[Intuitive self-models] 6. Awakening / Enlightenment / PNSE

post by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2024-10-22T13:23:08.836Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

Contents

  6.1 Post summary / Table of contents
  6.2 Apology / explanation for using the term “intuitive self-model” here
    6.2.1 “It’s not ‘an intuitive model’! It’s ‘seeing the true nature of things’!”
    6.2.2 “It’s not ‘an intuitive self-model’—the absence of ‘self’ is, like, one of its most salient features! It’s called anattā! C’mon!”
  6.3 PNSE discards the homunculus and its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”
    6.3.1 Brief recap of relevant takeaways from Post 3
    6.3.2 Back to PNSE
    6.3.3 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary
      6.3.3.1 A discussion of insight meditation
      6.3.3.2 “Trying” to get into PNSE can be counterproductive (in the moment)
    6.3.4 Removing the “vitalistic force” intuition doesn’t imply what it might seem to imply
      6.3.4.1 The Parable of Caesar and Lightning
  6.4 PNSE breaks the association between “awareness” and other self-reflective concepts
    6.4.1 Basic explanation
    6.4.2 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary
      6.4.2.1 Relation to one’s body
      6.4.2.2 The location of “awareness”
    6.4.3 A deeper explanation: the intrinsically-attention-grabbing nature of the homunculus
  6.5 Why do pain, anxiety, etc., seem less aversive in PNSE than in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model?
    6.5.1 PNSE makes S(anxious feeling) undermine, rather than reinforce and stabilize, the anxious feeling itself
    6.5.2 Is this a good or a bad thing?
      6.5.2.1 What is aversiveness good for anyway?
      6.5.2.2 Back to PNSE
  6.6 Explaining other practical impacts of PNSE
    6.6.1 Quieting of self-reflective (i.e. S(⋯)) thoughts
    6.6.2 Memory issues
    6.6.3 Other things
  6.7 Conclusion
None
8 comments

6.1 Post summary / Table of contents

Part of the Intuitive Self-Models series [? · GW].

I do have meditation experience—in my lifetime, I have probably logged as much as several hours of total time spent meditating! And I was keeping up my meditation practice until as recently as 2007! OK fine, obviously I won’t be speaking from personal experience here. But I will offer some opinions anyway, with pretty low confidence all around.

In §4.2 [LW · GW] I talked about how hard it is to change an intuitive self-model. Well, look to the hardcore meditators if you want to find a bunch of people willing to pour thousands of hours into sculpting their intuitive self-models, like Bernini on clay. My impression is that a whole zoo of different intuitive self-models have come out of this field of inquiry and practice.

I’ll particularly focus on an intuitive self-model called “Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience”^[1] (PNSE), a.k.a. “awakening”, “enlightenment”, or (I think?) kenshō. Well, it’s probably not “an intuitive self-model” so much as “a category of intuitive self-models”. But I think they have enough overlap for me to make some general comments, trying to “translate” first-person PNSE-related descriptions into legible third-person terms, just as I’ve been doing in the previous four posts, while skipping over a whole ocean of rich details and subtleties.

Needless to say, reading these descriptions is wildly different from experiencing the thing yourself. But hopefully it’s interesting in its own right, and certainly a hell of a lot faster.

I don’t expect this post to be of any practical use in experiencing PNSE, and have no opinion about whether attaining PNSE is even a good idea in the first place—see §1.3.3 [LW · GW] for my general (lack of an) opinion about which intuitive self-models are healthy versus pathological. …OK fine, I put a few pointers to discourse on the pros and cons of PNSE in this expandable box, and a bit more in §6.5.2.2 below.

Pros and cons of pursuing PNSE

I want to point to further reading on both sides of the “pursuing PNSE is a good idea” debate, although pretty please don’t take these as “best and most authoritative arguments” rather than “things that I happen to have randomly stumbled across in the past few weeks”.

IN FAVOR of pursuing PNSE being a good idea is, well, practically everyone who has ever written about their PNSE experiences, e.g. the Kelly and Adyashanti books cited at the top, or this comment about trading one day with PNSE for decades without it.

AGAINST pursuing PNSE being a good idea, see maybe Awakening by lsusr [LW · GW] where he describes meditating his way to a “total psychotic break”, and also in the comments [LW(p) · GW(p)] suggests that some people might be more effective at effecting change in the world if they’re “a tangled ball of tension” than if they let go of their desires or whatever. And also see Ingram’s discussion of “Dark Night of the Soul”, i.e. meditation-induced persistent misery. (Also: “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish!”). That said, both Ingram and lsusr wound up overall very happy with their PNSE decision in hindsight, as do most PNSE people, as far as I can tell. But on the other hand, if I hypothetically were to brainwash myself into being a paperclip maximizer [? · GW], then I would also be very happy with that decision in hindsight. (“Paperclips are just the fucking best! Can you believe I was that close to going my whole life without ever caring about paperclips? Boy, I sure dodged a bullet!!”) So one should be thoughtful about how to interpret retrospective / hindsight reports of that sort—you still have to figure out if it’s the good kind of change versus self-brainwashing. (That’s not rhetorical—I don’t know!)

