with a lack of boundaries. From the outside it can look loving and pampering and an incredible life, but do they ever really stop to try and get to know the other party, what it actually feels and wants? Are you doing what's best for it, or just what you think is best? Or worse, what you think makes you look best in front of others?

They call animal care professionals who ask for more restraint and less contact with said animals uncaring and cold because they honest to god cannot place themselves in a reality where a kindhearted hug could feel terrifying and a free donut could be horrible for one's survival. And I think information based arguments can fall short because they are primarily operating through emotions and what "feels" right to them. And I think some of these people may be drawn to animals and habituating wildlife because they won't ever tell them off in clean english. Idk it intrigues me

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Psychological Abuse

Hart, Binggeli, and Brassard (1998, pp. 32–33) have pointed out that psychological maltreatment not only stands alone but is often embedded in other forms of maltreatment. They identified 6 major types of psychological maltreatment:

Spurning - includes belittling, shaming, and public humiliation

Terrorizing - includes caretaker behavior that threatens or is likely to physically hurt, kill, abandon, or place the child in a dangerous situation

Isolating - generally involves placing unreasonable limitations on the child’s freedom of movement

Exploiting/corrupting - includes modeling, permitting, or encouraging antisocial behavior, or developmentally inappropriate behavior

Denying emotional responsiveness - generally considered to be ignoring the child’s needs

Mental health, medical, and educational neglect - involves ignoring the need for, or failing or refusing to allow or provide treatment for serious emotional/behavioral problems, physical health problems, and/or educational problems

Child Maltreatment

The accepted definition of child maltreatment reported in Garbarino, Guttman, and Seeley (1987) came from the Interdisciplinary Glossary on Child Abuse and Neglect:

“The definitions of emotional abuse include verbal or emotional assault, close confinement and threatened harm. The definitions of emotional neglect include inadequate nurturance/affection, knowingly permitting maladaptive behavior (for example, delinquency) and other refusal to provide essential care” (pp. 4–5).

A child is considered to be emotionally or psychologically abused when he or she is the subject of acts or omissions by the parents or other persons responsible for the child’s care that have caused, or could cause, a serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorder.

In some cases of emotional or psychological abuse, the acts of the parents or other caretakers alone, without any harm to the child’s behavior or condition, are sufficient to warrant intervention by a child protective services agency.

An example would be if the parents or caretakers used extreme or bizarre forms of punishment, such as habitual scapegoating, belittling, or rejecting treatment.

Demonstrable harm to the child is often required before a child protective services agency is able to intervene (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1992, p. 3).

Source ⚜ More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ On Psychology

[whetstonefires]

#the only point I take issue with is that I don't think jgy believes any of his closely held beliefs about his situation are bullshit#when he says he didn't have any choice I think he fundamentally believes it and can defend his positions when given the chance (via @thatswhatsushesaid)

well i'm sure he doesn't believe his own closely held beliefs are bullshit lol, but hm. this is interesting!

so if we posit that, when jgy says that, it's never just convenient wording for the feeling of 'my hand was forced by the situation'

but that he intellectually believed that when he, say, had his toddler killed to cover up a suspected disability which might have led people to suspect about the incest or otherwise think less of him, then framed a political inconvenience for it and had them massacred, that he had to do it, and do it like that

(that any lesser level of violence and optimization-of-personal-advantage was tantamount to suicide)

then...

are we supposing that he believes that in a sort of, he needs to believe it, that he has an elaborate internal narrative where everything he's done wasn't only appropriate but unavoidable, and therefore he can't and shouldn't take on guilt about it, and that letting go of that conviction even where it's absurd would wound him, kind of a way?

or more like a, he just has a default position of categorizing everything he does from an emotional place of 'survival' as necessary, and therefore adequately justified, and not considering further on that subject once he's committed to a course unless somehow externally prompted, because that's the efficient way to do it and (as with wwx) you can't afford inefficient emotional processes when you're trying to survive, kind of a way?

because those imply two fairly different psychological relationships to the doing of particularly egregious crimes, and as far as i can recall they're both compatible with the evidence.

Something about how Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen took the same parental trauma and, due to their differing ages and characters and the somewhat different pressures they were under, came away with very distinct conclusions that mostly seemed pretty similar at first, since they were cast in the same mold, i.e. the Lan disciplines.

