Surely it's an overstatement to call the level of effort "superhuman", given the frequency with which people seem to reach it. Difficult or unusual, perhaps.....
In "Waking Up", Sam Harris attributes (citing his Buddhist and Hindu sources) the bliss attained by meditation to ego death, having your sense of self drop away and thereby relieve you of the attachments and yearning usually associated with your mental processes. I wonder if that's a conflicting explanation or a different perspective on the same thing?
It's been a while since I had a session in a floatation tank, but I remember it as basically a cheap and quick shortcut to meditation. And blissful, in the way those first few seconds under the duvet after waking are, before you remember why you have to get up.
This is very insightful when it comes to art, especially music. (I am now reminded of that one time I managed to sit through the entire Disintegration Loops without diverting my attention. It was... IS immensely moving and beautiful, but I've been unable to recreate the experience ever since.)
However, does it really solve the Dark Room Problem, or just restate it? It introduces "inattentiveness" as a cause, without explaining where it comes from. Isn't "inattentiveness" the same as, or an example of, "inbuilt biological drive"? I mean, ever since I've learned the theory, it was obvious to me that the simplest way to counter the tendency to seclude yourself and do nothing is to introduce a set point of the amount of new stimuli that the brain expects to encounter. (Might be my "lived experience" speaking here, I apparently have ADD, which means a whole life with a brain repeatedly forcing me to drop what I'm doing and seek something else.)
They come up with a quantified measure for the entropy/predictability of musical stimuli and show kind of inverted-U-shape relationship to how much people liked those stimuli. So very predictable and very unpredictable songs were less prefered to intermediate amounts of complexity BUT the very predictable ones (i.e., metronome style) were still preferred over the very unpredictable ones (i.e., acoustic noise). This could very well be just a measurement artifact, but it could also mean that low high predictability still has value in that it reassures you of your well running world model, that is able to perfectly predict this boring tune.
Concerning the dark room problem in general: My take on it was always, that given the ever changing environment that we grow up in, when your goal is to minimize prediction error, it is just not a very good strategy to always seek a dark room since you won’t be able to update your internal world model properly and will inevitably experience more not less PE on the long run, once you leave the room. We have learned this relationship and build up a kind of meta prior about how being in a momentary state of no PE at all is not helpful on the long run. In order to get rid of this meta prior, one would have to make a lot of experience that teaches you otherwise (no PE=predictive of low PE in the future), i.e. meditation training and feeling good afterwards.
If the goal is to establish an uber-drive, then biological drives as set points seems like kind of a cop out. Maybe I seek food because I predict I won't be hungry and have a drive to minimize prediction error, or maybe I just have a drive to seek food when hungry. Occam's Razor says the latter.
A thought that I had a while ago and sorta fits this topic: I enjoy many types of music, especially when I am doing something else. My favorite genre though is symphonic metal, but to this I only listen deliberately. And I think the reason is that this epic style of music, with so many instruments and so much going on so fast, can fill my entire brain in a way no other genre does. Combine that with the predictability inherent to music and it's clear why I find it so enjoyable.
My wife, on the other hand, can't listen to symphonic metal at all. She doesn't have a problem with hard music per se, but symphonic metal apparently is "too much" (her words) for her.
ASMR occurs when you get extremely focused on one thing such as a quiet noise single noise or small movement, and it is *extremely* pleasurable. I feel bad for people who don't experience it. When it happens, my vision goes blurred and things sound like I'm in a tunnel, and I'm not thinking anything but just focused on hearing the scratchy voice or scratching sound that triggers it for me, which becomes amplified while I focus on it and all other sensory input fades away. And the result is an incredible feeling set of warm cascading tingles from scalp to spine. Sadly, it's fleeting and almost impossible to call up voluntarily. But I always experienced it even as a kid ( effort it had a name or I knew it happened to other people). I used to go into a trance watching a cashier's hands scanning items, or someone turn pages of a magazine or newspaper. The feeling is like what you imagine it must be like to be a purring cat, on MDMA.
Anyway, that'd an example of deep pleasure from focus on some minor thing that isn't and shouldn't be pleasurable in and of itself. And you don't need to be a trained yogi.
Still, to me, there is *nothing* as pleasurable as the hard and involuntary laughter that comes from an unexpected joke or funny thing happening. Humor is truly the most sublime of pleasures. And it comes from the unexpected, from a physical or verbal or social transgression that was unexpected and makes you laugh. To be truly really really funny, it has to be unexpected.. So that's a pleasure that's the absolute opposite of what you described...not regular, not predictable, not focused.
Pleasures exist on both ends. On one is the bliss of ASMR or meditation or a massage...quiet, focused, predictable. And on the other is really funny humor and rollercoasters, things that shake you up and thrill you.
I strongly object to that last sentence. An infinite flat featureless desert is compressible but not beautiful. I haven’t read much on the subject, but my knee jerk EvoPsych/Econish alternative is that beauty motivates hunter-gatherer nomads to choose one terrain instead of another, or one mate/ally instead of another. So we like green landscapes with rivers instead of barren Martian hellscapes. We like Melisandre with the amulet instead of without it. These things don’t seem reducible to compressibility.
When my mom used to drag me to a Congregationalist church service, where I was very bored, I would stare at a particular pipe on the organ or a particular point in the woodwork until my entire field of vision faded to a gray blur. Totally focusing on a metronome doesn’t seem like it would be that hard, if I started small with 5 minutes and increased it by 25% each time.
It's hard to talk about the jhanas without getting dragged into a tedious discussion about nomenclature and what jhanas are, and aren't, so let me be the first to kick that off by introducing the term 'access concentration'. I think this is the minimised uncertainty state you're looking for. If you can just sit and concentrate on the object of meditation for a prolonged period of time with no distractions it feels really, really nice and you'll carry this blissed out feeling with you for a few hours afterwards.
If you sit like that for long enough - and most people have to go on a retreat to make this happen - you'll probably be able to access the first jhana. And different people have different experiences, but many seem similar to mine which is that the jhana is very weird and very intense. I usually feel, for example, jolts of energy running down my hands and into my arms, and it feels a bit like I'm being electrocuted. It feels like I can't breathe, and it feels like I'm falling. Lots of people find it hard to sleep the first couple of times after accessing the jhana.
It's not clear to me how this fits into the model of the brain as Bayesian predictor. Or any cognitive model at all. Suggestions welcome!
> The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things?
> The usual workaround is
"Workaround" implies there's a problem to be solved. But that case hasn't been made. Assume everyone is gay. How come people keep having children?
Hu, why would the brain want to minimize prediction error?
There just was a post about the drive to discover. Isn't that kind of the opposite?
So if our brain wants to minimize prediction error and we also have a drive for discovery, then the first one comes from the brain and the second one comes from, hm, somewhere else?
Also, isn't learning all about getting in touch with stuff you can't predict - yet? It seems like a really bad idea on so many levels if we would be wired to minimize for this.
I've spent the last five years in Southeast Asia studying and teaching on Buddhist meditation forms (primarily Vipassana, but also others). I'd love to have a chat with you about it! Seeing your posts about your meditative journey have always been exciting for me.
I discovered the Jhanas pretty early in my practice and was deeply fascinated by them. I have a difficult time tapping into them out of retreat settings, but can regularly ascend through the second and third ones a few days into retreat. It definitely takes a lengthy settling into a proper and full seclusion; that begins with seclusion from the literal real world and all its busy-ness, and progresses to and through seclusion from deeply ingrained emotional and cognitive patterns.
And when you get that seclusion, that "dhyana", the corresponding hit of "piti" (that initial buzzy, light, clear feeling of sinking into deeper meditative states), it's an unparalleled experience. It's akin to ecstasy, minus all the downsides. It feels like the same euphoria, but fully natural and clear (and with no comedown).
And that's just the first Jhana. The further ones become progressively more profound and indescribable (as exemplified in the reading of any classical text on them, it gets very esoteric very fast).
I feel deeply, truly "myself" in those moments. I feel massively compassionate and open, creativity just explodes out of me, I'm patient and clear-headed and buzzing with aliveness. It's amazing and hugely profound, especially as a non-spiritual person for whom a long background in Christianity never really "clicked".
RE: experiencing absorption in other activities. Your choice of the metronome is an interesting one. Before Vipassana, my closest experiences with meditative states were all musical. I'd experience absorption in choir, amplified by the connection with other singers. I'd sink into them while practicing guitar and piano, when whole hours fly by (often accompanied by metronomes). They were never as deep as the states reached in Vipassana, but they were a taste, and they were a foundation I could relate the feeling two when my practice started.
A lot of Buddhism(s) posit(s) that these deep Jhana states are our most natural state of being; we were perpetually in something akin to them in childhood, and we lost track of them as our mind became more clouded over with increasingly complex patterns and schemata (sankara, in the Pali terminology). For me, deep meditation states have often felt like a returning to childlikeness.
I experienced one of these altered states and have a very simple explanation. Basically, the level of sensitivity to stimuli may be inversely proportional to the level of stimuli.
