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Distraction Programs recording: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Distraction Programs recording

Michael Smith1h 9min

Michael Smith

00:00

Yes, okay, Hi, sorry to change my settings a little bit there. I'm not staring at me. Okay. So hello, I wanted to I'm a bit scrambled this morning because I am heading out for a trip that's going to be taking up my time over the weekend, and I'm not quite done with any of the writing pieces that I am hoping to get out. The one piece I'm most excited about right now, most focused on is it could go out, but I think it would be a little sloppy if I send it out now, and I think that it would be a little disappointing. So I

Michael Smith

01:03

Okay, mark this point.

Unknown Speaker

01:21

Okay, hi,

Michael Smith

01:24

welcome, I am not very pleased at that beginning. I

Michael Smith

01:43

Yes, okay, there we go. Hello. I am a little bit rushing around today. I went over this week. This week has been a little extra compressed. I have a whole bunch of writing pieces that I'm working on in parallel, and one that I was really hoping to finish for this coming Sunday, when this is when this video is being released, is it was intended to be something that you could engage with, the readers could engage with. So last week, I published this piece on subjective science. This is the main theme that I'm focusing on. It's this is something that clicked for me really clearly as subjective science back in January, and I've been refining it since then, but it's a unifying framework for pretty much everything that I do. But I am, I'm out of time to be able to finish writing that piece in a good way right now. It would just come out as a bunch of abstract theory, which might be interesting to some people, but it's not easy to engage with, so I'm gonna have to go pretty soon. So what I'm hoping to do is just toss on a very quick I mean, for me, I hope I tend to ramble, but a quick explanation of the basic ideas that I'm hoping to or rather an outline of a basic idea that you can use in order to do some what I call crucial experiments in a piece of subjective science yourself. So I want to give a little bit of context about what I mean there and dive into the actual practice. Calling it a practice is funny, an exploration, an investigation, I think is a better description. A thing that's worth emphasizing here is that when I talk about here, I want to share this theory. I My goal is not to convince you or to convince anybody else that this is correct. I have really deep reasons for this. This is not just a matter of, well, I don't want to pressure you and like, let's, let's kind of get along with this, and let's, like, be gentle with one. I think that's good, that's good policy. It's like it helps make culture work better, kind of least I would hope so. But the reason I don't want to convince anybody of my ideas is because the process that has people believing them, because I am convincing, is not one that creates sanity, and I think it doesn't create kindness either. What I want is an expansion of the scientific project. But what I mean by that is not an expansion of the objective, materialist worldview. What I mean is that there is a key insight that made science really powerful, that made the Scientific Revolution mean something, the thing that made it so that we got a command over the physical world over the last 400 years that absolutely dwarfs everything that we did for the previous several 1000 it's not just, Hey, look at us. We're impressive. And it's not just building on the shoulders of giants, although that's also true. It's, it's there was a key insight. We got something, and I think we misunderstood what that insight is, and so we we applied it too narrowly. So that's why I talked about this in the in the essay last week. That's why science focuses so much on objectivity, because it can we have a great science of objects, a great science of things, but if we want to understand the nature of the human experience and the human heart, it's really important to track that what is actually important about people, the thing that's actually really interesting, precious and important about us is that we are not just objects. So if we're not just objects, what is an objective science going to do to help us understand ourselves better and help us cultivate wisdom and compassion and wholesomeness. So my vision is to get really clear about how we can use science without reducing it to objectivity. And so what I want to do today is give you an example piece of something that I've been playing with that I think is very powerful. But the important part is not, here's this tool. It is so powerful. Look at this tool I have. Like, what's what's that for? Like, great. We have more tools. We can throw it into the mix and create more chaos and stir the culture wars more and have politics burn more of our resources to the ground and terrify more people, while our faces get sucked into social media and our attention span gets driven into the ground. I'm not interested in that part. What I want to do is encourage us to develop clarity the kind of clarity that can let us actually do something profoundly meaningful, not because we specify this is the meaningful thing, then we do it, but rather, what is meaningfulness? What does it mean for us to have meaning when people really care tremendously about their connection to the divine, or the the development of their soul, or if they're much more materialist and they're just kind of going well, I there's something that's important to me about being a person, and I don't really have a framework for it, but I know It seems like love and care and connection are important. What's a framework we can use for exploring these things in good faith? So that's what I'm looking at. How can we explore these things in good faith? So what I want to do today is try to hand a piece of the model I use for how minds work, how human minds work. This is something I've been using in the background since 2019 was when it really clicked. When I went Got it, got it. There's a whole story there it was working with plant medicines in Peru, and I got a whole flash. And it's a fun story, but the relevant part here is that there was a way that I came to be able to observe my own mind. And I got the impression I could observe the behavior of others minds too. That made some of their properties, a very particular kind of clear to me, and it's worth noting. I mean, people can have all kinds of psychedelic insights, and they turn out to be nothing burgers, like so what? But this particular one, it seemed very sharply clear. Oh, this is not a psychedelic insight. This is that psychedelics cleared my vision and altered it in a way that made it easy for me to see something. And that vision has stuck with me since then. So that has produced a whole bunch of pretty significant model pieces. For instance, if you look up the hostile telepath problem. That's a blog post I have on this sub stack, so you can go back and take a look at that that is derived from this model. It came from staring at some questions and going well, given this model, and given this behavior that people have when I put them together, what should I expect to find? And this idea of the hostile telepath problem sort of pops out of that pretty naturally. So I'm not going to detail the full model here, because I don't really have a ton of time. I want to head out soon, if I can. We'll see. But the but I want to give enough that you can run what I call crucial experiments. So I need to give a tiny bit of context about what a crucial experiment is. If you read the post from last week on subjective science, it goes into this, you can also Google crucial experiments, and you'll find I think it's experiment is crucial, or something like that. This is an idea that Roger Bacon put forward as part of his spelling out the project that became the scientific revolution. But in my view, best as I can tell, the soul of science, the absolute core, is that we seek for explanations to be particular, enough, detailed enough, well fitted enough to reality that they that they anticipate things that we can check we can anticipate some surprising things, like Maxwell's equations. For instance, Max's four equations of electromagnetism. It turns out that if you wiggle the math around, you end up predicting a very specific speed of light, very, very specific speed of light. This is part of what kicked off the whole wait. This is weird because it doesn't have a reference frame like it's going that fast compared to what there's a whole history of science going on there, and that was part of what resulted in Einstein's relativity. But the thing is that you still have like that. That's an observable phenomenon. It's hard because light looks really fast. It's like 186,000

Michael Smith

11:35

miles a second, or 300,000 kilometers a second. I think that's a number that stuck in my head. But That's insanely fast, and it's very hard to measure that, but it's doable. And if you were to measure the speed of light, and you found it to not be that speed, it was significantly not that speed, that would invalidate Maxwell's equations. It would mean that those are that there's something in our assumption chain about how the equations are put together, the fact that they derive this speed, and that the speed is that of light, like the alt there's somewhere in that chain we can know, oh, something is wrong with our picture. But what we find over and over again is that the more refined we make our measurements, the more accurately it shows. Yes, actually, Maxwell's equations correctly predict the speed of light, which suggests that those equations are giving us a pretty finely contoured description of something that is probably real, it is likely to still be an approximation, like Newton's laws of motion were like this too. They were really good at giving us a picture of how to anticipate things, but they they turned out not to be quite right, but they were still approximately like right. They are still approximately right. Even Einstein's correction didn't get rid of the laws of motion Newton's laws of motion, it just adjusted them a little bit so that in extreme cases, we end up having to add a an error factor. So so I highlight this because there the main power of science is in the ability to get our explanations for what is real, to expose themselves to falsification, and then we check to see, is this explanation? Right? That part where you check, you check to see, is this explanation? You're checking if it's right, but rather you're checking if it's wrong. Is this excellent? Does this explanation make a prediction that turns out to be false? Does the speed of light turn out to be different than Maxwell's equations predict when you throw an object through the air, Newton's Laws predict it will go the arc will be that of a parabola. Is it exactly a parabola? If it deviates significantly from being a parabola? That invalidates Newton's laws. So if we measure it, what do we find? With some caveats, because it has to do with ignoring friction, and you have to be in a uniform acceleration context, which is approximated by gravitation. But technically, at the top of the arc, the gravity is slightly weaker than at the bottom, so it's not quite uniform acceleration, so not exactly a parabola, but you can but these, but these are not big exceptions. They're fairly precise, like you can tell what the friction of the air should be like, what the error range is at the measurement, you can tell precisely how much the acceleration should be different at the top of the arc versus the bottom. And from that, you should be able to calculate the shape of the parabola. So there's a whole bunch of things like this, the in science, over and over again. The thing that gives us all this advance is the ability to do crucial experiments, the ability to potentially disprove our ideas. So what I want to do is give you an idea that has enough detail that hopefully you can try to disprove it. I don't mean socially. I don't mean I bet you can't disprove this. Prove me wrong. I mean, for you, I mean, here is an understanding, I haven't told you yet, but here, here's a way to view something that about minds behaviors. And if you, if you examine that, and you explore it, and you try to see, look, what would this predict about how my subjective experience should work. Okay, so if I do this, then I should expect this effect. What happens if I do this? Do I get the expected effect with subjectivity? It's particularly tricky because of a property that is sometimes called reflexivity, where if I tell you what to expect, and then you go looking for it, you might create that effect. Yep, that makes it hard, but, and I don't claim to have worked out perfect methods for getting around that. So what I would say for that part is just be aware that it's possible to to expose something to apparent falsification, but discover it's actually a self fulfilling prophecy. That's important to note. But if it turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy, then there should be other things that we can do to create different effects. I know I'm being abstract. I'm like, I'm trying to gesture it. There's a logical structure here that is very potent and can be very tricky when we're dealing with subjective structures. I think it's navigable. I think we can do it. I don't have all the methods. I'm still figuring it out. I'm trying to offer this in part so that you can help us all figure it out as well. If you want, if you don't, if you just want to play with somebody, some ideas, that's fine, too. Exploratory experimentation, an exploratory experiment being very different from a crucial experiment. An exploratory experiment is, well, what if I just try and find out? Let's see what happens? Oh, if I try seeing the world through this lens, what is it actually like? What John bravaci might call serious play. It's not just No Well, it's okay. What if I really look through this? How do I experience the world if I'm not a Christian? What happens if I actually view the world through the lens of being a Christian? Can I experience that just to find out what it's like, not to practice it, not to convince myself that it's true, but just to find out, what does it feel like on the inside to be Christian, or you could flip it around if you're Christian, you could try being atheist and just in order to explore it, or being Hindu, or whatever like and I'm just picking on religion as an example, you could pick a bazillion other things. You try being a Mongol warrior. Find out what that's like. I mean, the serious play can give you a lot of very potent exploration and that matters for developing ideas and figuring out what things are worth guessing are the causes of how things work. But once you have a guess about the causes, the thing that lets you tell the difference between something that is plausible and something that is actually potent, something that would let you reformat, something that would give you a command of, for instance, subjective structures and your emotional experience with a type of depth and wisdom and understanding that We have with the ability to create car engines that's going to come from doing crucial experiments, from trying to disprove your ideas, making sure that your ideas are disprovable. But I want to quickly emphasize there's a tendency when we talk about expanding science to the subjective. Already touched on this earlier. But when we talk about expanding science to subjectivity or to meaning or to wholesomeness or to wisdom, there can be a gut twisting hesitation, like, is that really a good idea? And I want to emphasize, I think there is a reason for concern, and the thing that I mean is not subject to this concern, I'm happy to explain in more detail at some other point. But the I claim that a key reason, I think the key reason there is hesitation is because there has been a tendency to view real and objective as synonymous, which means that non objective things, which is to say, reflexive things, things that I have a self fulfilling prophecy nature to them get treated as less real. But examples of reflexive structures include things like falling in love and being touched by poetry, the significance of spiritual experiences. These. These are things that matter tremendously to the human heart, and if they're treated as not as real, there's sort of epiphenomenon of chemistry bumping around, and it's like accidents of the brain. And ultimately, it boils down to just atoms bouncing around and physics, physics saying it's hollow, and coming up with a reductionist explanation of these things that matter to the human heart doesn't address that. So I want to note I recognize the concern when I talk about a science of subjectivity and a science of wholesomeness and wisdom, a science of spirituality that is a real science, not just taking scientific ideas and using them to justify spiritual ideas that we were going to think anyway. I mean actually understanding spirituality and our connection to the divine. I mean something that is truly in good faith. I mean something that honors these topics and honors scientific process. So, okay, so model, so the phenomenon to stare at is, where do thoughts come from? That's the center of what inspired these questions for me? I don't claim to have a complete picture of this, but what I do have is a model that works well enough to give some surprising resulting effects. So I want then there's kind of a folk theory of where thoughts come from, where they just sort of bubble up

Michael Smith

21:27

sometimes for no reason. Like, you're thinking about avocados for no reason. Maybe it was because you were kind of hungry. But, like, you're lots of things you can think of. You're hungry. Why avocados? Well, I don't know. It was just a thing in my environment. I guess it might have had a cause, but meh, it's there's, it's not really a theory. There isn't really an explanation that's proposed most of the time for where, where thoughts actually come from. At least, as far as I've been able to tell, I I'm not sure there's even a theory within psychology of where thoughts come from. They just talk about the effects of thoughts. Some thoughts are given a cause, but if I'm mistaken about that, I'm happy to discover it. Let me know. I want to claim to you that no thought is random. All thoughts are the product of your mind trying to solve a problem. When I say, solve a problem, you can intuitively, you'd think, solve a problem or accomplish a task. I'm using the term problem, inspired a little bit from David Deutsch, for instance, that's where accomplish a task is driven by a problem Ness like I need to figure out a way to put this jar on the lid. Put this lid on the jar. How do I arrange that? And there's something very similar in terms of what is 23 times 17. Okay, well, I need to arrange that, and I can put it in the long multiplication algorithm format, and then kind of and it's like, okay, well, are you solving a problem? Are you accomplishing a task? Well, you're accomplishing a task to solve a problem. So I don't want to quibble about the words too much, but the point is that your mind takes in a goal. Which you provide? You provide your mind a goal. Don't worry too much about who you are, like who's you and what is your mind? I have ways of making these terms more precise, but I'm going to run with an intuition for now and hope that you have a similar one. You provide your mind with a goal. With a goal and end state, or a type of end state, and you pressure to find a way to get there. It works on trying to get there. And then eventually, hopefully, you get there. And then Bing, mind is satisfied. Thoughts are part of the conscious interface that you experience from this process. It is part of when your mind needs to show you something in order for it to accomplish the task that you have given it. It becomes a conscious thought. So and then this question, well, how do you ask your mind to do things? If you think of something like when you're trying to remember an actor's name, what was the actor's name was? What are you doing when you're trying right? I'm going to call that prompting your mind, or giving your mind an instruction. The instruction is, give me this actor's name. The issue is that if the information isn't readily available, the mind can't immediately fire off the information. You have to sort of pressure it to go find it. Sometimes, if you give it enough pressure, you'll end up incubating your request, so the mind creates sort of a copy of all right, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'll get back to you. And at that point, when the mind has enough of a clear command that it can go incubate, it can go run this, this process in the background. It's actually pretty important that you don't interfere with the mind mind's operating. That's why you kind of go, I'm not thinking of it. Look, maybe it'll come to me later. Let's just carry on. Every now and then you might think of, was it John Candy? No, no, no. It wasn't John Candy. That's this guy. No, no. Right? So that thought coming in, is the mind going, is this what you're looking for? And you go, no, please try again. So there's an exchange, like it's, like it's trying to ask for your input. So that, I claim is sort of the basic functioning of the mind, like there's, there's some processes about what is it doing in the background, how is it doing that process? Who are you? How are you able to apply these requests? But what I want to do is zoom in on just this part, if you look at how, okay. Well, one implication of this is that no thought is random. Thoughts are the result like this is a claim that all thoughts arise from some sort of problem solving effort. And it is not just it's not just like heat comes off of your computer, like the computers aren't trying to heat the room, they just do. And the claim is that thoughts are much more strategic than that. They're not the accidental output of a mind trying to do things. It is part of how the mind works. So you take this idea and this should have some interesting implications. One is that I since it seems like it is possible to trace thoughts back, like the same kind of way, that if you wonder, how did we land on this topic in the conversation. Why are we talking about koalas? We're talking about koalas because we were talking about marsupials, which is because of Australia, because we were talking about Steve Irwin, because we were talking about dangerous jobs, right? Because we were we were discussing what's going on with some of the oil rigging jobs, and how that does or doesn't relate to technological advances recently. So there you can sort of trace back, oh, we landed here. What was before that? Okay, and what was before that? You can do the same thing with thoughts. You can trace, wait, why I'm suddenly thinking about like the sakuras, the cherry blossoms in Japan. Why is that I was I guess it was looking at flower patterns. And that's like, you can kind of trace it back. I want to emphasize that when you're tracing it back, you're not trying to deduce, well, why might I be thinking of sakuras? Well, I do think a lot about Japanese stuff that's guessing, that's asking your mind to generate more guesses about why you might be thinking of this. What I'm talking about is more like an observational trace. One thing I observe in my own mind is that thoughts leave tracks. It's like the mind is a space where thoughts can arise. This is a little bit of an oversimplification, but I think it's close enough. It's almost like a slightly muddy space. And I mean muddy like, like, if you imagine a flat area that that just has smooth mud, and then you you roll a ball through it, it's going to leave a track that, after a while, the mud might kind of blur over and sort of mostly cover the track. But if you're now staring at this ball and you go, wait, wait, where is the track? Oh, got kicked over there. Okay, there's a way to trace that experience inside your mind, and if on the inside, to me, it feels very, very much like tracing a conversation. So a funny claim that comes from this, which you can explore and you can experiment with, if you like, is the trace of thought. You're going to run into one of two phenomena. One is you're going to trace it back to an immediate external sensory experience.

