corbin @corbindreams

self-therapy without equanimity seems like trying to refactor a codebase but there's no helpful documentation (or even anti-helpful comments) + also btw each read/write comes with taking a scary cold shower

corbin @corbindreams

4 weeks ago

it seems like self-therapy without equanimity is like debugging your tennis serve technique or refactoring an n-dimensional tower of hanoi but you’re too afraid to actually look at any of it

0 0 6 250 1

@nosilverv does this mean ill see you on michael’s pod soon

@nosilverv whoa

@AskYatharth i think ive said this before but i really enjoy how you articulate things it feels very direct and true (and relatable)

im curious what specific parts of these traditions you personally resonate with and want to see more people “steep” in i imagine that even if modern pedagogy took care of the minor risks + major risks + made sure to go not too slow / not too fast, you’d still advocate that people should pause and steep in certain stages/states/areas of the path — id love to hear examples

@ascetic_shadow ahh okay i can totally see that

@AlexKrusz @Plus3Happiness super agree

@maxkshen reminds me of:

yeah i agree see: the history of germ theory, and how long it took to convince people that you need to wash your hands (it took a while!) see: theories of diffusion of innovation (it takes a long time for innovations to culturally diffuse even if it *does* already have robustly reliable outcomes) see: sarno back pain stuff / pain reprocessing therapy is way less woo than meditation + way more cultural legitimacy/legibility + more robust outcomes (compared to meditation) + simpler to explain + easier to practice, but there's still a really open question of how do we scale those outcomes? i think it'll be possible but it seems very nontrivial (i think our best hope for Universal Basic Okayness is to do enough cultural diffusion to attract the future nerds who will end up doing the neuro/bio research breakthroughs to make the equivalent of a tanha vaccine, sorta)

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@dkazand @kathryndevaney omg

insight meditation as a subset of pain reprocessing therapy

@realitymap ooh just thought of this - e.g. if we're overcoming chronic pain (a very serious goal-oriented task!) using pain reprocessing therapy (very similar to vipassana / looking closely / insight meditation), we can still orient to this with play and curiosity! youtube.com/watch?v=6O-vLd…

@realitymap or, like, for example: there are fighters who fight for war and self defense etc can still totally appreciate the beauty and joy of playing around in daily practice (to some large extent) eg im also thinking of the air force pilots depicted in top gun maverick

the meditation field needs more people posting about how Fun and Beautiful it is to practice not just about the beauty of absorbing attention into incredible amounts joy/peace, and not just about how it can radically change our everyday experience and make us feel super peaceful.. there are lots of beautiful results, but we can also talk about how the process can be so beautiful too! this is common in music and sports and friendship. theres so much talk about not just the end product but also the beauty of late nights befriending your instrument, playing with sounds, struggling with chords. there’s so much talk about not just winning a tennis game but also the beauty of befriending the ball and the pleasure of swinging a racket. there’s so much talk about not just finally becoming best friends but also the beauty of doing the fun dance of small talk, getting to know someone new. we can do the same for meditation! i think one of the reasons people are so graspy about results is bc no one talks about how fun it can be to practice!!!!!!! it can be fun!! it can be SO fun!!!! we can normalize this it feels like meditation is in a phase right now where the common sentiment is to treat it like classical music — read some sheet music (instructions) and get good at playing the song like that to produce a beautiful result. do deliberate practice on your scales like a chore. have good posture. orrrr you could be a jazz musician! you can be friends with music, listen really closely and intimately to it, and start babbling. crawl, feel, stumble. make your own sentences! doodle around! explore! befriend the playground. become comfortable! develop real conversational fluency! i think we can make a similar shift of perspective in meditation practice, for jhana practices and insight practices and other practices!

@maxkshen @stephen_zerfas @patrickc would love to read this preprint

@ftlsid @__drewface omg i was just about to link your post cybermonk.substack.com/p/mechanisms-o…

