I’ve been redoing an introductory meditation course with a friend via the app Waking Up, where Sam Harris teaches mindfulness meditation. Despite starting meditation two and a half years ago, I find that it’s always nice to go back to the start with this kind of practice and I’ve found the Waking Up intro course to be the best one so far (compared to Calm, Headspace, Insight Timer, Sattva, and others). In one of the introductory course episodes, Sam talks about “expanding the sphere of consciousness”. He didn’t expand much on that exact combination of words, but it gave me a nice visual and a train of thought that I wanted to write about.

One of the goals of meditation, from what I’ve learned so far, is to dissolve the barrier between self and world, and to recognize that that there is no meaning to creating a distinction between your body, your head, your thoughts, the sounds you hear, the sounds that arise, the smells that permeate the air you breathe, the feeling of grass on your feet, and the grass itself. This is sometimes referred to as losing the duality of subject/object, and different meditation teachers have different approaches to this teaching. Sam Harris often approaches this by asking the the meditator to “look for the one who is looking”, which I’ve always found very difficult. To me, that statement brings me out of the meditation and into defense mode—”He’s here! He’s right here behind my eyes and inside my head!” This, of course, misses the point.

So when he mentioned “expanding the sphere of consciousness”, some imagery helped me to help think about vision and understand what he was getting at. Most people have the sense that they’re seeing from a spot just behind their eyes, in the center of their heads. Sam uses the idea of “looking for the one who is looking” to ask you where you’re seeing from, and to help you notice that you can’t see the seer in your visual field, you can’t observe the observer with your eyes. So it must not only be the visual field that is causing this sensation, this sensation that we feel that we can see… so what else is there?

If you were to look at a water bottle on a table, you would say you’re seeing the water bottle (which is “over there”) from inside your head (which is “here”). Imagine zooming out to look at the spot inside your head where the “seeing” originates from—for me, that means “looking” at it from a spot farther back in my head, inside my skull but toward the back and top of my head. To use the water bottle analogy, the water bottle is the place from which you originally feel you’re seeing (over “there”) and the spot you’re focusing from is somewhere farther back (the new “here”).

Think of the initial spot from which you feel that you’re seeing as a tiny sphere. This sphere is where, intuitively, you might feel that consciousness is held. You couldn’t see the sphere if you were contained entirely within it, so pulling back your gaze to a spot farther back in your head allows you to see the sphere from the outside. But… if the sphere is consciousness, and you’re aware of it, then you must be aware from somewhere, and that is clearly in consciousness too. So it seems to me that the sphere of consciousness is simply expanding to include both of those points—the point between your eyes which you originally thought was the center of consciousness, and this new spot, pulled back. Now the sphere might encompass all of the inside of your head.

If you’ve done a mindfulness meditation practice, you’ve likely been asked to focus on the breath and where you feel it in your body. So the sphere of consciousness must at least include the chest or abdomen where you feel the breath. A body scan will show you that the sphere can expand to include the whole body.

Sounds that you hear are also appearing in consciousness. They’re not produced at your ear, your ear simply receives them from somewhere else. So the sphere of consciousness must include the source of the sound—maybe it’s someone talking in the other room, or the sound of a truck backing up outside.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

I found this an interesting visual—the sphere grows as soon as you notice other things being captured by it in consciousness. In another meditation practice called metta (or loving-kindness), the meditator is often asked to focus on another person to send them kind words or thoughts. You may wish them success on an upcoming challenge, or wish them healing from trauma in the past. If this person is in your consciousness, and their future success or past trauma are in your consciousness, it seems to me that consciousness must encompass those things—it does not have clear spatial bounds, nor does it have temporal bounds.

There are several other ways to think about losing this subject/object duality and reaching the point where you feel like consciousness is not limited to living inside your head. One way, according to Richard Lang, is to remove the head from the equation entirely! His philosophy, called the Headless Way (described on his very old looking site, sorry Richard), proposes a series of experiments and meditations to help with this imagery. Surely others have other ways of doing this, and I’ll keep exploring them as I continue to learn and meditate.

