As of late July last year, "I" am in PNSE. A few comments.
First, no major errors or concerns when reading the post. I might have missed something, but nothing triggered the "this is misunderstanding what PNSE is fundamentally like" alarm.
Second, there's a lot of ways PNSE is explained. I like this short version: "I am me". That is, "I", the subject of experience, no longer experiences itself as subject, but rather as object, i.e. "me". It's like having a third-person experience of the self. I also like to describe it as thought becoming a sense, like vision or hearing, because "I" no longer do the thinking; instead this person does the thinking to me.
Third, not everyone describes it this way, but in Zen we call the transition into PNSE the Great Death because it literally feels like dying. It's not dissimilar from the ego death people experience on drugs like LSD, but ego "death" is better described as ego "sleep" because it comes back and, after it's happened once, the mind knows the ego is going to come back, whereas in the Great Death the sense of separate self is gone and not coming back. All that said, many with PNSE don't experience a violent transition like this, so the Great Death or something like it may be a contingent feature of some paths to PNSE and not others.
Fourth, I don't remember if the paper discusses this, and this is controversial among some Buddhist traditions, but PNSE doesn't mean the mind is totally liberated from belief in a separate self. You said the homunculus concept lies dormant, but I'd say it does more than that. The mind is filled with many beliefs that presupposed the existence of the homunculus, and even if the homunculus is no longer part of experiences of the world, it's still baked into habits of behavior, and it takes significant additional work once in PNSE to learn new habits to replace the old ones that don't have the homunculus baked into them. Very few people ever become free of all of them, and maybe literally no one does as long as they continue to live.
Fifth and finally, PNSE is great, I'm glad it's how I am now. It's also fine not to be in it, because even if you believe you have a homunculus, in an absolute sense you already don't, you're just confused about how the world works, and that's okay, we're all confused. PNSE is also confused, but in different ways, and with fewer layers of confusion. So if you read this post and are now excited to try for PNSE, great, do it, but be careful. Lots of people Goodhart on what they think PNSE is because they try too hard to get it. If PNSE doesn't sneak up on you, then be extra suspect of Goodharting! (Actually, just always be suspicious that you've Goodharted yourself!)
I think this post fails as an explanation of equanimity. Which, of course, is dependent on my opinion about how equanimity works, so you have a pretty easy response of just disputing that the way I think equanimity works is correct. But idk what to do about this, so I'll just go ahead with a critique based on how I think equanimity works. So I'd say a bunch of things:
Your mechanism describes how PNSE or equanimity leads to a decrease in anxiety via breaking the feedback loop. But equanimity doesn't actually decrease the severity of an emotion, it just increases the valence! It's true that you can decrease the emotion (or reduce the time during which you feel it), but imE this is an entirely separate mechanism. So between the two mechanisms of (a) decreasing the duration of an emotion (presumably by breaking the feedback loop) and (b) applying equanimity to make it higher valence, I think you can vary each one freely independent of the other. You could do a ton of (a) with zero (b), a ton of (b) with zero (a), a lot of both, or (which is the default state) neither.
Your mechanism mostly applies to mental discomfort, but equanimity is actually much easier to apply to physical pain. You can also apply it to anxiety, but it's very hard. I can reduce suffering from moderately severe physical pain on demand (although there is very much a limit) and ditto with itching sensations, but I'm still struggling a lot with mental discomfort.
You can apply equanimity to positive sensations and it makes them better! This is a point I'd emphasize the most because imo it's such a clear and important aspect of how equanimity works. One of the ways to feel really really good is to have a pleasant sensation, like listening to music you love, and then applying maximum equanimity to it. I'm pretty sure you can enter the first jhana this way (although to my continuous disappointment I've never managed to reach the first jhana with music, so I can't guarantee it.)
... actually, you can apply equanimity to literally any conscious percept. Like literally anything; you can apply equanimity to the sense of space around you, or to the blackness in your visual field, or to white noise (or any other sounds), or to the sensation of breathing. The way to do this is hard to put into words (similar to how an elementary motor command like lifting a finger is hard to put into words); the way it's usually described is by trying to accept/not fight a sensation. (Which imo is problematic because it sounds like equanimity means stopping to do something, when I'm pretty sure it's actively doing something. Afaik there are ~zero examples of animals who learn to no longer care about pain, so it very much seems like the default is that pain is negative valence, and applying equanimity is an active process that increases valence.)
I mean again, you can just say you've talked about something else using the same term, but imo all of the above are actually not that difficult to verify. At least for me, it didn't take me that long to figure out how to apply equanimity to minor physical pain, and from there, everything is just a matter of skill to do it more -- it's very much a continuous scale of being able to apply more and more equanimity, and I think the limit is very high -- and of realizing that you can just do same thing wrt sensations that don't have negative valence in the first place.
Huh, this is helpful, thanks, although I’m not quite sure what to make of it and how to move forward.