Both of them these under-parented kids trying to reconcile the message that the world is fundamentally just with the lived experience that it absolutely was not.

Lan Xichen comes away with this idea that justice is arrived at by keeping everyone happy--have I compared him to Jane Bennet yet, she's my reference archetype for this kind of eldest sibling--and working for the best possible final outcome. In which possibility he persistently has faith even when it fails to come to fruition; a disappointing compromise is just a lesson to do better next time.

This is a pretty resilient coping mechanism, since it can stand up to not only a lot of bad shit randomly falling out of the sky but to other people and even you fucking up supremely in a lot of different ways, and also to being harmed by enemies, because of course enemies will do that.

It cannot survive the sense of being totally helpless, or a loss without recoup or silver lining, because it relies on the conviction that you can bargain with the universe. That you are in a position to do so, and that the universe is disposed toward mercy.

(This I think is why he attached himself so intensely to Meng Yao--at his darkest moment, when everything was falling around him and he was alone, someone came and restored his faith in the world being, fundamentally, a good place, that will pick you up when you fall and offer second chances. Right up until it gets pulled out from under him, that's what that person means to him, every time he sees him again: that at its core life is kind, and you can be safe again after trauma.

The irony is imo less that this person is actually bad than that Meng Yao is the last person who believes that.)

Lan Wangji, on the other hand, younger and more rigid and somewhat more sheltered, comes away with the idea that bad things are the direct consequence of flawed actions. Punishment is natural law; on earth as it is in heaven; only perfection merits mercy.

(Mumble mumble Legalism I haven't read enough Chinese history to unpack that lol but.)

The advantage of believing this is that it frees you from the bulk of internal conflict. If bad things happen it's because they ought to. You can stop them from happening by doing everything right. There is no need therefore to be afraid, and relatively little need to be angry, and when you are angry it can happen in a contained, approved way, toward disruptions to the system.

This is not a worldview that can survive very many disruptions. It does not have a lot of shock absorption built in; to keep it mostly intact in the face of the universe glaringly failing to deliver requires, more or less, going systematically insane.

Plenty of people raised with these kinds of values do in fact choose to do that. If choose is the right word.

If our Lan Zhan hadn't already gotten his coping mechanism shaken up and expanded by Wei Wuxian and his charismatic undermining of the Lan Sect's system of making their laws appear to be the laws of the universe, I think he'd have been a lot more likely to break when the Wen took Cloud Recesses. Not in an obvious way, necessarily, not cracking up and screaming or berserking, and probably not even going into complete shutdown, but like. Retreating from reality a lot more.

Living way more completely in his own head, and lashing out more at people who threatened his elaborate, infinitely brittle mental architecture.

(In his worst moments, this is Lan Qiren.)

As it is, it takes Lan Wangji a long time and a pretty large amount of trauma to fully break out of this belief system, even once he's been confronted with its inadequacy to handle the actual complexities of the unstructured world.

(This is narratively important, I think, because Lan Zhan having gone through that growth is kind of the reward for the tragedy of the thirteen years; a cathartic grace note.)

And just when Lan Wangji's reached his success state on processing all that and been, essentially, rewarded by the universe with a Wei Wuxian, Lan Xichen's far more robust just-world coping mechanism is finally brought to its own shattering point. And how.

...also Jiang Yanli is a very similar person to Zewu-jun in a lot of ways, but not having been orphaned as a child or thrust into politics from a young age the scale of her ambition is more modest. But that's its own post probably!

[pandemic-info]

Reposting via a redditor; re:

Is there a sound argument for why people aren’t taking this seriously?

Why do they think that way? https://essaysyoudidntwanttoread.home.blog/2022/10/09/why-do-they-think-that/? 7 psychological defense mechanisms used to downplay covid https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737582325779624059.html? How to hide a pandemic https://howtohideapandemic.substack.com/p/how-to-hide-a-pandemic Cognitive Dissonance & Ableism https://www.tiktok.com/@fka.monstersincooperated/video/7360285749574421802 Anti-social punishment https://www.tiktok.com/@creative.neurospice/video/7269910082769653038 NYT: Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them (helplessness & habituation) https://archive.is/wVL85 [article about the ongoing right to avoid infection. ... how people just can't really face reality due to death anxiety] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/side-effects/202309/how-to-socialize-during-a-pandemic Increased risk-taking behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: psychological underpinnings and implications https://www.scielo.br/j/rbp/a/TPpQKTwfqTH5Q8qKghRkWpf/?format=pdf&lang=en Cognitive Biases https://www.instagram.com/p/C8TdduJMtKH/ We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-hit-peak-denial-heres-why-we-cant-turn-away-from-reality/ Difficulties in Understanding Population Risk versus Individual Risk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2X_HRfJpio&list=LLkcwJR5kj80dAQNAT83d1NQ&t=2522s

See also:

Normalcy bias

Semmelweis reflex

Just-world fallacy

Survivorship bias

Compassion fatigue

Sunk cost fallacy

Learned helplessness

Informational social influence

Ableism

Nihilism

[loassbarbie]

philosophy, conciousness, the 4D (imagination) and the world

I am a philosophy enthusiast, specially when it comes to the field of Metaphysics. I consider myself somewhat of an existentialist, and I enjoy reading a lot of Sartre. In several philosophical movements and schools of thought there is an idea about how imagination has a crucial role in our individual understanding, perceptions and assumptions of ourselves, the world and the Universe.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, in which Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. His conclusion is that because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it (Falkner, 2014).

Yogācāra is one of the philosophical backgrounds of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Its doctrine is summarized in the term vijṇapti-mātra, “nothing but cognition only” which also known as “Consciousness Only” or “Mind Only”. This school advocates the existence of the consciousness and cognitive object. An object that we think we see is an illusion according to Yogācāra School. This illusion is due to our habits. These habits come from our minds. This is for our habitual conditioning that we see that things as real and in different ways. In other words, only the subjective aspect (darsanabhaga) is real, not the objective aspect (nimittabhaga). The object world is merely the transformation of our consciousness (vijnanaparinama) (Barua, 2019).

Barua gives the example of "an itinerant ascetic, an amorous person and a dog, all catch sight of a woman, but they all have three different notions. The ascetic looks upon her as a mere carcass (made up of the five aggregates), the voluptuary or sensualist takes her to be an object of amorous delight while the dog takes her to be something eatable" (Barua, 2019), or a caregiver.

In other words, an object appears in different forms according to the conditioned, subjective state of mind.

Bottomline is, in my humble opinion of course: we perceive the world not as it is, but as we are. Since imagination (that we call the 4D) relies on intentionality, we must free our minds from the way we were conditioned if we want to see changes in our perceptions. And that the way things seem to you (your 3D) is not inherently what they are, but only your perception of what they are.

(Take Control - Kodaline / click the image for the Spotify link of the song)

References Barua, M. (2019). The Doctrine of Perception in Buddhism. The Journal of International Association of Buddhist Universities (JIABU), 12(1), 276–282. Retrieved from https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/Jiabu/article/view/216911

Grant Falkner. (2014). Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Absence as Presence. Retrieved from http://grantfaulkner.com/2014/08/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-absence-as-presence/

[luxe-pauvre]

Professor Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal, is much more cautious. “Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more,” he says. “We use them for everything. If you go to a website for a recipe, you press a button and it sends the ingredient list to your smartphone. It’s very convenient, but convenience has a price. It’s good for you to do certain things in your head.” Hardt is not keen on our reliance on GPS. “We can predict that prolonged use of GPS likely will reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus. Reduced grey matter density in this brain area goes along with a variety of symptoms, such as increased risk for depression and other psychopathologies, but also certain forms of dementia. […] Map reading is hard and that’s why we give it away to devices so easily. But hard things are good for you, because they engage cognitive processes and brain structures that have other effects on your general cognitive functioning.” Hardt doesn’t have data yet, but believes, “the cost of this might be an enormous increase in dementia. The less you use that mind of yours, the less you use the systems that are responsible for complicated things like episodic memories, or cognitive flexibility, the more likely it is to develop dementia. There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.” (Other scientists disagree – Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist who wrote the seminal Seven Sins Of Memory: How The Mind Forgets and Remembers, thinks effects from things like GPS are “task specific”, only.)

Rebecca Seal, Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’

[contemplatingoutlander]

THOM HARTMANN: Science Explains Why Republicans Can’t Accept Trump’s Guilt (Sept. 12, 2023)

Scientists discovered a fascinating reason why Republicans can’t accept criticism of Donald Trump. Thom explains.

In the above video, Thom Hartmann refers to a Raw Story column by cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, PhD (shown below):

Here are some excerpts from Azarian's column:

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems. Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world. What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?") Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health. For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs. Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions. In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

[mentalisttraceur]

One of the things that really frustrates me is that my upbringing has robbed me of a healthy default of confident calm in the face of cues that someone is frustrated or angry.

For now. This too I will overcome.

When I see signs of anger or frustration in others, I can't just feel like an unperturbed observer, I can't just watch or look away with curiosity, disinterest, or amusement. As if their negativity is harmless or unthreatening. I don't get that choice.

Yet. I am terraforming that choice into my mind.

My mind fires off the beginnings of a fight or flight response, I get mentally tense and vigilant and a nasty fear discomfort permeates (unless I am eagerly looking to handle the situation with anger or hostility) before I even get the chance to have any other thoughts about it.

Closer now. Better at catching myself in the moment. Shrinking the average gap between trigger and me flowing into the bypass canal towards calm confident presence. Reducing how much conscious thought it takes.

[creature-wizard]

Unwelcome Ozian copied Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler - see for yourself!

For those who don't know, Unwelcome Ozian is a conspiracy theorist who has been on Tumblr since the early 2010s, presenting himself as a Project Monarch survivor and a sort of guide for others who believe they experienced the same thing. However, a number of people who put their trust in him report that he has engaged in predatory and harassing behavior.

Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler are two conspiracy theorists who wrote a number of highly influential books together in the 1990's. Whether or not you've heard of them, if you have heard anything about Project Monarch, I promise you that at least some of that information goes back to them. Springmeier and Wheeler made a number of absurd and hateful claims - such as that the Antichrist would be enthroned in the year 2000, that many immigrants were secretly Manchurian agents, and that Al Gore was a real vampire who carried around a briefcase full of blood.

I actually read their three books on Monarch programming (They Know Not What They Do: Illustrated Guide to Monarch Programming Mind Control, The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave, and Deeper Insights Into The Illuminati Formula). When I finally got around to taking a look at the work of Unwelcome Ozian, I immediately recognized it as the same stuff Springmeier and Wheeler were pushing. It wasn't just the exact same kind of claims - it was often the exact same text, with some very minor alterations.

Here are some examples of obvious copying:

Chainless Slaves: The foundation of trauma-based programming is fear. A deep spirit of fear cripples a subject spiritually and emotionally.

Deeper Insights Into The Illuminati Formula: The foundation of trauma-based total mind-control is fear. A deep spirit of fear cripples a person spiritually & emotionally.

Chainless Slaves: Subject’s who have been given a designated purpose in life will have their genealogies hidden. They will have programmed to have a cover life to insure they will not be detected.

From The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: The Illuminati create mind-controlled slaves who are to function within the Illuminati hierarchy. These slaves will usually have their genealogies hidden, and will be created to have excellent cover lives to insure that they are not detected.

Chainless Slaves: Programmers will make a point of having the unborn subject hear the voices of individuals who will play a role in the programming. The subject may already know the hypnotic voice of one of their programmers at birth.

Deeper Insights Into The Illuminati Formula: This is why the Illuminati has made a point of having the unborn child hear the voices of people who will play a role in the trauma and programming of the child. The child may already know the hypnotic voice of one of its cult programmers at birth.

Chainless Slaves: The mind links together a series of mental processes. These links are called K-lines. Much of what the mind does is activate various K-lines so the mind can focus its conscious thinking.

Deeper Insights Into The Illuminati Formula: The mind strings together a series of "cognitive mental demons" that is a series of mental processes--similar to how a computer programmer writes a program. These strings have been called K-lines. Much of what the mind does is simply activations of various K-lines (a habitual ways of doing things), so that the mind can focus its limited conscious thinking.

Chainless Slaves: Another technique is to alternate leniency with harshness. When punishment is partnered with kindness, the effect is devastating and disconcerting because the subject looses the ability to predict what is going to happen.