Another larger goal of this practice that is extremely closely tied to subject/object duality is the loss of the feeling of “self” entirely. It’s the recognition that there is no “self” that is controlling consciousness. All that exists are the contents of consciousness—the feelings, sensations, and even the thoughts that arise—do so without a conscious controller to initiate them. This line of inquiry could be another blog post on its own (or, you know, thousands of years of philosophy and mediation along with several PhDs), so I’ll leave it be for now. It’s clear however that these two concepts—subject/object duality and the loss of self—are inextricably linked.

The subject/object duality usually precedes the loss-of-self experiences that experienced meditators often achieve. I believe that in both cases, an understanding of these concepts can help us to feel more conscious of others, more connected to one another, more connected to our environment, and more connected to the world in which we live.

With all of the changes taking place in light of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s been pretty incredible to see the enormous capacity for good that humans can display. Free food distribution from restaurants, people volunteering to pick up food and essentials for others, free online workout classes, doctors and nurses putting themselves at risk and working days on end to help, etc. This has been incredible to watch, and I’m pretty proud of humanity—this is one of the rare times you’ll hear me say that. And of course, I don’t need to provide examples to show that we humans also have the capacity for terrible evil and wrongdoing.

I was listening to a conversation between Tim Ferriss and the Buddhist monk / clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield and wanted to share something from the podcast. One of Jack’s Buddhist teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, talked about the wide range of human capacities using a metaphor of seeds. (The following is paraphrased from Jack in the podcast). Within every human is the capacity for doubt, anger, and anxiety. But within us is also courage, compassion, and peace. It’s very easy to give in to the pressure and to water the seeds of doubt and anxiety.

If, instead, you water the seeds of compassion and peace in light of this situation, those seeds will grow into towering trees that sway in the winds of change but never become uprooted.

The displays of compassion and generosity we’ve seen in this pandemic show us not only that we have the capacity to do good, but also that how you deal with this situation is up to you. This is a wonderful time to practice responding to adversity, choosing your priorities, and choosing what kind of energy you want to put out into the world and to those around you (virtually, I hope).

Which seeds will you choose to water during these trying times?

At the gym today, I listened to a Very Bad Wizards podcast about the fear of death, and about what it would be like to live forever, and I thought I’d share some thoughts. It’s a podcast that I absolutely love, with philosopher Tamler Sommers and psychologist David Pizarro, although sometimes you’d think their educations were reversed.

I’m going to present a few hypothetical lifespan cases, and I’m curious to hear which one you would choose and why:

• Live forever
• Drink a magical elixir that keeps you alive every day, but if you decide not to drink it you die
• Live 300 years, assuming you age proportional to your years, so a 299 year old would look like a 90 year old now
• Live a normal lifespan and don’t know when you’re going to die, but assume around 75-90

In all of these hypothetical cases there’s a huge dependence on how much satisfaction you derive from living. If you don’t feel deeply satisfied with your life, and don’t believe you could become that way, then there’s no reason to think about immortality because it would be a (figurative) death sentence. This blog post isn’t meant to be about achieving satisfaction in life though, so I’ll leave you that and talk about immortality today. So, given the above options, which would you choose?

To me, living forever has some obvious problems. First of all, you would see family members and friends die time and time again. The people you become most attached to would leave, and the only way to not live in a miserable cycle of death would be to detach yourself from those people or detach yourself from the emotions that make you feel close to them. Eventually, you’d need to find fulfillment in other walks of life outside of personal connections to family and friends, and I could see that leading to a depressing and empty existence. You also run the risk of not needing to push yourself to do, well, anything. If you have forever to do it, why bother doing it now? Part of the satisfaction we get from accomplishments involves the timeliness of them, and I could see that slipping away as time becomes a non-issue for your immortal brain. Lastly (though there are probably a ton of others), you would simply get bored. I think that we try to pack in as much as possible in our short time on this earth, and that short time span drives us to become the best we can be given this restraint. Part of what fuels that exploration, curiosity and growth is the fact that we simply can’t get everything done in time, but we should certainly try.

