So, it seems like there’s been up upswing in interest regarding meditation around here recently. I mention this because in this article Brienne advocates for several mental habits such as catching yourself having millisecond-scale mental events and arresting or reversing them, or being able to dispassionately watch herself being uncomfortable and then act on that discomfort in an effectively dissociated fashion. I have done exactly the same thing where I’ve suggested in a post that the solution to somebody’s problem was to simply execute a highly specific mental contortion, with the “how” of it left as an exercise to the reader. Plug for MarkL’s excellent meditation blog.
If I were to be honored with a seat on the Less Wrong High Council, I would probably lobby for some kind of short daily meditative practice to me incorporated into our dogma. Aside from various peer reviewed health benefits, I can anecdotally report that mindfulness meditation trains exactly the type of command-and-control abilities Brienne is describing.
I’ve believed that some thoughts are hard to notice because they happen quickly, but now I’m wondering whether it’s not so much that the thoughts are fast as that blanking the thoughts out of consciousness is what happens quickly.
Your “mental events” would include at least both the thoughts and the blanking out process. Have you noticed a blanking out process, and if so, what did you notice about it?
So, it seems like there’s been up upswing in interest regarding meditation around here recently. I mention this because in this article Brienne advocates for several mental habits such as catching yourself having millisecond-scale mental events and arresting or reversing them, or being able to dispassionately watch herself being uncomfortable and then act on that discomfort in an effectively dissociated fashion. I have done exactly the same thing where I’ve suggested in a post that the solution to somebody’s problem was to simply execute a highly specific mental contortion, with the “how” of it left as an exercise to the reader. Plug for MarkL’s excellent meditation blog.
If I were to be honored with a seat on the Less Wrong High Council, I would probably lobby for some kind of short daily meditative practice to me incorporated into our dogma. Aside from various peer reviewed health benefits, I can anecdotally report that mindfulness meditation trains exactly the type of command-and-control abilities Brienne is describing.
I’ve believed that some thoughts are hard to notice because they happen quickly, but now I’m wondering whether it’s not so much that the thoughts are fast as that blanking the thoughts out of consciousness is what happens quickly.
Your “mental events” would include at least both the thoughts and the blanking out process. Have you noticed a blanking out process, and if so, what did you notice about it?