When you think of "ultimatums", what comes to mind?

Manipulativeness, maybe? Ultimatums are typically considered a negotiation tactic, and not a very pleasant one.

But there's a different thing that can happen, where an ultimatum is made, but where articulating it isn't a speech act but rather an observation. As in, the ultimatum wasn't created by the act of stating it, but rather, it already existed in some sense.

Some concrete examples: negotiating relationships

I had a tense relationship conversation a few years ago. We'd planned to spend the day together in the park, and I was clearly angsty, so my partner asked me what was going on. I didn't have a good handle on it, but I tried to explain what was uncomfortable for me about the relationship, and how I was confused about what I wanted. After maybe 10 minutes of this, she said, "Look, we've had this conversation before. I don't want to have it again. If we're going to do this relationship, I need you to promise we won't have this conversation again."

I thought about it. I spent a few moments simulating the next months of our relationship. I realized that I totally expected this to come up again, and again. Earlier on, when we'd had the conversation the first time, I hadn't been sure. But it was now pretty clear that I'd have to suppress important parts of myself if I was to keep from having this conversation.

"...yeah, I can't promise that," I said.

"I guess that's it then."

"I guess so."

I think a more self-aware version of me could have recognized, without her prompting, that my discomfort represented an unreconcilable part of the relationship, and that I basically already wanted to break up.

The rest of the day was a bit weird, but it was at least nice that we had resolved this. We'd realized that it was a fact about the world that there wasn't a serious relationship that we could have that we both wanted.

I sensed that when she posed the ultimatum, she wasn't doing it to manipulate me. She was just stating what kind of relationship she was interested in. It's like if you go to a restaurant and try to order a pad thai, and the waiter responds, "We don't have rice noodles or peanut sauce. You either eat somewhere else, or you eat something other than a pad thai."

An even simpler example would be that at the start of one of my relationships, my partner wanted to be monogamous and I wanted to be polyamorous (i.e. I wanted us both to be able to see other people and have other partners). This felt a bit tug-of-war-like, but eventually I realized that actually I would prefer to be single than be in a monogamous relationship.

I expressed this.

It was an ultimatum! "Either you date me polyamorously or not at all." But it wasn't me "just trying to get my way".

I guess the thing about ultimatums in the territory is that there's no bluff to call.

It happened in this case that my partner turned out to be really well-suited for polyamory, and so this worked out really well. We'd decided that if she got uncomfortable with anything, we'd talk about it, and see what made sense. For the most part, there weren't issues, and when there were, the openness of our relationship ended up just being a place where other discomforts were felt, not a generator of disconnection.

Normal ultimatums vs ultimatums in the territory

I use "in the territory" to indicate that this ultimatum isn't just a thing that's said but a thing that is true independently of anything being said. It's a bit of a poetic reference to the map-territory distinction.

No bluffing: preferences are clear

The key distinguishing piece with UITTs is, as I mentioned above, that there's no bluff to call: the ultimatum-maker isn't secretly really really hoping that the other person will choose one option or the other. These are the two best options as far as they can tell. They might have a preference: in the second story above, I preferred a polyamorous relationship to no relationship. But I preferred both of those to a monogamous relationship, and the ultimatum in the territory was me realizing and stating that.

This can actually be expressed formally, using what's called a preference vector. This comes from Keith Hipel at University of Waterloo. If the tables in this next bit doesn't make sense, don't worry about it: all important conclusions are expressed in the text.

First, we'll note that since each of us have two options, a table can be constructed which shows four possible states (numbered 0-3 in the boxes).

This representation is sometimes referred to as matrix form or normal form, and has the advantage of making it really clear who controls which state transitions (movements between boxes). Here, my decision controls which column we're in, and my partner's decision controls which row we're in.

Next, we can consider: of these four possible states, which are most and least preferred, by each person? Here's my preferences, ordered from most to least preferred, left to right. The 1s in the boxes mean that the statement on the left is true.