First, I got into the state by meditating for 5+ hours in a row, with the goal of not being distracted by any conscious thoughts (and I eventually basically got there).
Everything afterwards felt intrinsically extremely intense and interesting in a profound way that is probably impossible to describe (but the effect was a peak-experience, not anything subtle). The best analogy I have is that the mere existence and visual appearance of things was amazing in a way that I probably had experienced as a young child (who find many ordinary things intrinsically fascinating) but forgot was possible.
I could also describe it as the opposite sensation from shell-shock or burnout. After an excessively stressful experience sometimes the world can feel less real / important - this was the opposite of that where everything felt super-real. This obviously also fits with the stimulation hypothesis. Such a mechanism also makes sense from a practical / evolutionary perspective.
There's also a likely reason why these states are not easy to achieve - conscious thoughts probably are a type of stimulation that affects this input sensitivity. I'm someone without any normal running (mental) dialog, and even then getting my mind quiet to such a degree was maybe one of the hardest things I've done and took 5+ hrs. Without tons of effort, just sitting in a dark room would probably normally just lead to being lost in thought.
Despite the extreme difficulty I'm often tempted to repeat the experiment, it would be a no-brainer if I thought achieving such a state would get easier with practice (anyone else have relevant experience?).
Based on my limited experiences with meditation I would say it's the opposite of prediction. You don't expect anything - you just are. I guess one could rephrase this as: without prediction, no predictive error.
I'm not sure this theory does arrive at the same place as Schmidhuber's. It seems like mediators get to a place where compression is unnecessary, otherwise the metronome would get boring if not at first, then after a while. Unless even the most basic sensations are somehow infinitely compressible? However, in the sense Schmid was using it, infinite compression seems impossible.
"The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. "
Why is this at all a reasonable supposition? A much more reasonable model is that the brain is maximizing the propagation of your genes, because that's what evolution selects for.
"suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? "
It seems very strange to me to assume that the brain would only minimize the prediction error. Surely this is one of a relatively large number of objectives for the brain and the Dark Room Problem is not surprising at all?
Concerning aesthetic preferences, I had read that for web pages and landscapes (and I guess it generalizes to many other things!), there were two characteristics that played a lot: orderliness and diversity, both showing a maximum preference for intermediate values.
"regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention." how can we wrangle this pattern into, say, our office work? to better hold our attention on something that is pretty familiar (and mostly boring,though some of it can be a little engaging) , yet has the occasional difficulty which mostly just feel frustrating ?
Leigh Brasington is considered something of a lay expert on the Jhanas (he was a computer programmer for most of his working life, I believe), but you can also find really insightful stuff on this subject in the extensive teachings from the inscrutable Alan Wallace
Finally - for those with a practical bent - you could do worse than follow the guidance of the recently deceased Culadasa in his seminal work, The Mind Illuminated:
Although, from the perspective of an enthusiastic practitioner, don't expect this to be an easy journey. "Access concentration" is not achievable by everyone in a few months. I can vouch for that.
This sounds a lot like overfitting in machine learning: give the model a very reduced set of signals to learn from, it'll get really good at predicting them, and it's kind of "happy" there - it takes a bit of a shock to make it realize again that the world is more complicated. But the whole point is that the world outside (the one we don't choose) is the interesting one.
Concentration is a Western mistranslation of the Pali word "samadhi" that has pervaded our interpretation of meditation and mindfulness. You can indeed experience jhana-like effects from it, but they are false jhanas and will only lead to more turmoil. Like a pressure cooker.
What is required is light awareness, and plenty of relaxation. Meditation is not about focusing on an object to the exclusion of all else. It as about paying attention to your own self and learning from that. You can't do that if you're ignoring everything.
There is also the option that all creatures that followed free energy reduction to its logical conclusion died out, leaving only those that act illogical.
I probably spend more of my pleasure time listening to symphonies than anything else, and it's not deep regularity that I get out of them. Complicated pattern in a sense, but not in the sense that a complex weaving is a pattern.
Sitting in a dark room does not appeal to me. I need outside stimulus. When I lie down in a dark room, i.e. at night, I need stimulus - like a book - to read until I fall asleep, even if it only takes 5 minutes.
I would disagree that hunger is created by a prediction error. I think anxiety is generated by a prediction error and hunger is just a base impulse coming from the stomach to activate the feeling of hunger.
When you start to feel anxious because there is no food, that is a prediction error of predicting food in your mouth and not getting it.
I've found out sitting (standing or lying is better, though) in the room that's quiet and pitch dark works extremely well as a "quick 15min recharger during a busy day".
Note it's VERY important for the room to be really pitch dark, and to suppress any sounds that could hint that something is happening. Headphones with brown noise, or just running water works well. Not fans - fan noise is too regular and brain filters it.
If the room is dark but not pitch dark, or a bit of sound passes through - your sensitivity gets maxed out instead, together with anxiety or whatever was bothering you before.
> beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.
That could explain why modern architecture isn't beautiful as per those recent blog posts, since all the details have been compressed to just glass/steel/concrete cubes. Hell, maybe an architecture degree is enough "super human focus" on architecture to make that blissful
While we don't know exactly how brain works and whether it optimizes any utility function, we do know a utility function optimized by the organism as a whole: the probability of passing on its genes. Sitting in a dark room doesn't really help with this task, so I'm skeptical that it should be considered beneficial/pleasurable by the brain.
Keeping your attention stably on an object likely requires being able to “write” to your own value function. If you can’t consciously control what your brain assigns value to, then it’ll naturally wander because the metronome isn’t gonna feed you or mate with you.
This made me wonder if ADD might be correlated with declines in public religiosity. If you never reift the concept of “good” and think about it directly, I can see how you’d likely have a hard time saying, in a specific situation, “this specific thing is very important”, and thus maintaining focus on it.
Pascal's pensee #139, in part: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."
This reminds me of the enjoyment Richard Feynman had in sensory deprivation tanks as he describes in "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman". For those who are comparing concentration practices with insight practices, it seems to me that both do have the quality of refraining from conceptual involvment (ie perhaps prediction), either by single pointedness in concetration practice, or non-judgemental (receptive, accepting) attitude in insight practice.
Isn't there a built-in curiosity module that actually forces you to do things which consequences you cannot predict? There was some interesting AI research recently about implementing curiosity for robots.
The best vacations I have ever taken are the ones where I'm in a place where there are very few things to do, very few distractions, and nothing that needs to be done. Visiting family in a very rural place, where most of the time is just sitting on a porch and talking (or maybe not even talking) has been some of the most relaxing experiences of my life. My wife, who did not grow up around that environment or family, strongly agrees.
I can definitely see the potential in trying to recreate such an environment artificially through meditation or similar.
First jhana is basically comparable to a runner’s high. It can get more intense but that’s a good reference point, it’s a concrete sensory thing not a mysterious spiritual experience incomprehensible to a non-meditator.
Back when you wrote about it before, I suspected the Friston-style “uncertainty reduction” had to work on the distribution of your general life experience, not on an arbitrary distribution (dark room, etc). So most people don’t experience much drive to minimize prediction of a dark room, because the brain knows that won’t generalize to the “world” distribution and thus won’t be helpful. Instead we mostly try to get better at predicting our real lives. But maybe hardcore meditators have successfully changed their real life distributions to contain such a large portion of dark rooms that the brain says “oh we see these inputs a lot, they must be important” and rewards them for mastering it. (And I can’t deny these stimuli-reduced zones would be easier to predict than most other things, so I bet it feels amazing.)
Evidently there is a quiet room at the university - not a reading room, a *perfectly* quiet room for the measurement of sound, in the engineering building. People supposedly have weird reactions to it, some agreeable but not all favorable. Similarly, I was once on a cave tour in southwestern Missouri, and the young woman guide mentioned to the group consisting of my husband and me and a random little boy who had ridden up to the mouth of the cave on his bike, that she was going to turn off her flashlight and we would be plunged into as-near total darkness as most people ever experience, and warned that sometimes people find this disorienting and fall over, that this was not uncommon. It didn't seem likely to me that we would fall over and the three of us looked at each other with shy pride when she turned the lights back on and we were all standing normally. When we were finished, we got in our car and the little boy got on his bike to return to wherever his family was camping. I am sorry to report that I am so predictable that something about the addition of this unknown, cave-appreciating child to our otherwise childless day lent it a certain "impaled by beauty'' quality of the sort old Holden Caulfield felt when he saw his sister in her fuzzy pajamas. I have believed that aesthetics is as complex and important a subject as ethics, and I will be interested to read more about "Schmidhuber's theory". If it is to be simplified, I think it would reduce to something like "Life is always better than not-life", and that there would be good evolutionary reasons for this.
This description sounds a lot like what regular or problem gamblers describe as the "zone" they enter when playing. That especially true for people playing slots, where the repetitive acts and single focus bring them into a desired mental state where everything else disappears. Apparently this is so much the goal for many of them that some report being annoyed and disappointed when they win big, since it interrupts their flow.
