Mindfulness and Simulation Theory

So I just finished reading Guy Claxton’s 2006 article “Mindfulness, Learning and The Brain.” I find it quite fascinating for a number of reasons. But the thing that popped out the most was the way that he framed mindfulness as a logical extension of simulation theory of mind. More interestingly, Claxton never actually makes explicit reference to simulation theory of mind. But based on the language he uses the connection is undeniable.

I did find his major metaphors to be a little bit sloppy or inadequate though. But he did a decent job of talking about mindfulness, which can be very difficult to talk about.

The general idea is that we often find our own reality to be totally engrossing. It is as if we are watching our lives and we are directly facing a computer screen in which we are making decisions, ‘clicking, tapping’, as he says. We are directly in front of the ‘screen’ of our lives and we are working hard to make decisions. But he then talks about a second ‘screen’. What if we don’t have to experience ourselves simply as the first person engaging in the decisions of life? What if we can have a perspective in which we are watching ourselves making those decisions? We are not the first screen guy, rapidly working and making decisions, but we can take the perspective of a second screen guy who is watching the first screen guy make decisions.

We can have a semi-removed perspective in which we are no longer immersed in our own experience, but are observing our own experience from a distance of sorts. Claxton then explains how this logic of screen guy 1 and screen guy 2 implies that we are neither of these screen guys. We do not have a concrete identity. This lines up with lots of Buddhist ideas.

He then goes on to explain how this possibility for mindfulness may have developed evolutionarily. He draws on Nicholas Humphrey's and Richard Dawkins’ claims about social living to explain how individuals would need to learn to predict one another. This is where his argument drifts into simulation theory of mind. Basically, the idea is that living in social communities our ancestors would have learned how to predict how each other were thinking. This depends on the ability to 1. build models of other people and 2. to then assume the perspective of those people in order to understand how it is that they are feeling. This ability to assume a different perspective, Claxton speculates, might make mindfulness possible. When we are taking a removed, mindful perspective on ourselves we are utilizing this ability to push ourselves beyond our own view and into the view of others. This is why Claxton warns that when being mindful we need to be careful that we aren’t simply taking the perspective of another person that is judgmental, or a person from our past.

He suggests that this is why the non-judgmental attitude of therapists can be so important. He says that they allow us to build a model of another person who is not judging us or being harsh. At later times we can then utilize that non-judgmental model of perception to gain an adequate view of ourselves. This is all so clearly in line with simulation theory of mind.

It does, however, imply some interesting things. To me it seems like if simulation is based on models then there is a bit of tension between simulation theory and theory-theory. I suppose it confirms Goldman’s claim that what we really possess is a simulation-theory hybrid in which processes of simulation are aided by our tacit theoretical mental models. All that stuff is so fascinating. But I’m pleased to see how much Claxton is in line with simulation theory, and with how much mindfulness can be connected to it. Also, I am pleased because he confirms or corroborates much of what I was writing about like an hour ago in my post on privacy and simulation. He has some lines that are like what I was talking about when I said something about a loop of imaginative simulations of people. We are imagining other people’s views on us, and are thus using our model of another person to imagine their model of us. Interesting stuff.

More 'Poetry' Babble

Sometimes I sit down and I type nonsense. I don't dare call it poetry because I don't care enough and I doubt I'm really expressing anything super worthwhile. But I put the word poetry in quotes because frankly I have poetry on my mind a lot these days.

The days are mostly colorful

They change when I let them

And the only time I let them is when I work ever so hard

The mental mines where I don’t let it eat me

Just a piece of cake left for someone else

Just a series of stones them are meant to melt

I typically work more than I want to

It seems like radar is something that comes and goes

It is something I feel from every direction

Something that doesn’t even feel so much as it totalizes

It taste like it feels like it smells like it sounds like it touches

It feels like collaboration

It feels like mythical gods stocking produce

It feels like husbands and wives respecting their

Newly found roles

Roles that don’t make sense because they never did

But I want it to make sense

I want it to be alright like some kind of magic

Every turn becomes a new step

A new way to think about something

A language of languages

A palette of plates

A plate of palettes

A tasty way to experience reality

Which doesn’t take like it hears smells feels

It only tastes

It only feels

It only smells

It only isn’t

One Two Three Four and

It all goes onward like a song

It is a song

It counts and it writhes and

Perhaps it even expresses

That is what I’m doing here

In this moment on this ‘page’

On this world

In my mind

Expressing because I don’t think I know how too

Feeling dominated and wanting to feel dominated

Not feeling like I rule because I don’t trust that

What would it mean to rule something?