I do feel confused about how you’re using the term “equanimity”. I sorta have in mind a definition kinda like: neither very happy, nor very sad, nor very excited, nor very tired, etc. Google gives the example: “she accepted both the good and the bad with equanimity”. But if you’re saying “apply equanimity to positive sensations and it makes them better”, you’re evidently using the term “equanimity” in a different way than that. More specifically, I feel like when you say “apply equanimity to X”, you mean something vaguely like “do a specific tricky learned attention-control maneuver that has something to do with the sensory input of X”. That same maneuver could contribute to equanimity, if it’s applied to something like anxiety. But the maneuver itself is not what I would call “equanimity”. It’s upstream. Or sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
Also, I also want to distinguish two aspects of an emotion. In one, “duration of an emotion” is kinda like “duration of wearing my green hat”. I don’t have to be thinking about it the whole time, but it’s a thing happening with my body, and if I go to look, I’ll see that it’s there. Another aspect is the involuntary attention. As long as it’s there, I can’t not think about it, unlike my green hat. I expect that even black-belt PNSE meditators are unable to instantly turn off anger / anxiety / etc. in the former sense. I think these things are brainstem reactions that can be gradually unwound but not instantly. I do expect that those meditators would be able to more instantly prevent the anger / anxiety / etc. from controlling their thought process. What do you think?
Also, just for context, do you think you’ve experienced PNSE? Thanks!
although I’m not quite sure what to make of it
(Kinda figured this, almost decided not to post the comment.)
Also, just for context, do you think you’ve experienced PNSE? Thanks!
Yes with some caveats. I think I've experienced no-self, which is what you describe from 6.2 onward. But if you'd asked me how far I am to enlightenment, I'd have said maybe 15%. Which is to say, I think no-self is a real thing you can achieve (and I definitely think it's a net positive), but I think from there, the ladder goes way way higher. Like the "take one day vs. entire life" comment implies a goodness multiplier of at least 20000x compared to the minds of regular people. Even if we assume this is widely exaggerated (although people keep insisting that it's not) and that the real multiplier is two OOMs smaller, than that' still 200x, whereas I'd put no-self at somewhere between 1x and 2x. If someone did claim that just the no-self part gives you even a 200x multiplier (which I doubt the person in the twitter comment would say), then I'd just be scratching my head at that.
... which could be a sign that I'm delusional and haven't really experienced no-self, but I think my experience fits quite well with your description (less anxiety, less self-reflective thoughts, identification with everything in awareness, etc.). Actually I think no-self + flow state is really very similar to regular flow state, which is again why the multiplier can't be that high. So, yeah, in my model enlightenment and no-self are two radically different things, the first is way harder to achieve and presumably way way better, and I think I've experienced the second but I know I'm nowhere close to the first -- if in fact it exists, which I suspect it does. (Sorry for the rambly answer.)
Also, I also want to distinguish two aspects of an emotion. In one, “duration of an emotion” is kinda like “duration of wearing my green hat”. I don’t have to be thinking about it the whole time, but it’s a thing happening with my body, and if I go to look, I’ll see that it’s there. Another aspect is the involuntary attention. As long as it’s there, I can’t not think about it, unlike my green hat. I expect that even black-belt PNSE meditators are unable to instantly turn off anger / anxiety / etc. in the former sense. I think these things are brainstem reactions that can be gradually unwound but not instantly. I do expect that those meditators would be able to more instantly prevent the anger / anxiety / etc. from controlling their thought process. What do you think?
Agree with all this.
More specifically, I feel like when you say “apply equanimity to X”, you mean something vaguely like “do a specific tricky learned attention-control maneuver that has something to do with the sensory input of X”. That same maneuver could contribute to equanimity, if it’s applied to something like anxiety. But the maneuver itself is not what I would call “equanimity”. I
I don't think it feels that way. What it feels like is that, if you pick any item in awareness, there's by default a tension with that thing, which makes it feel lower valence. If you apply equanimity -- which as I said, I can best describe as 'try not to resist' -- then the apparent tension lessens. With pain, this like experiencing the pain but not suffering. With positive sensations, the best way I can describe it is that if you succeed in applying a decent amount of equanimity, you realize afterward that your enjoyment wasn't "pure" but was plagued by attachment/craving. A decent way to describe it is that "pleasure turns into fulfillment"; I think that's the term associated with good-sensations-that-have-no-craving-aspect. But in both cases they definitely become higher valence. And with neutral sensations it kinda still feels like you've removed craving or resistance, even though this doesn't particularly make sense. Anyway, it really doesn't feel like it's an attention-control maneuver, it feels like it's a property of the sensation.
I sorta have in mind a definition kinda like: neither very happy, nor very sad, nor very excited, nor very tired, etc. Google gives the example: “she accepted both the good and the bad with equanimity”
Imo meditators are often evasive when it comes to this topic and refuse to just say that meditation is supposed to make you feel better, even though it obviously does, and this is probably causally upstream of you writing this sentence. i think it's just because 'feeling better' is generally associated with 'feel more nice things', and trying to chase pleasures is the opposite of meditation; you're supposed to be content with what is (again, equanimity feels like not resisting; it's sometimes analogized to the inverse of friction in a mechanical system). So yeah, I mean, applying tons of equanimity doesn't make you feel more pleasure, but yeah it does feel really good/high-valence, just in a non-pleasur-y but fullfilment-y sense. (The one time I was on a formal retreat, the meditation teacher even complained when I mentioned that I had a goal for meditating, and I had to specify that this doesn't mean I'm thinking about the goal while meditating; tbqh imo many people are just kinda bad at differentiating these things, but it's really not that complicated.)