Michael Smith

29:31

And this is stuff like while you're walking along, and you you look over and you see a little a stump of a tree in the stump, like the the stump of one of its branches kind of looks like a smiley face. And then this starts a whole chain of thought. So you should be able to trace your whatever random thought you're having, back to an experience like that. You might not be able to, just as a matter of practice. Often, minds will drop these chains because they're not relevant to the problem solving process. And you might not be used to tracing them back, and some people are just better at doing this tracing than others. But as far as I can tell, this tracing is a skill. It is or a strength. Might be another way of putting it. It says a muscle that you grow. So if you try, you should be able to find these pathways. Footnote. Thing worth being aware of is that if you because of reflexivity, because of the self fulfilling prophecy nature of this stuff, it could be that thoughts are kind of random, but by expecting them to have some sort of structure, and you look for them, your mind kind of creates the structure a little bit like how in a dream, if you expect to open a door and find a swimming pool, you tend to find a swimming pool. It's not that there really was a swimming pool back there. It's that your expectation created that structure for your experience. I do think that there is something like that that can happen here, but specifically when it comes to tracing the chains of your thinking, my impression is pretty vividly that that's not what's going on. I haven't found a good way to check this is part of the overall guess that is a little harder to falsify, so mostly it's I don't know. Like, if I start doubting that, I start doubting things, like my ability to trace where we were in a conversation, and I start challenging my memory. And like, memory is fallible, but like we're talking about that level of fallibility, I start to wonder whether I can remember anything at all, anything at all. Like, am I able to remember what I was talking about? So like, my ability to write, for instance, feels very closely related to my ability to trace thoughts, because I can trace the thought forward, and then I can go back and check what did I write? I don't go, Wow, that's so weird. I don't remember writing that. It's, well, how did I get to this part of the writing? Right? I was trying to do this thing. To do this thing, so tracing thoughts and looking back at my writing feels very similar. So and again, it's possible that's creating a structure rather than implementing or rather than discovering one that's there. I don't know how to check that, so it just seems worth noting that's a possibility. That's part of what needs to be investigated. But we haven't developed the skills, the methodologies of subjective science to check that yet. So open area to explore. So end code. So, so that's one funny implication, is that with some effort, you should be able to trace your thoughts back to some external sensation. But you remember I said that there were two things that could show up. So this is the main topic that I wanted to mention today. Suppose that you were to incubate a command to your mind that goes something like this, experience that I keep having this particular sensation I don't want to consciously experience. How do I make it so that I do not experience it? So for instance, maybe you really hate the experience of getting angry and you like I certainly you don't like the things that make you angry, but maybe you don't like the sensation of anger itself. And so you try to figure out, is there some way I can be not angrier? I don't know how to make the anger not be there, to make it go away, but maybe that would be a solution. Can I make the anger go away and just not experience it ever. I don't know. Maybe I can avoid the sensation, kind of distract myself and let it kind of fade out in the background. I don't know. But then I feel the anger, and then I get distracted. How do I do this? If you chew on this and you go, how do I avoid anger? How do I not experience anger? If that gets incubated. So the mind kind of automates the process the same way it can automate the process of looking for an actor's name. What do you expect to have happen? So this is a point where I hope I've given enough detail that you might be able to deduce the effect. It might be worth pausing the video and thinking about it if you want to. I think it's helpful to see, oh, these structures, actually, some of them have necessary consequences. This is not as strictly necessary as a math theorem, but I think there's kind of a necessary conclusion, a plausibly necessary conclusion. So consider pausing here, so the the basic structure. So I'll give you my impression of what happens here. The basic structure is a structure is that for one thing, it produces what I've come to call a distraction program. The deal is that your mind gets the command that it needs to keep a certain sensation, like anger, from becoming conscious so it starts to try to figure out where are the things that lead up to that experience, and then associate those with some way of pulling attention away so that they can't finish the chain. If it can block it, it would if it can block the experience from occurring, like, if somebody is at risk of making you angry and finding ways, like, No, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. I mean, I just, I just want to be okay. I'm thinking, I'm gonna go eat some ice cream now. So you can end up pulled away and distracted. You end up with some sort of sensation that boots up, a mental sensation quite often, that it can show up as suddenly getting foggy or suddenly fawning. It can show up as suddenly remembering that you have a task that you need to do, desperately needing to pull out your phone and scroll social media. There's a huge range of effects here, but one, one particular part of this structure is that unlike remembering the name, like, when you remember an actor's name, you go, right, yes, it was John Cleese. That was his name. John Cleese, yeah, you don't wonder why, like, why on earth am I thinking of John Cleese? What does that have to do with our conversation? The trace that I'm talking about, that sort of track in the mud very clearly points it like this came from your request back here. This is the answer to your request. It's John Cleese. And you go, yes, it was John Cleese. Thank you mine. That was a little random and out of context, but thank you for finally answering my question. So your i The thing is that if your distraction program, if the distractions come up like, Oh man, I'm at risk of getting angry. Let me pull out my phone and look at social media. Well, you know you're at risk of getting angry. So the trace in the mud is actually taking you right back to the very sensation that the program is trying to distract you from. So what that means is that programs will try to prevent you distraction. Programs specifically will try to find ways to prevent you from tracing the path back. One way to think of this is that they try to hide their own existence, because their existence brings your attention right to the sensation that they're trying to keep you that their instruction is to try to keep you from being aware of so this has the structure of what sometimes gets called an anti meme this is after A fictional book. There is no anti mimetics division the I have not actually read the book. I've gotten a lot of summaries of it, the basic idea, but I because of it, I could use the term anti meme for this. An anti meme is a mental structure that whose functioning relies on keeping its existence outside of consciousness, which means that if you go looking for it, you're going to get some really weird effects. You're going to encounter its functioning, but you're not going to encounter it as, oh, look, there's an anti meme. You're going to encounter it as, why am I thinking about this? I don't care. I'm just going to have a carrot.