okay so 9 months ago i realized that people actually know quite a lot about the micromechanics of unconditional peace [1] and i also found @johnsonmxe's "vasocomputation" hypothesis [2] [1] corbinnn.substack.com/p/advanced-med… [2] opentheory.net/2023/07/princi… but i was a wee little boy who didn't know much about anything (i think i still am) but i think i'm finally starting to kindaaa sortaaa understand what's going on! so here's my current understanding of some things: vasocomputation is a theory largely rooted in the perspective of sensorimotor development / embodied cognition, and i imagine that it would have to agree with a lot of other domain-invariant principles of sensorimotor metalearning 21:30 - 21:55 "When we're born, we're born into incredible sensory chaos (that William James calls this blooming buzzing confusion) and things are just happening, it's like a huge dose of LSD all the time, and it's hard to navigate. And one of the crucial tools we have available to us is clenching our smooth muscles to stabilize patterns." this seems true of all domains of sensorimotor skill development that require learning effective motor patterns from scratch! to loosely use a gradient descent analogy: our behavior vector starts at some random initialization, and as a beginner we can only make gross calibrations [3], but we can increasingly refine and calibrate towards skillful mastery the example coming to mind right now is: in second language acquisition, you start out with saying X to grossly mean a first-order approximation of something, then through experience/feedback you make many increasingly refined calibrations, developing the fluency to say X to mean something more hi-fi/accurate/nuanced [3] this seems at least partially significantly because we can only perceive low-fidelity gradients, i.e. our perceptual space starts out as a bad low-dimensional projection of reality, and also needs refinement/development; it is also a motor skill, see doi.org/10.1017/s01405… (as an example of refining perception, think about increasingly nuanced interoception in tennis training, or increasingly nuanced color differentiation in painters, or increasingly nuanced felt-senses of word meanings when learning a new language) anyway, it seems like tanha/upadana are particularly interesting instances of these gross calibrations, in the sensorimotor game of life my mental model is something like: physical pain, emotions, preferences are kinda like the rewards on a gridworld RL environment (in general these can all be healthy and human, and can exist post-tanha/post-upadana) -> tanha(thirst) as a certain unskillful implementation of preferences, specifically the kind that leads to upadana -> upadana(grasping) as a certain unskillful implementation of agency/control towards those preferences, characterized by grabbygrab/clinging/etc the interesting thing is that tanha/upadana feels *incredibly bad* -- even though it might cause 99%+ of the suffering, it is just <1% of the motor pattern of playing the game of life (we know from advanced meditators that skillfully navigating life and holding wholesome relationships etc still has to be trained and cultivated even after incredible meditative development). the analogy that comes to mind is something like: imagine you're a tennis player who grips too strongly in an odd way such that you get a terrible blister every time you played tennis, and if you fix your harmful grip you'll feel a lot better, and it may make someee things a lot easier, but also obviously this would not be a miracle change to the vast majority of your technique or scores/rating or etc but, why did this very-sucky-feeling habit get implemented? first, a small detour to an analogy: - a child's behavior + world model have an initialization that is very bad/inaccurate/unskillful/etc - we can look at the sensorimotor domain/game of how parents have the responsibility of developing/cultivating/calibrating a child's behavior and world model - in this process, the parental algorithm commonly (maybe necessarily? not sure) takes an implementation where they take advantage of the child’s ~death-aversion to produce intensely negative feedback to brutely enact gross calibrations in behavior + world model (i.e. i am talking about some forms of parental discipline) - but then you can generally stop using these brute gross calibrations when the child’s behavior patterns are more skillful, mature, safer, etc + when the child has a good sense of danger proxies and so you can update their model via language/etc instead of physical simulation of danger (shouting, hitting, etc) - obviously, even in a very skillful parenting environment, the child will grow up to have inaccurate priors about the world and will not act perfectly skillfully. but in less skillful parenting environments, there will be more inaccurate priors, and these inaccuracies might often be especially related to things feeling more deathly dangerous than they actually are (as a byproduct of the aforementioned calibration algorithm implementation) - this specific algorithm/implementation of parenting, especially in higher intensities with lots of shaming or physical violence etc, is perhaps not ideal but is **incredibly easy-to-find (search and setup for better algorithms is very nontrivial and costly)** i imagine that tanha/upadana is somewhattt like a micro version of this kind of thing! a gross brute implementation of developmental calibrations (unskillful in some sense but it was the easiest to find, and was necessary during early development; as @KanizsaBoundary says: "correct solutions to cognition take nontrivial knowledge and setup, which is also not free") and then @johnsonmxe's vasocomputation argument is that the computation and world model etc are using vascular smooth muscle cells ("taṇhā as a particular default bias in the computational-biochemical tuning of the human nervous system, and upādāna as the impulsive physical (VSMC) clenching this leads to") but tanha/upadana are different from the parenting analogy in a few very significant + very interesting ways: 1) calibrations to a child's personality/behavior/model seem to live in something in a more continuous space or a more densely connected graph like some n-dimensional tower of hanoi (borrowing from @meditationstuff analogy); but tanha/upadana seems to have a largely discrete ontology as we see advanced meditators describe some persistent phenomenological shifts that lean relatively more discrete (e.g. @RogerThisdell's stage model) (sure, it's not fully discrete, but this seems way more discrete than making calibrations in personality/behavior...? maybe these two things actually have similar ontologies but just undergo phase shifts at different scales? etc idk yet) 2) in the parenting / child development scenario, there's a sense in which you can think of the child as receiving a "hand-me-down" world model from the parent, kinda like the parent is hardcoding gridworld values; but for tanha/upadana, there is no "hand-me-down" of specific gridworld values, so the problem seems kinda categorically different? tanha/upadana seem to lean towards being a global parameter / globally applied pattern. yes it seems the case that you can selectively reduce tanha/upadana for certain situations, but we also definitely see global shifts in experience where practitioners undergo mostly-global reductions in tanha/upadana. Hmmmm..... 3) why is tanha/upadana deeply connected with the sense of self, in many different ways? the sense of a central epistemic agent seems to be incredibly instrumental in perpetuating tanha/upadana. the recent preprint from Shawn Prest et al is really interesting (osf.io/preprints/psya…) and i'm glad there are papers nowadays trying to computationally formalize the difference between the identified-with self (the *sense* of a central epistemic agent, etc; which seems to be a generated overlay onto experience, and removal does not *necessarily* lead to organism dysfunction) versus the organismic self (e.g. that which Levin talks about here: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.…) and of course there's many other questions... but will sign off for now! (i need more phenomenological sensory clarity, mathematical machinery, and/or biophysics knowledge to figure out more... and/or i wanna talk to more people about this... and i also wanna start prioritizing my own meditative practice/development a bit more)

Michael Edward Johnson @johnsonmxe

2 years ago

Last year I proposed “vasocomputation,” that vascular tension acts as a special type of memory that regulates neural dynamic range. Recently at @JoinEdgeCity I shared some updates: how ‘thoughts’ are patterns of vascular tension, and implications for Buddhist enlightenment 1/x

40 108 1K 224K 1K