To have dominion over a piece of water?

I slip and slide and I’m always saturated

I’m drowning in it learning to swim in it

I find the notion of domination almost impossible

Janus and divine violence have kept me afraid

Kept me from feeling the power that I’m supposed to feel

It doesn’t need to be a win lose thing

I don’t think that coming and going like some kind of demon

Is very useful for me sitting here at the bottom of myself

I don’t need to be the one telling anyone anything

I only need to be the one who wants to tell myself

How it really is and what I really could be

This emphasis

This talk

This way

Not how I want it

Certainly not

But I accept it

Because that is how I want it

On Privacy: The Obstruction of Visibility as the Regulation of the Evidence Required for Imaginative Simulations

So I often think about the issue of privacy. The issue of seeing each other and seeing other people and how we don't want to see each other.

I think that this issue becomes clearest to me when I enter public bathrooms. The rinky dink stalls just seem so hilarious to me. They just seem so odd because the bottom line is that I can see through the slits in the door. They don't hide you very well. I can see you. Sorta.

So this just leads to me ask certain questions about what privacy really is, how it is accomplished, what it is for, and how it really works when we say that it has been achieved. What I'm really getting at is that privacy might have something to do with the imagination and simulation theory of mind. Let me talk about three things to think about this. First, I'll talk about the experience of being the one seeking privacy, the one inside the bathroom stall who wants not to be seen. Second, I'll talk about being the one who is outside the stall and who has no real view of the other person. Then I feel like identity may also have something to do with this, so I'll talk about that.

So when you are in a bathroom stall you have this door closed and for the most part no one can see you. You are hidden from the gaze of other people. But what is it that would truly make you feel like you were invisible to other people? What really provides that sense of privacy? I am suggesting that it is your own imagination and capacity to internally simulate other people's gazes that would make you feel uncomfortable. Say, for example, that I was in a bathroom stall, and then I left said bathroom stall only to realize that someone I knew was waiting for that same stall. Suddenly they realize that I was the person in that stall, and I realize that they have now seen me. They now have all the information that they need to imagine my sitting on the toilet. So my privacy is retroactively destroyed. Although I am no longer in the bathroom stall in that moment, and they are not actually seeing me in a moment of exposure, they very shortly after the fact have been given all the evidence they need to see me exposed in their mind's eye.

All of this really has to do with how we perceive other people in our mind's eye. That is the place where simulation takes place, where imagination takes place. I believe that other people exist primarily in our imagination, as my writing of 6/13/10 should have made clear.

So what if I am the person outside of a stall, what is it that gives the person inside the stall privacy? Well, I had an interesting experience once at the National Archives. Everyone there wore name badges that had their picture on them. Once someone was in a bathroom stall and there ID was clipped to their belt loop, so because their pants were around their ankles their picture was visible to me. So basically because I had their picture right there in front of me they didn't really have such a thing as privacy. Sure, I couldn't actually see them naked sitting on the toilet, but I had all the evidence that I needed to imagine them sitting there.

So I am saying that privacy doesn't just depend on the obstruction of visibility, it depends on someone being prevented from having the evidence they need to imagine us in a compromising situation.

Let me give an example: what if we didn't want our parents or our friends to have any knowledge of an embarrassing romantic, sexual, social, or some other type of encounter that we had. We wouldn't tell our parents obviously, and then a couple of weeks may go by and we may forget about the whole thing and think that our privacy has been established. But suppose that we wrote about our embarrassing event in a journal of sorts, and then our parents or friends or whoever read our journal without our permission. Clearly, our privacy has been blown.

But why has our privacy been blown? The event was not directly witnessed by out family or friends, but we still feel the pain of embarrassment, and the feeling that our privacy has somehow been compromised. But why? What is it that has compromised our privacy? It is something in the imagination of our friends and family who have now read our journal.