The order of the states represents my preferences (as I understand them) regardless of what my potential partner's preferences are. I only control movement in the top row (do I insist on polyamory or not). It's possible that they prefer no relationship to a poly relationship, in which case we'll end up in state 2. But I still prefer this state over state 1 (mono relationship) and state 0 (in which I don't ask for polyamory and my partner decides not to date me anyway). So whatever my partners preferences are, I've definitely made a good choice for me, by insisting on polyamory.

This wouldn't be true if I were bluffing (if I preferred state 1 to state 2 but insisted on polyamory anyway). If I preferred 1 to 2, but I bluffed by insisting on polyamory, I would basically be betting on my partner preferring polyamory to no relationship, but this might backfire and get me a no relationship, when both of us (in this hypothetical) would have preferred a monogamous relationship to that. I think this phenomenon is one reason people dislike bluffy ultimatums.

My partner's preferences turned out to be...

You'll note that they preferred a poly relationship to no relationship, so that's what we got! Although as I said, we didn't assume that everything would go smoothly. We agreed that if this became uncomfortable for my partner, then they would tell me and we'd figure out what to do. Another way to think about this is that after some amount of relating, my partner's preference vector might actually shift such that they preferred no relationship to our polyamorous one. In which case it would no longer make sense for us to be together.

UITTs release tension, rather than creating it

In writing this post, I skimmed a wikihow article about how to give an ultimatum, in which they say:

"Expect a negative reaction. Hardly anyone likes being given an ultimatum. Sometimes it may be just what the listener needs but that doesn't make it any easier to hear."

I don't know how accurate the above is in general. I think they're talking about ultimatums like "either you quit smoking or we break up". I can say that expect that these properties of an ultimatum contribute to the negative reaction:

• stated angrily or otherwise demandingly
• more extreme than your actual preferences, because you're bluffing
• refers to what they need to do, versus your own preferences

So this already sounds like UITTs would have less of a negative reaction.

But I think the biggest reason is that they represent a really clear articulation of what one party wants, which makes it much simpler for the other party to decide what they want to do. Ultimatums in the territory tend to also be more of a realization that you then share, versus a deliberate strategy. And this realization causes a noticeable release of tension in the realizer too.

Let's contrast:

"Either you quit smoking or we break up!"

versus

"I'm realizing that as much as I like our relationship, it's really not working for me to be dating a smoker, so I've decided I'm not going to. Of course, my preferred outcome is that you stop smoking, not that we break up, but I realize that might not make sense for you at this point."

Of course, what's said here doesn't necessarily correspond to the preference vectors shown above. Someone could say the demanding first thing when they actually do have a UITT preference-wise, and someone who's trying to be really NVCy or something might say the sceond thing even though they're actually bluffing and would prefer to . But I think that in general they'll correlate pretty well.

The "realizing" seems similar to what happened to me 2 years ago on my own, when I realized that the territory was issuing me an ultimatum: either you change your habits or you fail at your goals. This is how the world works: your current habits will get you X, and you're declaring you want Y. On one level, it was sad to realize this, because I wanted to both eat lots of chocolate and to have a sixpack. Now this ultimatum is really in the territory.

Another example could be realizing that not only is your job not really working for you, but that it's already not-working to the extent that you aren't even really able to be fully productive. So you don't even have the option of just working a bit longer, because things are only going to get worse at this point. Once you realize that, it can be something of a relief, because you know that even if it's hard, you're going to find something better than your current situation.

Loose ends

More thoughts on the break-up story

One exercise I have left to the reader is creating the preference vectors for the break-up in the first story. HINT: (rot13'd) Vg'f fvzvyne gb gur cersrerapr irpgbef V qvq fubj, jvgu gjb qrpvfvbaf: fur pbhyq vafvfg ba ab shgher fhpu natfgl pbairefngvbaf be abg, naq V pbhyq pbagvahr gur eryngvbafuvc be abg.