How about drinking an elixir to keep you alive? Also what would it taste like? Would you go mad drinking the same flavour elixir every day? Is it purple? I imagine it’s purple. Anyway this option allows you to just end it when you get bored with seeing the same stuff over and over and over. Seems simple enough, and seems like a good choice. As they mention in the podcast, vampires will often retreat to their coffin for a couple hundred years just because they get bored of the scenery and want to wake up to a new world every once in a while. The hibernation option wasn’t presented here, but this choice would allow you to give up once you got what you needed from life. But the same problems about a lack of time pressure exist as in the infinite case, and I could easily see someone devolving into a boring blob of sensation-seeking meat with bigger things on the ever-retreating horizon, never actually reaching those things because they’ve got the time to do them later.

A 300 year life seems like it might not be so bad, if we ignore of course the economic, political and ecological issues that would come along with the first generation of 300-year-olds. For me, it would allow me time to learn more things, explore more of the world, learn to play cello (though I plan to do that in this short lifetime anyway!) and see more technology change throughout my life… sign me up! There are likely some issues I haven’t though of yet, so maybe just put me on the wait list for now.

The last option is the normal life-span life, which I guess we’re stuck with for now. Might as well enjoy it! …And still try to learn cello.

Here’s the link to the podcast, in case you want to explore in more depth. Just a disclaimer, in the first segment they remake classic thought experiments in philosophy using porn references and it’s absolutely hilarious.

I just finished the best book that I’ve ever read, ever. In fact, it’s more than the best book I’ve ever read… I would argue that it’s the best collection of words I’ve ever seen in any sort of literary piece ranging from novels to essays to textbooks.

The book is called The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, linguist, and evolutionary psychologist (on occasion). The contents of the book have pretty dramatically changed the way I think about the world, given me a much clearer understanding of how things work, and given me a ton of insight into the brain and its functions. It has explained to me many behaviours and many human tendencies, and given a lot of credit (and some solutions) to my worry about how the current political climate is affecting our ability to think rationally and reasonably.

The nature vs. nurture debate is a somewhat solved one, in that we all know that pretty much everything is a combination of both. The goal of Steven Pinker’s book is to argue that we rely very heavily on this idea of the blank slate, the idea that everything we do and think is programmed into us from our environment, and that relying so heavily on this very false idea leads to serious issues in policy, education, politics, legal discussions, and more. The first half of the book dispells three popular myths, then discusses how some “hot button” topics such as gender, violence, and children could look when approached through a lens of human nature. Throughout the book, he argues that an understanding of human nature is necessary to understand who we are and how we act, and that challenging socio-political topics cannot be properly answered by ignorantly blaming our environment. In fact, a better understanding of these issues which takes into account the perspective of human nature and evolutionary psychology helps us to make progress toward goals of equality, freedom, and peace.

The first of the three myths he dispells is that of the blank slate itself. The idea that our environment has more of a role than our genes do in terms of our development is false. I’d guess that (especially in the current socio-political climate) the average person would say that over 90% of our thoughts and behaviour are caused by our environment, and that intuition couldn’t be farther from the truth. The best example of the many, many studies that suggest that our genes make up at least 50% of what we consider “personality” is a series of studies with identical twins who were raised in different homes vs. adopted children who are raised in the same home. Time after time, the identical twins showed more similarities in terms of personality, mannerisms, even strange tendencies like twirling a pen when they’re nervous, when compared to the adopted children who were raised with the same parents, same parenting style, same rules, etc. It may be surprising, but you’ll understand if you read the book, which you absolutely should. Ignoring the idea that much of our personality is genetically determined can lead to dangerous decisions, and he outlines that perfectly in his book.