In case you’re wondering, I personally am uninterested in exploring PNSE mainly on the grounds of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—I’m generally happy with my mental health and especially my productivity, so I don’t want to mess around with any sort of irreversible mind-alteration until I retire, or more likely, until Artificial General Intelligence [LW · GW] apocalypse or utopia renders the question moot!

If you’ve read Posts 2 [LW · GW]–3 [LW · GW], you’ll be able to understand my main thesis on PNSE is a single sentence: If you start with the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model (§3.2 [LW · GW]), but throw out the “homunculus” concept (§3.4 [LW · GW]), along with its associated “vitalistic force” (§3.3 [LW · GW]) and “wanting” (§3.3.4 [LW · GW]), then you get PNSE. (If you didn’t read Posts 2–3, then you might want to do that now, although I put a brief recap in §6.3.1 below.)

That might sound like a small change, but I’ll explain how it comes to have massive consequences, on everything from equanimity and memory to sense-of-self and vibrancy-of-experience.

Quick summary of the rest of the post:

• Section 6.2 explains why some readers might object to the term “intuitive self-model” in this context, and why I’m using it anyway.
• Section 6.3 presents my main thesis that PNSE throws out the homunculus—along with some evidence, discussion, and clarification of likely misconceptions.
• Section 6.4 explains how the homunculus is conventionally a bridge connecting the “awareness” concept (Post 2 [LW · GW]) to other “self”-related concepts like “my body”, “my feelings”, “my goals”, “what other people think of me”, and so on. With the homunculus gone, “awareness” is left floating on its own, with no natural salient association to other self-reflective world-model concepts. This, I’ll argue, is why PNSE people may claim that there’s a “free-floating universal consciousness”, or something to that effect.
• Section 6.5 attempts to explain the connection between PNSE and equanimity. This turns out to be related to the previous section, in that the homunculus concept is normally a bridge enabling self-reflective thoughts to sustain feelings of anxiety. With the homunculus out of the picture, that stops happening. I’ll also discuss what anxiety is good for in the first place, and relatedly whether this change is for the better.
• Section 6.6 covers a couple other consequences of PNSE: the general quieting of self-reflective thoughts, and memory issues.

For the record, my main sources for this post are the Martin 2020 “Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences” (PNSE) paper,^[2] and parts of Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015), The End Of Your World by Adyashanti (2008), and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram (2nd edition, 2018), plus some blog posts (including this helpful series by Kaj Sotala [LW · GW]), conversations, and helpful feedback / pushback on earlier drafts by a couple friends who claim firsthand experience of “awakening” (see acknowledgements at the bottom).

6.2 Apology / explanation for using the term “intuitive self-model” here

I’m probably annoying some readers by using the phrase “intuitive self-model” in this post. Specifically, I anticipate two objections:

6.2.1 “It’s not ‘an intuitive model’! It’s ‘seeing the true nature of things’!”

Response: Those aren’t necessarily contradictory. An “intuitive model” can reflect “the true nature of things”, specifically in the case that the intuitive model is a veridical model of those things—see §1.3.2 [LW · GW].

It turns out that almost everybody, PNSE or not, sees their intuitive self-models as being veridical—notwithstanding the fact that different people around the world have wildly different intuitive self-models. Apparently, even a single person passing through multiple different PNSE intuitive self-models over time may say “I used to think I had seen through the illusions to the true nature of things … but now I realize that I wasn’t there yet. But this time, I’m sure that I’m seeing the true nature of things!!”^[3]

Anyway, as it happens, I do think that, for the most central difference between the PNSE intuitive self-model and the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, namely PNSE’s lack of a vitalistic-force-carrying homunculus (§6.3), the PNSE version is more veridical. (See §3.6: “The homunculus concept does not veridically correspond to anything at all” [LW · GW].) But I think PNSE intuitive self-models typically have plenty of non-veridical aspects too.^[4] Sorry. Of course, veridical or not, the PNSE experience is undoubtedly “real” as opposed to “fake”, in the §1.3.1 [? · GW] sense.

(I’ll be making some narrow points about veridicality, but the question of “what is the true nature of things?” is generally outside the scope of this series, for reasons in §1.6.2 [? · GW].)

6.2.2 “It’s not ‘an intuitive self-model’—the absence of ‘self’ is, like, one of its most salient features! It’s called anattā! C’mon!”

Response: Oops, I think this is just an unfortunate terminology snafu.