An interesting note is that to some extent in that case I wasn't even expressing a preference but merely a prediction that my future self would continue to have this angst if it showed up in the relationship. So this is even more in the territory, in some senses. In my model of the territory, of course, but yeah. You can also think of this sort of as an unconscious ultimatum issued by the part of me that already knew I wanted to break up. It said "it's preferable for me to express angst in this relationship than to have it be angst free. I'd rather have that angst and have it cause a breakup than not have the angst."

Revealing preferences

I think that ultimatums in the territory are also connected to what I've called Reveal Culture (closely related to Tell Culture, but framed differently). Reveal cultures have the assumption that in some fundamental sense we're on the same side, which makes negotiations a very different thing... more of a collaborative design process. So it's very compatible with the idea that you might just clearly articulate your preferences.

Note that there doesn't always exist a UITT to express. In the polyamory example above, if I'd preferred a mono relationship to no relationship, then I would have had no UITT (though I could have bluffed). In this case, it would be much harder for me to express my preferences, because if I leave them unclear then there can be kind of implicit bluffing. And even once articulated, there's still no obvious choice. I prefer this, you prefer that. We need to compromise or something. It does seem clear that, with these preferences, if we don't end up with some relationship at the end, we messed up... but deciding how to resolve it is outside the scope of this post.

Knowing your own preferences is hard

Another topic this post will point at but not explore is: how do you actually figure out what you want? I think this is a mix of skill and process. You can get better at the general skill by practising trying to figure it out (and expressing it / acting on it when you do, and seeing if that works out well). One process I can think of that would be helpful is Gendlin's Focusing. Nate Soares has written about how introspection is hard and to some extent you don't ever actually know what you want: You don't get to know what you're fighting for. But, he notes,

"There are facts about what we care about, but they aren't facts about the stars. They are facts about us."

And they're hard to figure out. But to the extent that we can do so and then act on what we learn, we can get more of what we want, in relationships, in our personal lives, in our careers, and in the world.

(This article crossposted from my personal blog.)

This is a simple idea that I came up with by myself. I was looking for a means to enter high functioning lots-of-beta-waves modes without the use of chemical stimulants. What I found was that very bright light works really, really well.

I got the brightest light bulbs I could get cheaply. 105 watts of incandescents with halogen gas, billed as the equivalent of 130 watts of incandescent light. And I got an adaptor like this that lets me screw four of those into the same socket in the ceiling. The result is about as painful to look at as the sun. It makes my (small) room brighter than a clear summer's day at my latitude and slightly brighter than a supermarket.

I guess it affects adenosine much like caffeine does because that's what it feels like. Yet unlike caffeine, it can be rapidly turned on and off, literally with the flip of a switch.

For waking up in the morning, I find bright light more effective than a 200mg caffeine tablet, although my caffeine tolerance is moderate for a scientist.

I have not compared the effects of very bright light to modafinil, which requires a prescription in my country.

When under this amount of light, I need to remind myself to go to bed, because I tire about three hours later than with common luminosity. Yet once I switch it off, I can usually sleep within a few minutes, as (I'm guessing) a flood of unblocked adenosine suddenly overwhelms me. I used to have those unproductive late hours where I was too awake to sleep but too tired to be smart. I don't have those anymore.

You've probably heard of light therapy, which uses light to help manage seasonal affective disorder. I don't have that issue, but I definitely notice that the light does improve my mood. (Maybe that's simply because I like to function well.) I'm pretty sure the expensive "light therapy bulbs" you can get are scams, because the color of the light doesn't actually make a difference. The amount of light does.

One nice side benefit is that it keeps me awake while meditating, so I don't need the upright posture that usually does that job. Without the need for an upright posture, I can go beyond two hours straight, which helps enter more profoundly altered states.