The second is the idea that he calls the ghost in the machine. This is the feeling that there is a “you” inside your head which consists of your conscience and tells your brain what to think, which subsequently tells your body what to do. In philosophy, this is sometimes referred to as mind-body dualism (i.e. the separation between mind and body). The “you” simply is your brain, an extremely complex computer, a circuit of connections and pathways and chemical reactions shaped by your genes and your experiences. With a proper understanding of the brain, there is no need for a soul or a separate “you” that lives inside your head, as if that ghost in your machine can manipulate your thoughts disconnected from your brain.

Lastly, he makes an extremely strong case against the idea of the noble savage. This is the somewhat popular (and completely incorrect) belief that if we didn’t have our current society (technology, capitalism, borders, governments, etc.) that we would live peacefully, like the small tribes of people who have been secluded from modern civilization for hundreds of years. The truth of the matter is that in these pre-state societes, murder rates are unfathomably high, and rape, revenge killings, and violent inter-tribe war are common. The few studies that did find these “peaceful tribes” were completely disproven shortly after their publication, yet their legacy lives on in our ignorant but hopeful minds.

Pinker goes on to talk about some what he calls “hot-button topics” and brings up some interesting, controversial, and I think extremely true things. Among the less controversial are statements like “intelligence depends upon lumping together things that share properties, so we are not flabbergasted by every new thing we see”. This is written when attacking the post-modernist idea that everything is socially constructed, including not only “race, gender, masculinity, nature, facts, reality, and the past” but now extending the list to include things like “authorship, choice, danger, dementia, illness, inequality, school success”, and more. He talks about the mental processes of conceptual categorization and explains how it works and why stereotypes are not necessarily a bad thing, provided you don’t assume that every member of a group shares all of the properties of the stereotype of that group.

 

Another example is when he talks about violence, and how we wrongly blame violent toys and violent media for turning children into violent creatures. We have always been and will always be violent, men will always be more violent than women by nature, and we should try to understand our violent nature in order to correct it and keep improving toward a world where people live happily and peacefully. Not only do we ignore some genetic predisposition toward violence by invoking the blank slate theory, but we also miss the mark in trying to fix the issues that come from it. There’s a whole chapter on this, and then another entire book called The Better Angels of Our Nature where he expands even more on the topic, though I haven’t read that book yet.

The concept of the blank slate is dangerous in a few ways, and I think this is best described by Pinker himself:

The vacuum that it [the blank slate] posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering. Its corollary, the Noble Savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of “a government of laws and not of men”. It blinds us to our cognitive and moral short-comings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions.

I highly, highly suggest you read this book. It’s sparked even more curiosity for me to dive into the world of learning about psychology, evolutionary psychology, biology, and philosophy and I think it has presented me with some very good answers. These answers are not only to questions that I hadn’t thought of before, but also intelligent answers to questions which I knew the right answer to, but didn’t know how to express the answer intelligently. This is important because a lot of things in this book can be seen as controversial, but I think many people know that the truth is sometimes not politically correct, and if you can’t defend controversial points well, it discredits the ideas that you might stand behind.

And to end with two quotes for reflection:

“… Popular ideologies may have forgotten downsides – in this case, how the notion that language, thought and emotions are social conventions creates an opening for social engineers to try to reform them.”

“The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate… is a totalitarian’s dream.”

As you might know, I’ve been reading more about philosophy and psychology recently and have been thinking of a lot of interesting questions and learning a ton of new things. Today I’d like to talk about two somewhat opposing schools of ethical thought, describe a few flaws of each, give you my opinion, and ask you some challenging questions that should make you think or make you discuss some heavy stuff with a friend or significant other.

Before diving into deontology and consequentialism, I’d like to present an important term that we should think about while reading this: moral relativism. Moral relativism is the idea that there is no universally correct set of morals, and that your moral code can differ depending on many different factors. Whether or not you believe that all moral principles are universal, some moral principles are universal, or that all moral principles are based on external factors such as environment, it’s an important term to know and think about. I’ll likely give my opinion on this in another post, but for now let’s just keep it in mind.