Let’s go back to the “spinning dancer” animation of §1.2.1 [LW · GW]. When I look at it, I experience it through a certain intuitive model in my head. Question: Is that intuitive model in my head “a model of a dancer”?

• (A) In one sense, yes—the contents of the model involve a dancer.
• (B) In a different sense, no—the target of the model does not involve a dancer. Or more specifically, there is a thing in the world that the model was built (by the predictive learning algorithm) to model, and that thing is not a dancer, but rather a pattern of flickering pixels on a screen. There was never any actual dancer! Some graphic artist probably just created a 3D model from scratch!

Anyway, I’m using “intuitive self-model” in the (B) sense, not the (A) sense. There’s a brain, in a body, running a predictive learning algorithm that creates a generative model of everything in the world, some of which are aspects of that very same brain algorithm. I think it’s fine to use the word “self-model” when the brain algorithm builds a generative model to help predict aspects of that algorithm itself. But the contents of that generative model need not involve a “self”—and certainly not a “self” with all the connotations that we conventionally ascribe to that word.

6.3 PNSE discards the homunculus and its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”

6.3.1 Brief recap of relevant takeaways from Post 3

I’ll quickly summarize a few relevant points from Post 3: The Homunculus [LW · GW]:

• Vitalistic force (§3.3 [LW · GW]) is an intuitive concept that we apply to animals, people, cartoon characters, and machines that “seem alive” (as opposed to seeming “inanimate”). It doesn’t veridically (§1.3.2 [LW · GW]) correspond to anything in the real world (§3.3.3 [LW · GW]). It amounts to a sense that something has intrinsic important unpredictability in its behavior. In other words, the thing seems to be unpredictable not because we’re unfamiliar with how it works under the hood, nor because we have limited information, nor because we aren’t paying attention, etc. Rather, the unpredictability seems to be a core part of the nature of the thing itself (§3.3.6 [LW · GW]).
• Wanting (§3.3.4 [LW · GW]) is another intuition, closely related to and correlated with vitalistic force, which comes up when a vitalistic-force-carrying entity has intrinsic unpredictability in its behavior, but we can still predict that this behavior will somehow eventually lead to some end-result systematically happening. And that end-result is described as “what it wants”. For example, if I’m watching someone sip their coffee, I’ll be surprised by their detailed bodily motions as they reach for the mug and bring it to their mouth, but I’ll be less surprised by the fact that they wind up eventually sipping the coffee. Just like vitalistic force, “wanting” is conceptualized as an intrinsic property of an entity; the intuitive model does not allow it to have any upstream cause (§3.3.6 [LW · GW]).
• The homunculus (§3.3.5 [LW · GW]) is an intuitive concept, core to (but perhaps narrower than) the sense of self. It derives from the fact that the brain algorithm itself has behaviors that seem characteristic of “vitalistic force” and “wanting”. Thus we intuit that there is an entity which contains that “vitalistic force” and which does that “wanting”, and that entity is what I call the “homunculus”. In particular, if “I apply my free will” to do X, then the homunculus is conceptualized as the fundamental cause of X. And likewise, whenever planning / brainstorming is happening in the brain towards accomplishing X, we “explain” this fact by saying that the homunculus is doing that planning / brainstorming because it wants X. Yet again, the intuitive model requires that the homunculus must be the ultimate root cause; there can be nothing upstream of it.

(More precisely: If there are deterministic upstream explanations of what the homunculus is doing and why, e.g. via algorithmic or other mechanisms happening under the hood, then that feels like a complete undermining of one’s free will and agency (§3.3.6 [LW · GW]). And if there are probabilistic upstream explanations of what the homunculus is doing and why, e.g. “if my stomach is empty, then I’ll start wanting food”, then that correspondingly feels like a partial undermining of free will and agency, in proportion to how confident those predictions are.)

6.3.2 Back to PNSE

Anyway, the most salient aspect of PNSE is that the homunculus, and its vitalistic force, are kicked out of the intuitive model.^[5]

For example, Ingram mentions “the illusion of a permanent, separate, independently functioning (acausal), localized self”, as the key thing that PNSE gets rid of. Yup, that’s a decent match for what I call “the homunculus”. And in particular, his term “acausal” is synonymous with my term “infused with vitalistic force”.

OK, so if the homunculus is out, what’s the thing that replaces it? In my terminology, I would just say “something free of vitalistic force, and somewhat closer to the actual algorithm”. There’s a stream of thoughts that arise, each with idiosyncratic causes and antecedents. The algorithm that surfaces thoughts and assigns them valence [LW · GW] is sufficiently complex that we can’t in general anticipate which thought will arise next, and whether it will feel motivating, until we see it. But there’s no vitalistic force involved.

Ingram’s terminology for the homunculus-replacement is: “there is naturally occurring, causal, self-perceiving, immediate transience”. I think his words “naturally occurring” and “causal” are synonymous with what I call “lacking vitalistic force”.