After about 10 months of almost daily use of this lighting, I have not noticed any decrease in effectiveness. I do notice I find normally-lit rooms comparatively gloomy, and have an increasingly hard time understanding why people tolerate that. Supermarkets and offices are brightly lit to make the rats move faster - why don't we do that at our homes and while we're at it, amp it up even further? After all, our brains were made for the African savanna, which during the day is a lot brighter than most apartments today.

Since everyone can try this for a few bucks, I hope some of you will. If you do, please provide feedback on whether it works as well for you as it does for me. Any questions?

I posted this question as a comment* on this Luminosity article, but I guess that was the wrong place for it and I still really want to know what people think. The article says:

It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else.  Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.

I agree! I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts and looking at them.

Here is my problem: I think I may have been over-trained by high school to write for an audience. So, if I'm keeping a journal of my thoughts to look back on later, who is my audience?

If I'm writing as if I'm writing for myself, then my writing won't make any sense to other people. Like, I'll write "but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment for the whole evening." This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won't be able to follow the causal links. Instead, I can write in a way that another person would understand, and explain everything that wouldn't make sense to someone who isn't me. But then who am I writing for? At this point in the process, I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don't personally need an explanation for in a document that I assume other people aren't going to see and might not even care about if they did. (Like people with personal blogs! They explain things! Why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?

But also, writing for yourself with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing brings up security issues? If I'm writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts that I want to document about my friend, I'm going to write "Joe" because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven't talked to him about directly. Which means I need to censor names. But at soon as I start censoring names, then I'm already no longer writing for myself, but for an audience that I'm trying to hide information from. This sounds like a problem because then I'm no longer recording everything and also trying to avoid adding details that give people away. But, overall, I'm writing for an audience again, which brings up all those other audience-related issues I mentioned earlier.

Help! How should I write things? 

*Should I delete the old comment?

I have decided that it would be valuable for me to read books (blog posts, articles, random conversations between smart people who store chatlogs) about introspection, take notes, and try to distill and clarify the information.  This could result in me eventually giving up, or in a Luminosity Sequence: Second Edition (Now With Literature, Part Of This Complete Breakfast!), or (optimism!) me being able to sort ~90% of people into some number of categories such that their category membership tells me how to help them develop luminosity superpowers in N simple steps with exercises/therapy-ish stuff/etc.

Help me eat luminosity!  I need recommendations for stuff to read.  This stuff should be:

• readable (I will not long slog through something I'm stylistically allergic to)
• not obvious nonsense (but if it didn't work on you/your personal friends, that's not "obvious nonsense", it could be cognitive heterogeneity; I just want to filter out crap like "The Secret")
• something I can probably get my hands on (library, 100% legal! electronic acquisition, it being on the Internet).

I read really fast.  Don't worry about oversaturating me with recommendations, but please do say a little about why you recommend a thing (even if it's "I haven't read this, but I keep hearing about it, so I guess some people like it") and post recommendations in separate comments so people with information about the item can vote up and down separately.  Recommendations for non-written things will be heavily discounted but not outright disqualified.

I would also like a supply of guinea-pigs-in-waiting for if and when I get to the point of trying the sorting or the superpower-giving part of the optimistic end state of the project.

If people want me to, I can document the process of luminosity-eating so there is a template to follow for other subject-eating projects, but I wouldn't do this by default because in general I only do things that someone would care if I didn't do them.

Related to: Living Luminously

Well? Should you?

Linked is a treatise on exactly this concept. If the effects of recording and classifying every thought pan out like the author says they'll pan out... well, read a (limited) excerpt (from the Introduction), and I'll let you decide whether it's worth your time.

If you do the things described in this book, you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in "The Memory Book''. You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.

YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you'll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.

You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it's not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work - you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a "structural integrity'' to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)

The full text is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, which is why I hesitated to post this topic in the first place. But there are probably note-taking junkies, or luminosity junkies, or otherwise interested folk amongst LW. So why not?