I like this model a lot, definitely my favourite post from your sequence so far[1].
So the fundamental question we need to answer is: how do I unhook? But “you” don’t unhook. Local awareness unhooks from the “you” that plans to unhook. One of the reasons we have not been able to unhook easily is because the “I” can’t do it. —Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015)
This prompted interesting effects. I tried to indirectly unhook using the same mental motion I developed in lucid dreaming to load concepts indirectly into my background context, which in that setting causes newly procedurally generated dreamscape to be seeded with that concept. It's something like holding the intention/broadcasting to the system as a whole what you'd like to be there, without the normal motion of sending it as a command or discrete information packet. Kinda holding the information and letting other parts see it, rather than sending it to them. Also highly related to the mental motions I use for influencing various autonomic systems. This I think just worked and produced an altered state which let me see some of the situations I've been in from useful perspectives, and maybe lead to untangling a long-standing interpersonal challenge.
The others cover maybe more important ideas, but less novel as I'd re-derived the core model of consciousness as this form of self modelling after reading the sequences and GEB in like 2012. The trance and DID bits added some detail, but this one feels like a strong clarification of some things I've come across in an ontology I'm happy with.
I think the answer is: the homunculus concept has a special property of being intrinsically attention-grabbing…. The homunculus is thus impossible to ignore—if the homunculus concept gets activated at all, it jumps to center stage in our minds.
I don't fully understand this bit. I feel like I'm reading a mathematical proof where the author leaves out steps that are trivial to the author, but not to me.
After reading all the 2.6 and 3.3 sections again, I think the answer to why the homunculus is attention-grabbing is because it involves "continuous self-surprise" in the same way an animate object (mouse...) is. A surprise that is a present as a proprioceptive signal or felt sense. With PNSE, your brain has learned to predict the internal S(X) mental objects and this signal well enough that the remaining surprisingness of the mental processes would be more like the gears contraption from 3.3.2, where "the surprising feeling that I feel would be explained away by a different ingredient in my intuitive model of the situation—namely, my own unfamiliarity with all the gears inside the contraption and how they fit together." And as such, it is easier to tune out: The mind is doing its usual thing. Process as usual.
6.1 Post summary / Table of contents
Part of the Intuitive Self-Models series.
I do have meditation experience—in my lifetime, I have probably logged as much as several hours of total time spent meditating! And I was keeping up my meditation practice until as recently as 2007! OK fine, obviously I won’t be speaking from personal experience here. But I will offer some opinions anyway, with pretty low confidence all around.
In §4.2 I talked about how hard it is to change an intuitive self-model. Well, look to the hardcore meditators if you want to find a bunch of people willing to pour thousands of hours into sculpting their intuitive self-models, like Bernini on clay. My impression is that a whole zoo of different intuitive self-models have come out of this field of inquiry and practice.
I’ll particularly focus on an intuitive self-model called “Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience”[1] (PNSE), a.k.a. “awakening”, “enlightenment”, or (I think?) kenshō. Well, it’s probably not “an intuitive self-model” so much as “a category of intuitive self-models”. But I think they have enough overlap for me to make some general comments, trying to “translate” first-person PNSE-related descriptions into legible third-person terms, just as I’ve been doing in the previous four posts, while skipping over a whole ocean of rich details and subtleties.
Needless to say, reading these descriptions is wildly different from experiencing the thing yourself. But hopefully it’s interesting in its own right, and certainly a hell of a lot faster.
I don’t expect this post to be of any practical use in experiencing PNSE, and have no opinion about whether attaining PNSE is even a good idea in the first place—see §1.3.3 for my general (lack of an) opinion about which intuitive self-models are healthy versus pathological. …OK fine, I put a few pointers to discourse on the pros and cons of PNSE in this expandable box, and a bit more in §6.5.2.2 below.
Pros and cons of pursuing PNSE
I want to point to further reading on both sides of the “pursuing PNSE is a good idea” debate, although pretty please don’t take these as “best and most authoritative arguments” rather than “things that I happen to have randomly stumbled across in the past few weeks”.
IN FAVOR of pursuing PNSE being a good idea is, well, practically everyone who has ever written about their PNSE experiences, e.g. the Kelly and Adyashanti books cited at the top, or this comment about trading one day with PNSE for decades without it.