Prior to that moment our friends/family had no evidence of our embarrassing moment. But once they read it, they suddenly have evidence to imagine and simulate us in that compromising situation. And thus we have evidence to imagine them imagining us in that situation. It is our knowledge of their knowledge that makes us feel embarrassed.

So privacy comes down to regulating the evidence that other people have to imagine us in compromising situations. To bring it back to my original example, when we are in a bathroom stall we are blocked from other people's visibility enough that they don't have any evidence to imagine who it is that is sitting in the bathroom stall. Similarly, we don't have any evidence to imagine that we are being watched by a specific person.

All of this has to do with what Foucault describes when he talks about panopticism. It is other people's gazes, and our knowledge of their gaze, that really gives us the means of controlling our own behavior, or of feeling like we do or do not have privacy.

So it comes to down to the economy of the imagination. It comes back to how much information is available to allow people to imagine us in certain ways. What matters is the evidence people have to imagine us in compromising situations, and how much we are aware of how people are able to imagine us in those compromising situations.

It is like a loop of imaginative simulation. We are imaginatively simulating other people's imaginative simulations of us. So it becomes about gauging what kind of evidence people have to simulate us. This is what I mean by the economy of the imagination. What kind of things are people able to imagine us doing. What is the evidence that they have that is allowing them to imagine/simulate us in those ways.

What a weird post this is. Sorry it is so embarrassing and silly. It is funny because I'm very embarrassed to be writing about this. About this issue of bathrooms and privacy. It just sounds very funny to me.

And in some ways I am engaging in the process I am describing. I am putting out information about my thoughts that will potentially compromise the privacy of my mind. So who will read this, and will it effect the way that other people imagine me? How does this change the economy of my imagination of other people? It makes it so that certain people can think certain things about me. And it makes it so that I have to think those certain things about myself as if I were other people. This whole post just fucks with my mind. The loop of imaginative simulations between people is so hard for me to articulate clearly and without all this jargon and technical terminology. Whatevs.

Active Days, Active Mind

So I was thinking a little while ago about my job and my thinking and my writing. I was thinking about how once I had learned all of my major tasks and felt more comfortable with them, then perhaps I would have time for my own thoughts. Then perhaps I could let myself daydream about the things I'm writing so as to cover some ground on them. But I haven't really been able to do that very much yet.

My mind is still very active though. I find myself thinking tons of different things. But I just don't know about what. The last two days on my lunch break I have had an idea and felt like OH BOY I need to write about that idea! But then I neglected to write it down and sure enough it just slipped away. To be expected I suppose. I need to write these things down when I really think that.

But I'm still slowly working on this new essay of mine. It will be comparable in length to my 'Society's Implicit War' essays. Those essays were so long that I ended up publishing them serially. I suspect I may end up doing the same thing with these new ones. Almost certainly. I've written about ten pages so far and have another 20 pages of outlines and quotations I've pulled. I think once I've pulled all the quotations that I want I'll be able to write it pretty quickly. But the skimming and quotation pulling is hard work. It takes real focus to just sit down and skim this book page by page and figure out where all these different lines fit into the outline of my discussion.

But when I'm at work I'm not able to think about these things. It is true that on certain breaks I have had moments of breakthrough where I suddenly understand a new connection, or something like that. But usually I have to work hard for that. Or maybe I don't. Maybe it just happens.

But anyways, my reading has been pretty productive the last couple days. I was able to finish Zizek's Violence: Six Sideways Reflections and I feel like I'm still grappling with it. But it is starting to make a bit of sense to me.

After that I quickly moved on to a new book I bought called The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla. The essay I'm currently working on 'Art, Zen, and Intellectual Insurrection' revolves around the power that intellectuals or other creative types can have on political change. So the book seemed like a good place for me to take my reading. ALso it has given me a better sense of the lives of certain people who I have yet to read, but will undoubtedly have to read. Heidegger is the person who is standing out in my mind the most right now. The chapter on Heidegger traces his relationships with Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers. He seems like his life was very fascinating. In any case, I need to read Being and Time. Long book that feels really daunting, but I think I can do it. But I think that this brief biographical introduction will help me grapple with his work.