As I recall, minimizing prediction error/free energy, whatever, is a great model of learning, the accumulation of lots of errors resulting in better predictions, richer models, etc (Jeff Hawkins book on this is great, On Intelligence). But it strikes me as incomplete, because the brain also rewards you for the prediction error; dopamine follows novelty, otherwise known as stimulation, and the motivation to chase this had a name, no less: curiosity. Hell, turn up the dial as the personality trait openness to experience and call it novelty-seeking, which is maybe related to ADHD. Point being, the brain seems to be rewarding to sides of an equation, both being valuable to learning, development and ultimately survival. As much as people need peace, people need stimulation (and some more than most), and that piece seems to be missing.
Poetry (the kind that rhymes and scans) is also a satisfying mixture of predictability and unpredictability. For two English words to rhyme, they have to be the same from the primary stressed vowel onwards, but different before that. So, when you hear a limerick starting "there was a young lady from Norway", you automatically register that 2nd and 5th lines will also end with "-orway" (predictability), but you don't know how the author will get there (unpredictability), which holds your attention. You also know the approximate rhythmic structure of each coming line, but you don't know what words will form that structure.
Perhaps a fruitful, and less commonly explored avenue for insight into these meditative states, would be the monastic works of the Eastern/Orthodox monks.
There is a long history of "natural" meditation, as a precursor (and later in one's progress, antagonist) to one's spiritual meditation. Part of the natural meditative stage involves attention to breath, posture, shutting off of attention to what's going on around oneself, and ultimately even to one's own thoughts. One gets the image of removing opaque or translucent layers, and finding, behind them, pure light, which is taken to be God as immanent to the created universe and soul.
Part of the view that informs this practice was developed out of the Christianized neo-Platonic movements in the first few centuries CE, and their debates about the state of the soul after death. Maximus the Confessor is an authority here (though admittedly a dense read!), and talks extensively about a sort of "stability-in-motion", in which the soul, rather than becoming static (one thinks here of true Nirvana, or total dissolution of self) or going off to infinity (in the form of ever-novel experiences and change, as we have in this life) finds rest in a sort of cyclical habit, which he considers to be the most perfect reflection of the Divine way of being that a creature can attain to.
The relationship between "Eastern" (Hindu, Buddhist, etc) meditative practices/goals, and this form, has often been a topic of interest to me.
Why do you keep using the phrase "full stop". It's a Britishism so it's confusing that you would use it. That's just what they call the period, and saying "period" is the equivalent expression without using weird ways that English people have renamed punctuation marks.
Like I said before, I can't come up with a rational argument against wireheading. If you can mentally hack your brain into deriving maximum pleasure from sitting alone in a dark room -- and that's a big "if", absent drugs or neurosurgery -- then I can't come up with any response other than "go for it". Yes, the world would be poorer for it, but you'd be so much richer that the tradeoff is well worth it.
I used to practice secular meditation pretty seriously. I was eventually able to reach states I don't know how to describe except as pure bliss. There are different ways to achieve this, I'm sure, and I don't want to claim this was officially a jhana. Arguing about definition of some altered state is far less interesting than discussing the thing itself. That said, Scott's post very much does *not* jibe with my experiences.
The mental model of the mind I learned through meditation is that our conscious awareness is not the entire mind, but something of a staging area. The staging area is where things take on a valence: good, bad, annoying, pleasurable. It is constantly bombarded by physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions. It usually jumps between several different things. One technique you learn when you meditate is to place a single thing in this staging area (e.g. the breath) and exclude everything else. Once you can do this, you can observe the surrounding mental universe, kind of like how you can focus on things in your peripheral vision when you stare at a point. You can achieve some insights this way. Another thing you can do, though, is let that one feeling/thought/emotion in your conscious awareness *become* your entire world. If you have a pleasurable sensation, like a breeze wind blowing on your skin, you can now focus on that, and let that become everything. You experience of state consisting only of one thing: pleasure. Eventually, when you get really good, you realize that in the general subconscious background radiation, there's always a bit of joy somewhere. When you find it, you can place it in your conscious awareness, and experience a period of bliss.
This model and these experiences also made statements I'd previously heard from meditators make sense. For example "pain is not suffering": pain always exists, but if you don't allow it in your staging area, there's nothing negative about it. It's just some physical sensation trying to get your attention. It also explained how people with a lot of meditation experience could deal with a lot of pain without requiring anything supernatural.
I am very interested in reading comments from people who have had similar experiences and from those who have had very different experiences.
Speaking of Andrés Gómez Emilsson, he will always have my undying gratitude for bringing severe pain and suffering to the attention of the effective altruism community.
"Symphonies are beautiful, and we intuitively feel like it’s because they have some kind of deep regularity or complicated pattern. But they’re less regular/predictable/symmetrical than a metronome. Andrés thinks this is because they hit a sweet spot: regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention."
Manfred Schroeder makes a similar case in Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.* To be interesting or beautiful, something has to be almost predictable, but not quite. Either complete uniformity or complete randomness is less beautiful.
Mathematically, this shows up as power law spectrum, especially pink (1/f) noise. If you look at most pieces of music and plot the frequency of different (horizontal) intervals, they follow 1/f spectra. Small changes in pitch are more likely, but there are still a significant number of large changes in pitch. If you take randomly generated music using a 1/f distribution between notes, it sounds better than other distributions - but still not as good as actual music because there's more to music theory than just this.
*It's been about a decade since I read this book and I read it at about the same time as Godel, Escher, Bach by Mandelbrot, so there's a chance this was in that book instead.
There was this video going around a couple of years ago, claiming that sb. measured brain waves of high-level meditators - like 10 000 hours + x of meditation - and found that some type of brain wave that ordinary people have rarely for a few seconds in special moments of bliss or special attention can be found in the meditators like all the time, whether meditating or not. Is this like total BS or something that is possible based on what we know about the brain? Feels strange to ask such a naive question in an area where I have very little knowledge, but I'd also like to know.
I don't think music is pleasurable for the same reason meditation is pleasurable. I think when a baby learn to talk, when they notice a pattern in language that is pleasurable to them. If it wasn't pleasurable they probably wouldn't try to learn to speak. And babies like it when you talk to them.
As an adult it is no longer pleasurable to notice pattern in language. Maybe because you don't need it anymore. Or maybe if it was pleasurable then adults would just sit around learning made up languages all the time.
But a melody has so many patterns to learn, it is still pleasurable for an adult. Music is a superstimulus for language learning.
Well Scott this is not an accurate depiction of the meditative techniques that give rise to
ekaggatā (one-pointed awareness) or what is known as "access consciousness", the first Jhana. Intense focus is not the instruction. Vitaka and vicāra involve aiming the mind at an object of awareness and once obtained, relaxing attention on the object which makes sustained attention possible. This gives rise to mind-body bliss, which fades to tranquility, that that fades to an equanimity. At this point the meditator can move through "formless mind states" by using the techniques for achieving advanced Jhana states. Neuroscientist David Vago (when he was at Harvard) did FMRI studies on meditators in Jhana states and found that most of the brain's sense perceptual apparatus' and the default mode network areas quieted to such an extent that remaining functioning was primarily thalamus, brainstem and cerebelum. Hence the phenomenal surround and the body fades away and the meditator is left in a womb-like sometimes dark, sometimes internally lit, non-material perceptual mind world. There is much controversy in all the Buddhist schools about the usefulness of Jhana practice. Ultimately they all agree it is just "meditative experience" and not "realization". Turning off the world is not a path to liberation from suffering as it described in the Buddhist teachings.
I’ve sat in total darkness and silence meditation retreats for up to 14 days. I confirm the unbelievable amounts of bliss which are achievable through Jhanas and vipassana in such pristine environments. Happy to talk about it.
When people get literally zero sensory input, they tend to start hallucinating; sitting in a dark room makes you see visual echoes and all kinds of random noise. So prediction errors don't exactly disappear when not much is happening...
I never got why people were stumped by the dark room problem (from the reducing uncertainty angle). Do they not remember being afraid of the dark as a kid? A dark room is one where you could be surprised by anything at any time. Much better to scout around the area and learn so you will not be surprised later.
I set a metronome to 15 beats per minute and then time my breathing 5 beats on the in-breath and 5 beats on the out-breath. I wouldn't call it blissful, but it helps me regulate my breath and reach a state of calm that I enjoy. There is also a state of near bliss that can be reached by abstaining from breathing. I thunk this is why free diving is almost addictive.
I am curious in the author's epistemic status with respect to articles including this one.
The author seems to find others' accounts of temporary or in some cases durable euphoric states accessed through meditation practices credible.
The author seems to be curious regarding a neurological understanding of such states.
The author also seems to distance himself at one degree from the population of firsthand witnesses to such euphoric states.
Is there a past article in which Scott is willing to disclose any firsthand experience?
Is Scott blissed out but hiding it out of concern that the firsthand claim would harm his credibility?
A meditation dabbler sufficient satisfied with life as experienced that the further investment in more serious meditation seems like more hassle than it's worth?