AGAINST pursuing PNSE being a good idea, see maybe Awakening by lsusr where he describes meditating his way to a “total psychotic break”, and also in the comments suggests that some people might be more effective at effecting change in the world if they’re “a tangled ball of tension” than if they let go of their desires or whatever. And also see Ingram’s discussion of “Dark Night of the Soul”, i.e. meditation-induced persistent misery. (Also: “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish!”). That said, both Ingram and lsusr wound up overall very happy with their PNSE decision in hindsight, as do most PNSE people, as far as I can tell. But on the other hand, if I hypothetically were to brainwash myself into being a paperclip maximizer, then I would also be very happy with that decision in hindsight. (“Paperclips are just the fucking best! Can you believe I was that close to going my whole life without ever caring about paperclips? Boy, I sure dodged a bullet!!”) So one should be thoughtful about how to interpret retrospective / hindsight reports of that sort—you still have to figure out if it’s the good kind of change versus self-brainwashing. (That’s not rhetorical—I don’t know!)
In case you’re wondering, I personally am uninterested in exploring PNSE mainly on the grounds of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—I’m generally happy with my mental health and especially my productivity, so I don’t want to mess around with any sort of irreversible mind-alteration until I retire, or more likely, until Artificial General Intelligence apocalypse or utopia renders the question moot!
If you’ve read Posts 2–3, you’ll be able to understand my main thesis on PNSE is a single sentence: If you start with the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model (§3.2), but throw out the “homunculus” concept (§3.4), along with its associated “vitalistic force” (§3.3) and “wanting” (§3.3.4), then you get PNSE. (If you didn’t read Posts 2–3, then you might want to do that now, although I put a brief recap in §6.3.1 below.)
That might sound like a small change, but I’ll explain how it comes to have massive consequences, on everything from equanimity and memory to sense-of-self and vibrancy-of-experience.
Quick summary of the rest of the post:
For the record, my main sources for this post are the Martin 2020 “Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences” (PNSE) paper,[2] and parts of Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly (2015), The End Of Your World by Adyashanti (2008), and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram (2nd edition, 2018), plus some blog posts (including this helpful series by Kaj Sotala), conversations, and helpful feedback / pushback on earlier drafts by a couple friends who claim firsthand experience of “awakening” (see acknowledgements at the bottom).
6.2 Apology / explanation for using the term “intuitive self-model” here
I’m probably annoying some readers by using the phrase “intuitive self-model” in this post. Specifically, I anticipate two objections:
6.2.1 “It’s not ‘an intuitive model’! It’s ‘seeing the true nature of things’!”
Response: Those aren’t necessarily contradictory. An “intuitive model” can reflect “the true nature of things”, specifically in the case that the intuitive model is a veridical model of those things—see §1.3.2.
It turns out that almost everybody, PNSE or not, sees their intuitive self-models as being veridical—notwithstanding the fact that different people around the world have wildly different intuitive self-models. Apparently, even a single person passing through multiple different PNSE intuitive self-models over time may say “I used to think I had seen through the illusions to the true nature of things … but now I realize that I wasn’t there yet. But this time, I’m sure that I’m seeing the true nature of things!!”[3]
Anyway, as it happens, I do think that, for the most central difference between the PNSE intuitive self-model and the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, namely PNSE’s lack of a vitalistic-force-carrying homunculus (§6.3), the PNSE version is more veridical. (See §3.6: “The homunculus concept does not veridically correspond to anything at all”.) But I think PNSE intuitive self-models typically have plenty of non-veridical aspects too.[4] Sorry. Of course, veridical or not, the PNSE experience is undoubtedly “real” as opposed to “fake”, in the §1.3.1 sense.
(I’ll be making some narrow points about veridicality, but the question of “what is the true nature of things?” is generally outside the scope of this series, for reasons in §1.6.2.)
6.2.2 “It’s not ‘an intuitive self-model’—the absence of ‘self’ is, like, one of its most salient features! It’s called anattā! C’mon!”
Response: Oops, I think this is just an unfortunate terminology snafu.
Let’s go back to the “spinning dancer” animation of §1.2.1. When I look at it, I experience it through a certain intuitive model in my head. Question: Is that intuitive model in my head “a model of a dancer”?
Anyway, I’m using “intuitive self-model” in the (B) sense, not the (A) sense. There’s a brain, in a body, running a predictive learning algorithm that creates a generative model of everything in the world, some of which are aspects of that very same brain algorithm. I think it’s fine to use the word “self-model” when the brain algorithm builds a generative model to help predict aspects of that algorithm itself. But the contents of that generative model need not involve a “self”—and certainly not a “self” with all the connotations that we conventionally ascribe to that word.
6.3 PNSE discards the homunculus and its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”
6.3.1 Brief recap of relevant takeaways from Post 3
I’ll quickly summarize a few relevant points from Post 3: The Homunculus:
(More precisely: If there are deterministic upstream explanations of what the homunculus is doing and why, e.g. via algorithmic or other mechanisms happening under the hood, then that feels like a complete undermining of one’s free will and agency (§3.3.6). And if there are probabilistic upstream explanations of what the homunculus is doing and why, e.g. “if my stomach is empty, then I’ll start wanting food”, then that correspondingly feels like a partial undermining of free will and agency, in proportion to how confident those predictions are.)
6.3.2 Back to PNSE
Anyway, the most salient aspect of PNSE is that the homunculus, and its vitalistic force, are kicked out of the intuitive model.[5]
For example, Ingram mentions “the illusion of a permanent, separate, independently functioning (acausal), localized self”, as the key thing that PNSE gets rid of. Yup, that’s a decent match for what I call “the homunculus”. And in particular, his term “acausal” is synonymous with my term “infused with vitalistic force”.