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: Another trick is to alternate leniency with harshness. This trick is done in the military also, and has been worked with success by the Chinese government upon the people of Red China. When leniency is alternated with kindness, the effect is devastating and disconcerting because the person looses the ability to predict what is going to happen.

Chainless Slaves: Alien Parts for contact, bonding w/ aliens and acceptance of mock alien invasion.

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: Alien alters for contact, bonding w/ aliens, & acceptance of mock alien invasion

Chainless Slaves: Angel (imitation) Parts for divine messages, these may be seen as angels

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: Angel (imitation) alters for divine messages, these may be seen as Spirit Guide alters

Chainless Slaves: GREEN or EMERALD GREEN. These are cat altars. They still see themselves as belonging to the cult family, and deny that they have been abused to protect their cult family

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: GREEN or EMERALD GREEN. These cat altars recognize they have been abused. They still see themselves as belonging to the cult family, and deny that they have been abused to protect their cult family.

Chainless Slaves: YELLOW. These are the strong Christian alters of which there will only be a few in the System. They help serve as a balancing point to control the System as well as to hide what the System is all about.

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: YELLOW. These are the strong Christian alters of which there will only be a few in the System. They help serve as a balancing point to control the System as well as to hide what the System is all about.

Chainless Slaves: Element Parts (Air or Wind, Water, Earth, Fire) for magick and compliance

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: Element alters (Air or Wind, Water, Earth, Fire) for magick & compliance

Chainless Slaves: Satanic hierarchy Parts, to insure the occult part of the system is controlled and follows occult teachings

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave: Satanic hierarchy alters, to insure that system is controlled by Satan

This isn't even close to all of the instances of copied text in Chainless Slaves, but I think it's enough to demonstrate where Unwelcome Ozian is getting a lot of his material from.

If you're curious whether his book Rules of Programming has any copied material - I can confirm it does. I went through it a few months back and posted about it over here.

If you'd like to learn more about the origins of the Project Monarch mind control conspiracy theory, and how we know it's BS, you can check out this post over here.

[mindblowingscience]

Scientists from the US, UK, and Uruguay analyzed data from 378,932 people aged 40 to 69 to see how those who are genetically 'programmed' to nap regularly fared cognitively compared to those who lacked comparable genes. Nappers, they found, had larger brains, equivalent to those who were 2.6 to 6.5 years younger. "Our study points to a causal link between habitual napping and larger total brain volume," says lead author Valentina Paz, a neuroscientist at University College London (UCL). Previous research on adults over the age of 65 suggests daytime dozing improves short-term cognition, with nappers outperforming non-nappers in cognitive tests. The new study didn't record nap length, but prior studies suggest naps under 30 minutes are best, with earlier naps less likely to affect nighttime sleep.

Continue Reading

[writerbuddha]

Okay so I recently saw a reblog to Jedi Apologists refutation of the Jedi being a cult which talked about mindfulness as a bad thing with it’s emphasis on self compassion leading to narcissism (I’m paraphrasing). Anyway, this really didn’t sound right from everything I’ve read about it on various pro-Jedi blogs and have taken away from Star Wars itself. And we’ll when I looked up mindfulness some of the stuff I’ve found went into how the practice has been corrupted by Western capitalism and how Buddhists have criticised the way it’s used too.

So as a practising Buddhist how does Western mindfulness deviate from its Buddhist roots and how do the Jedi use mindfulness in the truest sense?

First of all, people have a tendency to forgot or to actively ignore that there is a difference between these four:

Mindfulness

Meditation

Mindfulness meditation

Being mindful of your emotions

Mindfulness in Buddhism

Mindfulness in Buddhism can be defined as maintaining a flow of voluntarily awareness or attention, holding, bearing something in mind, without distraction, without forgetfulness. This awareness, attention is non-judgmental, not filtering things through subjective opinions, or labeling things as good and bad based on like or dislike. But it entails you to have a clear view of what's happening in your mind, body, and environment, and you can recognize which ways of speaking, behaving and using the mind is conducive to your and to other's well-being, which are afflictive, toxic, harmful to you and to others, and you can do the sensible, compassionate thing.