(Incidentally I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile. I wonder how he managed it, or what benefits/costs it wrought?)

Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.

I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.

The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths? 

I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?

The primary arguments I've heard for death are: 

• "I look forward to the experience of shutting down and fading away," which I hope could be easily disillusioned by gaining knowledge about how truly undignified dying is, bloody romanticists.
• "There is something better after life and I'm excited for it," which, well... let me rephrase: please do not turn this into a discussion on ways to disillusion theists because it's really been talked about before.
• "It is Against Nature/God's Will/The Force to live forever. Nature/God/the Force is going to get humankind if we try for immortality. I like my liver!" This argument is so closely related to the previous and the next one that I don't know quite how to respond to it, other than that I've seen it crop up in historical accounts of any big change. Human beings tend to be really frightened of change, especially change which isn't believed to be supernatural in origin.
• "I've read science fiction stories about being immortal, and in those stories immortality gets really boring, really fast. I'm not interested enough in reality to be in it forever." I can't see where this perspective could come from other than mind-numbing ignorance/the unimaginable nature of really big things (like the number of languages on Earth, the amount of things we still don't know about physics or the fact that every person who is or ever will be is a new, interesting being to interact with.)
• "I can't imagine being immortal. My idea about how my life will go is that I will watch my children grow old, but I will die before they do. My mind/human minds aren't meant to exist for longer than one generation." This fails to account for human minds being very, very flexible. The human mind as we know it now does eventually get tired of life (or at least tired of pain,) but this is not a testament to how minds are, any more than humans becoming distressed when they don't eat is a testament to it being natural to starve, become despondent and die.
• "The world is overpopulated and if nobody dies, we will overrun and ultimately ruin the planet." First of all: I, like Dr. Ian Malcolm, think that it is incredibly vain to believe that man can destroy the Earth. Second of all: in the future we may have anything from extraterrestrial habitation to substrates which take up space and consume material in totally different ways. But! Clearly, I am not feeling these arguments, because this argument makes sense to me. Problematic!

I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.

So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?

The old thread (found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6dc/the_true_rejection_challenge/ ) was becoming very unwieldy and hard to check, so many people suggested we made a second one. I just realized that the only reason it didn't exist yet was bystander effect-like, so I desiced to just do this one.

From the original thread:

An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended.  (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing.  (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it.  It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it.  Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.

This is a thread for discussing my luminous!Twilight fic, Luminosity (inferior mirror here), its sequel Radiance (inferior mirror), and related topics.

PDFs, to be updated as the fic updates, are available of Luminosity (other version) and Radiance.  (PDFs courtesy of anyareine).  Zack M Davis has created a mobi file of Radiance.

Initial discussion of the fic under a Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality thread is here.  The first dedicated threads: Part 1, Part 2.  See also the luminosity sequence which contains some of the concepts that the Luminosity fic is intended to illustrate.  (Disclaimer: in the fic, the needs of the story take precedence over the needs for didactic value where the two are in tension.)

Spoilers are OK to post without ROT-13 for canon, all of Book 1, and Radiance up to the current chapter.  Note which chapter (let's all use the numbering on my own webspace, rather than fanfiction.net, for consistency) you're about to spoil in your comment if it's big.  People who know extra stuff (my betas and people who have requested specific spoilers) should keep mum about unpublished information they have.  If you wish to join the ranks of the betas or the spoiled, contact me individually.

Miscellaneous links: TV Tropes page (I really really like it when new stuff appears there) and thread.  Automatic Livejournal feed.

Data for a Better Planet focuses on The Quantified Self, and offers an overview of the state of the art in detailed, quantitative personal tracking.

This seems related to an LW interest cluster.

This is an introduction and description of vipassana meditation [edit: actually, anapanasati, not vipassana as such] more than Buddhism. Nonetheless I hope it serves as some testament to the value of Buddhist thought outside of meditation.