OK, so if the homunculus is out, what’s the thing that replaces it? In my terminology, I would just say “something free of vitalistic force, and somewhat closer to the actual algorithm”. There’s a stream of thoughts that arise, each with idiosyncratic causes and antecedents. The algorithm that surfaces thoughts and assigns them valence is sufficiently complex that we can’t in general anticipate which thought will arise next, and whether it will feel motivating, until we see it. But there’s no vitalistic force involved.
Ingram’s terminology for the homunculus-replacement is: “there is naturally occurring, causal, self-perceiving, immediate transience”. I think his words “naturally occurring” and “causal” are synonymous with what I call “lacking vitalistic force”.
6.3.3 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary
6.3.3.1 A discussion of insight meditation
I think the idea here is that:
And the more you do this practice, the fewer thoughts still seem to be caused by the homunculus. And eventually the homunculus concept seems to be not doing anything, and just goes away.
6.3.3.2 “Trying” to get into PNSE can be counterproductive (in the moment)
If I have the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model (§3.2) active, and if there’s a self-reflective thought that I’d describe as “trying really hard to excise the homunculus from my intuitive self-model”, then that thought would involve the homunculus powerfully exercising its “vitalistic force” and “wanting”. So that thought would be increasing the salience of the homunculus concept in your own mind—which is moving in precisely the wrong direction! Very tricky!
6.3.4 Removing the “vitalistic force” intuition doesn’t imply what it might seem to imply
The PNSE paper has a fascinating quote:
This might seem[6] to imply that they lacked the drive to accomplish ambitious projects. And yet, the PNSE paper notes:
Likewise, Ingram wrote a nice 600-page book while in PNSE, and so on. How do we think about that?
I propose an analogy:
6.3.4.1 The Parable of Caesar and Lightning
In Julius Caesar’s intuitive models, lightning is created by the god Jupiter. Suppose I time-travel to tell Caesar that, where I’m from, Jupiter does not create lightning. Then it would seem to Caesar that I’m saying that there is no lightning. After all, from Caesar’s perspective, if Jupiter is very active, there’s a lot of lightning; if Jupiter is moderately active, there’s occasional lightning; and if Jupiter stopped creating lightning, there would be no lightning. …But that’s not what I’m saying! From my perspective, Jupiter doesn’t create lightning, but there is still lightning!
By the same token, in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, unpredictable intentional behavior (both attention control and motor control) comes from the homunculus exercising “vitalistic force” (sense of agency and animation, §3.3) to accomplish the things it “wants” (§3.3.4). So from the perspective of a normie like me with that model, if the homunculus is exercising a lot of vitalistic force, then there’s a lot of energetic exercising of willpower; if the homunculus is exercising a little bit of vitalistic force, then there’s occasional somewhat-lazy intentional behavior; and if all the vitalistic force disappeared entirely, along with the homunculus, then all that’s left would be an unthinking sheep / drone / catatonic stupor. …But that’s not what the PNSE people are saying! In the PNSE self-model, there is no vitalistic force, but there is still energetic, agentic behavior!
That’s not to say that a switch to PNSE doesn’t entail any changes whatsoever to goals, drive, etc.—more on that below—I’m just trying to clarify a potential misconception.
6.4 PNSE breaks the association between “awareness” and other self-reflective concepts
6.4.1 Basic explanation
In the generative model space, there are associations between different concepts—when I think of one thing, it makes me think of another thing. Beliefs are part of that (e.g. if I believe that a squirrel is in the glove compartment, then thinking about opening the glove compartment leads to me thinking about finding the squirrel), but associations also include other things (e.g. thinking about a goal might make me think of a strategy that would accomplish that goal).
There are associations between self-reflective concepts, just like any other concepts, and it’s here that PNSE has an interesting effect:
In the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, the homunculus is evidently a bridge enabling associative connections between “awareness” from other self-reflective concepts. Why is it a bridge? Well on one side, the homunculus is connected to awareness—it “experiences” awareness, and in turn it manipulates awareness via attention-control actions. On the other side, the homunculus is conceptualized as having goals, controlling and owning the body, and so on. Thus the homunculus forms a bridge from awareness to the rest of the self-reflective world.
In PNSE, by contrast, the homunculus is gone, and the bridge is broken. “Awareness” no longer has any particular relation to those other self-reflective concepts. I think this comes across clearly when people talk about PNSE. For example:
6.4.2 Some first-person descriptions along with my commentary
6.4.2.1 Relation to one’s body
In PNSE, the “awareness” concept has no intrinsic association with my body—sure, it can contain my-body-related thoughts, but that’s no different from how it can contain any other thoughts. So in PNSE, there’s no strong intuitive difference between how the “awareness” concept is related to your own body, versus how the “awareness” concept is related to the couch.