6.3.3 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary

6.3.3.1 A discussion of insight meditation

The big, practical trick to understanding no-self when doing insight practices is to tune in to the fact that sensations arise on their own in a natural, causal fashion, even the intentions to do things.  … So long as you note whatever arises, you know that you were mindful of it. Noticing each sensation and those that follow, you will see their actual nature. Seeing their actual nature, you will gain profound insights directly. What the sensations are doesn’t matter one bit from the point of view of noting practice. What is important is that you know what they are. —Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram (2nd edition, 2018)

I think the idea here is that:

• Every time a thought arises, you “see its true nature”—in my terms, you see that the thought (and its valence) arose from complex idiosyncratic antecedents within the brain algorithm, without any “vitalistic force”, as opposed to being caused by the homunculus via its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”.
• …Having observed that fact, in the future, maybe thoughts like that won’t seem to be caused by the homunculus.

And the more you do this practice, the fewer thoughts still seem to be caused by the homunculus. And eventually the homunculus concept seems to be not doing anything, and just goes away.

6.3.3.2 “Trying” to get into PNSE can be counterproductive (in the moment)

So the fundamental question we need to answer is: how do I unhook? But “you” don’t unhook. Local awareness unhooks from the “you” that plans to unhook. One of the reasons we have not been able to unhook easily is because the “I” can’t do it. —Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015)

If I have the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model (§3.2 [LW · GW]) active, and if there’s a self-reflective thought that I’d describe as “trying really hard to excise the homunculus from my intuitive self-model”, then that thought would involve the homunculus powerfully exercising its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”. So that thought would be increasing the salience of the homunculus concept in your own mind—which is moving in precisely the wrong direction! Very tricky!

6.3.4 Removing the “vitalistic force” intuition doesn’t imply what it might seem to imply

The PNSE paper has a fascinating quote:

These participants reported having no sense of agency or any ability to make a decision. It felt as if life was simply unfolding and they were watching the process happen.

This might seem^[6] to imply that they lacked the drive to accomplish ambitious projects. And yet, the PNSE paper notes:

Nevertheless, many of these participants were functioning in a range of demanding environments and performing well. One, for example, was a doctoral-level student at a major university. Another was a young college professor who was building a strong career. Still another was a seasoned public and private sector executive who served as a high-level consultant and on various institutional-level boards.

Likewise, Ingram wrote a nice 600-page book while in PNSE, and so on. How do we think about that?

I propose an analogy:

6.3.4.1 The Parable of Caesar and Lightning

In Julius Caesar’s intuitive models, lightning is created by the god Jupiter. Suppose I time-travel to tell Caesar that, where I’m from, Jupiter does not create lightning. Then it would seem to Caesar that I’m saying that there is no lightning. After all, from Caesar’s perspective, if Jupiter is very active, there’s a lot of lightning; if Jupiter is moderately active, there’s occasional lightning; and if Jupiter stopped creating lightning, there would be no lightning. …But that’s not what I’m saying! From my perspective, Jupiter doesn’t create lightning, but there is still lightning!

By the same token, in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, unpredictable intentional behavior (both attention control and motor control) comes from the homunculus exercising “vitalistic force” (sense of agency and animation, §3.3 [LW · GW]) to accomplish the things it “wants” (§3.3.4 [LW · GW]). So from the perspective of a normie like me with that model, if the homunculus is exercising a lot of vitalistic force, then there’s a lot of energetic exercising of willpower; if the homunculus is exercising a little bit of vitalistic force, then there’s occasional somewhat-lazy intentional behavior; and if all the vitalistic force disappeared entirely, along with the homunculus, then all that’s left would be an unthinking sheep / drone / catatonic stupor. …But that’s not what the PNSE people are saying! In the PNSE self-model, there is no vitalistic force, but there is still energetic, agentic behavior!

That’s not to say that a switch to PNSE doesn’t entail any changes whatsoever to goals, drive, etc.—more on that below—I’m just trying to clarify a potential misconception.

6.4 PNSE breaks the association between “awareness” and other self-reflective concepts

6.4.1 Basic explanation

In the generative model space, there are associations between different concepts—when I think of one thing, it makes me think of another thing. Beliefs are part of that (e.g. if I believe that a squirrel is in the glove compartment, then thinking about opening the glove compartment leads to me thinking about finding the squirrel), but associations also include other things (e.g. thinking about a goal might make me think of a strategy that would accomplish that goal).

There are associations between self-reflective concepts, just like any other concepts, and it’s here that PNSE has an interesting effect:

In the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, the homunculus is evidently a bridge enabling associative connections between “awareness” from other self-reflective concepts. Why is it a bridge? Well on one side, the homunculus is connected to awareness—it “experiences” awareness, and in turn it manipulates awareness via attention-control actions. On the other side, the homunculus is conceptualized as having goals, controlling and owning the body, and so on. Thus the homunculus forms a bridge from awareness to the rest of the self-reflective world.