One day I hope more people take up the mantle of the Buddhist Conspiracy, the Bayesanga, and preach the good word of Bayesian Buddhism for all to hear. Until then, though, I'd like to follow in the spirit of fellow Bayesian Buddhist Luke Grecki, and describe some of my personal experiences with anapanasati meditation in the hopes that they'll convince you to check it out.

Nearly everything I've learned about anapanasati/vipassana comes from this excellent guide. It's easy to read and it actually explains the reasoning behind all of the things you're asked to do in vipassana. I heavily encourage you to give it a look. Meditation without instruction didn't lead me anywhere: I spent hours letting my mind get tossed about while I tried in vain to think of nothing. Trying to think of nothing is not a good idea. Vipassana is the practice of mindfulness, and it is recommended that you focus on your breath (focusing on breath is sort of a form of vipassana, and sort of its own thing; I haven't quite figured it out yet). I chose that as my anchor for meditation as recommended. Since reading the above linked guide on meditation, I've meditated a mere 4 times, for a total of 100 minutes. I'm a total novice! So don't confuse my experiences for the wisdom of a venerable teacher. But I think that maybe since you, too, will be a novice, hearing a novice's experiences might be useful. A mere 100 minutes of practice, and I've had many insights that have helped me think more clearly about mindfulness, compassion, self-improvement, the nature of feedback cycles and cascades, relationships between the body and cognition, and other diverse subjects.

The first meditation session was for 10 minutes, the second for 40 minutes, the third for 10 minutes, and the fourth for 40 minutes again. Below are descriptions of the two 40 minutes sessions. In the first, I experienced a state of jhana (the second jhana, to be precise; I'm about 70% confident), which was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. In the the second, my mind was a little too chatty to reach a jhana, but I did accidentally have a few insights that I think are important for me to have realized.

The below are very personal experiences, and I don't suspect that they're typical. But I hope that describing my experiences will inspire you to consider mindfulness meditation, or to continue with mindfulness meditation, even if your experiences end up being very different from mine. You might find that some of the 'physiological effects' I list are egregious, but I decided to leave them in, 'cuz they just might be relevant. For instance, I find that, quite surprisingly, my level of mindfulness seems to directly correlate with how numb various parts of my body are! Also, listing what parts of me were in pain at various points might alert future practitioners to what sorts of pain might be expected from sitting still for longer than thirty minutes. The most interesting observations will probably be in the 'insights' sections.

40 minutes, Evening/night, September 17, 2010.

Setting: First laying down on a bed with a pillow over my eyes, then sitting up on the bed on a pillow.

Physiological effects:

• Before jhana:
• I lay down on my bed with a pillow over my eyes. I think this is interesting, because many texts I've read emphasize the importance of sitting up straight. I don't think it is necessary. That said, they do seem to know what they're talking about, and I'm very new to this, so perhaps being able to enter a jhana from a position of lying down was something of a fluke.
• I started concentrating on my breath.
• My breath alternated between deep and slow and a more natural breath. As time went on and I became more comfortable, my breath became less slow and more normal.
• I experienced numb facial muscles and random eye muscle flickers. I felt trong sense of peace, compassion, and wellbeing.
• The numbness and joy gave way to a full-out jhana experience after about 5 to 10 minutes of meditation.
• During jhana:
• Incredibly intense feeling of bliss, compassion, and piece. I involuntarily laughed at loud about five times. I think there must have been some kind of feedback loop going on here. I felt clearheaded.
• Incredibly intense body high. My whole body was quivering, including especially my eyelids. It was a numbness-like feeling, though perhaps different in that if felt like quivering. It could be that my perception of the feeling had changed.
• I sat up on a pillow.
• Watching the inside of my eyelids was entirely grey, where most of the time there are neon patterns on a black background. This was rather odd and the most obvious evidence that something really weird was going on with my perception.
• I tried to sit in a half-lotus position. This was mildly painful, though the pain wasn't bad, if you take my meaning. I kept at it for about two to five minutes, after which I reverted to a normal cross-legged position.
• I had a strong compulsion to sing out 108 'Om mane padme hum's, which I did, followed by 108 more, counting on my fingers.
• I then got up and played a few blitz chess games online, still feeling the very strong effects of the meditation. Surprisingly, in the 3 games I played I was a tad subpar. I sorta expected to play amazingly well, though I wasn't sad when it turned out I was wrong. This might be a sign that my feelings of clearheadedness were not entirely justified, but the results aren't very indicative either way. By the third game the effects had mostly worn off, but I still felt very peaceful, compassionate, self-accepting, and joyful. The flittering quivering numbness and energy had mostly worn off.