Here’s an analogy. It’s possible for a plain cardboard Amazon box to contain lightsaber chopsticks. But there’s nothing lightsaber-chopstick-y about a plain cardboard Amazon box, in and of itself. By the same token, in PNSE, it’s possible for the “awareness” concept to contain an interoceptive sensation, or a motor command, etc. But those things have no particular connection to the intuitive “awareness” concept itself.
6.4.2.2 The location of “awareness”
Suppose someone is rubbing my foot. When I pay attention to that sensation, the associated concept (call it “rub”) involves what I call “local spatial attention” being on my foot. Meanwhile, in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model, the self-reflective S(rub) concept (§2.2.3) involves local spatial attention being in my head (since the homunculus is involved, see §3.7). These are mutually-incompatible predictions, and therefore the self-reflective S(rub) thought will interfere with the strength / vividness of the “rub” concept itself. It’s kind of a reverse “refrigerator-light illusion”—as soon as you self-reflect upon the feeling, the feeling becomes weaker.
By contrast, in the PNSE conceptual space, we wind up with the flexibility to simultaneously activate the S(rub) concept while maintaining local spatial attention on the foot, since there’s no homunculus concept anchoring S(⋯) to the head (see §3.7.5). Thus, there’s less interference between S(rub) and rub, and thus the “rub” concept can be more strongly activated (more vivid), even from the self-reflective vantage point of S(rub). I think the excerpt above is related to that.
6.4.3 A deeper explanation: the intrinsically-attention-grabbing nature of the homunculus
Above I said that deleting the homunculus breaks the “bridge” between “awareness” and other self-reflective concepts (my body, my feelings, my actions, my goals, etc.). But there’s a subtlety that I glossed over. Yes, the homunculus is gone. But it’s replaced by … something. Why isn’t that “something” a new “bridge”?
As an example: There’s a brain algorithm phenomenon wherein there’s an intention in “awareness”, which then spawns a motor action in the body (§2.6). Conventionally, we conceptualize this phenomenon as a consequence of the homunculus. In PNSE, we don’t. But the brain algorithm phenomenon is still there, and thus the PNSE intuitive self-model needs to conceptualize that phenomenon somehow. So the question is: whatever that conceptualization is, why doesn’t it constitute a strong intuitive association between the “awareness” concept and the self-reflective concepts related to the motor action (e.g. my body, my desires, my actions)?
I think the answer is: the homunculus concept has a special property of being intrinsically attention-grabbing. After all, recall from §3.3 that I think vitalistic force is built partly from the feeling of physiological arousal—it’s not just prediction error, but surprise.[7] The homunculus is thus impossible to ignore—if the homunculus concept gets activated at all, it jumps to center stage in our minds. That’s what makes it such a strong “bridge”. By contrast, in PNSE, it’s true that there’s some relationship between the “awareness” concept and other self-reflective concepts, but that relationship is conceptualized as a non-attention-grabbing “inanimate” mechanism, which can thus easily slip into the background. And thus, it becomes easy in PNSE to activate the “awareness” concept without any other self-reflective concepts getting dragged in by association.
6.5 Why do pain, anxiety, etc., seem less aversive in PNSE than in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model?
Equanimity is an aspect of PNSE that comes up frequently in the secular discourse. I’ll argue that it’s a consequence of the previous section—i.e., that it’s closely related to PNSE’s lack of association between “awareness” and bodily feelings.
6.5.1 PNSE makes S(anxious feeling) undermine, rather than reinforce and stabilize, the anxious feeling itself
Suppose I get an anxiety-provoking email—maybe my friend says that she has news about her health, and we need to talk. That triggers the brainstem reaction we call “anxiety”, involving negative valence, physiological arousal, and certain other reactions, along with corresponding interoceptive sensations and involuntary attention (see here) towards those sensations.
Panels (a)–(b) in this diagram give an everyday example of what happens next. The brainstem anxiety reaction passes into the cortex in the form of interoceptive sensory inputs, which stay strongly active via involuntary attention. Then the subsequent thoughts would involve concepts associated with the anxious feeling (e.g. its upstream causes), which in turn would activate other associated concepts, etc., via the normal logic of the generative model space. It’s basically an unpleasant form of brainstorming (see here).
In (a), there’s a closed excitatory loop: the interoceptive sensory inputs associated with anxiety make me think of the possibility that my friend is seriously ill, which in turn strongly implies that more feelings of anxiety are imminent. That feeds back to the brainstem—the cortex is “concurring” with the brainstem that the situation warrants anxiety, so to speak.[8] In other words, the cortex brainstorming has turned up a plausible story “explaining” the anxiety.
However, in (b), suppose I just learned that my friend is perfectly fine after all. Now there isn’t a closed excitatory loop. On the contrary, the anxiety-related interoceptive sensory inputs make me think of my friend’s good health, which in turn provide evidence against the possibility that I will feel more anxious feelings in the immediate future. The brainstem gets that signal and gradually winds down its anxiety reaction.
Everything so far has been object-level. Now let’s get into the more confusing self-reflective stuff!
