Several weeks ago, I bought myself a nice little gadget, the Muse S brain sensing headband, which is a consumer-grade EEG device for sleep tracking and neurofeedback. I use it predominantly for recording my brain waves during unguided meditation so that I can play around with the resulting EEG data. Being the overzealous data scientist that I am, I quickly (and likely prematurely in terms of data volume) jumped into all sorts of statistical tests and time-series analyses, partly reproducing, … [Read more...]
The Detriment of Self-Knowledge
Imagine you have a few pieces of wood and you want to build a chair. Once you have a plan of how to construct the chair, you must gather certain truths about your pieces of wood. So, for example, you measure their sizes. This gives you quantitative facts that will be useful for cutting the pieces properly. Once you've built the chair, and it doesn't wobble, you have no more use for these facts. You can and likely will forget them. This is how we should handle the truth in general: gather … [Read more...]
What Is Reality? Science Vs. Spirituality
For a useful working concept, we can define reality as that which is qualitatively experienced by an aware mind and quantitatively modeled by science. Accordingly, we can describe reality as a spectrum that spans in two directions: one way into the more abstract, quantitative, and objective; the other way into the more concrete, qualitative, and subjective. At the one extreme, we have pure mathematics and a conceptualization of the world as a mathematical object—perhaps an intricate quantum … [Read more...]
How Are Individuality and Creativity Possible?
If your will—what you want—is determined by what you have learned through your environmental, parental, and sociocultural conditioning in conjunction with mimetic processes, then how is individuality possible? For one thing, all the learned contents, coming from an innumerable amount of different sources, are intermingled in a way that is perfectly unique to you: it is your personal learning history, which, in addition, is not linearly imposed onto you, but dynamically shaped by how you react … [Read more...]
Why You Don’t Have Your Own Will
You don't have your own will, and neither do I. