I personally see an inner monologue as as much of a tool as any other part of my brain. The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory (the auditory loop is an extremely easy place to store small amounts of nearly arbitrary data in the immediate term, and you can abuse your language processing to store moderate amounts of linguistic data in the short term as long as you’re able to retrace a path of thought through it).
I do find that I don’t have a constantly running narrative of my thoughts and what I’m doing, even if I remember having one in the past. I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning, or for enhancing myself in some task as described in the earlier paragraph, but most of the time my inner monologue is inactive.
I do agree with Keep Your Identity Small, I seem to have been doing that, or something very similar, automatically from a certain point in my mid teens. This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups, which is both good and bad, as it allows me to exit groups or communities easily, and for example, permanently ‘shed’ online identities that I decide I can’t use anymore for whatever reason (like sharing too much info that’s reasonably correlatable to another identity or real life).
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into. My go-to form of meditation is focusing attention on my body, in any position, with or without muscle relaxation or increasing blood flow.
The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory
Same.
I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech (though that also falls under extended working memory).
This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups.
Same here. And that, together with what you wrote earlier (“I don’t think I can model people”), leads to less of a felt connection to other people—in both directions: It makes us harder to model.
It is why I have tried to pick up skills in that direction. The way our mind has developed makes it harder—but I think if we succeed, more fluid.
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into.
Since being a teen, I have done a lot of self-introspection. Meditation looked suspicious to me for a long time. I knew about its benefits though the same is said about religion. I was delighted to find a non-dogmatic introduction on LessWrong though I’m not such which one of the many under the tag meditation it was. Probably one by Kaj. I tried the breathing exercise, and it was effortless. Same with other exercises. I had trouble locating emotions in the body and was skeptical, guessing it being illusory (same trouble Duncan has). I attended a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat two years ago organized by an LWer and billed as non-dogmatic and open to individual needs. It worked out incredibly well. The teacher (Julia Harfensteller) provided a lot of exercises and cues from multiple directions. The resolution of my introspection increased immensely. At the end, I gained access to my emotions—previously, they had been so well-regulated subconsciously as to be almost invisible. In the weeks after, I went thru big parts of The Mind Illuminated (see e.g. here).
Things I did:
Breathing meditation (decompose the sensations of the breath)
Noticing beginnings and ends of thoughts down to pre-thoughts.
Noticing bodily sensations, itches, bodily posture with high resolution.
Noticing and naming emotions and noticing bodily correlates.
Regulating emotions up and down e.g joy.
Tuning brain modules up and down, e.g. awareness of physical space, social space, senses, thoughts.
Fun mental experiments like running two though trains in parallel (or rather interleaved).
Deconstruct consciousness.
When I write decompose or deconstruct, I mean it in a sense that includes an intuition like in math when you can solve equations without thinking because your practice has pushed most of the work into the subconscious (System 1 if you want) and made it automatic, effortless.
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech
I overlooked the obvious, yes, I do that too, of course. However, less of the rehearsing speech part, and more of looking for concrete words for concepts in the moment. I do believe I would improve the fluidity of my speech by rehearsing, I’m not sure that kind of practice is aligned with my values.
Most of your meditation description sounds fascinating, it seems mostly like practicing the skill I already have to strengthen the connection between direct sensations and conscious attention. The only parts that I’ve never consciously done before are regulating emotions up, and paying attention in general while in emotional states.
I still find backtracking through thoughts difficult, and am not completely successful. I think the way I practice is not particularly effective, but I would like to improve.
I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to a meditation retreat, I’d have to re-evaluate quite a few things to consider actually going.
a lot of time in one large chunk to improve the mind (introspect, meditate, or something). As with programming some things you can only do if you go deeper and deeper in one run (extreme maker schedule).
tight feedback loops with the teacher and other practitioners hopefully at about the same level.
Both interrelate. But with your specific profile and experience level, I think it will be difficult to find a suitable retreat. It might work better to work closely with a meditation practitioner that you click with.