Deontology

Deontology is an approach to ethics which emphasizes a strong code of moral rules which are abided by no matter the consequence. Some of the most famous deontological thinkers include John Locke and Immanuel Kant, who believed that we should only make moral choices which are universally true and will always be universally true. He suggested to treat humanity “never merely as a means to an end but always at the same time as an end,” meaning that regardless of the outcome, each choice you make along the way is important and should be made in a morally correct way.

There are a couple of issues with deontological thinking; first, there are extreme cases where it breaks down. A common example used against this system of ethics is the case where a Nazi officer asks you if you’re hiding a Jew in your house, and you don’t lie about doing it because lying is seen as “wrong”. The result is, of course, a murdered Jew (which hopefully you’re against) when the lie might not have harmed anyone except your moral code.

Second, this manner of thinking only works well if there is a universal right and wrong. While a person could abide by it with their own moral code, the benefit of deontology breaks down as soon as you have conflicting moral codes. Some questions to ask yourself that might challenge deontology include: Is it wrong to kill? What if the person killed your family? What if it’s in self-defense? When is it acceptable to lie? What is the acceptable punishment for a murder?

Consequentialism

On the other side of the coin, we see consequentialism. Consequentialism is concerned with the moral worth of overall consequence of actions, not necessarily the actions themselves. Utilitarianism, made popular by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, is a good example of consequentialism; it aims to maximize outcomes for the greatest number of people, or increase happiness, without much regard for the nature of actions that make this possible. Not all consequentialists are utilitarians, but utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism.

One criticism of consequentialism is that it seems to lack empathy, or any general concern for the well-being of individuals. If people are concerned with the “greater good”, they might make decisions that go out of their way to harm others even if the net result is an increase in happiness of a larger number of people. Many people have drawn links between psychopaths and utilitarianism, whether those links are justified or not.

Another important criticism is that the “greater good” in general presupposes that there is some common thing that is undeniably “best”, similarly to the flaw in deontology. It contradicts moral relativism and assumes that one way is the right way, and that everyone should act in a way that best works to achieve this greater good. Depending on your opinions on moral relativism, this might be a downside to this philosophy.

Some Opinions

So where do I stand on this scale of deontology and consequentialism? I think that anyone who knows me could tell you that I’m more of a consequentialist and utilitarian than anything else, but I think everyone is a bit of both.

The way I see it is that we all have a moral code that we try to abide by, and we make exceptions when the consequences of adhering to our moral code are contrary to our intent in keeping that moral code. The justification of our moral code is a personal thing, but my reasons for trying to keep to my moral code include minimizing harm to others, maximizing happiness for myself and for others, treating everyone as equal, being fair in judgments, and being able to observe situations objectively, even situations that I’m involved in. Given these goals, my moral rules (things like not lying, being fair to everyone, not solving problems with violence, etc.) can bend if the consequence of adhering to that moral code is negative. The amount that those rules bend depends on the severity of the outcome, for good or for bad.

A simple example is lying: we know that it’s wrong to lie, but when telling the truth will harm someone unnecessarily and lying will not harm anyone, we choose to tell what we call a white lie. In that case, the moral rule is bent only slightly, and the outcome avoids harm and increases happiness without strongly contradicting any of my deepest moral core philosophies. On the other hand, killing a 70 year old to save a 10 year old would be hard for me to do, because while the 10 year old might have more potential in their future lives and that might be the right utilitarian / consequentialist decision, my moral code tells me pretty strongly that killing is wrong. In my opinion, on a day to day basis, doing the right thing implies doing the thing that will result in the best outcome as long as it doesn’t break your moral code and as long as it doesn’t compel anyone else to break their rules either, but of course there can be exceptions in extreme cases.