In PNSE, by contrast, the homunculus is gone, and the bridge is broken. “Awareness” no longer has any particular relation to those other self-reflective concepts. I think this comes across clearly when people talk about PNSE. For example:

6.4.2 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary

6.4.2.1 Relation to one’s body

This shift is not revolutionary; it’s the same as looking in the mirror in the morning and having an intuitive sense that the face you are looking at is yours. It is not a mystical experience; it is a simple experience. When you look in the mirror, you experience the simple recognition, “Oh, that’s me.” When the shift of perception that’s called awakening happens, whatever our senses come into contact with is experienced as ourselves. It’s as if we think with everything we encounter, “Oh, that’s me.” We don’t experience ourselves in terms of our ego, in terms of a separate someone or separate entity. It’s more a feeling of the One recognizing itself, or Spirit recognizing itself. —The End Of Your World by Adyashanti (2008)

In PNSE, the “awareness” concept has no intrinsic association with my body—sure, it can contain my-body-related thoughts, but that’s no different from how it can contain any other thoughts. So in PNSE, there’s no strong intuitive difference between how the “awareness” concept is related to your own body, versus how the “awareness” concept is related to the couch.

Here’s an analogy. It’s possible for a plain cardboard Amazon box to contain lightsaber chopsticks. But there’s nothing lightsaber-chopstick-y about a plain cardboard Amazon box, in and of itself. By the same token, in PNSE, it’s possible for the “awareness” concept to contain an interoceptive sensation, or a motor command, etc. But those things have no particular connection to the intuitive “awareness” concept itself.

6.4.2.2 The location of “awareness”

Local awareness is like a clear bubble of intelligence that can travel and know directly from wherever it is within our bodies or from the field of spacious awareness. Local awareness knows from within its new location, instead of feeling the location of the perceiver behind our eyes, in our head. For instance, when local awareness travels to your hand, it knows directly from within your hand. When it moves to your emotions of sadness or joy, it knows from within those feelings. Like a spotlight, local awareness has the ability to focus in one area. Local awareness can become small or expand to a larger area. Local awareness can move, become identified, or disidentified. It lights up its location from within. When awake awareness is the primary operating system, we can remain spacious and open while simultaneously focusing on a particular task. —Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015)

Suppose someone is rubbing my foot. When I pay attention to that sensation, the associated concept (call it “rub”) involves what I call “local spatial attention” [LW · GW] being on my foot. Meanwhile, in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, the self-reflective S(rub) concept (§2.2.3 [? · GW]) involves local spatial attention being in my head (since the homunculus is involved, see §3.7 [LW · GW]). These are mutually-incompatible predictions, and therefore the self-reflective S(rub) thought will interfere with the strength / vividness of the “rub” concept itself. It’s kind of a reverse “refrigerator-light illusion”—as soon as you self-reflect upon the feeling, the feeling becomes weaker.

By contrast, in the PNSE conceptual space, we wind up with the flexibility to simultaneously activate the S(rub) concept while maintaining local spatial attention on the foot, since there’s no homunculus concept anchoring S(⋯) to the head (see §3.7.5 [LW · GW]). Thus, there’s less interference between S(rub) and rub, and thus the “rub” concept can be more strongly activated (more vivid), even from the self-reflective vantage point of S(rub). I think the excerpt above is related to that.

6.4.3 A deeper explanation: the intrinsically-attention-grabbing nature of the homunculus

Above I said that deleting the homunculus breaks the “bridge” between “awareness” and other self-reflective concepts (my body, my feelings, my actions, my goals, etc.). But there’s a subtlety that I glossed over. Yes, the homunculus is gone. But it’s replaced by … something. Why isn’t that “something” a new “bridge”?

As an example: There’s a brain algorithm phenomenon wherein there’s an intention in “awareness”, which then spawns a motor action in the body (§2.6 [LW · GW]). Conventionally, we conceptualize this phenomenon as a consequence of the homunculus. In PNSE, we don’t. But the brain algorithm phenomenon is still there, and thus the PNSE intuitive self-model needs to conceptualize that phenomenon somehow. So the question is: whatever that conceptualization is, why doesn’t it constitute a strong intuitive association between the “awareness” concept and the self-reflective concepts related to the motor action (e.g. my body, my desires, my actions)?