I personally see an inner monologue as as much of a tool as any other part of my brain. The inner monologue, as a tight coupling of auditory and linguistic processing, is rather helpful for performing some kinds of thought, for extending working memory (the auditory loop is an extremely easy place to store small amounts of nearly arbitrary data in the immediate term, and you can abuse your language processing to store moderate amounts of linguistic data in the short term as long as you’re able to retrace a path of thought through it).
I do find that I don’t have a constantly running narrative of my thoughts and what I’m doing, even if I remember having one in the past. I still use internal monologue to trigger parts of my brain for things like planning, or for enhancing myself in some task as described in the earlier paragraph, but most of the time my inner monologue is inactive.
I do agree with Keep Your Identity Small, I seem to have been doing that, or something very similar, automatically from a certain point in my mid teens. This does have a side effect that I never really feel like part of most groups, which is both good and bad, as it allows me to exit groups or communities easily, and for example, permanently ‘shed’ online identities that I decide I can’t use anymore for whatever reason (like sharing too much info that’s reasonably correlatable to another identity or real life).
I’m curious what kinds of meditation you’ve looked into. My go-to form of meditation is focusing attention on my body, in any position, with or without muscle relaxation or increasing blood flow.
Same.
Or for recalling previous conversations or rehearsing speech (though that also falls under extended working memory).
Same here. And that, together with what you wrote earlier (“I don’t think I can model people”), leads to less of a felt connection to other people—in both directions: It makes us harder to model.
It is why I have tried to pick up skills in that direction. The way our mind has developed makes it harder—but I think if we succeed, more fluid.
Since being a teen, I have done a lot of self-introspection. Meditation looked suspicious to me for a long time. I knew about its benefits though the same is said about religion. I was delighted to find a non-dogmatic introduction on LessWrong though I’m not such which one of the many under the tag meditation it was. Probably one by Kaj. I tried the breathing exercise, and it was effortless. Same with other exercises. I had trouble locating emotions in the body and was skeptical, guessing it being illusory (same trouble Duncan has). I attended a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat two years ago organized by an LWer and billed as non-dogmatic and open to individual needs. It worked out incredibly well. The teacher (Julia Harfensteller) provided a lot of exercises and cues from multiple directions. The resolution of my introspection increased immensely. At the end, I gained access to my emotions—previously, they had been so well-regulated subconsciously as to be almost invisible. In the weeks after, I went thru big parts of The Mind Illuminated (see e.g. here).
Things I did:
Breathing meditation (decompose the sensations of the breath)
Decomposing visual perception (‘unseeing’ shapes, forms, motions, faces)
Noticing beginnings and ends of thoughts down to pre-thoughts.
Noticing bodily sensations, itches, bodily posture with high resolution.
Noticing and naming emotions and noticing bodily correlates.
Regulating emotions up and down e.g joy.
Tuning brain modules up and down, e.g. awareness of physical space, social space, senses, thoughts.
Fun mental experiments like running two though trains in parallel (or rather interleaved).
Deconstruct consciousness.
When I write decompose or deconstruct, I mean it in a sense that includes an intuition like in math when you can solve equations without thinking because your practice has pushed most of the work into the subconscious (System 1 if you want) and made it automatic, effortless.
I overlooked the obvious, yes, I do that too, of course. However, less of the rehearsing speech part, and more of looking for concrete words for concepts in the moment. I do believe I would improve the fluidity of my speech by rehearsing, I’m not sure that kind of practice is aligned with my values.
Most of your meditation description sounds fascinating, it seems mostly like practicing the skill I already have to strengthen the connection between direct sensations and conscious attention. The only parts that I’ve never consciously done before are regulating emotions up, and paying attention in general while in emotional states.
I still find backtracking through thoughts difficult, and am not completely successful. I think the way I practice is not particularly effective, but I would like to improve.
I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to a meditation retreat, I’d have to re-evaluate quite a few things to consider actually going.
I think the two big advantages of a retreat are
a lot of time in one large chunk to improve the mind (introspect, meditate, or something). As with programming some things you can only do if you go deeper and deeper in one run (extreme maker schedule).
tight feedback loops with the teacher and other practitioners hopefully at about the same level.
Both interrelate. But with your specific profile and experience level, I think it will be difficult to find a suitable retreat. It might work better to work closely with a meditation practitioner that you click with.