A moderately disappointed meditator who nonetheless finds the experiences of other credible, who is looking for the factors that explain the differences between his experiences and others' experiences?
Granted, none of my business, and open to that feedback. But also, the background would help set an understanding for this article and similar.
Am I the only person who's really weirded out by this? On an intellectual level I don't like the idea of a metronome being better to listen to than a symphony, but even on a visceral level reading something about listening to a metronome being "better than anything you've felt before" makes my skin crawl.
I read this article, sat down to meditate, and a few minutes later was interrupted by a Verizon employee ringing my doorbell to see if my Internet was working fine.
It's interesting to conceptualize things like 'equanimity' as widening the variance on your priors. Being at peace with things as they are is, in some sense, equivalent to a uniform prior on all possibilities. Nirvana is frequentist paradise.
I once sat in a perfectly dark and quiet room. Didn't sleep, didn't do anything. I was hoping for some hallucinations, after reading about sensory deprivation studies. But nothing happened, it was pretty boring. I totally lost my sense of time and finally left the room when my pee bottle was full. Then I also checked the time: 13 hours inside, 13 hours of doing nothing and being bored. I felt pretty awesome afterwards though, went for a hike, didn't sleep for 30 hours, mild euphoria and experiencing colors and smell more intensely. Do recommend if you have too much time at hand.
As a meditator for almost 50 years, I can report that it will change your life in every way you can't imagine. Most people are averse to trying it because they are stuck where they are. They are comfortable with the known and fear the unknown. But when one learns that the way to happiness is to understand that life is a journey and one must never stop evolving, they might give a try. Another thing: Meditation will benefit you right away. Increase your peace and happiness quotient almost from day one. But there are still vast realms to explore and miles to go before you sleep, and you have only opened the door a crack. Also, the mind is incredibly complex and one mediation technique like concentrating on the breath, will lead you only so far. There are numerous others. Find a very experienced teacher.
Motorcyclists experience something of this nature. At least on a twisty road, the sensory load (to every sense) and the need to constantly evaluate and plan tends to fully occupy the mind. And the danger tends to heighten concentration. There is also repetition and rhythm to taking the corners, but it's "incompressible".
This is very interesting. In music classes, I had a funny teacher looking like the old man in Back to the Future taking us out into different rooms as small groups. It was before anybody would start playing music. He would tell us to sit down and turn on a metronome. We would meditate for half the class. It was so blissful. Through that sound, you can envision yourself playing the instrument at the level of perfection, which he thought was the best exercise for music.
Well, a number of Neural Network researchers have tackled the problem of broad drives, already, in a few different ways. If you 'seek new', you'll discover more and achieve more of your goals, yet a *simplistic* drive for newness leads to 'couch potatoes' - literally, the artificial intelligence sat staring at a screen that flashed random images, because "They're all NEW! Oh, and that one's new, too! And..."
Seeking symmetry and regularity is the *opposite* of seeking the new... yet, the abundant evidence on HUMAN couch-potatoes shows that we must be seeking newness. AND, they are BOTH more nuanced drives that "just anything new" and "regularity"... because a human couch potato gets *bored* when the new images on the screen are RANDOM. That is, we want a *story that makes sense*. The world is compositional, and our curiosity is specifically designed to decompose the complex world around us. Additionally, symmetry and regularity is stifling, when it is *not chosen* - anyone who has experience prolonged solitary confinement can verify, you DO have waves of intense emotion, and hallucinatory visions, yet they are NOT GOOD.
So, we seek paradoxical goals - regularity, AND newness. And our regularity can NOT be "redundancy against our wishes". And newness can NOT be "random insanity". The *fact* that we have two *opposing* drives means that we will locate our actions 'somewhere in-between'.
I do NOT mean to imply a Buddhist "middle path" - rather, imagine a pair of springs pushed against each other. At equal force, they are balanced in the center; yet any disparity in pressure pushes the equilibrium toward one side or the other (WITHOUT going *all* the way to the extrema!). These two springs are a *sensitive GAUGE*, a mechanism to adapt to shifting and uncertain circumstances. WE NEED *PARADOXICAL* DRIVES, in order to form a SENSITIVE AND RESPONSIVE equilibrium. Curiosity and stability are just a few of the paradoxical drives in us, simultaneous.
So this is speculative but based on interactions with numerous high performing meditators and interactions with successful teachers along with significant personal experience there is a decent amount of support for this view. And these are hotly debated in mediation circles so this is merely one perspective. The Jhanas are essentially a path, a set of stages, that allow us to learn how sensory experience is created. Part of this sensory experience is our level of happiness. As we start to see how experience is created, we come to understand cause and effect, and start to realize how we can create or influence our experiences to result in happiness/less stress. So seeing the creation of experience is the goal of Jhana meditation. The Buddha described the process of how experience is created as the links of dependent origination with each link or module modifying the raw experience.
Some say there are 9.5 Jhana's, but essentially each Jhana is linked to the relaxation of either a central nervous system, or a mental module, these start to be relaxed and no longer engaged so our experiences change because they are no longer firing. What they contribute to the experience is no longer there so our experiences are different. Our motivational systems goals and priorities are being reprogrammed.
So one can think of the Jhana journey as deactivating mental and physical modules that build our sensory experiences.
In the first Jhana our default mode network, the system responsible for scenario and analysis planning starts to relax. This system is designed to motivate us towards longer term goals. The first Jhana emerges as a sense of excitement, or vitality, when mind becomes sufficiently calm that our default mode network deactivates. We don't fully know why but many feel tingling in hands or face, or back of legs. Bliss is a bit of an overstatement. The suttas describe it as arising because of sensory seclusion, but a better word might be sensory stimulation or stress.
The second Jhana occurs as a result of deep physical relaxation. Think of it as body happiness, a sense of no stress and relief. Body is either aroused or relaxed as as arousals starts to ebb relaxation arises and it feels good.
The third Jhana is deeper still, and its a sense of a lack of motivation and contentment. What is happening here is we are getting less and less motivation to do anything.
The fourth is interesting, parts of our body schema deactivate and the outline of our bodies disappears, we are only aware of points of contact (with the floor our hands, our back in the chair and so forth). Our body feels hollow because we are only aware of the points of contact with the floor.
The fifth parts of our proproception system shuts down, our sense of where we are is fading. It feels like we are floating in a black space. We have a loss of a sense of where we are, and our map of the external environment starts fading. The edges of our bodies are no longer detected, we can't tell where we end and the external world begins and we feel one with the univese.
The 6th, other parts of proprioception system disengage and we feel like we are floating in blackness, btu there are still icons on our various mental interfaces so its not complete blackness its a sense of spaciousness.
7th, we start to see the user interfaces (our maps) upon which vision and these icons representing experience are rendered and we start to see that experience is made up of things or icons plans on the user interfaces.
8th the user interfaces themselves fade, and we no longer feel experience at all.
9th the whole ssytem shuts off, but we have a feeling of the system shutting off and that allows us to see the system is essentially a set of interfaces and icons on interfaces.
Anyway, that is what the experience is like, a deactivating of the modules tht create experience ,ch more to this but if you can think of Jhana practise as relaxing mental modules that build experience it will serve you well.
There have been a bunch of podcasts released recently that discuss similarities between jhanas, seizures, orgasms. A hypothesis floated a few times was that when you approach those states, more and more neurons are being entrained (i.e., they start firing with the same frequency) until together they can cross the high threshold required to activate a system necessary to enter one of those states. See Chelsey Fasano's podcast 'Orthogonal' or the 'Guru Viking' podcast episodes featuring Leigh Brasington, Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano and some other guy. If there is interest, I can find specific episodes and timestamps.
I recently became extremely interested in the subject after states that closely match Leigh's description of jhanas started occurring to me during Argentine tango parties (a.k.a. milongas). I had quite a lot of concentration meditation experience before that, though, including training specifically focused on the jhanas. Still, it boggles my mind how it's possible to have so much joy, happiness and contentment off the cushion, especially in a setting as stimulating as a dance party.
Sitting in a dark room right now. Will report back.
Surely it's an overstatement to call the level of effort "superhuman", given the frequency with which people seem to reach it. Difficult or unusual, perhaps.....
In "Waking Up", Sam Harris attributes (citing his Buddhist and Hindu sources) the bliss attained by meditation to ego death, having your sense of self drop away and thereby relieve you of the attachments and yearning usually associated with your mental processes. I wonder if that's a conflicting explanation or a different perspective on the same thing?
It's been a while since I had a session in a floatation tank, but I remember it as basically a cheap and quick shortcut to meditation. And blissful, in the way those first few seconds under the duvet after waking are, before you remember why you have to get up.
This is very insightful when it comes to art, especially music. (I am now reminded of that one time I managed to sit through the entire Disintegration Loops without diverting my attention. It was... IS immensely moving and beautiful, but I've been unable to recreate the experience ever since.)