Buddhist Mindfulness and Western Psychology - mindfulness versus meditation

In the context of Western psychology, "mindfulness" often refers to mindfulness practices incorporated into the Western therapeutic toolkit, most often mindfulness meditation. However, one must understand that even as all forms of Buddhist meditation involve mindfulness, mindfulness is not the same as meditation and not all types of mediation is mindfulness meditation. The Buddha taught his followers to practice mindfulness all the time. It should be clear that one can make Buddhist mindfulness a day-to-day activity, but it would be very difficult to stay in the state of mindfulness as it is defined in Western psychological context.

Mindfulness in the Western context is becoming more fully aware of the present moment and becoming more fully in the present moment, completely and non-judgmentally. It generally involves heightened awareness of sensory stimuli, e.g. noticing your breathing, feeling the sensations of your body, being in the “now.”

Buddhists define meditation as a tool used to habituate yourself to constructive, realistic and beneficial emotions and attitudes, to build up good habits of the mind. It's used to transform thoughts and views so that they are more compassionate and correspond to reality. Some forms of meditation are aimed to develop mindfulness. Whereas in the Western context, meditation is often defined as a set of techniques that are intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness and focused attention.

Therapies incorporating mindfulness practices include: Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness-based art therapy (MBAT), Mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM) and Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MSBR).

The Jedi way: "Be mindful of your emotions"

The Jedi way of being mindful of your emotions in George Lucas' Star Wars is to hold your emotions in calm, non-reactive ("passive") and peaceful awareness. When you do that, you can realize: you are not your emotions. You are not your fear; you are not your anger; you are not your aggression; you are not your hate. They're arising within you, and when you're not mindful of them, you are pulled by them to places where you didn't really want to go. However, when one is mindful of their emotions, instead of being carried by them, one can recognize where fear, anger, hate, aggressive feelings are leading them, and can choose the light path over the dark path: to act with firmness, spacious clarity and compassion.

This kind of mindfulness practiced by the Jedi, the Jedi teachings of "be mindful of your emotions", "be mindful of your thoughts" and that one's mind should be where one is, in what they're doing, are very much identical to Buddhist mindfulness. But it should be noted that even though many Jedi - Qui-Gon, Yoda, the whole council, etc. - and even Jar Jar were meditating, this doesn't mean that they attempted to incorporate meditation into a therapeutic toolkit.

Western pop-culture mindfulness

The Western pop-culture mindfulness is to immerse yourself into the present moment, focusing your full and undivided attention to your experiences, whether it's within you or around you. It lacks the aim to discern what is conducive to your and to other's well-being, and it's just experiencing passively. Most worryingly, it's promoted as a way to increase the pleasures you receive from the present. Eat mindfully, get a massage mindfully, walk mindfully, have sex mindfully etc. And this is profoundly non-Buddhist, because it's all about squeezing out more intense and more lasting pleasure of the things that are coming and passing. When "mindfulness practice" is removed from other Buddhist teachings, guiding us to release our greed, anger, to develop empathy, kindness and compassion, and non-attachment, "mindfulness" could reinforce negative qualities. For example, if one fails to differentiate between self-compassion and self-indulgence, self-care and self-centeredness, they likely conclude that their narcissistic tendencies are self-compassion.

Most worryingly, mindfulness is conflated with mediation and is marketed as some kind of relaxation exercise or stress-reduction technique. But mediation was designed to gain insight and wisdom, not to relax. Also, it's popular to treat it as a tool or as a magical remedy for psychological healing, whereas it wasn't designed to be anything like that. It can powerfully support therapeutic processes, but one must know that Buddhist practice is not a substitute for, say, psychotherapy. And when pop-culture mindfulness fails to deliver, people often believe, what they did to themselves was Buddhism and mindfulness, whereas that wasn't Buddhism or mindfulness at all.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Habits

Habit - a well-learned behavior or automatic sequence of behaviors that is relatively situation specific and over time has become motorically reflexive and independent of motivational or cognitive influence—that is, it is performed with little or no conscious intent.

For example, the act of hair twirling may eventually occur without the individual’s conscious awareness.

How Habits are Formed

The question of habit formation can be approached from a scientific perspective or a more subjective and experiential one.