Insights on breath:

• I could feel the temperature difference of the air as it was inhaled and exhaled.
• When I breathed heavily, inhalation was very slightly painful.
• (A few others that I've forgotten.)
• (I had the above insights before entering jhana. I think they helped achieve jhana.)

General insights:

• Previously I'd heard that meditation could lead to feelings of profound bliss, compassion, and even a sort of very strong physical body high. I'd mostly discounted such reports on the grounds that 1) I've done some drugs and didn't expect the effects to be as strong as e.g. cannabis, and 2) it didn't seem clear how just focusing on your breath could cause significant physiological changes of the sort necessary to have such strong effects. After experiencing jhana, I can say I was wrong. However, I still do not understand the neurochemical mechanisms behind my experience, besides postulating the magical hypothesis of 'cascades'.
• More generally, I realized more fully that the Buddhists really do have a lot of very good and very credible thoughts on mindfulness and rationality. I'd known this for awhile just by studying Buddhist texts and teachings, but feeling vipassana meditation working so strongly and obviously really made it sink in that Buddhism is very worth studying attentively.
• Cascades and feedback loops in the mind are very, very strong. By becoming more mindful and more accepting, I allowed myself to become even more mindful and accepting, until the feedback loop led me to an incredible altered state. This led me to really believe that the mind is very messy and prone to accidentally allowing causation between two parameters when it'd probably be better to allow just one to push on the other, like happiness causing laughter and not the other way around. Nonetheless, I can use the messiness of my mind to my advantage by thinking the right kinds of thoughts. I got a better sense of this when I meditated again a two weeks later.
• I am naturally rather severely self-critical. Previously I'd considered this, if not a virtue, then it least a necessary evil and a good habit that I should keep: it keeps me from being excessively narcissistic, it reminds me of areas where I can improve, it keeps me from feeling too justified in a dispute, and it allows me to better understand faults others see in me. However, becoming so accepting of both my faults and others' during meditation led me to think that perhaps the disgust I feel for myself and others is a needless emotion, and that simply acknowledging areas of improvement without associating them with negative affect is a much better way to make myself a more awesome person and understand the plights of others. The whole time I'd thought that getting angry at myself was a necessary part of being self-critical, but after meditating I realized that anger isn't a necessary part of realizing faults, just like self-love isn't a necessary part of realizing strengths. Both are affect-laden thoughts where simple awareness will do better. I have a feeling that this insight generalized to a lot of other problems.
• If the Buddhist concept of Enlightenment is anything like a constant state of jhana (and this is somewhat implied by accounts of Gautama Buddha's path), then I can definitely see why people would want to aim for it, and I can see how it could be a very real, very effective, and very profound state of mind. It doesn't seem to me as if one has to postulate anything spiritual to think of Enlightenment as an amazing state of being that we should all aim for as rationalists. The magnaminity, compassion, competence, acceptance, and feeling of awesomeness created by the jhanas should be cultivated and drawn upon whenever possible.
• Because of this, it is very worth researching ways to 'cheat' and induce jhana states without having to undergo careful meditation. Neurofeedback, isochronic beats, and transcranial magnetic stimulation all seem like potential paths towards easy Enlightenment. (The jhanas seem to allow strong clarity of mind where drugs do not; but it is possible that being on drugs as much as possible might also be an interesting path. I'd rather not go down it yet.) 'Course, we might still have to just do it the hard way.