Speaker 1

38:40

Or why am I thinking of this? I don't know. I'm just, I just have all these noisy thoughts all the time, and I can't do anything right? And

Michael Smith

38:52

so when I mentioned, if you start tracing these tracks back, you'll encounter two things, one of which is back to a an external sensation. There is another possibility, which is that the act of tracing it back will activate the program that caused the thought, and it will stop you from trying to trace the thought back. What you will encounter should be systematic. This is not an incidental thing of what I don't remember, what was before, then, uh, I don't know. Maybe it'll come to me later. Maybe not, I don't know. And then later, you think of it, and you go, Oh, no, no, I remember I was thinking about this, like, that's not, that's not one of these. That's just not having, that's not a distraction program, that's just not being familiar with how to trace pathways back, chains of thought back. What I'm talking about is something more like, why is it that I just can't seem to reply to this text message my friend sent me? I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'm just bad. I'm just bad at replying to people I don't know. So the question of, why did the thought maybe I'm bad at replying to people, where did that thought come from? And why are you trying to solve the problem of being bad? Like, where is that coming from? So that can be tricky to notice, because the entire point of a thought like that, I claim, is to distract you from tracing the thought back. So if you take the claim, man, maybe I'm bad. Why am I bad? And you ask, Why did I think that thought, not abstractly, but tracing it back, this thought arose. What was its cause? What if I trace its mud path back, you'll activate it again and again and again and again. Every time you trace the thought back, you will reactivate the distraction program. This can create exhaustion, mental fog, complete blankness, suddenly being really scared. In in many cases, this like there's one case where I want to, I maybe should have put this caution at the front. I'm not too concerned about it at this point, but I want to emphasize, if you, if you dig hard at this process and you feel like it is morally necessary for you to unearth the distraction program, you can create a very miserable, subjective experience for yourself. I think that's unwholesome, and I do not recommend it. There was one person, kind of a friend, more of an acquaintance, but a friend of some people that are very close to me, who ended up having an intensely difficult time with her suicidal ideation getting reopened up after years of freedom from that because she dug too hard at trying to find the root of these distraction programs out of some sort of idea that she had to or she was going to suffer even worse, I think that that is an unwholesome approach, and I don't recommend it. So view this more as gentle, exploratory. If you want to play with this in your own mind, just notice it and but also take seriously. If your mind has a bunch of do not enter, do not look here signs implicitly plastered in a certain sector. You can find out how it enforces those signs, but I don't suggest trying super hard to do a frontal assault on that area, because there's probably a reason why those signs are there. So what I'm trying to do is describe something structural. So one thing that distraction programs end up producing like I suspect the distraction programs are at the root of a lot of what people talk about when they're referring to trauma. I don't mean to claim that this defines trauma, but I think that a lot of cases when people are talking about trauma, what they're referring to is a structure where there was a strategy that was designed to keep some chunks of your functioning outside of consciousness for some reason, and one of the effects of that is that you have incubated a particular process, a particular strategy in your mind that makes it it makes it so that there are parts of how you live your life that cannot update, they cannot modify their strategies based on the fact that situations have changed since the incubation first happened. So you end up running primitive strategies that were meant to solve a problem that isn't present anymore, but it can't notice that those problems aren't present anymore, and you can't see that it's doing that because it has an anti memetic structure. It's self hiding is a more simple way of saying it. So I mentioned that all of this was in order to suggest some crucial experiments you might be able to do. So one implication is there are only these two kinds of results, or arguably three. The three results you can get from trying to trace the course of your thoughts. One is that you root it back in an external sensation, you discover that it got inspired by some particular external sensation, and that you can trace the thought chain. The second is that actually, you're maybe not very skilled at that, and you sort of lose track, but that should feel sort of like your eyes get tired, or like you're like you just don't have the concentration to be able to do that process. That's not a fact about the mud traces. That's a fact about your ability to find them, so you might find that you're not able to trace them. The third thing that you can find is, wait, what was I talking about? Right? That kind of phenomenon where you're going wait, what? God, suddenly, I just don't care where that thought came from. Why am I even doing this? Can be very sneaky, very, very sneaky. And sometimes it's it's helpful to look back and notice that that happened, just bearing in mind that if you try to look back and notice that that happened, that might reactivate the distraction