The Subjective Experience of Habit Formation

Bergson was a French philosopher who took cues from Ravaisson’s discussion of habits and their formation. Bergson (1911) wrote of both active and passive habits.

Passive habits arise from exposure to things we eventually get used to. High-altitude climbers gradually adapt their bodies to the lower levels of oxygen available as they climb above 7,000 feet.

Active habits are those we develop by repeated intention and effort, crystalizing as skills we perform with little or no thought. A gymnast practices walking, jumping, and flipping on a narrow beam until she can do all these maneuvers smoothly without falling.

Habits as skills can also be seen as a springboard to creativity.

Based on what we can habitually do, we reach new heights, as when a jazz musician ingrains the playing of a basic melody, then improvises new and adventurous notes on top of the underlying theme.

The scientific perspective on habit formation is exemplified today by neuroscience research. This research has highlighted crucial brain pathways involved in forming habits.

The Neuroscience of Habit Formation

When you first learn to tie your shoes, the attempts are quite conscious and effortful. As you practice this skill, it becomes a habit, something you can do easily and automatically, even while thinking of other things.

Neuroscience has asked how conscious and goal-directed actions are converted into a habit (Yin & Knowlton, 2006).

Clues to the mystery of habit formation can be found in an ancient area of the brain called the basal ganglia (Yin & Knowlton, 2006).

The basal ganglia are deep structures near the base of the brain that developed early in the evolution of our nervous system.

These structures play a major role in coordinating all kinds of voluntary movements, including the complex motions involved in walking, running, eating, talking, and grasping and manipulating with the hands, etc.

The basal ganglia, in conjunction with the brain’s frontal or “executive” lobe, also help perform the crucial task of rapidly selecting which type of movement should be made, out of the many options available in a given situation.

When faced with a tiger suddenly springing from the bushes, what should you do? Stand still, run to climb a tree, or make a dash for the river and hope the tiger can’t swim? The movement program chosen at this point might determine whether you get to pass your genes along to any offspring.

Since movements are most effective when well learned or habitual, the basal ganglia are also very involved in habit formation. Certain habits appear to be formed through the interplay between two distinct basal ganglia pathways (Yin & Knowlton, 2006).

One of these pathways is associative. It consciously collects information needed for reaching goals such as staying warm, finding food, finding a mate, and expressing oneself artistically.

A second pathway is more automatic. This route takes those lessons learned from the first pathway and includes them in a repertoire of stored habits.

These habits are then available to be called upon, when cued by a given situation.

Another key aspect to habit formation is positive reinforcement or reward.

For an activity to become a habit, it helps if it’s not only repeated often, but also positively reinforced.

We can trigger positive reinforcement through an external reward, like money, food, or praise. Such experiences release dopamine, one of the brain’s favorite “feel good” neurochemicals. A rewarding dopamine release can also occur through internal triggers, like visualizing yourself reaching a cherished goal (Neuroscience News, 2015).

Dopamine release has been shown to depend on neurons within the limbic system, another ancient brain circuit that processes emotions and the experience of reward. The limbic system is deeply connected with the basal ganglia and can stamp our memories and habits with emotional and reward value (Trafton, 2012).

Psychological Theories on Habit Formation

The American philosopher William James made early contributions to habit theory that still resonate today.

James (1914) thought of habit as the result of repeating the same action over and over, in similar circumstances, until it is ingrained in our brain circuitry.

He also believed that ingrained habits would automatically arise in the face of strong cues associated with their formation. When walking into your darkened room, the room and darkness cue the automatic habit of reaching for the light switch.

Behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner would expand on James’s insights into habit, with animal studies that emphasized how habit formation is fueled by rewards.

Skinner (1953) created cages for pigeons with buttons that dropped a food pellet when pushed.

In exploring the cage, the hungry pigeons would eventually peck the button on the wall. They soon came to realize that pecking the button would produce a food pellet.

This experimental scenario included what for Skinner were the primary factors in producing a habit:

Stimulus, like the button to be pecked

Behavior, like pecking the button

Reward, like the food pellet

Skinner (1953) believed that behaviors repeatedly engaged in for the sake of a reward will become habits. This hypothesis was borne out by his pigeons repeatedly pressing the button, even when that action was no longer followed by a food pellet.