However, does it really solve the Dark Room Problem, or just restate it? It introduces "inattentiveness" as a cause, without explaining where it comes from. Isn't "inattentiveness" the same as, or an example of, "inbuilt biological drive"? I mean, ever since I've learned the theory, it was obvious to me that the simplest way to counter the tendency to seclude yourself and do nothing is to introduce a set point of the amount of new stimuli that the brain expects to encounter. (Might be my "lived experience" speaking here, I apparently have ADD, which means a whole life with a brain repeatedly forcing me to drop what I'm doing and seek something else.)
Concerning beauty: I found this study very helpful:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/47/9397.abstract
They come up with a quantified measure for the entropy/predictability of musical stimuli and show kind of inverted-U-shape relationship to how much people liked those stimuli. So very predictable and very unpredictable songs were less prefered to intermediate amounts of complexity BUT the very predictable ones (i.e., metronome style) were still preferred over the very unpredictable ones (i.e., acoustic noise). This could very well be just a measurement artifact, but it could also mean that low high predictability still has value in that it reassures you of your well running world model, that is able to perfectly predict this boring tune.
Concerning the dark room problem in general: My take on it was always, that given the ever changing environment that we grow up in, when your goal is to minimize prediction error, it is just not a very good strategy to always seek a dark room since you won’t be able to update your internal world model properly and will inevitably experience more not less PE on the long run, once you leave the room. We have learned this relationship and build up a kind of meta prior about how being in a momentary state of no PE at all is not helpful on the long run. In order to get rid of this meta prior, one would have to make a lot of experience that teaches you otherwise (no PE=predictive of low PE in the future), i.e. meditation training and feeling good afterwards.
If the goal is to establish an uber-drive, then biological drives as set points seems like kind of a cop out. Maybe I seek food because I predict I won't be hungry and have a drive to minimize prediction error, or maybe I just have a drive to seek food when hungry. Occam's Razor says the latter.
A thought that I had a while ago and sorta fits this topic: I enjoy many types of music, especially when I am doing something else. My favorite genre though is symphonic metal, but to this I only listen deliberately. And I think the reason is that this epic style of music, with so many instruments and so much going on so fast, can fill my entire brain in a way no other genre does. Combine that with the predictability inherent to music and it's clear why I find it so enjoyable.
My wife, on the other hand, can't listen to symphonic metal at all. She doesn't have a problem with hard music per se, but symphonic metal apparently is "too much" (her words) for her.
ASMR occurs when you get extremely focused on one thing such as a quiet noise single noise or small movement, and it is *extremely* pleasurable. I feel bad for people who don't experience it. When it happens, my vision goes blurred and things sound like I'm in a tunnel, and I'm not thinking anything but just focused on hearing the scratchy voice or scratching sound that triggers it for me, which becomes amplified while I focus on it and all other sensory input fades away. And the result is an incredible feeling set of warm cascading tingles from scalp to spine. Sadly, it's fleeting and almost impossible to call up voluntarily. But I always experienced it even as a kid ( effort it had a name or I knew it happened to other people). I used to go into a trance watching a cashier's hands scanning items, or someone turn pages of a magazine or newspaper. The feeling is like what you imagine it must be like to be a purring cat, on MDMA.
Anyway, that'd an example of deep pleasure from focus on some minor thing that isn't and shouldn't be pleasurable in and of itself. And you don't need to be a trained yogi.
Still, to me, there is *nothing* as pleasurable as the hard and involuntary laughter that comes from an unexpected joke or funny thing happening. Humor is truly the most sublime of pleasures. And it comes from the unexpected, from a physical or verbal or social transgression that was unexpected and makes you laugh. To be truly really really funny, it has to be unexpected.. So that's a pleasure that's the absolute opposite of what you described...not regular, not predictable, not focused.
Pleasures exist on both ends. On one is the bliss of ASMR or meditation or a massage...quiet, focused, predictable. And on the other is really funny humor and rollercoasters, things that shake you up and thrill you.
Answer: Tuning out all sensory input and all attachment to the world in order to enter your own private, interior state of bliss.
Question: What is wireheading?
I strongly object to that last sentence. An infinite flat featureless desert is compressible but not beautiful. I haven’t read much on the subject, but my knee jerk EvoPsych/Econish alternative is that beauty motivates hunter-gatherer nomads to choose one terrain instead of another, or one mate/ally instead of another. So we like green landscapes with rivers instead of barren Martian hellscapes. We like Melisandre with the amulet instead of without it. These things don’t seem reducible to compressibility.
When my mom used to drag me to a Congregationalist church service, where I was very bored, I would stare at a particular pipe on the organ or a particular point in the woodwork until my entire field of vision faded to a gray blur. Totally focusing on a metronome doesn’t seem like it would be that hard, if I started small with 5 minutes and increased it by 25% each time.
A plausible explanation for my love of minimal dub techno
It's hard to talk about the jhanas without getting dragged into a tedious discussion about nomenclature and what jhanas are, and aren't, so let me be the first to kick that off by introducing the term 'access concentration'. I think this is the minimised uncertainty state you're looking for. If you can just sit and concentrate on the object of meditation for a prolonged period of time with no distractions it feels really, really nice and you'll carry this blissed out feeling with you for a few hours afterwards.
If you sit like that for long enough - and most people have to go on a retreat to make this happen - you'll probably be able to access the first jhana. And different people have different experiences, but many seem similar to mine which is that the jhana is very weird and very intense. I usually feel, for example, jolts of energy running down my hands and into my arms, and it feels a bit like I'm being electrocuted. It feels like I can't breathe, and it feels like I'm falling. Lots of people find it hard to sleep the first couple of times after accessing the jhana.
It's not clear to me how this fits into the model of the brain as Bayesian predictor. Or any cognitive model at all. Suggestions welcome!
> The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things?
> The usual workaround is
"Workaround" implies there's a problem to be solved. But that case hasn't been made. Assume everyone is gay. How come people keep having children?
Hu, why would the brain want to minimize prediction error?
There just was a post about the drive to discover. Isn't that kind of the opposite?
So if our brain wants to minimize prediction error and we also have a drive for discovery, then the first one comes from the brain and the second one comes from, hm, somewhere else?
Also, isn't learning all about getting in touch with stuff you can't predict - yet? It seems like a really bad idea on so many levels if we would be wired to minimize for this.
I've spent the last five years in Southeast Asia studying and teaching on Buddhist meditation forms (primarily Vipassana, but also others). I'd love to have a chat with you about it! Seeing your posts about your meditative journey have always been exciting for me.
I discovered the Jhanas pretty early in my practice and was deeply fascinated by them. I have a difficult time tapping into them out of retreat settings, but can regularly ascend through the second and third ones a few days into retreat. It definitely takes a lengthy settling into a proper and full seclusion; that begins with seclusion from the literal real world and all its busy-ness, and progresses to and through seclusion from deeply ingrained emotional and cognitive patterns.
And when you get that seclusion, that "dhyana", the corresponding hit of "piti" (that initial buzzy, light, clear feeling of sinking into deeper meditative states), it's an unparalleled experience. It's akin to ecstasy, minus all the downsides. It feels like the same euphoria, but fully natural and clear (and with no comedown).
And that's just the first Jhana. The further ones become progressively more profound and indescribable (as exemplified in the reading of any classical text on them, it gets very esoteric very fast).
I feel deeply, truly "myself" in those moments. I feel massively compassionate and open, creativity just explodes out of me, I'm patient and clear-headed and buzzing with aliveness. It's amazing and hugely profound, especially as a non-spiritual person for whom a long background in Christianity never really "clicked".
RE: experiencing absorption in other activities. Your choice of the metronome is an interesting one. Before Vipassana, my closest experiences with meditative states were all musical. I'd experience absorption in choir, amplified by the connection with other singers. I'd sink into them while practicing guitar and piano, when whole hours fly by (often accompanied by metronomes). They were never as deep as the states reached in Vipassana, but they were a taste, and they were a foundation I could relate the feeling two when my practice started.
A lot of Buddhism(s) posit(s) that these deep Jhana states are our most natural state of being; we were perpetually in something akin to them in childhood, and we lost track of them as our mind became more clouded over with increasingly complex patterns and schemata (sankara, in the Pali terminology). For me, deep meditation states have often felt like a returning to childlikeness.
I experienced one of these altered states and have a very simple explanation. Basically, the level of sensitivity to stimuli may be inversely proportional to the level of stimuli.
First, I got into the state by meditating for 5+ hours in a row, with the goal of not being distracted by any conscious thoughts (and I eventually basically got there).
Everything afterwards felt intrinsically extremely intense and interesting in a profound way that is probably impossible to describe (but the effect was a peak-experience, not anything subtle). The best analogy I have is that the mere existence and visual appearance of things was amazing in a way that I probably had experienced as a young child (who find many ordinary things intrinsically fascinating) but forgot was possible.
I could also describe it as the opposite sensation from shell-shock or burnout. After an excessively stressful experience sometimes the world can feel less real / important - this was the opposite of that where everything felt super-real. This obviously also fits with the stimulation hypothesis. Such a mechanism also makes sense from a practical / evolutionary perspective.
