Reclusland

• craving a cigarette while performing a cognitive task not only increases the chances of a person’s mind wandering, but also makes that person less likely to notice when his or her mind has wandered.

• craving disrupts an individual’s meta-awareness, the ability to periodically appraise one’s own thoughts.

• Participants were assigned at random to either a crave-condition or low-crave group. Those in the latter group were permitted to smoke throughout the study; members of the crave-condition group had to abstain. Participants were asked to read as many as 34 pages of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from a computer screen. If they caught themselves zoning out, they pressed a key labeled ZO. Every few minutes, a tone sounded, and they were asked via the computer, “Were you zoning out?” to which they responded by pressing a “Yes” or “No” key. After 30 minutes, a reading comprehension test was administered.

• Although both groups were prompted a similar number of times, the people craving cigarettes acknowledged more mind-wandering episodes-three times as many, in fact- as those in the low-crave group. But as far as independently recognizing (meta-awareness) that they were zoning out, those who were craving were no more likely to do so than the other group. Participants in the craving group had at least three times as many opportunities to catch themselves zoning out-but they did not. They were impaired in their ability to notice their own mind-wandering episodes.

• this may explain why craving often disrupts efforts to exercise self-control-a process requiring the ability to become aware of your current state in order to regulate it.”

(via here)

see also:

• my previous post: “It’s not because of the study in itself, but because certain people don’t make the effort, they forget themselves.“
• Gurdjieff: “Remember yourself always and everywhere.“

“When people do a lot of study, their minds are full of words, they get high on the books and forget themselves. They get lost in externals. Now this is so only for those who don’t have wisdom, who are unrestrained and don’t have steady sati. For these people studying can be a cause for decline. When such people are engaged in study they don’t do any sitting or walking meditation and become less and less restrained. Their minds become more and more distracted. Aimless chatter, lack of restraint and socializing become the order of the day. This is the cause for the decline of the practice. It’s not because of the study in itself, but because certain people don’t make the effort, they forget themselves. Actually the scriptures are pointers along the path of practice. If we really understand the practice, then reading or studying are both further aspects of meditation. But if we study and then forget ourselves it gives rise to a lot of talking and fruitless activity.”

- Ajahn Chah (via Mind Deep)

books or the internet, the same rules apply…

“We are sheep kept to provide wool for our masters who feed us and keep us as slaves of illusion. But we have a chance of escape and our masters are anxious to help us, but we like being sheep. It is comfortable.”

- Gurdjieff

“It is a combination of what we are born with and outside circumstances that makes us what we are; it is all mechanical, all under the law of accident. It is useless to deny that people are born different and that we cannot change — in any case at the beginning. We have to take it for granted that people have different capacities, but not for awakening; this is where people make a mistake. Awakening does not depend on what is born; it depends on magnetic centre, and magnetic centre depends on what one is interested in. One person is interested in one thing and another in another thing, but on what that depends we do not know and it will not help us to investigate this question because it will be only theories. In our state of consciousness we can know only some things and we must concentrate on the things we can know without wasting time on the things we cannot know.”

- P. D. Ouspensky

I forget how I found this article, but it’s a great one.  You can read the whole thing through the link below, but I’ve summarized what I think are the main points here:

The unnatural selection of consciousness:

• Biology does not tolerate anything biologically useless and, given that my brain consumes 20% of my energy supply, and quite a lot of this seems to be used by neurons that are supposed to be responsible for keeping me conscious, consciousness must have a use.

• But how well-founded is this belief? Was it really natural selection that eventually brought into being creatures that could see that they were naturally selected? Was it the blind laws of physics that so organised the matter in us that it could see the laws of physics and that they were blind? If we are going to address these questions properly, we need to start far enough back to see them clearly. We need to ask by what means consciousness could have come into being – if it was not there in the beginning – and what advantages it confers.

• Consider the emergence of sight from photosensitivity. Firstly, chemical or electrochemical sensitivity to light is not the same as awareness of light. Secondly, the content of awareness of light – brightness, colour, never mind beauty or meaning – is not to be found in electromagnetic radiation, which is not intrinsically bright, coloured, beautiful or meaningful. These secondary and tertiary qualities are not properties of the physical world and the energy in question. Thirdly, it is not clear how certain organisations of matter manage to be aware – of impingements of energy, and later of objects, and (in the case of humans) of themselves – when very similar organisations of matter do not have this property.

• Computers, after all, do not get any nearer to being conscious as the inputs are more complexly related to their outputs, however many stages and layers of processing intervene between the two.

• Indeed, the contrast between environment and organism already contains an embryonic hint of the differentiation between a subject and its objects; howsoever this might be concealed by treating organisms as physical systems. Without this fudge, it is difficult to see how energy exchanges between parts of a physical system would count as “inputs” and “outputs”.

• But the question remains: How is it that certain configurations of matter should be aware, should suffer, enjoy, fear etc? What is there in matter, such that eventually certain configurations of it (human beings) pool that experience and live in a public world?

• Why should consciousness of the material world around their vehicles (the organisms) make certain (material) replicators better able to replicate?

• Think, after all, what unconscious mechanisms can achieve: the evolution of most of the universe; the processes that are supposed to have created life and conscious organisms; the growth, development and most of the running of even highly conscious organisms such as ourselves. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task.

• Once you have a species that depends on consciousness, then it is essential for its members to remain conscious. But if we assume the materialist viewpoint and, unlike many evolutionary biologists, adhere to it consistently, and set aside an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees the entire evolutionary process as something that was always leading up to us or creatures like us, it seems highly implausible that, in an unconscious biosphere, consciousness, even if it were on offer, would seem like a good option.

• Looking prospectively from the beginning rather than retrospectively, one could argue that an organism that has to plan, to deliberate, to rehearse possible courses of action, and has to see wholes so as to deal with singulars, in order to survive, is in a mess. Of course, once in the mess, it would be better off with better consciousness – and this applies irrespective of whether we are considering threats and opportunities from the material environment, other species, or competition from conspecifics.

• And there is a serious difficulty with the notion of “better and better” consciousness that will compensate for the disadvantage of having to work through consciousness in the first place.

• For some…the criterion for intelligence…is that the organism is more closely coupled into its environment. If that were true, then a silicate crystal, so hard-wired into its environment that no wires are required, would be just the thing to be.

• Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.