Deeper Than Not-Self

I can't really identify what makes that happen. There is sometimes a felt sense of an impulse to do something and then it happens.  Raising my arm for instance.  
Sometimes at work I catch myself after a conversation or in conversation asking where did that come from?   This spontaneous uprising that created joy in myself and others during an interaction. 

I would say 99% of my activities are based on habit, in terms of the full bandwidth of my activity. When I'm typing, or jogging, or walking down the street most of the activity output seems to result from what's been wired in based on past experiences. 

I also feel that there is a very limited bandwidth where I can intend an action. But it is more like "aiming" my habit. Or "aiming" my noticing. It's 1% redirection. I can't intend an entirely new action or suddenly be able to notice an entirely new kind of experience. (For example, over the last few years I've nearly completed re-training my jogging to use a mid-foot landing rather than a heel landing... and even though I can say the change in a dozen words, it took three dozen months to make into a new habit. At first, I couldn't really find my feet as I was jogging! I would just catch moments of experience...)

As for the intention, is it real? It's so tautological... I feel as if my intention meets the world half-way, but I only notice my intention by what the world does... so I can't say either one comes first and causes the other. It feels co-arising... so does that really count as intention? 

But interestingly, it's clear that this intending needs to be intended for a change to occur. For example, based on a Ken McLeod idea, I spent about a year listening to the sound of my own voice as I talked --- not picking words, just listening to the sound --- and over the year the harshness just faded away. I didn't want to hear it either and slowly it went away. I'm SURE that wouldn't have happened if I didn't make it a practice.

My own belief is that the body-mind does have intention, but it is sooo limited in its ability to make change occur. Basically, we are imprisoned by the nature of the habits/patterns we form. Best to develop good habits!    (BTW, my realization of the power of habits has been especially reinforced by watching my parents age and how locked into the pattern of their life they have become. And it's soooo hard for them to change at their age. It really made me think about my habits and what kind of prison I was creating for my future self!)

This is all very much unresolved in my own thinking, so I'm very curious in thoughts on this topic. Thanks for starting it Chris!

I sometimes realize that what I see as spontaneous free flowing conversation is a pattern of my personality...  As Ken would say " pattened based existence ".   Shargrol, he gave that practice to a woman and after some time doing it, she came back to him and said " She just never shuts up! " 

Conscious intent to make a bodily movement doesn't seem to do *anything*, the arm doesn't move. But then suddenly then there is a mental sensation that's hard to describe and then the arm moves. 

It's as though the conscious intent percolates into an unconscious system and then at some point that unconscious system says "Ok, it makes sense to do this *now*"

But natural daily movement seems to be a unintentional steady flow of actions, when I pay attention it seems to be punctuated by these conscious/unconscious interactions but that might be an artefact of paying attention.

Speech I've always felt was weird, I go into a conversation with a clear intent of what I'm going to say, but (unless it's an interaction tied down to specific goals, e.g. getting a call centre person to do something), then it's like a different person takes over and speaks through my mouth.

Really interesting conversation! I hope to get a chance to contribute in the next several days. 

Just to poke at your 100% stance (e.g. " We can't control our reactions and what we call "intent" is really an afterthought for the self-conscious part of our mind.")... 

Is there such a thing as learning? How do we learn anything that we don't already know?

Is there such a thing as creativity? What is it? 

I find that sometimes this buddhism stuff gets taken to far... For me, I hold that "there is limited bandwidth for intention/control" is a better explanatory model than "intention/control is a complete illusion" but I'm prepared to be wrong.

Ah, okay. Yes and I agree that the "how" aspect is a mystery in many ways...

...just some thoughts:

The most interesting thing to me is that we "don't know until it happens". For example, I can have the idea "I'm going to raise my arm" and loosely intend to will myself to raise my arm. Nothing happens but I'm suddenly more aware of the sensations of "my arm" which I wasn't before. I can intend stronger and I start feeling sensations that are more associated with lifting, the muscles that would pull up on my arm if it was being raised... but it still doesn't lift. Then my awareness is very much in my arm and my intention and the arm begin to lift my arm. So at that point I can say "my intention was strong enough to lift my arm, because my arm was lifted by my intention", which is basically retrospective and tautological. 

A lot of the "assumed self" can be like that, a retrospective and tautological description of what already happened. 

This tautology idea is also true of perceptions of the exterior world. For example, if I hold a green pea balanced on top of a knife edge with a finger and ask "which side is it going to fall?" Well, I simply don't know. It feels balanced and it could fall either way. When I let go, it falls to left side of the blade so I think "it must have been more over the left side, because it fell to the left side, which means it was on the left side." Again, a totally retrospective and tautological description of what already happened. But the truth was, it was not knowable before hand. 

A lot of the "assumed mechanics of the outside world" is like that, too. Mostly retrospective and tautological descriptions.

However, there is something to say about developmental insight and wisdom and the sense of identity... because I rarely make assumptions about having control over my initial reactions to stimuli, just because I've spent so much time investigating them and seeing their nature. I'm pretty aware that I do have not a lot of influence on what happens next or how I will initially respond. It's true that reactions don't linger, they mostly arise and pass and don't create long domino chains of reaction, but this meat machine still computes via meat patterns. Which is one way of saying that this whole enlightenment pursuit has been pretty humbling and I know I'm not that smart or in control (despite objectively probably behaving smarter and seemingly being in more control as a result of practice). 

“Which is one way of saying that this whole enlightenment pursuit has been pretty humbling and I know I'm not that smart or in control”

 

It's all going to go horribly wrong and make the Big Bang look like some cheap little firecracker?

Kindled up!

From the blurb:
“A brilliant bastard.” —Cory Doctorow
“Comfort, of course, is the last thing that Watts wants to give.” —New York Review of Science Fiction

Chris Marti wrote: “We’re programmed for delusional optimism.”

So, (drunk posting, but hey), maybe this is a by product of some sort of meta evolutionary process. Organisms that are delusionally optimistic *enough* will, mostly, survive and breed. Organisms that are too pessimistic won't take advantage of opportunities and ones that are too optimistic will get themselves killed.

Ultimately the only test will be if we as a species survive. And survival doesn't necessarily mean as the current bipedal wandering around ape, it just means there are some sort of descendants. It's a big test, if we fuck up the planet then we probably get to be some sort of scarce monkeys and the rats or cockroaches get a go at intelligence and if we don't then maybe we become ethereal beings of light or enlightened hybrid machine intelligences... 

But why would they want to do that? Supposing it's possible eventually to upload a biological mind, e.g. by steadily incorporating more silicon processing functions (and would that be the same as the original biological mind? (but skip that for now)), presumably the processing substrates are sufficiently powerful for it not to be a significant cost to AI, whereas having human viewpoints available would be useful for when they meet some space-faring critters that as just as nasty as humans can be.

Perhaps we just need to bring them up properly. That's always been an interesting question to me, if we could create a sentient computer consciousness, we ought to think about how we teach it morality and values. Which in turn should give us to think what those things actually are.

I've tended to assume that evolution would eventually head in the 'increasing amounts of silicon' direction. But suppose AI were enable us to change our existing biological brains to work more effectively (whatever that means)?

I think it was vinay gupta ("leashless") who remarked that humans were basically rabbits. Very sexy and pretty dumb about their lot in life, just running around and grazing and being mostly prey for everything else out there and while making as many babies as possible. I like calling it optimism, too. But then it turned our lives got long enough that human culture developed allowed these rabbits to inherit technologies from those that lived before and that allowed them to become very powerful bunnies. But still very dumb and very sexy. 

I think AI's interior will be as opaque/unknowable as a whale's or a housewren's. We humans like to create minds for others and believe that our creations are true, but most of the time we're just projecting our hopes/fear/self into others.

One other thought, there's probably going to be multiple AIs so it's possible that every possible combination of mentality/motivation gets expressed. The nurturing AI, the murderous AI, the trickster AI, the college stoner AI, the narcissist AI, the saint AI, the gambler AI, the musician AI, the therapist AI...