So where do you stand on this? Here are some questions you can ask yourself, and maybe ask a friend or significant other if you want some stimulating conversation:

• How much importance do you put on having a strong moral code?
• When do you bend it?
• Would you ever break some of your own moral rules?
• Is there a univeral set of morals that should apply to everyone?
• Do our morals come from evolution and millions of years of emotional development, or are they learned? Do they come from a belief or understanding of a higher power or a god? If it’s a mix, how much of an influence does each source have?
• Can a universal set of rules exist without a universal higher power?
• Do you think that outcome is more important than the steps taken to reach the outcome?
• Are the lives of any two people equal? What if one of those people is your family member?
• Can you think of a time when your moral code was tested (other than that last question)?

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I hope those questions made you think. I’ll write soon about my thoughts on moral relativism and what I call weighted utilitarianism, so keep an eye out if you’re interested!

References:

Consequentialism
Kantian Deontology
Utilitarianism
Moral Relativism
Against Consequentialism – Germain Grisez

Today, I’d like to introduce something called virtue theory, which was on of Aristotle’s ways of saying that we should be good people and happiness will follow. More specifically, virtue theory is based on the idea that nature has built into us the desire to be virtuous, and just like the innate purpose of a flower is to grow and spread its pollen and reproduce, Aristotle believed that our innate purpose can be found through virtuosity.

But what does it mean to “be virtuous”?

Virtuosity, in this case, basically means doing the right thing at the right time, treating people the right way, and knowing how to handle yourself in situations through judgment and understanding. This is, obviously, quite vague.

Let’s dig into this a little bit though… what is the “right” way to handle yourself in all situations? You would think that this could be pretty subjective. But in Aristotle’s view, there was something he called the Golden Mean, which is the midpoint between two extremes; the common example used here is the virtue of courage. A virtuous person is courageous, but in virtue theory one must sit in-between the extremes of being not courageous enough (cowardly) and being too courageous (reckless). Another example might be the midpoint between stinginess (cheapness) and prodigality (excessive spending), the virtue one would call generosity. Making millions of dollars but not helping someone who is in dire need would be cheap and cruel, while spending all of your rent money buying rounds for random people at the bar would be idiotic and irrational. Somewhere in the middle one can find the “right” generosity, giving to those in need but not spending excessively on useless things. Not that beer is useless… but you know. Not if you’re spending rent money.

But where this golden mean lies could be different in everyone’s opinion. So how does this concept help anyone? Well, understanding the virtues in the situations presented to you and being able to identify where others lie on the scale will help you to develop habits that lead you to become a virtuous person. For example, you’re at a networking event (just drawing from my experience here…) and you’re in a conversation with two people who just met each other. One person starts divulging some information about their issues in their relationship with their mother, and the other person starts being visibly uncomfortable. You can learn from this: when meeting someone new for the first time, be careful when talking about highly personal things because it might not be the right time or place for it. Through life experience and by copying those who we respect and trust, we find where our golden mean is. Extrapolating a bit from this, you could say that the entire construction of your moral compass comes from watching your parents and other influences as you approach your golden mean.

And why would you want to become virtuous? What’s the point?

Eudaimonia: nope, it’s not a deadly disease. Eudaimonia is a state of being which could be seen as the ultimate state of happiness, and sometimes is translated from Greek as “human flourishing”. Living a eudaimonistic life means that you’ll be constantly improving yourself and your way of being, but means that you will also find true happiness, according to the theory.

And why would we want that? Isn’t it easier to just live life without thinking about all this stuff? Well, yes. But that kind of life could never reach the level of satisfaction of the life of someone who practices or is at least aware of these kinds of virtues and strives to improve upon them. Also, according to Aristotle, the kind of person who tries to achieve eudaimonia is the kind of person who will do good things, help people, and make others happy. Seems to me like it’s worth thinking about, which is why I’m sharing this knowledge today.

I’ve taken a great interest in philosophy and psychology recently, and I’d like to start writing more about them. I don’t have a degree in either of those fields, but I’ve read up a lot about it and I find it useful to talk about how that learning can affect the everyday life of someone who isn’t a scholar in those subjects.

More to come!

References:
Crash Course Philosophy: Virtue Theory
Eudaimonia - Philosophy Basics
Golden Mean - Wikipedia