I think the answer is: the homunculus concept has a special property of being intrinsically attention-grabbing. After all, recall from §3.3 [LW · GW] that I think vitalistic force is built partly from the feeling of physiological arousal—it’s not just prediction error, but surprise.^[7] The homunculus is thus impossible to ignore—if the homunculus concept gets activated at all, it jumps to center stage in our minds. That’s what makes it such a strong “bridge”. By contrast, in PNSE, it’s true that there’s some relationship between the “awareness” concept and other self-reflective concepts, but that relationship is conceptualized as a non-attention-grabbing “inanimate” mechanism, which can thus easily slip into the background. And thus, it becomes easy in PNSE to activate the “awareness” concept without any other self-reflective concepts getting dragged in by association.

6.5 Why do pain, anxiety, etc., seem less aversive in PNSE than in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model?

Equanimity is an aspect of PNSE that comes up frequently in the secular discourse. I’ll argue that it’s a consequence of the previous section—i.e., that it’s closely related to PNSE’s lack of association between “awareness” and bodily feelings.

6.5.1 PNSE makes S(anxious feeling) undermine, rather than reinforce and stabilize, the anxious feeling itself

Suppose I get an anxiety-provoking email—maybe my friend says that she has news about her health, and we need to talk. That triggers the brainstem reaction we call “anxiety”, involving negative valence, physiological arousal, and certain other reactions, along with corresponding interoceptive sensations and involuntary attention (see here [LW · GW]) towards those sensations.

Panels (a)–(b) in this diagram give an everyday example of what happens next. The brainstem anxiety reaction passes into the cortex in the form of interoceptive sensory inputs, which stay strongly active via involuntary attention. Then the subsequent thoughts would involve concepts associated with the anxious feeling (e.g. its upstream causes), which in turn would activate other associated concepts, etc., via the normal logic of the generative model space. It’s basically an unpleasant form of brainstorming (see here [LW · GW]).

In (a), there’s a closed excitatory loop: the interoceptive sensory inputs associated with anxiety make me think of the possibility that my friend is seriously ill, which in turn strongly implies that more feelings of anxiety are imminent. That feeds back to the brainstem—the cortex is “concurring” with the brainstem that the situation warrants anxiety, so to speak.^[8] In other words, the cortex brainstorming has turned up a plausible story “explaining” the anxiety.

However, in (b), suppose I just learned that my friend is perfectly fine after all. Now there isn’t a closed excitatory loop. On the contrary, the anxiety-related interoceptive sensory inputs make me think of my friend’s good health, which in turn provide evidence against the possibility that I will feel more anxious feelings in the immediate future. The brainstem gets that signal and gradually winds down its anxiety reaction.

Everything so far has been object-level. Now let’s get into the more confusing self-reflective stuff!

Panel (c) shows a closed excitatory loop that can happen in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model. The object-level interoceptive feeling of anxiety brings to mind the self-reflective S(feeling of anxiety) (§2.2.3 [? · GW]). This self-reflective thought is conceptualized as being associated with the homunculus, which in turn is closely associated with the body and its feelings. So there’s a closed excitatory loop, just as there is in (a), and this loop reinforces and stabilizes the anxiety reaction. This loop is basically “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”—kinda stewing in feelings of anxiety.

Panel (d) shows what happens when we switch to PNSE. The first step is the same: the object-level interoceptive feeling brings to mind the self-reflective S(feeling of anxiety) thought—i.e., the idea that the feeling of anxiety is currently in conscious awareness. However, in PNSE, per §6.4 above, the “awareness” concept itself has no particular association with the body and its interoceptive sensations, so there’s no closed loop—no “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”—and the anxiety starts to wind down (unless the brainstorming can find a different closed loop like (a)).

6.5.2 Is this a good or a bad thing?

6.5.2.1 What is aversiveness good for anyway?

Aversive reactions (to anxiety, pain, etc.) involve two ingredients: negative valence and involuntary attention.

• Negative valence without involuntary attention would be things like “the idea of withdrawing my life savings in cash, and shredding it all”. If that idea crossed my mind, I would just say “Nope!”, and move on with my day.
• Involuntary attention without negative valence would be, for example, a loud sudden school bell indicating the end of an unpleasant class and beginning of recess.

Why (evolutionarily) are both of these ingredients present? Well, the negative valence ingredient is obvious—it’s important to be motivated to avoid pain, and valence is the very substance out of which all motivation is wrought, see here [LW · GW]. Involuntary attention is more interesting: it’s a hack-y workaround! Basically, the brain algorithms have a flaw in their design, where if there’s a possible upcoming problem, the algorithms often lead to “ignoring the problem” behavior instead of “solving the problem” behavior (more discussion here [LW · GW]). That flaw exists for deep algorithmic reasons; and involuntary attention is a hack to mitigate it. When involuntary attention is triggered, it forces attention onto the feeling of pain, anxiety, etc., and by extension any inferred upstream causes of those feelings, and possible solutions if any, and so on, preventing the problems from being ignored in favor of more pleasant things to think about.