There's also a likely reason why these states are not easy to achieve - conscious thoughts probably are a type of stimulation that affects this input sensitivity. I'm someone without any normal running (mental) dialog, and even then getting my mind quiet to such a degree was maybe one of the hardest things I've done and took 5+ hrs. Without tons of effort, just sitting in a dark room would probably normally just lead to being lost in thought.
Despite the extreme difficulty I'm often tempted to repeat the experiment, it would be a no-brainer if I thought achieving such a state would get easier with practice (anyone else have relevant experience?).
Based on my limited experiences with meditation I would say it's the opposite of prediction. You don't expect anything - you just are. I guess one could rephrase this as: without prediction, no predictive error.
I'm not sure this theory does arrive at the same place as Schmidhuber's. It seems like mediators get to a place where compression is unnecessary, otherwise the metronome would get boring if not at first, then after a while. Unless even the most basic sensations are somehow infinitely compressible? However, in the sense Schmid was using it, infinite compression seems impossible.
"The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. "
Why is this at all a reasonable supposition? A much more reasonable model is that the brain is maximizing the propagation of your genes, because that's what evolution selects for.
"suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? "
It seems very strange to me to assume that the brain would only minimize the prediction error. Surely this is one of a relatively large number of objectives for the brain and the Dark Room Problem is not surprising at all?
Concerning aesthetic preferences, I had read that for web pages and landscapes (and I guess it generalizes to many other things!), there were two characteristics that played a lot: orderliness and diversity, both showing a maximum preference for intermediate values.
"regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention." how can we wrangle this pattern into, say, our office work? to better hold our attention on something that is pretty familiar (and mostly boring,though some of it can be a little engaging) , yet has the occasional difficulty which mostly just feel frustrating ?
Some reference on this subject for those that are intersted.
This is a really good book on the Jhanas:
http://rc.leighb.com/index.html
Leigh Brasington is considered something of a lay expert on the Jhanas (he was a computer programmer for most of his working life, I believe), but you can also find really insightful stuff on this subject in the extensive teachings from the inscrutable Alan Wallace
https://www.alanwallace.org
For the rationalists amongst the audience, I can guarantee his edited book on Buddhism and Science as a fascinating and stimulating read:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/buddhism-and-science/9780231123358
Finally - for those with a practical bent - you could do worse than follow the guidance of the recently deceased Culadasa in his seminal work, The Mind Illuminated:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mind-Illuminated/John-Yates/9781501156984
Although, from the perspective of an enthusiastic practitioner, don't expect this to be an easy journey. "Access concentration" is not achievable by everyone in a few months. I can vouch for that.
This sounds a lot like overfitting in machine learning: give the model a very reduced set of signals to learn from, it'll get really good at predicting them, and it's kind of "happy" there - it takes a bit of a shock to make it realize again that the world is more complicated. But the whole point is that the world outside (the one we don't choose) is the interesting one.
This really hard concentration is actually really bad for you. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/
Concentration is a Western mistranslation of the Pali word "samadhi" that has pervaded our interpretation of meditation and mindfulness. You can indeed experience jhana-like effects from it, but they are false jhanas and will only lead to more turmoil. Like a pressure cooker.
What is required is light awareness, and plenty of relaxation. Meditation is not about focusing on an object to the exclusion of all else. It as about paying attention to your own self and learning from that. You can't do that if you're ignoring everything.
There is also the option that all creatures that followed free energy reduction to its logical conclusion died out, leaving only those that act illogical.
Evolution does not always mesh well with logic.
Beauty is about sending credible signals of being in a certain group.
I probably spend more of my pleasure time listening to symphonies than anything else, and it's not deep regularity that I get out of them. Complicated pattern in a sense, but not in the sense that a complex weaving is a pattern.
Sitting in a dark room does not appeal to me. I need outside stimulus. When I lie down in a dark room, i.e. at night, I need stimulus - like a book - to read until I fall asleep, even if it only takes 5 minutes.
I would disagree that hunger is created by a prediction error. I think anxiety is generated by a prediction error and hunger is just a base impulse coming from the stomach to activate the feeling of hunger.
When you start to feel anxious because there is no food, that is a prediction error of predicting food in your mouth and not getting it.
I've found out sitting (standing or lying is better, though) in the room that's quiet and pitch dark works extremely well as a "quick 15min recharger during a busy day".
Note it's VERY important for the room to be really pitch dark, and to suppress any sounds that could hint that something is happening. Headphones with brown noise, or just running water works well. Not fans - fan noise is too regular and brain filters it.
If the room is dark but not pitch dark, or a bit of sound passes through - your sensitivity gets maxed out instead, together with anxiety or whatever was bothering you before.
> beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.
That could explain why modern architecture isn't beautiful as per those recent blog posts, since all the details have been compressed to just glass/steel/concrete cubes. Hell, maybe an architecture degree is enough "super human focus" on architecture to make that blissful
While we don't know exactly how brain works and whether it optimizes any utility function, we do know a utility function optimized by the organism as a whole: the probability of passing on its genes. Sitting in a dark room doesn't really help with this task, so I'm skeptical that it should be considered beneficial/pleasurable by the brain.
Is there any research on values and attention?
Keeping your attention stably on an object likely requires being able to “write” to your own value function. If you can’t consciously control what your brain assigns value to, then it’ll naturally wander because the metronome isn’t gonna feed you or mate with you.
This made me wonder if ADD might be correlated with declines in public religiosity. If you never reift the concept of “good” and think about it directly, I can see how you’d likely have a hard time saying, in a specific situation, “this specific thing is very important”, and thus maintaining focus on it.
"I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex."
What things are like sex?
Pascal's pensee #139, in part: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."
One of the most blissful places in the universe is inside an MRI machine.
This reminds me of the enjoyment Richard Feynman had in sensory deprivation tanks as he describes in "Surely you're joking Mr. Feyman". For those who are comparing concentration practices with insight practices, it seems to me that both do have the quality of refraining from conceptual involvment (ie perhaps prediction), either by single pointedness in concetration practice, or non-judgemental (receptive, accepting) attitude in insight practice.
Isn't there a built-in curiosity module that actually forces you to do things which consequences you cannot predict? There was some interesting AI research recently about implementing curiosity for robots.
The best vacations I have ever taken are the ones where I'm in a place where there are very few things to do, very few distractions, and nothing that needs to be done. Visiting family in a very rural place, where most of the time is just sitting on a porch and talking (or maybe not even talking) has been some of the most relaxing experiences of my life. My wife, who did not grow up around that environment or family, strongly agrees.
I can definitely see the potential in trying to recreate such an environment artificially through meditation or similar.
First jhana is basically comparable to a runner’s high. It can get more intense but that’s a good reference point, it’s a concrete sensory thing not a mysterious spiritual experience incomprehensible to a non-meditator.
Back when you wrote about it before, I suspected the Friston-style “uncertainty reduction” had to work on the distribution of your general life experience, not on an arbitrary distribution (dark room, etc). So most people don’t experience much drive to minimize prediction of a dark room, because the brain knows that won’t generalize to the “world” distribution and thus won’t be helpful. Instead we mostly try to get better at predicting our real lives. But maybe hardcore meditators have successfully changed their real life distributions to contain such a large portion of dark rooms that the brain says “oh we see these inputs a lot, they must be important” and rewards them for mastering it. (And I can’t deny these stimuli-reduced zones would be easier to predict than most other things, so I bet it feels amazing.)
Neil up there in Heaven going “GLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-“
Evidently there is a quiet room at the university - not a reading room, a *perfectly* quiet room for the measurement of sound, in the engineering building. People supposedly have weird reactions to it, some agreeable but not all favorable. Similarly, I was once on a cave tour in southwestern Missouri, and the young woman guide mentioned to the group consisting of my husband and me and a random little boy who had ridden up to the mouth of the cave on his bike, that she was going to turn off her flashlight and we would be plunged into as-near total darkness as most people ever experience, and warned that sometimes people find this disorienting and fall over, that this was not uncommon. It didn't seem likely to me that we would fall over and the three of us looked at each other with shy pride when she turned the lights back on and we were all standing normally. When we were finished, we got in our car and the little boy got on his bike to return to wherever his family was camping. I am sorry to report that I am so predictable that something about the addition of this unknown, cave-appreciating child to our otherwise childless day lent it a certain "impaled by beauty'' quality of the sort old Holden Caulfield felt when he saw his sister in her fuzzy pajamas. I have believed that aesthetics is as complex and important a subject as ethics, and I will be interested to read more about "Schmidhuber's theory". If it is to be simplified, I think it would reduce to something like "Life is always better than not-life", and that there would be good evolutionary reasons for this.
Autistic stimming and the flow of videogames both seem relevant to this thesis.
This description sounds a lot like what regular or problem gamblers describe as the "zone" they enter when playing. That especially true for people playing slots, where the repetitive acts and single focus bring them into a desired mental state where everything else disappears. Apparently this is so much the goal for many of them that some report being annoyed and disappointed when they win big, since it interrupts their flow.
