I really like the meditation/enlightenment frame for poking at these concepts. You might enjoy my Neuroscience of Meditation piece; here’s an excerpt:
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Finally, we may be able to usefully describe the Buddhist jhanas through a combination of CSHW and neural annealing. Essentially, Buddha noted that as one follows the meditative path and eliminates unwholesome mental states, they will experience various trance-like states of deep mental unification he called ‘jhanas’. These are seen as progressive steps to full enlightenment- the first few jhanas focus on joy, and after these are attained one can move to jhanas which revolve around contentment and feelings of infinity, and finally full cessation of suffering. Importantly, these experiences are not seen as ‘mere signposts’ on the path, but active processes which are causally involved in the purification of the mind — in the original Pāli, the root of ‘jhana’ can refer to both ‘meditate’ and ‘burn up’, e.g. to destroy the mental defilements holding one back from serenity and insight.
A ‘modern’ approach here might be to identify the various jhanas as natural resonant modes of the brain– i.e., different jhanas would map to different harmonic configurations, each with a different phenomenological texture, but all high in consonance/harmony. If this is true, we should be able to do neat things like identify which jhana a meditator is experiencing from their CSHW data, or reconstruct Buddhism’s list of jhanas from first principles based on the math of which brain harmonics can be combined in a way that produces high consonance/harmony. Perhaps we could even find a novel, unexplored jhana or two, pleasant configurations of brain harmonics that even most experienced meditators have never experienced.
But if we add neural annealing to this model, we can start to understand how experiencing the various jhanas may actively sculpt the mind. At its most basic, meditation offers a context for people to sit with their thoughts and maybe do some work on themselves, and get some practice ‘getting out of their own way’. Basically removing the ‘defilements’ which clutter up their brain harmonics, much like removing a clamp from a bell or shaking a mouse out of a trombone. Once these ‘resonance impediments’ are removed, and energy is added to the system (through effortful meditation), brains will naturally start to self-organize toward the simpler resonant configurations, the first jhanas. But importantly, highly-resonant states are also high-energy states- i.e., the very definition of resonance is that energy travels in a periodic pattern that reinforces itself, instead of dissipating in destructive interference. So if you get a brain into a highly-resonant state (a jhana) and keep it there, this will also start a neural annealing process, basically purifying itself (and making it easier and easier to enter into that particular resonant state- “harmonic recanalization”) more or less automatically.
With this in mind, we might separate Buddha’s path to enlightenment into two stages: first, one attempts to remove the psychological conditions which prevent them from attaining a minimum level of ‘whole-brain resonance’; mostly, this will involve trying to meditate, experiencing a problem in doing so, fixing the problem, trying to meditate again. Rinse, repeat- possibly for years. But in the second stage, once enough of these conditions are gone and resonant momentum can accumulate, they can start ‘climbing the jhanas,’ mostly just entering meditative flow and letting the math of Laplacian eigenmodes and neural annealing slowly shape their mind into something that resonates in purer and purer ways[8], until at the end it becomes something which can only support harmony, something which simply has no resources that can be used to sustain dissonance.
[8] What precisely is happening as one climbs the various jhanas? Resonance in chaotic systems is inherently unstable, and so if the first jhana is “a minimum level of whole-brain resonance” we should expect many perturbations and failures in maintaining this pleasant state as unpredicted sense-data, chaotic internal feedback loops, and evolved defenses against ‘psychological wireheading‘ knock the system around. Each additional jhana, then, may be thought of as a widening of the set of factors being stabilized, or using a higher-dimensional or further-optimized implicit model of wave dynamics to compensate for more sources of turbulence. This optimization process might separate into discrete steps or strategies (jhanas), each with their own particular phenomenology, depending on what kind of turbulence it’s best at stabilizing. I expect we’ll find that earlier jhanas are characterized by seeking particular narrow resonant configurations that work; later jhanas flip the script and are characterized by seeking out the remaining distortions in the ‘web of phenomenology’, the problem states that don’t resonate, in order to investigate and release them.
(More in the post itself)
Of course, the challenge here is: if this is a good theory of how the brain works, of how meditation works, of what enlightenment, is—can we use it to build something cool? Something that actually helps people, that you couldn’t have built without these insights?
I think there’s a lot of great points and habits of thinking here. My intuition is that it’s really hard to marshall resources in this space, SENS has done this, and they seem pretty open to feedback (I think Jim is great). The next exploratory step in getting this to happen might be as a proposal to SENS.