Astral Codex Ten

mindfulness

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mindfulness

Article

mindfulness is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 31, 2023 and July 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “mindfulness is interesting precisely because of how mindless our actions usually are”; “which feels expansive, more like a mindfulness-like state”. It most often appears alongside Wikipedia, Against Automaticity, auditory cortex.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 31, 2023
  • Last seen: July 16, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually
August 31, 2023 · Original source
But dig deeper and this is part of every traditional description of the human condition. Plato spoke about the conflict between our rational, emotional, and appetitive souls, and that in some people the rational soul fails at its duty to run the show. The Buddhist term “Buddha” means “awakened one”, in contrast to everyone else who was not fully awake; the slightest experience with meditation is enough to demonstrate that “mindfulness” is interesting precisely because of how mindless our actions usually are.
Consciousness As Recursive Reflections
July 16, 2024 · Original source
For another example, as I focus on typing this, other parts of my brain monitor the noise of traffic out in the street and the pressure of my buttocks on the chair. There have to be small oscillations there, binding the multitude of sensory neuron spikes into representations of specific cars and buttocks, but they did so separately from my typing and thinking, before I noticed them. Now I’m aware of them and type about them, so the thinking and typing oscillation has merged with the listening and pressure-feeling ones, which feels expansive, more like a mindfulness-like state. The merged oscillation is necessarily bigger, because it now encompasses the auditory cortex for listening and the cerebellum for proprioception. So the internal lines of communication are now longer, so the oscillation frequency has had to go down, and that’s why I’m typing this sentence more slowly than the first one in this paragraph.
An ability to make such a comparison makes the neuron able to treat signals it receives in a shared rhythm (and therefore likely from other parts of the same oscillation) differently from signals that are not part of the same rhythm (and are therefore coming from elsewhere). This physically implements the crucial distinction between neuronal interactions within the same oscillation, and interactions beyond the same oscillation. With this grounding achieved, let’s go back up to the level of abstraction of thoughts, where I’ll call this distinction the difference between the inside and the outside of a thought. We’ll need this difference to explain why thoughts that oscillate give rise to qualia, and sometimes to self-awareness. Inside conscious thoughts You can notice your own mental activity. Let various thoughts arise and fall away, without engaging with them, or recognize a few as relevant or examine them for a while. Or drop some and look for new ones, either way is fine. If you have never done mindfulness meditation, it really helps to keep doing this noticing process for a minute before you go on reading. Now what is strange about that is: subjectively, it is not obvious that that which is noticing those thoughts… is itself a thought! It’s going on in the same brain as the ones it is noticing. It’s processing information just as they do: to notice something is to process information from it. It’s just as time-limited: there was a time before the noticing started, and there will be a time after. And it’s just as limited in scope, as is evident from the limit to how much it can notice simultaneously. But even examining itself thoroughly, it still seems, subjectively, to itself, very different from them! What this noticing thought notices about those other thoughts, the information from them it processes, is what they “look like” (i.e. are neurally encoded as) “from outside” (i.e. not in sync with its own rhythm). The inside view of a thought (its internal rhythmic communication) is very different, much like the insides of cars, cartwheels and cardiologists look very different from their outsides. Each thought does not notice its own outside, so it can’t easily notice resemblances to the outsides of other thoughts, so it’s not obvious to itself that it is itself just another thought. Again, this is just at the level of abstraction. What is really happening is: Since the oscillation/thought is made of neurons receiving and processing information, that’s all it ever does.