Called one of the most influential psychologists of our time, Daniel Kahneman has been appearing in articles from Freakonomics – yes because of a recently released book, Thinking Fast and Slow - and here’s an example:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/28/daniel-kahneman-answers-your-questions/

Q. You recommend the use of checklists in business decision-making to counteract a number of the most common biases – confirmation bias, anchoring, etc. I would like to know what you think of the argument that framing bias (and the associated narrow targets) has an even greater impact – for example, framing strategy as being about beating competitors (with potentially misleading analogies from chess, football, judo etc. used as a guide) or framing the focus of marketing as being on branding (thereby encouraging an inside-out perspective) rather than customers (which would encourage a more outside-in approach), even the focus on shareholder value (rather than broader stakeholder value) which has been linked to short-termism that ultimately isn’t in shareholders best interests? -Jack Springman

A. You are absolutely right – or at least I agree with you! Appropriate framing of the problem that is to be solved is essential to everything that follows. And it is certainly the case that a bad frame of the problem will lead to bad decisions. We may not have emphasized this point sufficiently in the checklist we proposed in the Harvard Business Review earlier this year.

In my own work with self-development and the enlightenment culture technologies I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and observing the behavior of “selves” – the organizing structures in the brain mind that make us behave in the ways we recognize as human and ‘conscious’. I think Kanhemans model of the experiencing vs the remembering selves was both useful, and that it is very instructive when applied to the enlightenment tradition’s models.

He talks about this a bit in this excellent TED video – so, take the time to watch it if you have an interest in the nature of the self, the “ego” as it’s commonly (and typically pejorativly) called in moden ET (enlightenment traditions) ulture, then the minutes you spend watching this video should seem worthwhile – that is, your remembering self will store a story about them being worthwhile which you will occassionaly recall.

Here is a transcript of a relevant part for those who read faster than they watch:

Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you can ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don’t leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It’s the finite resource that we’re spending while we’re on this earth. And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.

So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they’re really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That’s not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.

Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that’s the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn’t need.

(This article on Daniel Kahneman will be continued…)

So – if we are software, then all kinds of interesting things become possible, is I suppose the takeaway from this piece. It does still posit something outside, tinkering with what’s inside.

Inherently unsatisfying or supremely satisfying, depending on your favorite imprinted storylines.

How to Build a Computer Model of God

Can Souls Exist Without a Physical Component?

I normally hate it when people use Physics principles or Mathematical theorems to justify something unrelated and not intended. That said, my thought process started with the wonders of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. It says, in a nutshell:

Any sufficiently complex mathematical system will contain truths which cannot be proved using that same system.

It is much more complex than that of course, but it basically means that, at least in Math, some truths will always be out of grasp in the current system. What if the system we live in – Earth – has similar properties? Of course, moving from a Math system to life is a bit of a stretch. Instead, I thought, could I build a real life computer system which has these properties??

…

To achieve this, I introduce a new function to the Hypervisor. This new function allows the system to look at any process running in a virtual machine by accessing (reading) a given memory location. In this way, the Hypervisor can view any processes state that it wishes. It may also store a copy of that state to disk without notifying or having the virtual machine environment have any evidence that it is happening. When a process dies, the Hypervisor can save the state of the process to disk, and still 100% of virtual machine resources are given back to the system. No evidence of this saving is left behind for the virtual machine to notice, since all of it happened outside the virtual machines scope and view.

It is now a simple matter for the Hypervisor to do some interesting things with the saved process states. It could, for instance, reincarnate the saved process into a new process in the same virtual machine by copying the saved contents into a new process, or perhaps only certain segments of the saved process state. It could also take the saved process state and insert it into a new process in other virtual machines, which could be completely different operating environments than the one the process originated in. In this way, the Hypervisor could approximate a process flowing through states of reincarnation or travel from Earth to Heaven or Hell, all without leaving a trace in the original environment.

I attended a lecture given by Richard M Doyle - ”Stairway to Eleusis – the EXEGESIS exegesis and the dharma of Philip K Dick” – as I understood it, he was part of a team of researchers who had the opportunity to go over the infamous and near mythical 9000 page book written by PKD as a consequence of his also infamous schizophrenic break/enlightenment/religious experience.

For those unfamiliar with teh story, R Crumb’s also infamous comic is about the best way I know of to fill in the backstory.

Robert Crumb – The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick

The result of this team study of the file boxes containing the folders of the huge largely handwritten Exegesis document is a book about to be released, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick - making about a tenth of the original document available for study.

A lot of people who have, either thru luck, or practices, or trauma, or other methods, entered one of the many types of “enlightenment” experience will recognize Philip K Dick’s description of one of the characteristic effects of such experiences – the sense of a vast, unending flow of information, suddenly accessible, and often overwhelming. Whatever this experience is, whatever it means, it is common, and has been described thousands of times in the large body of esoteric literature and stories.

I’ve had the experience myself, quite a few times, at many levels of intensity. I’ve had it often enough to know, for instance, that the experience “contains” information and stories that are probably garbage, or at least not true in any human sens eo fthe word true, even tho they are sometimes strikingly “pretty”, ornate, and beautiful and evocative as stories.

I’ve had the experiences often enough that I have had to create a keyphrase for one of the special problems that these experiences raise for we explorers. I call it “the First Content Problem”.

The First Content Problem is this – what is the source of the vast, seemingly endless streams of content that seem to erupt from somewhere and flood the mind during certain types of consciousness and ‘special experience’? If it is coming from somewhere – Where? What? How? If it is being created by the brain and imagination ‘on the fly’, what the hell is doing it? How is such a massive amount  of mental stuff  made (or drawn, constructed, written – whatever verb applies)?

It’s hard to model out how one could actually study the ‘first content problem’ – how do you measure an inner experience. As I mentioned, I’ve tried a few experiments – a bit like trying to put a bucket in the wild rushing river of information, then look to see if what I caught in the bucket made sense. The results were not satisfying to me – I felt unsure if I was looking at gobbledegook or something real seen from an unfamiliar angle.

The brain and mind does seem to extract or build stories or narrative fragments sp0ntaneously “out of” the sensation of the flood of information – but the stories are also pretty clearly fictions when examined closely. Look at PKD’s narratives as described in the R Crumb comic as an example – some of his story constructions are pretty clearly paranoiac, whereas if you are doing your practices right, you hope at least lol, your story constructions will be metanoiac – but they are still story constructions, fictions and metaphors and allusions , and as you look closely at them the gaps, the places where the story breaks down and it’s fictionality is revealed, will become glaringly obvious.

So, what is this process of creating these “holy stories’, these metanoias? Why does it happen? What is it about that experience of vast and endless streams of information flooding thru the mind that causes us to spontaneously write the “holy stories”, to create mythology?

If anybody else comes along and reads this who is also curious about this, I invite you to suggest ideas for studying this “first content problem”.