program, right? So my claim is that those are the three kinds of things that you can encounter. You should not, for instance, encounter that the thought arises spontaneously from nothing. That might sound like a stupid claim, but what I'm talking about is, for instance, if you watch the process of how you decide to move your finger, obviously you can decide to move your finger. Like, whatever you can decide to move your finger means like, somehow, like what is free will. How does that work? But you can tell the difference between Yes, I chose to move my finger, versus some electric shock happened in my hand and it cramped. And you can also tell things like, if your arm is numb and your hands non responsive, you can choose to move your finger and you are surprised that it doesn't respond. So what that highlights is that there is some sort of knowing that you have chosen to move your finger that is connected to the fingers movement. If you try to track that experience and go, Well, where does it come from? Where does the choice come from? I claim that you're going to run into a pretty systematic challenge answering that question with anything more detailed than it comes from nothingness. There are structural reasons why that arises, but that's an example of a piece of phenomenology, a piece of experience as experienced from the inside, where you have something that seems to arise from nothing. I'm talking about theory, theoretically, objectively. Ah, yes, this is I'm claiming free will exists in the objective universe. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what is the actual subjective experience? My claim is that the actual subjective experience of thinking never has thoughts arising from nothingness. That's not how it works. That's not how it ever works. Thoughts arise as a result of a process that is solving a problem or accomplishing a task. So you should be able to trace it back to, what task is it attached to? The same way the thought John Cleese, you can tell is attached to, what was that actor's name like there was an effort. So you might be able to think of other alternative hypotheses. But the interesting thing is that if you were to trace your thoughts back and you find anything other than the three that I was naming before, you find it roots in an external sensation. You're not able to do the tracing for what amounts of mechanical reasons. And wait, am I a potato, right? Those are basically the three things that you can encounter the so that's that's one experiment you can do. A second one is that there's an implication that if you have no ongoing problem solving effort, your mind should become silent, that one's harder to track and properly falsify, because it's unclear whether you have subconscious processes that are trying To solve a problem in the background. Maybe you do, okay,

Michael Smith

48:43

but it highlights the possibility that there might be a way to have the subjective experience of silence, and that this is when I've thoroughly verified myself. I'm like, Yeah, this is doable. This is very doable to do that. What you can do is bring your attention to something that cannot be a problem and cannot be something you can accomplish. So what is that? Well, for one thing, for reasons having to do with the structure of mind that I didn't really go into the fact that it's the mind that creates the impression of there being objects, a process called reification. But prior to the mind's construction, there is no sense of objectiveness. There are no things. So one way that you can do this is by focusing on no thing. So you can do a a figure, foreground, inversion. There's a lot of meditation instructions that talk about this. I'm, I'm, I think that this is something you can learn to basically just do. It's like flexing a muscle, but even but a lot of it is knowing that there's a muscle to flex, and it doesn't have to be endlessly mysterious. If you track something like you are in a room or a space right now, the chances are very good, as you've been watching this video, that you lost track of your environment, that you lost track of the feeling of your toes, the fact that you're breathing, that's incredibly normal. That's the standard thing almost everybody does. There's a compression that happens to awareness. That's the mind's activity. It's, it's sort of like a tinkerer going into their workshop in order to work on something. So when, if, if you, if you allow yourself to to become aware of the background instead, right? So, right now I can be aware of the room around me. I run into a problem where my mind starts to get associations by my bringing my attention to the things in the room, the walls, the door behind me, the fact that I need to go through it pretty soon. So like that. It starts to rev things in my mind. But all of the objects in this room, the desk, the computer, the curtain, everything here is inside of empty space. What defines the room is the empty space. So if I bring my attention to the empty space,

Michael Smith

51:33

there's nothing to do. So I can watch my mind going, Yeah, but, but don't I need to, like, say the next part. I want to finish this up, and then I need to deal with the editing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can get to that, but right now I'm focusing on,

Michael Smith

52:02

I I do this gesture, because often a way that I I approach this is, instead of focusing on the spatial version, I'll focus on the aural version, that in a very quiet space, I can listen to the silence. This is where I think the koan comes from. Of what is the sound of one hand clapping? The structure of the koan, as I understand it, is, listen to the sound of two hands clapping. Now, listen to the sound of one hand clapping.

Michael Smith

52:42

You aren't it's not that you don't hear anything, it's that you can hear nothing.

Michael Smith

52:55

So listen to nothing. You

Michael Smith

53:07

okay, so with caveats around how, like, this is not a super crucial experiment, because it's possible to have subconscious processes running, and then it keeps producing noise because it's trying to solve a problem, like if you just suddenly think John, suddenly think John Cleese, you know? Well, that did not quiet the mind, but one thing that it should do is stop the chains of thought that are based on your immediate sensory experiences. You're not stopping your sensory experience. You're stopping the mind running off with, oh, right, right, right. I need to pack this thing too.

Michael Smith

53:53

So one implication of that is that if you focus on emptiness, you focus on nothing, and then you notice some stilling of the mind, and then you still have thoughts. If you trace those thoughts and like either it'll be obvious, you know, John Cleese. I don't know, I'm thinking of John Cleese so much, but just the name that came to mind. I mean, I kind of know why. But so the it. So the the you, you can trace like you, some of the thoughts will be because, right, right, right, I was working on that problem, and now these thoughts are coming to mind, right, because I was writing this piece, and now I'm thinking about those things, and my mind has some momentum, unsurprising, but if you have a random thought, if you're doing this and you have a random thought, then my impression is that close to, without fail, and I say close to as like a caveat of I guess there might be some exceptions, but I think maybe always random thoughts are going to come from distraction programs, which means that if you start trying to trace them, you're going to have some really crazy subjective experiences, because you'll reactivate the distraction program every time you start trying to trace it, you will forget to focus on nothing while doing it, because You'll get the like the effect where you forget about your elbows, you forget about the feeling of your shirt on your skin, that compression of forgetting most of your experience will have you zooming in on the object of your thought, that the sensation of your thoughts, because that's how the distraction program typically works. So that's a second experiment that you can do. So if you find something other than that, like, if you focus on the emptiness, you start to feel some stillness, and a thought arises, and then you trace the thought, and you notice, oh, no, no, this roots right back in that thing with the tree. Okay, focusing more on emptiness, and yeah, I keep noticing, like, there's you shouldn't find that that's happening for the most part. I say for the most part because you like often, what will happen is people will be focusing on the emptiness, and then not not only will it trace back to the tree, but it'll trace back to the moment when they fixated on the tree, when they actually switched from focusing on emptiness to collapsing their awareness briefly on and compressing their awareness into the tree, going, Oh, look at that. That Oh, look at that. Is what kicks off the chain of thought. So if you keep your awareness vast on the emptiness you

Michael Smith

56:49

there's a way to cultivate it so that it stays quiet. By the way, it's just a really yummy experience. It's something that I would love for everyone to be able to access. It is beautiful. That's beautiful, right? So that's the second experiment that you can do, and a third one. Well, okay, so let me, let me gesture at two experiments that you could do, and I recommend you don't, mostly because I think some people could be very clever. And this is part of how I used to invite people to experiment with this stuff. And I now look at it and I go, I think this was unhealthy and unwholesome. So one of them is, you can plug the distraction program into itself and cause it to go burr the way that if I say pineapple, Aardvark, pineapple, Aardvark, pineapple, Aardvark, pineapple, Aardvark, pineapple, Aardvark. Okay, so if we do a little bit of spaced repetition of me going pineapple, Aardvark, like, now there's a pretty random Association. Like, what does pineapple Aardvark have to do with anything? Well, watch this pineapple. Okay, so there's an association. I was harder than I meant. There's an association that just fires. It doesn't take much to create an association. You would have to trace that association for it to stay sort of baked in the mud of the mind. But you can just create arbitrary associations, up to a point, if you create such an arbitrary Association, so that the signs of the distraction program running become a cause for you to trace the thought back. If it's Oh, I'm on a different thought. What is the thought chain? Or oh, I'm encountering mental fog. What created the mental fog? If you loop it back that way, and you if you do that tracing a bunch, particularly if you sit down, you meditate on this and you focus on it, you can create a loop where the attempt to trace triggers the distraction program, and the triggering of the distraction program triggers the trace so you end up with a bur that happens, this is highly psychoactive, okay, um, I should also warn You that really pressing on this particular approach is what reactivated that one person's suicidal ideation. I think the reason is that the distraction program was tied to suicidality, and it noticed that there it wasn't she was trying to avoid suicidality. It was that that was part of the strategy for avoiding whatever the experience was, whatever the ongoing emotional experience was. And so one strategy for dealing with the Burr was to bring in the big guns. So I don't recommend that you do that approach. What I if you really want to play with this, what I would invite you to do is maybe try for a minute or two playing with, let me try to trace back this random thought. And then when you hit a bar, it often doesn't feel like a sudden explosion. It can feel like a little bit of a disorientation. Then you can go, Oh, where did the disorientation? Boy, I super don't want to trace that. Where does the super don't want? Oh, right, if you hit anything that is really awful in the guts or something like that, stop. Just stop. This is stuff that I think can benefit a lot from having compassionate presence and caring holding of people who love you and that you trust, and you don't have to dig in these directions. I'm more warning that there's a, I'm trying to gesture it. There's a, there's a thing here that you could experiment with if you wanted to, if you do, please be gentle with yourself. Please be gentle. I've mostly seen people benefiting a lot from playing with this. But some of the some of the places where people have encountered challenge is pretty significant. That's pretty significant, so please be very gentle. The point is not to create intense psychoactive experiences. It is to explore how the structure of the mind works. So if you can understand, oh, there's an anti meme here, there's a respectful way of relating to the fact that you put it there for some reason. So by default, I would recommend that you not do that plugging in thing instead. There's a more wholesome direction that I want to want to invite you into if you instead, when you notice that there is an anti memetic structure, there you go, this is trying to distract me from something, and then you back the distraction. I think you get better results. So what I mean by that is, and why am I thinking this? It's, oh, God, no, I have. I need to deal with that bit of accounting. And Wait, why am I thinking of the accounting right? Because I was trying to focus on this. Oh, man, I feel kind of dizzy. Oh, this is one of those distraction programs. Or it might be hypothesis, it might be one of these distraction programs. So in theory, in theory, that means that if I distract myself consciously, the program does not have to compress my awareness and make me do specific things. It doesn't have to zoom me in. Instead, I can just focus on, you know what I'm going to go. Journal about what I want to do tomorrow that has nothing to do with what I was thinking, but that's great. Or, oh man, I think I'm going to go cook lunch, not because I have an urge to cook lunch, but because I think cooking my lunch will make my attention go to something else. I think that's good. If you do that, it should cause the distraction program to become lighter. It doesn't have to so intensely. So you should actually find some relief occurring in your psyche. I see this in the sense of, like, if you're really focusing on what was that actor's name, that's a kind of effort, a kind of contraction, and then incubation is sort of stuffing that effort into your subconscious mind. If you imagine releasing that effort where you go, I actually don't care. It's nice to be able to call something to mind. You want to retain that capacity, but you don't want to constantly be trying to call things to mind. Distraction. Programs can have that kind of quality, like constantly scanning, oh God, am I ever going to experience anger? Where are the signs of anger? And if you go, ah, right there. I feel hesitation. I note it, and I go, Cool, right here. I think I see the sort of cloud, the fuzz, that is the hint of the distraction program, wanting my attention to go elsewhere. I won't investigate in detail. Instead, I'm going to go do something else. I think that's a lot more wholesome, and I think it creates a lot of space in the psyche. So that's like a personal opinion about what is good for a human being to do. And it's, it's not as intensely a crucial experiment, but it's in the direction, because if you do that move and you find that it doesn't help at all. That's relevant. Just happened, oh man, my video sometimes does this. Just did the low quality pop. I wish I knew why it does this. Apologies. The video is suddenly terrible. I need to wrap up soon. Anyway, yeah, so those are some things that you can play with. There was another one I was hoping to name, and I just don't quite remember what it is. In that case, I think I just, I just had too much I wanted to say, but maybe it's a distraction program. So, yeah, yeah. So my so want to emphasize that it's possible to just play with this perspective and just notice, I don't know what happens? What happens if I see the world through this lens? Oh, man, yeah, I can view that as a distraction program that is so different from trying to show that those aren't running right. See, like, I think this is something that I wish I had more detail on and if I had more time, I would want to think about it more carefully. I first got this flash of insight in 2019 but so I've had some time, but I would love to reflect more on what would actually be truly crucial coming up with good, crucial experiments is a lot of the ingenuity of science. I don't claim to be an amazing scientist in that respect. I'm a great theoretician, but a really good, crucial experiment would expose the existence of distraction programs by making it so that they have a very necessary consequence that is quite surprising. And then you investigate it and you discovered that consequence, because, in principle, you could have discovered

Michael Smith

01:06:50

something else. So I think some of these psychoactive effects from playing around with these structures can play that kind of role. But I think it's also worth noting, well, are there other reasons why that might happen that have nothing to do with the distraction program. And of course, there are alternative ideas, but you can always generate more hypotheses. That isn't quite what I meant is you can't prove that these structures are there. What you're looking for is giving the giving an opportunity to prove that they aren't. If you give it an opportunity to prove that it's not there that starts to do some really powerful insight creation. And I've done a decent bit of that. I think I can do a lot more. So what I would like to invite you to do is play around with this stuff, either exploratory experiments or some of the crucial ones.

Unknown Speaker

01:07:40

Let me know what you find. I mean, if you

Michael Smith

01:07:43

want to, you can just play with this on your own and discover privately. But I would find it interesting to hear what people actually do with this.

Michael Smith

01:07:55

If you come up with more crucial experiments or one or improvements on the ones that I do, or if you see a glitch in the logic of the ones that I'm doing, like, that's not crucial. Like, like, you're doing circular logic in this particular way. And that's not just reflexivity. I think that was just an error that would be good to hear if people are engaging in these things in a way that is, hey, let's, let's find out what's real. Let's find out what's real together. Then I'm fine with my ideas being disproven. I'm also fine with the methods that I have for examining my ideas being shown to go, no, no, that's not quite right. I'm quite sure about the science of it, quite sure of the basic logic of the science. So would love to hear from you how this like, what sense you make of this, and then as you experiment, what you find, what refinements do you develop? So with that, I'll wrap up here. Will probably be a pretty raw video. And again, apologies that at the end, it kind of zooms in. I don't know why zoom does this. I really wish it didn't, but here we are. If you happen to know why zoom does that, I would love to know. I tried to explore it and examine it, and all the recommendations I can find I've already dug into and some settings somewhere that no one can control, as far as I can tell. So, okay, that's it. Time for me to go. Thanks for listening. It's like an hour long. It seemed to be incapable of doing less than an hour for these presentations so here we go. Yeah. Thanks for watching.

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