Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
So we have been engaged in a very long discussion because we’re talking about a topic that is central—the possibility of enlightenment—to try to make that something plausibly accessible to us rather than something wrapped and shrouded in mesmeric mystique. Instead we’ve been trying to understand this from a cognitive science perspective that could tell us why these higher states of consciousness might in fact provide a means for the radical self-transformation, self-transcendence, enhanced inner peace, and connectedness to reality that are the central legacy of the Axial Age Revolution and that are still needed today, even if we no longer believe in the mythology of the Axial Age religions and philosophies.
How do we find a place to vouchsafe the precious value that these states can confer on lives in terms of meaning and transcendence when we no longer can understand and articulate and legitimate that in terms of a two world mythology?
So we had been discussing the properties of these higher states of consciousness. We had discussed what the world is like: it’s bright, both comprehensive and detailed, intricate and interesting, the world in a grain of sand. It’s highly intelligible, it’s beautiful, and behind it is a pervasive sense of oneness. The self that is resonating with that world in the higher state of consciousness is a self deeply at peace, like in Plato’s description of anagoge. It’s experiencing joy, it’s experience a kind of deep remembrance (sati) of the being mode, its true and authentic self. It is losing its ego-centrism.
We talked about the connectedness between the self in the world as one so intimate, so flowing, so anagogic that the sense of participation and conformity is achieving a sense of identity, deep and profound being at one with the oneness. But it is so profound that it is almost always described as ineffable.
We then took a look at what might be going on in these states because we’re trying to give a descriptively adequate and prescriptively adequate account. We took a look at the continuity hypothesis: that they’re the same machinery that’s at work in our everyday experience of the fluency of reading into the moments of insight into the insight cascades of flow, and then being exapted even more into mystical experience, and then some of those mystical experiences bring about a quantum change. They bring about a deep transformative experience.
I proposed to you that what’s going on in these higher states of consciousness is something like a state of flow but that the skill, the expertise that is flowing is not this particular skill, of rock climbing or being a martial artist or playing jazz, it’s the domain-general skill of getting an optimal grip on the world. So what’s happening is people are getting a flow state in their ability to optimally grip on the world.
This connection to the machinery of insight helps to explain why disruptive strategies are used in order to try to bring about the higher states of consciousness, because disruptive strategies are so central to trying to create insight. They’re both naturally disruptive strategies and you can acquire them through mindfulness psychotechnologies.
We were examining what these disruptive strategies do: they massively increase variation in your processing and that reveals invariants—both good invariants (you get to see more of the real patterns that are remaining unchanged through all the variation, that’s what science does across all their variations. We try to find the real patterns that are invariant and what science does is increase the variation, we run experiments. We do all kinds of manipulations and increase variations to try to find what remains invariant because we take that to point out to us what is more real. That’s what you’re doing!), but it’s opening up the invariants of the world, and you’re using the flow state’s capacity for enhanced implicit processing / implicit learning of complex patterns / tracking of causal patterns to do that, it’s also picking up on the bad invariants.
It’s helping to reveal all the ways in which you are systematically misframing. Like a child going through a developmental stage (and I would point you to the work of my former student, friend, colleague Jenson Kim for this idea of development as a systematic form of insight, something he and I are working on together). Like a child going through a developmental stage, realizing not just this error or that error but a systematicity in the way that they’re misframing reality and finding a nexus, a point where the insight is not just an intervention in this problem but in a whole class and type of problems. That developmental change of seeing through illusion and into reality that is so central to wisdom is also being afforded by these higher states of consciousness.
There’s two or three terms he brings up again in this episode that he hasn’t used for a while, and I find the terms very ungooglable, and I can’t remember how he defined them earlier in the conversation—“exacted”, “exceptation” and maybe “exactation”.
Can anybody help me out here?
[edit] is he saying Exapting instead of Exacting? And by Excapting, is he meaning something like “the repurposing of existing tools for new purposes”?
Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
I also found hints of your steelmanning divination argument in here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnkbdwckdfHS2H22Q/steelmanning-divination
He was making the case for a random walk through the space of things we’re not changing in order to help us find what we might be doing wrong.
There’s two or three terms he brings up again in this episode that he hasn’t used for a while, and I find the terms very ungooglable, and I can’t remember how he defined them earlier in the conversation—“exacted”, “exceptation” and maybe “exactation”.
Can anybody help me out here?
[edit] is he saying Exapting instead of Exacting? And by Excapting, is he meaning something like “the repurposing of existing tools for new purposes”?