Other theories sought to go beyond behaviorism’s focus on observed behavior alone, to include a mental or cognitive component in habit.

Edward Tolman (1948, 1954) believed that repeated or habitual responses involved the use of internal ideas, or “maps,” as cognitive components that helped navigate mazes, etc.

Neuroscience has further explored certain questions about habit, with the help of nerve conduction and brain scan studies.

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ More: References ⚜ On Habits ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[thejockout]

A Word On Dumbing Down

In some conversations with my bros @avissapiens and @master-villain the other day, I finally managed to put a specific idea into words that had been crystallising for a long time. Nothing earth-shattering or even transformative, because I'd been exploring this same understanding with different wording for quite a while now, but it felt significant to me and sparked me to make this post.

The realisation was simple: Dumbing Down is not something you can "Do" as a standalone action. It's perhaps more accurate to say Dumbing Down is itself the perspective shift and realisation that "Smart" is something you can choose to "Not Do."

Clunky wording, I know, but pretend it's smooth for me.

(And as a necessary fyi, this post assumes familiarity with Dumbing Down as a hypnotic concept, which is nowadays most often written and spoken about as a general simplification of thought and cognition versus turning you into some drooling doofus. Maybe the latter is your thing, maybe it isn't - either way, I'm talking here about the more "realistic"/AKA sustainable model where the word dumb is synonymous with "so laid back, you don't want to think or care if people perceive you as dumb because of it".)

Too many subjects (myself included) work at hypnotic personality and cognition changes with a straining effort, in an energetically desperate approach. This is understandable - we tend to push hard for things we really want - and anyone can fall victim to it. It's very similar contextually to the trap many anxiety sufferers fall into when they begin therapy. In an earnest attempt to recover, many sufferers approach recovery with the exact same mindset they do life; that of a "fixer", a "do-er", someone who problem-solves and overthinks themselves into knots and runs loops around the same well-worn mental tracks over and over again to the point of exhaustion.

Don't worry, I'm not here to give some big-brain solution to mental health issues. I suffer myself and am on my own journey of recovery, so I'm in no place to play armchair psychologist. But I will speak about this topic as it relates to hypnosis and dumbing down because the overlap of people who are into Dumbing Down/IQ Reduction/Simplification/Bimbofication/Himbofication hypnosis and who suffer with anxiety (and overthinking) is quite high, so chances are that many who struggle with Dumbing Down suggestions are making the same mistakes. Please see my peer-reviewed Paint Diagram below which provides unequivocal, non-anecdotal proof of this.

IMO, there's nothing wrong with this overlap. Kink is an outlet for many people to deal with emotional issues, and often a very helpful coping mechanism. Dumbing Down is no different conceptually. But I'm talking about this because, just like approaching anti-anxiety work with an anxious energy and effort is doomed to failure, the exact same is true for Dumbing Down. Approaching it with an Intellectualist mindset OR in other words, the anxious energy of a fix-er and do-er and try-er is antithetical to the very state you wish to experience.

Does that make sense?

Successful Dumbing Down (beyond the very enjoyable, shorter-term effects of deep trance which feel like intoxication) is effectively the act of stepping back from mental action/the habit of overthinking. To give another clumsy metaphor, if your default mind works like a toy train constantly running around its track, sometimes gaining speed and sometimes slowing down... Dumbing Down comes from realising "hey, I can actually plug this thing out." No, it's not as simple as turning off an appliance, and it takes time for everyone. Overthought (in all its forms, whether anxious or just from over-intellectualising your life) is effectively a habit, and habits take time to make or break.

Therefore, Perspective Shift #1 that you need to make: recognise that thinking patterns and their frequency are ultimately behavioural and habitual, and can therefore be rewired and lessened with time and specific action. It's not an immediate thing - but it is possible, and this is effectively what dumbing in hypnosis is about.

That perspective raises some questions, I know. But I don't want to write about the answers just yet. Reread and consider that last paragraph a few times to make sure you've really processed it. Think about the questions it leaves you with, and come up with a few answers of your own if you can. You can post your thoughts in the comments or reblogs of this post, as I will be taking the time to read through them, and I'll continue this topic in future as I think more on it myself.

Later.