Hopefully it’s obvious that if something is too aversive, it’s not only unpleasant but (ironically) gets in the way of problem-solving. For example, think of the severely anxious person who can’t get out of bed.

But also, if something is not aversive enough, then that also can get in the way of problem-solving: you might just ignore the problem instead of solving it, thanks to the lack of any involuntary attention pulling your mind to it.

As an example of the latter: as I write, a little (metaphorical) voice in my head periodically says “what if a reader sees that and recognizes that it’s false?”, and I think that voice is powered by very-low-level anxiety-driven involuntary attention, but it’s not particularly unpleasant nor frequent, and I think it’s probably net helpful to my productivity (at its current level).

And conversely, I bet you can think of examples from your life of people ignoring potential problems thanks to a deficiency of involuntary attention. At an individual level, if someone has a potential looming health problem, but it’s not currently causing them any pain or any anxiety, then they may well not try to mitigate it. (Even if they “rationally” agree that mitigating it would be importantly beneficial! They might just never get around to it.) At a somewhat larger scale, it seems plausible that Sam Bankman-Fried’s personality profile included clinically low anxiety; he and his many victims obviously would have been better off if he had had some anxiety-driven involuntary attention towards negative possibilities like “what if I get caught breaking the law?” or “what if I’m mistaken about the FTX balance sheet?”. At an even larger scale, if policymakers and voters generally felt more anxiety-driven involuntary attention towards the possibility of future pandemics, then perhaps they wouldn’t be doing so very very little to prevent them, as compared to the scope and probability of the problem.

Thus, for example, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy guru David Burns prompts his clinically anxious patients to think hard about exactly how much anxiety they want to have, and then to aim for that amount, which is often more than zero. (More details here [LW · GW].)

6.5.2.2 Back to PNSE

Based on the above, PNSE should directly cause a strong reduction in self-reflective forms of anxiety and aversion (e.g. “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”).^[9] I think it should also indirectly cause some reduction in object-level anxiety, for the simple reason that self-reflective anxiety may well bring to mind object-level anxiety. (If I’m anxiously dwelling on my anxious feelings about the speech, then that may cause me to also feel anxious about the speech directly!)

Is that a good or a bad thing? It depends. How much are you worried about excess anxiety being counterproductive and miserable, versus insufficient anxiety making you blasé about your important life goals? Different people are different.

6.6 Explaining other practical impacts of PNSE

6.6.1 Quieting of self-reflective (i.e. S(⋯)) thoughts

One reason that new thoughts pop up is because the brain algorithm infers that they’re likely to have positive valence. Another reason that new thoughts pop up is because they’re strongly associated with an existing thought. I think in PNSE, both of those reasons become less applicable to self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts. They have a weaker association with heavily-valenced thoughts (of either sign), and they have a weaker association with the body and its associated bodily attention and sensations. So there’s just generally less S(⋯) thoughts overall. And that’s what the Martin 2020 “PNSE” paper says.

6.6.2 Memory issues

PNSE seems to come with memory problems. Martin 2020 more specifically suggests that there are two kinds of memory issues: (1) forgetting appointments, and (2) a self-perceived general deficit in autobiographical memory that seemed (from the interviewer’s perspective) to not correspond to any real memory problem.^[10]

I think both of these memory issues fit in well with my picture. In particular, the reduction in self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts is synonymous with “being in a flow state more often” (§4.4.1 [LW · GW]), and these two symptoms map well to my discussion of “losing track of time” in a flow state back in §4.6.1 [LW · GW].

To quickly summarize that §4.6.1 [LW · GW] discussion:

• The “forgetting appointments” problem is because self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts have a more salient connection to the bigger picture of what I’m doing and how it fits into the narrative of my day and life, which might in turn trigger the thought “I’m supposed to go to an appointment”.
• The “self-perceived (but apparently not real) deficit in autobiographical memory” problem comes from the combination of auto-associative memory and the availability heuristic—self-reflective concepts generally provide a convenient “hook” with which to auto-associatively recall lots of memories fast, and that makes it feel like those memories are strong and abundant. With fewer self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts in memory storage, it thus feels like there are fewer memories. But in fact the memories are there—they just need to be triggered by object-level “hooks” (e.g. if I see my friend now, it could trigger a memory of seeing that same friend yesterday), as opposed to being triggered by narrative-of-my-life-level “hooks” (e.g. if I think to myself “gee what was I doing this morning?”)

However, there’s one more factor.^[11] I think PNSE is associated with less mind-wandering in general, and less autobiographical mind-wandering in particular (thanks to the lack of “hooks” mentioned above). And if your mind wanders less, then you’ll wind up with worse long-term memory retention of whatever your mind would have wandered to—cf. “spaced repetition”. So it is in fact plausible that some nonzero amount of the self-perceived memory deficits are real. (Better put more stuff into Anki!)