As I recall, minimizing prediction error/free energy, whatever, is a great model of learning, the accumulation of lots of errors resulting in better predictions, richer models, etc (Jeff Hawkins book on this is great, On Intelligence). But it strikes me as incomplete, because the brain also rewards you for the prediction error; dopamine follows novelty, otherwise known as stimulation, and the motivation to chase this had a name, no less: curiosity. Hell, turn up the dial as the personality trait openness to experience and call it novelty-seeking, which is maybe related to ADHD. Point being, the brain seems to be rewarding to sides of an equation, both being valuable to learning, development and ultimately survival. As much as people need peace, people need stimulation (and some more than most), and that piece seems to be missing.
Poetry (the kind that rhymes and scans) is also a satisfying mixture of predictability and unpredictability. For two English words to rhyme, they have to be the same from the primary stressed vowel onwards, but different before that. So, when you hear a limerick starting "there was a young lady from Norway", you automatically register that 2nd and 5th lines will also end with "-orway" (predictability), but you don't know how the author will get there (unpredictability), which holds your attention. You also know the approximate rhythmic structure of each coming line, but you don't know what words will form that structure.
Perhaps a fruitful, and less commonly explored avenue for insight into these meditative states, would be the monastic works of the Eastern/Orthodox monks.
There is a long history of "natural" meditation, as a precursor (and later in one's progress, antagonist) to one's spiritual meditation. Part of the natural meditative stage involves attention to breath, posture, shutting off of attention to what's going on around oneself, and ultimately even to one's own thoughts. One gets the image of removing opaque or translucent layers, and finding, behind them, pure light, which is taken to be God as immanent to the created universe and soul.
Part of the view that informs this practice was developed out of the Christianized neo-Platonic movements in the first few centuries CE, and their debates about the state of the soul after death. Maximus the Confessor is an authority here (though admittedly a dense read!), and talks extensively about a sort of "stability-in-motion", in which the soul, rather than becoming static (one thinks here of true Nirvana, or total dissolution of self) or going off to infinity (in the form of ever-novel experiences and change, as we have in this life) finds rest in a sort of cyclical habit, which he considers to be the most perfect reflection of the Divine way of being that a creature can attain to.
The relationship between "Eastern" (Hindu, Buddhist, etc) meditative practices/goals, and this form, has often been a topic of interest to me.
Why do you keep using the phrase "full stop". It's a Britishism so it's confusing that you would use it. That's just what they call the period, and saying "period" is the equivalent expression without using weird ways that English people have renamed punctuation marks.
Like I said before, I can't come up with a rational argument against wireheading. If you can mentally hack your brain into deriving maximum pleasure from sitting alone in a dark room -- and that's a big "if", absent drugs or neurosurgery -- then I can't come up with any response other than "go for it". Yes, the world would be poorer for it, but you'd be so much richer that the tradeoff is well worth it.
I used to practice secular meditation pretty seriously. I was eventually able to reach states I don't know how to describe except as pure bliss. There are different ways to achieve this, I'm sure, and I don't want to claim this was officially a jhana. Arguing about definition of some altered state is far less interesting than discussing the thing itself. That said, Scott's post very much does *not* jibe with my experiences.
The mental model of the mind I learned through meditation is that our conscious awareness is not the entire mind, but something of a staging area. The staging area is where things take on a valence: good, bad, annoying, pleasurable. It is constantly bombarded by physical feelings, thoughts, and emotions. It usually jumps between several different things. One technique you learn when you meditate is to place a single thing in this staging area (e.g. the breath) and exclude everything else. Once you can do this, you can observe the surrounding mental universe, kind of like how you can focus on things in your peripheral vision when you stare at a point. You can achieve some insights this way. Another thing you can do, though, is let that one feeling/thought/emotion in your conscious awareness *become* your entire world. If you have a pleasurable sensation, like a breeze wind blowing on your skin, you can now focus on that, and let that become everything. You experience of state consisting only of one thing: pleasure. Eventually, when you get really good, you realize that in the general subconscious background radiation, there's always a bit of joy somewhere. When you find it, you can place it in your conscious awareness, and experience a period of bliss.
This model and these experiences also made statements I'd previously heard from meditators make sense. For example "pain is not suffering": pain always exists, but if you don't allow it in your staging area, there's nothing negative about it. It's just some physical sensation trying to get your attention. It also explained how people with a lot of meditation experience could deal with a lot of pain without requiring anything supernatural.
I am very interested in reading comments from people who have had similar experiences and from those who have had very different experiences.
Speaking of Andrés Gómez Emilsson, he will always have my undying gratitude for bringing severe pain and suffering to the attention of the effective altruism community.
https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/log-scales
"Symphonies are beautiful, and we intuitively feel like it’s because they have some kind of deep regularity or complicated pattern. But they’re less regular/predictable/symmetrical than a metronome. Andrés thinks this is because they hit a sweet spot: regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention."
Manfred Schroeder makes a similar case in Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.* To be interesting or beautiful, something has to be almost predictable, but not quite. Either complete uniformity or complete randomness is less beautiful.
Mathematically, this shows up as power law spectrum, especially pink (1/f) noise. If you look at most pieces of music and plot the frequency of different (horizontal) intervals, they follow 1/f spectra. Small changes in pitch are more likely, but there are still a significant number of large changes in pitch. If you take randomly generated music using a 1/f distribution between notes, it sounds better than other distributions - but still not as good as actual music because there's more to music theory than just this.
*It's been about a decade since I read this book and I read it at about the same time as Godel, Escher, Bach by Mandelbrot, so there's a chance this was in that book instead.
There was this video going around a couple of years ago, claiming that sb. measured brain waves of high-level meditators - like 10 000 hours + x of meditation - and found that some type of brain wave that ordinary people have rarely for a few seconds in special moments of bliss or special attention can be found in the meditators like all the time, whether meditating or not. Is this like total BS or something that is possible based on what we know about the brain? Feels strange to ask such a naive question in an area where I have very little knowledge, but I'd also like to know.
I don't think music is pleasurable for the same reason meditation is pleasurable. I think when a baby learn to talk, when they notice a pattern in language that is pleasurable to them. If it wasn't pleasurable they probably wouldn't try to learn to speak. And babies like it when you talk to them.
As an adult it is no longer pleasurable to notice pattern in language. Maybe because you don't need it anymore. Or maybe if it was pleasurable then adults would just sit around learning made up languages all the time.
But a melody has so many patterns to learn, it is still pleasurable for an adult. Music is a superstimulus for language learning.
I made a comic about this http://spacespy.thecomicseries.com/comics/191/
Well Scott this is not an accurate depiction of the meditative techniques that give rise to
ekaggatā (one-pointed awareness) or what is known as "access consciousness", the first Jhana. Intense focus is not the instruction. Vitaka and vicāra involve aiming the mind at an object of awareness and once obtained, relaxing attention on the object which makes sustained attention possible. This gives rise to mind-body bliss, which fades to tranquility, that that fades to an equanimity. At this point the meditator can move through "formless mind states" by using the techniques for achieving advanced Jhana states. Neuroscientist David Vago (when he was at Harvard) did FMRI studies on meditators in Jhana states and found that most of the brain's sense perceptual apparatus' and the default mode network areas quieted to such an extent that remaining functioning was primarily thalamus, brainstem and cerebelum. Hence the phenomenal surround and the body fades away and the meditator is left in a womb-like sometimes dark, sometimes internally lit, non-material perceptual mind world. There is much controversy in all the Buddhist schools about the usefulness of Jhana practice. Ultimately they all agree it is just "meditative experience" and not "realization". Turning off the world is not a path to liberation from suffering as it described in the Buddhist teachings.
I’ve sat in total darkness and silence meditation retreats for up to 14 days. I confirm the unbelievable amounts of bliss which are achievable through Jhanas and vipassana in such pristine environments. Happy to talk about it.
When people get literally zero sensory input, they tend to start hallucinating; sitting in a dark room makes you see visual echoes and all kinds of random noise. So prediction errors don't exactly disappear when not much is happening...
I never got why people were stumped by the dark room problem (from the reducing uncertainty angle). Do they not remember being afraid of the dark as a kid? A dark room is one where you could be surprised by anything at any time. Much better to scout around the area and learn so you will not be surprised later.
I set a metronome to 15 beats per minute and then time my breathing 5 beats on the in-breath and 5 beats on the out-breath. I wouldn't call it blissful, but it helps me regulate my breath and reach a state of calm that I enjoy. There is also a state of near bliss that can be reached by abstaining from breathing. I thunk this is why free diving is almost addictive.
Isn't the ultimate Dark Room just sleeping?
Most people love to sleep and it definitely minimises prediction error.
It's also another theory for the big pile of explanations for why sleep exists at all.
I am curious in the author's epistemic status with respect to articles including this one.
The author seems to find others' accounts of temporary or in some cases durable euphoric states accessed through meditation practices credible.
The author seems to be curious regarding a neurological understanding of such states.