Panel (c) shows a closed excitatory loop that can happen in the Conventional Intuitive Self-Model. The object-level interoceptive feeling of anxiety brings to mind the self-reflective S(feeling of anxiety) (§2.2.3). This self-reflective thought is conceptualized as being associated with the homunculus, which in turn is closely associated with the body and its feelings. So there’s a closed excitatory loop, just as there is in (a), and this loop reinforces and stabilizes the anxiety reaction. This loop is basically “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”—kinda stewing in feelings of anxiety.
Panel (d) shows what happens when we switch to PNSE. The first step is the same: the object-level interoceptive feeling brings to mind the self-reflective S(feeling of anxiety) thought—i.e., the idea that the feeling of anxiety is currently in conscious awareness. However, in PNSE, per §6.4 above, the “awareness” concept itself has no particular association with the body and its interoceptive sensations, so there’s no closed loop—no “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”—and the anxiety starts to wind down (unless the brainstorming can find a different closed loop like (a)).
6.5.2 Is this a good or a bad thing?
6.5.2.1 What is aversiveness good for anyway?
Aversive reactions (to anxiety, pain, etc.) involve two ingredients: negative valence and involuntary attention.
Why (evolutionarily) are both of these ingredients present? Well, the negative valence ingredient is obvious—it’s important to be motivated to avoid pain, and valence is the very substance out of which all motivation is wrought, see here. Involuntary attention is more interesting: it’s a hack-y workaround! Basically, the brain algorithms have a flaw in their design, where if there’s a possible upcoming problem, the algorithms often lead to “ignoring the problem” behavior instead of “solving the problem” behavior (more discussion here). That flaw exists for deep algorithmic reasons; and involuntary attention is a hack to mitigate it. When involuntary attention is triggered, it forces attention onto the feeling of pain, anxiety, etc., and by extension any inferred upstream causes of those feelings, and possible solutions if any, and so on, preventing the problems from being ignored in favor of more pleasant things to think about.
Hopefully it’s obvious that if something is too aversive, it’s not only unpleasant but (ironically) gets in the way of problem-solving. For example, think of the severely anxious person who can’t get out of bed.
But also, if something is not aversive enough, then that also can get in the way of problem-solving: you might just ignore the problem instead of solving it, thanks to the lack of any involuntary attention pulling your mind to it.
As an example of the latter: as I write, a little (metaphorical) voice in my head periodically says “what if a reader sees that and recognizes that it’s false?”, and I think that voice is powered by very-low-level anxiety-driven involuntary attention, but it’s not particularly unpleasant nor frequent, and I think it’s probably net helpful to my productivity (at its current level).
And conversely, I bet you can think of examples from your life of people ignoring potential problems thanks to a deficiency of involuntary attention. At an individual level, if someone has a potential looming health problem, but it’s not currently causing them any pain or any anxiety, then they may well not try to mitigate it. (Even if they “rationally” agree that mitigating it would be importantly beneficial! They might just never get around to it.) At a somewhat larger scale, it seems plausible that Sam Bankman-Fried’s personality profile included clinically low anxiety; he and his many victims obviously would have been better off if he had had some anxiety-driven involuntary attention towards negative possibilities like “what if I get caught breaking the law?” or “what if I’m mistaken about the FTX balance sheet?”. At an even larger scale, if policymakers and voters generally felt more anxiety-driven involuntary attention towards the possibility of future pandemics, then perhaps they wouldn’t be doing so very very little to prevent them, as compared to the scope and probability of the problem.
Thus, for example, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy guru David Burns prompts his clinically anxious patients to think hard about exactly how much anxiety they want to have, and then to aim for that amount, which is often more than zero. (More details here.)
6.5.2.2 Back to PNSE
Based on the above, PNSE should directly cause a strong reduction in self-reflective forms of anxiety and aversion (e.g. “feeling anxious about feeling anxious”).[9] I think it should also indirectly cause some reduction in object-level anxiety, for the simple reason that self-reflective anxiety may well bring to mind object-level anxiety. (If I’m anxiously dwelling on my anxious feelings about the speech, then that may cause me to also feel anxious about the speech directly!)
Is that a good or a bad thing? It depends. How much are you worried about excess anxiety being counterproductive and miserable, versus insufficient anxiety making you blasé about your important life goals? Different people are different.
6.6 Explaining other practical impacts of PNSE
6.6.1 Quieting of self-reflective (i.e. S(⋯)) thoughts
One reason that new thoughts pop up is because the brain algorithm infers that they’re likely to have positive valence. Another reason that new thoughts pop up is because they’re strongly associated with an existing thought. I think in PNSE, both of those reasons become less applicable to self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts. They have a weaker association with heavily-valenced thoughts (of either sign), and they have a weaker association with the body and its associated bodily attention and sensations. So there’s just generally less S(⋯) thoughts overall. And that’s what the Martin 2020 “PNSE” paper says.
6.6.2 Memory issues
PNSE seems to come with memory problems. Martin 2020 more specifically suggests that there are two kinds of memory issues: (1) forgetting appointments, and (2) a self-perceived general deficit in autobiographical memory that seemed (from the interviewer’s perspective) to not correspond to any real memory problem.[10]
I think both of these memory issues fit in well with my picture. In particular, the reduction in self-reflective S(⋯) thoughts is synonymous with “being in a flow state more often” (§4.4.1), and these two symptoms map well to my discussion of “losing track of time” in a flow state back in §4.6.1.