6.6.3 Other things

There’s also the obvious effect that if someone has a PNSE intuitive self-model, and you ask them questions about it, they’ll give different answers than a person who has a Conventional Intuitive Self-Model. And if they feel like they’re suffering less, then they’ll probably tell their friends that PNSE is a good idea, and maybe go become a meditation teacher instead of whatever they were doing before. Etc.

Separately, there’s a strong empirical correlation between PNSE and “meditating an awful lot”, so there might be systematic effects that correlate with PNSE but are not directly caused by it, but rather are caused by meditation in a more direct way.

I’m sure there’s much more to be said in this section, but I lack the time and expertise to say it.

6.7 Conclusion

Like I said at the top, this post is just dipping a toe into the vast ocean of variations and implications of PNSE and other meditation-related intuitive self-model changes. I’d love to hear from commenters about how it seems right or wrong. Next post is: “hearing voices, and other hallucinations” [LW · GW]!

Thanks Thane Ruthenis, lsusr, Kaj Sotala, Jonas Hallgren, Johannes Mayer, Linda Linsefors, and Justis Mills for critical comments on earlier drafts.

1. ^{^}

   Martin 2020 made up the term “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) by searching for any term whatsoever that his interviewees would be generally happy to describe themselves with. (“In the field non-symbolic was the only term found that was widely and readily accepted by participants.”) I don’t really know what “non-symbolic” is supposed to mean, and don’t really care either. For the purpose of this post, I’m just treating “PNSE” as a label—one which seems relatively uncontroversial and unambiguous.

2. ^{^}

   Note there’s some negative “gossip” here about the reliability of the PNSE paper, but I think if I treat it as a collection of anecdotes and don’t put too much stock in the proposed systematization, it should be fine. I have seen a few people (Aella, Sasha Chapin, and I think others too but I forget) say that the PNSE paper strongly resonates with their personal experience.

3. ^{^}

   For example: “The transition to any location brought a substantial change in worldview and often shattered the sense of what was previously believed true regarding PNSE. This was even the case for transitions from one location to another … PNSE was often accompanied by a tremendous sense of certainty that participants were experiencing a deeper or more true reality. This sense of internally experienced truth often led to a form of dogmatism. This was especially the case among participants who had only experienced one location on the continuum, or who were part of a group that officially sanctioned one or more locations. Due to the certainty they felt, these participants had difficulty accepting that individuals who described their experiences differently than what they experienced or considered acceptable were actually experiencing PNSE. Participants with dogmatic tendencies felt like theirs was the correct and true version of the experience. When asked to contrast their experience with the data collected from other participants, these participants would often definitively state that the research project was obviously having difficulty understanding what was and was not a valid PNSE experience.”—Martin 2020

4. ^{^}

   As a typical example, Loch Kelly at one point mentions “the boundless ground of the infinite, invisible life source”. OK, I grant that it feels to him like there’s an infinite, invisible life source. But in the real world, there isn’t. I’m picking on Loch Kelly, but his descriptions of PNSE are much less mystical than most of them.

5. ^{^}

   When I say “kicked out of the intuitive model”, I mean more specifically that the homunculus concept is not active for whatever duration of time PNSE occurs. I imagine that even people who have spent decades in PNSE will still “have a homunculus concept”, in the sense that they have homunculus-related data structures stored somewhere in their cortex. But those data structures would be lying dormant, not impacting behavior and experience.

6. ^{^}

   See for example a thread here [LW(p) · GW(p)] where some non-meditators were puzzling over this point.

7. ^{^}

   Part of the backstory here is that physiological arousal is a brainstem reaction, but one which can be a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, in the sense that the cortex can predict that something merits physiological arousal, and then the brainstem promptly makes that prediction comes true. See discussion of “defer-to-predictor mode” here [LW · GW].

8. ^{^}

   This discussion might seem kinda circular. The cortex can tell the brainstem that it expects anxiety reactions, and then those anxiety reactions actually appear, like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Then why am I anxious about public speaking, but not anxious about staring at the ceiling? The answer is: it’s partly circular, but it’s also partly supported by a cortex-independent “ground truth”—things like innate fear-of-spiders. For algorithmic details see here [LW · GW].

9. ^{^}

   You can compare and contrast this sentence with Kaj Sotala’s blog post “From Self to Craving” [LW · GW]. I think we have some common ground?

10. ^{^}

    Another source is Adyashanti (2008), who describes memory issues in stark terms: “…I’ve had many students develop memory problems, some who have even gotten checked for Alzheimer’s…”. But he’s less specific about the symptoms than Martin 2020. He also hints (contra Martin 2020) that it’s a transitional problem that eventually goes away. If so, I wouldn’t know how to explain that, other than just that changes can be scary and then people get used to stuff.

11. ^{^}

    Thanks lsusr for this point.

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