The author also seems to distance himself at one degree from the population of firsthand witnesses to such euphoric states.
Is there a past article in which Scott is willing to disclose any firsthand experience?
Is Scott blissed out but hiding it out of concern that the firsthand claim would harm his credibility?
A meditation dabbler sufficient satisfied with life as experienced that the further investment in more serious meditation seems like more hassle than it's worth?
A moderately disappointed meditator who nonetheless finds the experiences of other credible, who is looking for the factors that explain the differences between his experiences and others' experiences?
Granted, none of my business, and open to that feedback. But also, the background would help set an understanding for this article and similar.
Am I the only person who's really weirded out by this? On an intellectual level I don't like the idea of a metronome being better to listen to than a symphony, but even on a visceral level reading something about listening to a metronome being "better than anything you've felt before" makes my skin crawl.
Need a book review of GEB
I read this article, sat down to meditate, and a few minutes later was interrupted by a Verizon employee ringing my doorbell to see if my Internet was working fine.
"If you sit long enough the monkeys will come down from the trees."
Who said that?
My personal definition of anxiety is knowing something to be true that I refuse to believe.
A book that I think is relevant to this discussion: Feeding Your Demons.
Its a translation and commentary on the work (myth? presence?) of a 12th or 13th century Buddhist nun.
I found it very helpful.
It's interesting to conceptualize things like 'equanimity' as widening the variance on your priors. Being at peace with things as they are is, in some sense, equivalent to a uniform prior on all possibilities. Nirvana is frequentist paradise.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0091.html
I once sat in a perfectly dark and quiet room. Didn't sleep, didn't do anything. I was hoping for some hallucinations, after reading about sensory deprivation studies. But nothing happened, it was pretty boring. I totally lost my sense of time and finally left the room when my pee bottle was full. Then I also checked the time: 13 hours inside, 13 hours of doing nothing and being bored. I felt pretty awesome afterwards though, went for a hike, didn't sleep for 30 hours, mild euphoria and experiencing colors and smell more intensely. Do recommend if you have too much time at hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuBeBjqKSGQ Is this great because it’s predictable or unpredictable? Or something like predictable in an unpredictable way? Or this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVUrJZZMIYg
As a meditator for almost 50 years, I can report that it will change your life in every way you can't imagine. Most people are averse to trying it because they are stuck where they are. They are comfortable with the known and fear the unknown. But when one learns that the way to happiness is to understand that life is a journey and one must never stop evolving, they might give a try. Another thing: Meditation will benefit you right away. Increase your peace and happiness quotient almost from day one. But there are still vast realms to explore and miles to go before you sleep, and you have only opened the door a crack. Also, the mind is incredibly complex and one mediation technique like concentrating on the breath, will lead you only so far. There are numerous others. Find a very experienced teacher.
Anil Seth mentions your SSC post about Free Energy in his new book 'Being You'
Motorcyclists experience something of this nature. At least on a twisty road, the sensory load (to every sense) and the need to constantly evaluate and plan tends to fully occupy the mind. And the danger tends to heighten concentration. There is also repetition and rhythm to taking the corners, but it's "incompressible".
If meditation was actually better than sex, we wouldn't keep seeing guru sex scandals.
This is very interesting. In music classes, I had a funny teacher looking like the old man in Back to the Future taking us out into different rooms as small groups. It was before anybody would start playing music. He would tell us to sit down and turn on a metronome. We would meditate for half the class. It was so blissful. Through that sound, you can envision yourself playing the instrument at the level of perfection, which he thought was the best exercise for music.
Well, a number of Neural Network researchers have tackled the problem of broad drives, already, in a few different ways. If you 'seek new', you'll discover more and achieve more of your goals, yet a *simplistic* drive for newness leads to 'couch potatoes' - literally, the artificial intelligence sat staring at a screen that flashed random images, because "They're all NEW! Oh, and that one's new, too! And..."
Seeking symmetry and regularity is the *opposite* of seeking the new... yet, the abundant evidence on HUMAN couch-potatoes shows that we must be seeking newness. AND, they are BOTH more nuanced drives that "just anything new" and "regularity"... because a human couch potato gets *bored* when the new images on the screen are RANDOM. That is, we want a *story that makes sense*. The world is compositional, and our curiosity is specifically designed to decompose the complex world around us. Additionally, symmetry and regularity is stifling, when it is *not chosen* - anyone who has experience prolonged solitary confinement can verify, you DO have waves of intense emotion, and hallucinatory visions, yet they are NOT GOOD.
So, we seek paradoxical goals - regularity, AND newness. And our regularity can NOT be "redundancy against our wishes". And newness can NOT be "random insanity". The *fact* that we have two *opposing* drives means that we will locate our actions 'somewhere in-between'.
I do NOT mean to imply a Buddhist "middle path" - rather, imagine a pair of springs pushed against each other. At equal force, they are balanced in the center; yet any disparity in pressure pushes the equilibrium toward one side or the other (WITHOUT going *all* the way to the extrema!). These two springs are a *sensitive GAUGE*, a mechanism to adapt to shifting and uncertain circumstances. WE NEED *PARADOXICAL* DRIVES, in order to form a SENSITIVE AND RESPONSIVE equilibrium. Curiosity and stability are just a few of the paradoxical drives in us, simultaneous.
So this is speculative but based on interactions with numerous high performing meditators and interactions with successful teachers along with significant personal experience there is a decent amount of support for this view. And these are hotly debated in mediation circles so this is merely one perspective. The Jhanas are essentially a path, a set of stages, that allow us to learn how sensory experience is created. Part of this sensory experience is our level of happiness. As we start to see how experience is created, we come to understand cause and effect, and start to realize how we can create or influence our experiences to result in happiness/less stress. So seeing the creation of experience is the goal of Jhana meditation. The Buddha described the process of how experience is created as the links of dependent origination with each link or module modifying the raw experience.
Some say there are 9.5 Jhana's, but essentially each Jhana is linked to the relaxation of either a central nervous system, or a mental module, these start to be relaxed and no longer engaged so our experiences change because they are no longer firing. What they contribute to the experience is no longer there so our experiences are different. Our motivational systems goals and priorities are being reprogrammed.
So one can think of the Jhana journey as deactivating mental and physical modules that build our sensory experiences.
In the first Jhana our default mode network, the system responsible for scenario and analysis planning starts to relax. This system is designed to motivate us towards longer term goals. The first Jhana emerges as a sense of excitement, or vitality, when mind becomes sufficiently calm that our default mode network deactivates. We don't fully know why but many feel tingling in hands or face, or back of legs. Bliss is a bit of an overstatement. The suttas describe it as arising because of sensory seclusion, but a better word might be sensory stimulation or stress.
The second Jhana occurs as a result of deep physical relaxation. Think of it as body happiness, a sense of no stress and relief. Body is either aroused or relaxed as as arousals starts to ebb relaxation arises and it feels good.
The third Jhana is deeper still, and its a sense of a lack of motivation and contentment. What is happening here is we are getting less and less motivation to do anything.
The fourth is interesting, parts of our body schema deactivate and the outline of our bodies disappears, we are only aware of points of contact (with the floor our hands, our back in the chair and so forth). Our body feels hollow because we are only aware of the points of contact with the floor.
The fifth parts of our proproception system shuts down, our sense of where we are is fading. It feels like we are floating in a black space. We have a loss of a sense of where we are, and our map of the external environment starts fading. The edges of our bodies are no longer detected, we can't tell where we end and the external world begins and we feel one with the univese.
The 6th, other parts of proprioception system disengage and we feel like we are floating in blackness, btu there are still icons on our various mental interfaces so its not complete blackness its a sense of spaciousness.
7th, we start to see the user interfaces (our maps) upon which vision and these icons representing experience are rendered and we start to see that experience is made up of things or icons plans on the user interfaces.
8th the user interfaces themselves fade, and we no longer feel experience at all.
9th the whole ssytem shuts off, but we have a feeling of the system shutting off and that allows us to see the system is essentially a set of interfaces and icons on interfaces.
Anyway, that is what the experience is like, a deactivating of the modules tht create experience ,ch more to this but if you can think of Jhana practise as relaxing mental modules that build experience it will serve you well.
There have been a bunch of podcasts released recently that discuss similarities between jhanas, seizures, orgasms. A hypothesis floated a few times was that when you approach those states, more and more neurons are being entrained (i.e., they start firing with the same frequency) until together they can cross the high threshold required to activate a system necessary to enter one of those states. See Chelsey Fasano's podcast 'Orthogonal' or the 'Guru Viking' podcast episodes featuring Leigh Brasington, Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano and some other guy. If there is interest, I can find specific episodes and timestamps.
I recently became extremely interested in the subject after states that closely match Leigh's description of jhanas started occurring to me during Argentine tango parties (a.k.a. milongas). I had quite a lot of concentration meditation experience before that, though, including training specifically focused on the jhanas. Still, it boggles my mind how it's possible to have so much joy, happiness and contentment off the cushion, especially in a setting as stimulating as a dance party.