I also just finished reading the chapter on Foucault and I feel very good about it. I guess for the last year or so I have been in the thick of Foucault's thought. I felt dominated by him for a while. To figure out what was going on with his work seemed like an uphill battle, an overwhelming task. But now I don't feel as worried. Not that I have mastered Foucault or anything like that. But that I feel like I have passed the halfway mark in my battle with Foucault. I've read enough of his stuff that the journey with him will now be one in which I can move beyond him and incorporate him into my larger understanding of things.

How I felt with Foucault for quite a while is now how I'm starting to feel with Zizek. Zizek has written so much. It seems so interdisciplinary and so challenging. I'm not sure what I will end up doing with him. But I plan on reading him more. Violence was pretty compelling. We will see.

I'm gonna go to a coffee shop and work on pulling quotations out of Collingwood now. So long.

Loving Love and Reading About Violence

I am experiencing some tension right now between the themes of my reading and writing. The two themes that are troubling me the most are 1. my focus on zen, acceptance, and love, and 2. my focus on violence, anger, and war.

I’m a very loving person. I want to be a loving person. I like love a lot. I hope I am as loving as I hope I am. But violence occupies so much of my thought and reading, it is a strange predicament.

But generally I am struggling a little bit to feel the coherency of my reading. The most interesting part is that I can feel a coherence. To me my reading is following some kind of logic. I’m moving from book to book and from topic to topic. I think that I am reading in those directions because there are relationships. But it feels so hard for me to peg down or explain what the connections are. I don’t know how to explain what it is that I’m after on the whole. Mainly I guess because lately I am undergoing a lot of changes in my thinking. Lots of new ideas are coming to me.

But interestingly they don’t feel like brand new ideas. They don’t feel like huge turns or shifts. Sometimes there are big shifts. But for the most part I feel like it is growing in complexity and interconnectivity. I feel like there is a unified theme emerging in my mind. Perhaps this is where i feel the tension coming from.

I think the tension is coming from that I am starting to see Zen and love and war and struggle as compatible in some weird way. But this would make sense. I find nihilism to be a very positive thing that is full of a lot of love. I think nihilism somehow feels really good.

I want to be a really positive and loving person. Yet I find myself so preoccupied with questions about violence and struggle. Maybe that is a good thing. I think it is definitely good to identify love and compassion as the major things to come back to. But I also think that it is important to think about war and violence, seeing as how it happens so often.

So in reality I feel like my two major interests, love and war, are very compatible.

But I think this also has to do with the essay that I’m working on. Unfortunately I have not yet settled on a title for this essay. And I’m still in the working stages of it. It seems as if it may have the potential to become quite a large piece of writing. It seems like it could be bringing together quite a lot of my interests. Just as I always try to do, I’m trying to bring together more things than I have before. I don’t like this title I just came up with. Before I had called it ‘Art and Intellectual Insurrection’, I’ve called it ‘The Artist and the Will to Empathy’. Right now I just came up with ‘Art, Zen, and Intellectual Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change Through an Expressive Existence’. Whatever. I am getting at some things in this essay. I want to talk about art as a way to live a better life and potentially as a way to life a politically and socially meaningful life. I want artists to somehow change culture for the better. And I want Zen to be a thing. But all of this is so out of wack. Neuroplasticity, Zen, history, war and violence, Collingwood, Foucualt, Zizek, Searle, all these things and people are coming together for me in this essay. I can only feel it bubbling though. My writing is still at such an early stage. But I’m gonna do it soon. Because I think this will help me reconcile a lot of the interests that are feeling disjointed at this point.

I Love Nihilism, I Love Zen

I am not sure what I am getting at with this title. But then immediately after I wrote that I added the part that says “I Love Zen.” Because at first the title was just “I Love Nihilism.” Both of which are true. I love both of those things. I find nihilism to be very exciting and liberating. It helps me feel good about what is happening in my life. I also love Zen. I have been reading some Zen stuff and man does it make me feel good. Just so fascinating. So practical. So real and perceptive. So insistent on perception and the struggle with perception.

Hello, reality. Can I have you? Can I get close to you? Can I perceive you accurately? It seems as though Zen tries to help answer those questions with a yes. I need to meditate.

