Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture - Ryan A Bush 2021
Unplugging from Your Software
Chapter 1: The Theory and Practice of Psychitecture
When you have cultivated mindfulness, life becomes richer, more vivid, more satisfying, and you don’t take everything that happens so personally. Attention plays a more appropriate role within the greater context of a broad and powerful awareness. You’re fully present, happier, and at ease, because you’re not so easily caught up in the stories and melodramas the mind likes to concoct. Your powers of attention are used more appropriately and effectively to examine the world. You become more objective and clear-headed, and develop an enhanced awareness of the whole.
- Culadasa, The Mind Illuminated
Before we dive into the many methods for modifying our minds, we need to acquire a tool that will be indispensable for our progress. In order to modify the structure of our minds, we need to observe and analyze their rules and patterns. We need to closely examine our thoughts, emotions, values, and drives, as well as the relationships among them, and correct the misperceptions which have been built into us.
It’s as if you have just taken a job as a programmer where your role is to redesign a poorly built program. The original programmer failed to comment the function of each part of the software, and he is not available for questioning. So you have to figure out how this thing is structured by studying it. You have to go through the algorithms one by one and figure out how they work to determine how they can be reworked.
In order to effectively analyze our software, we have to step outside of it. And the tool that allows us to do this is called metacognition. Metacognition has been defined as “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena”32. You could view it as thinking about your thinking or awareness of your own field of awareness, and the metacognitive perspective is the foundational viewpoint for psychitecture.
Redesigning the mind without stepping outside of it would be like trying to repair your glasses without taking them off. Although you obviously never actually exit your own mind, when you practice metacognition, you essentially lift yourself up out of the system on which you normally operate so you can look down on the tangled mess of wires and begin the process of rewiring.
Closely related to metacognition is the now-popular concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a metacognitive strategy which has been defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.”33 Though the term is often misunderstood, and has lost some of its meaning in the process of becoming a cultural fad, it is a crucial method of psychitectural intervention. Mindfulness allows us to press pause on our software so we can step in and reprogram it.
We will look at methods for increasing mindfulness, but I have found that making a priority of objective introspection and metacognitive awareness can be enough to cultivate it. Simply deciding to start noticing your thoughts without judgment or engagement may cultivate this habit in the same way that deciding to enter the housing market causes you to start noticing “for sale” signs in suburban lawns.
If mindfulness does not come easily to you and you are not accustomed to noticing the thoughts and emotions you experience in any given moment, you may need a practice for cultivating it. Vipassana meditation is one of the most common of such practices, and many people, as well as some preliminary research, have found it to be beneficial.34
This practice will gradually guide you to a non-attached awareness of your own internal processes, often beginning with physical sensations like the breath and working up to thoughts and emotions. It trains you to notice when your attention gets sucked back into the captivating narrative your cognition presents to you. Many books have been written describing how to meditate, so I will only include a concise guide from Sam Harris’s Waking Up:
1. Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
2. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting— feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
3. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly— either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen.
4. Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don't have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.)
5. Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath.
6. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath.
7. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath— or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
8. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.35
Possibly the most important benefit of mindfulness is that developing it causes your mental processes to become direct objects of examination. It trains you to suspend judgment on your own thoughts and emotions and view them as the reflexive instincts they are, rather than as incontestable facts.36 37
Meditation seems to train you to stop automatically identifying with all of your thoughts, so that, for example, when the thought ’John’s a jerk’ pops into your head, you don’t assume that John necessarily is a jerk. You take the thought as something your brain produced, which may or may not be true, and may or may not be useful.
- Julia Galef 38
As we will soon explore, the thoughts your brain outputs are generated automatically in response to real-world events, generally without your consent. The chains these thoughts form are stories which often embody both the emotional dramatization and banality of a soap opera. The default mind accepts these repetitive tropes as legitimate, and often even identifies with them.39
Attention will be represented by the gaps between points in an algorithm. The less attention you are paying to your own mind in any given scenario, the more powerful the links will be. The more attention you are paying, the weaker the links will be. This means that mindfulness can always serve as a psychitectural tool, as awareness of the active algorithms at any time is the first step to modifying them.40 41 Although his work contains its fair share of new age pseudoscience, Eckhart Tolle captures and distills some of the wisdom which the ancient Eastern sages taught:
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Siddhārtha Gautama and others have argued that our perceptions of self are illusory - that you are not the self you typically identify as, or even that there is no self at all.42 The self, like all concepts, is a fluid, man-made construct, and it is best not to take it as a rigid reality. This book will urge you, however, not to eliminate your sense of self, but to choose to identify as the designer of your mind rather than as your mind itself. Imagine looking down on your own mind, observing, analyzing, and ultimately shaping and rewiring it.
Stepping off of our rogue psychological roller coaster often provides momentary relief, which is what people mean when they talk about “living in the present.” But more importantly, it gives us the distance and clarity needed to actually observe the function of this roller coaster. It allows us to increasingly cease to identify with our minds, and to see our inner experiences for what they are.43
Before you unplug, beliefs are simply the truth. Values are good and bad. Goals are automatically worth pursuing. Emotions unconsciously color our experience. Desires are in control. But after unplugging, you gain the ability to step back and observe what is really going on. Once you’ve unplugged, notice how things look from here. Notice that thoughts are just thoughts, beliefs just beliefs, emotions just emotions. All are simply the reflexive algorithms of a robotic mind - not reality.
The mindfulness/meditation movement stops with what I consider to be the prerequisite step of psychological optimization. It tells you to cultivate the objective, non-attached awareness of your own internal processes… and then do it some more. I would speculate that a leading reason some people seem not to benefit from meditation is that they are not instructed to analyze and modify the automatic processes they observe during meditation. This is exactly what we are going to do.
The following nine chapters will examine the most commonly problematic algorithms in the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral realms. They will teach you the methods for reprogramming them and nearing your ideal software. You will become a skilled psychitect, and by aiming your constructive efforts toward the structure of your mind, you will learn to terraform it into a truly habitable, delightful place for its sole inhabitant.