40 minutes, Midnight, October 4, 2010.

Setting: Seated on a pillow on blanket on roof of my house in Tucson.

Physiological effects:

• My left leg (quadricep) was mildly sore throughout from running/sprinting two days before. At times in went mildly numb, though not painfully so. My left foot also went slightly numb at various points throughout the sitting.
• My shoulders and facial muscles would tense moderately at various times near the beginning of the sitting and slightly near the end. This normally followed losing track of my breath. My breathing also got heavier and faster during these times. When I focused on my breath again, my shoulders and facial muscles dropped and relaxed, and my breath returned to normal rapidity/intensity.
• After 10 minutes and at various points after, for roughly 15 seconds each, I could feel certain facial muscles go slightly numb, though not painfully so.
• Roughly 15 to 20 minutes in (not sure), my left hand went somewhat numb for one to three minutes.
• Roughly 20 minutes in, my left arm went very numb for roughly two minutes, though I didn't feel any pain. My arm felt 'tight'. The numbness went away rather rapidly, followed immediately by what felt like increased blood flow and thus warmth in the rest of my body.
• Roughly 25 minutes in I felt mild pain in my lower left back. It mostly went away within a minute or two.
• After the meditation was over (40 minutes) I stood up and stretched. I felt very peaceful and happy. At first I felt a tad dizzy but soon felt fine.

Insights on breath:

• Breathing was faster and more intense when I stopped focusing on it and thought of other things. (Sometimes it was slower and more intense. I think intensity was the real key change.) When I refocused on my breath, it naturally became smoother and at a more normal pace.
• Previously, I'd always thought that air went 'up' my nose when I breathed in. I suddenly realized that air actually entered my nose diagonally, and this whole time I'd thought I'd been breating 'up' because of confirmation bias. All of a sudden it was obvious that I was breathing in diagonally. But moments later I realized I was actually mostly breathing 'up', and only a little diagonally: my new theory had also been subject to confirmation bias! So I settled on thinking that I did indeed breathe in 'up', but also a little diagonally.
• I noticed that there are two types of breath. The first is very airy and goes through the top of your nose; it is the one that comes most naturally to me and I imagine most others. The second is throaty and maybe a little stuffy, and it seems as if less air is passing through. I tend to breath the second way a little more naturally when I try to tuck my chin in against my neck; but I can still breathe in the more airy way as well when I do this, so your mileage may very.

General insights:

• Patterns of muscle contractions, patterns of thoughts, and patterns of breathing are all interrelated and can cause feedback loops. Being mindful of my thoughts helps me relax my muscles; relaxing my muscles helps my breathing be more natural; having a natural breath allows me to be more mindful; and so forth. This is good if I am diligent, but bad if I am not; I tend to gravitate towards whatever state I'm in. It takes effort to move between states of mind, but it seems that entropy and novel stimuli tend to push me toward patterns of thought that are irritant. I believe it is eminently possible that I could cultivate the disposition such that entropy and novel stimuli tend to push me towards mindfulness, compassion, and awesomeness.
• Confirmation bias is there even at the very low instinctual level of breathing. As soon as you come up with a theory, even direct sensory experience doesn't always change it when it's wrong.
• Psychic irritants, as they are sometimes called, are constantly mucking around in your brain, causing low level stress, anxiety, guilt, and general discomfort. It seems likely that this was the natural state of the brain for thousands upon thousands of years. I find it very odd that with an hour of focused mindfulness -- all you do is pay wordless attention to your breath! -- you can make a naturally fuzzy and pained human mind into a pure and blissful meditative engine. The difference is striking. It is hard for me to imagine why living in the moment has such a profound effect on cognition.