But I think that Nihilism offers something very similar to Zen. I think it offers a way to be peaceful. A way to try to perceive reality accurately and a way to just be. Yeah. But it seems to me that the Nihilists that I have read were taking steps to enable the practice of Zen. I believe that Nihilists, too, want to perceive reality accurately. I think Nihilism wants to know what is really going on. I also suspect that my reading of Nihilism is too limited. So I’ll read more Nihilist stuff in the future, no doubt.

I already wrote an extended post on this once. I believe it was in April. I wrote about Nihilism as a positive philosophy. One that can bring about calmness and mindfulness. I still think that it is true. But that was when my reading was explicitly focused on Nihlism. Now my reading has been explicitly focused on Zen. So now I am coming to similar conclusions. From both sides of the street it seems like the same road to mindfulness. I am finding similar lessons and conclusions about daily life in both Zen and Nihilism.

Because this all has to come back to daily life. I want to live differently everyday. I want to become different all the time. And to me it seems like Nihilism and Zen both offer this path towards a different life. They offer an open and flexible set of rules or ideas that can allow you to live your life creatively. I want to live my life creatively. And I am so happy that Shunryu Suzuki has been so explicit about how Zen is about expressing yourself fully in every moment. Expressing your true nature, all the time. That is what I want.

But I will just say quickly that this idea of ‘nature’ and expressing your nature doesn’t jive so well with something I’m reading right now and other stuff I have read before. In particular, John Searle in “Making the Social World” discusses status functions. And Slavoj Zizek, in “Violence”, which I am currently reading, discusses how things don’t necessarily have a nature or an essence, but rather language and society gives things their ‘nature’. Things to ponder, no doubt. But I suspect these things are compatible. And I suspect they are compatible because creativity is still possible, and we could creatively construct our own essence. Perhaps. Anyways. Cya.

Crowded Bus Rides, Headphones and Solipsism

What if I were to just start talking to all kinds of people on the bus? What if I just said hello to them and asked them how they were doing? What if I just smiled at them and started telling them about my day?

I ask these questions because the answer is simple: it would be weird and it would probably make most people uncomfortable.

But what the hell is that all about? Why do I need to keep to myself on the bus?

What is this about this culture that prevents me from freely talking to strangers on the bus?

I think it might have something to do with the rigid categories that we are surrounded by. On the bus, for example, two guys were talking about the video game Halo. They were just talking about how the fictional monsters in the game were very compelling to them. They found it exciting, it was a really good time for them. They enjoyed it a lot,a nd they could enjoy talking to each other and seeing how they both enjoyed it.

But what about the older guy sitting next to me? Couldn’t we enjoy talking to each other somehow? Wouldn’t there be something to talk about? Perhaps the weather, perhaps how it is Wednesday and how we are both excited to be past ‘hump day’. But that is bull shit. Not that it isn’t worthwhile. I’m a big proponent of small talk. I’ve even written about small talk, check out my post on customer service. But why couldn’t we have honest deep talk about our lives? Because we just don’t know what people are interested in.

And that is the thing. Is that people are ‘interested’ in certain ‘things’. Specific things. I’m not writing very clearly right now. But I’m trying to get at the perceived boundaries between people and how they come from social categories or from specific interests. I don’t know. Knowledge. Social knowledge separates people. Age prevents me from striking up random conversations because I assume older people lead different lives and we wouldn’t have much in common. Gender prevents me from talking to people because men are difficult to approach randomly and with women there is often weird sexual connotations lingering in the background with any randomly started conversation. And I don’t even think that has to be the case, but it is most unfortunate how gender relations are so often permeated by or traced with sexual relations.

And then everyone has their headphones on. Then I have my headphones on. It locks me into a world where only I can hear the music, where only I am there. Headphones feel solipsistic. They feel like they make a world of isolated subjectivity. They confine me.

Sometimes I see a cute girl and I want to talk to her so I take my headphones off. I just open myself up to the outside world. Because if I didn’t have my headphones off I clearly don’t want to talk. I used to think about this in college classrooms. Everyone has their headphones on, no one is talking. But what if you take your headphones on when you enter the classroom? Class doesn’t start for another 15 minutes so why aren’t you listening to your music? All these other people are still listening to their music, why aren’t you? Are you expressing your willingness to engage in conversation by removing your headphones?