To quickly summarize that §4.6.1 discussion:
However, there’s one more factor.[11] I think PNSE is associated with less mind-wandering in general, and less autobiographical mind-wandering in particular (thanks to the lack of “hooks” mentioned above). And if your mind wanders less, then you’ll wind up with worse long-term memory retention of whatever your mind would have wandered to—cf. “spaced repetition”. So it is in fact plausible that some nonzero amount of the self-perceived memory deficits are real. (Better put more stuff into Anki!)
6.6.3 Other things
There’s also the obvious effect that if someone has a PNSE intuitive self-model, and you ask them questions about it, they’ll give different answers than a person who has a Conventional Intuitive Self-Model. And if they feel like they’re suffering less, then they’ll probably tell their friends that PNSE is a good idea, and maybe go become a meditation teacher instead of whatever they were doing before. Etc.
Separately, there’s a strong empirical correlation between PNSE and “meditating an awful lot”, so there might be systematic effects that correlate with PNSE but are not directly caused by it, but rather are caused by meditation in a more direct way.
I’m sure there’s much more to be said in this section, but I lack the time and expertise to say it.
6.7 Conclusion
Like I said at the top, this post is just dipping a toe into the vast ocean of variations and implications of PNSE and other meditation-related intuitive self-model changes. I’d love to hear from commenters about how it seems right or wrong. Next post is: “hearing voices, and other hallucinations”!
Thanks Thane Ruthenis, lsusr, Kaj Sotala, Jonas Hallgren, Johannes Mayer, Linda Linsefors, and Justis Mills for critical comments on earlier drafts.
Martin 2020 made up the term “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) by searching for any term whatsoever that his interviewees would be generally happy to describe themselves with. (“In the field non-symbolic was the only term found that was widely and readily accepted by participants.”) I don’t really know what “non-symbolic” is supposed to mean, and don’t really care either. For the purpose of this post, I’m just treating “PNSE” as a label—one which seems relatively uncontroversial and unambiguous.
Note there’s some negative “gossip” here about the reliability of the PNSE paper, but I think if I treat it as a collection of anecdotes and don’t put too much stock in the proposed systematization, it should be fine. I have seen a few people (Aella, Sasha Chapin, and I think others too but I forget) say that the PNSE paper strongly resonates with their personal experience.
For example: “The transition to any location brought a substantial change in worldview and often shattered the sense of what was previously believed true regarding PNSE. This was even the case for transitions from one location to another … PNSE was often accompanied by a tremendous sense of certainty that participants were experiencing a deeper or more true reality. This sense of internally experienced truth often led to a form of dogmatism. This was especially the case among participants who had only experienced one location on the continuum, or who were part of a group that officially sanctioned one or more locations. Due to the certainty they felt, these participants had difficulty accepting that individuals who described their experiences differently than what they experienced or considered acceptable were actually experiencing PNSE. Participants with dogmatic tendencies felt like theirs was the correct and true version of the experience. When asked to contrast their experience with the data collected from other participants, these participants would often definitively state that the research project was obviously having difficulty understanding what was and was not a valid PNSE experience.”—Martin 2020
As a typical example, Loch Kelly at one point mentions “the boundless ground of the infinite, invisible life source”. OK, I grant that it feels to him like there’s an infinite, invisible life source. But in the real world, there isn’t. I’m picking on Loch Kelly, but his descriptions of PNSE are much less mystical than most of them.
When I say “kicked out of the intuitive model”, I mean more specifically that the homunculus concept is not active for whatever duration of time PNSE occurs. I imagine that even people who have spent decades in PNSE will still “have a homunculus concept”, in the sense that they have homunculus-related data structures stored somewhere in their cortex. But those data structures would be lying dormant, not impacting behavior and experience.
See for example a thread here where some non-meditators were puzzling over this point.
Part of the backstory here is that physiological arousal is a brainstem reaction, but one which can be a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, in the sense that the cortex can predict that something merits physiological arousal, and then the brainstem promptly makes that prediction comes true. See discussion of “defer-to-predictor mode” here.
This discussion might seem kinda circular. The cortex can tell the brainstem that it expects anxiety reactions, and then those anxiety reactions actually appear, like a self-fulfilling prophecy? Then why am I anxious about public speaking, but not anxious about staring at the ceiling? The answer is: it’s partly circular, but it’s also partly supported by a cortex-independent “ground truth”—things like innate fear-of-spiders. For algorithmic details see here.
You can compare and contrast this sentence with Kaj Sotala’s blog post “From Self to Craving”. I think we have some common ground?
Another source is Adyashanti (2008), who describes memory issues in stark terms: “…I’ve had many students develop memory problems, some who have even gotten checked for Alzheimer’s…”. But he’s less specific about the symptoms than Martin 2020. He also hints (contra Martin 2020) that it’s a transitional problem that eventually goes away. If so, I wouldn’t know how to explain that, other than just that changes can be scary and then people get used to stuff.
Thanks lsusr for this point.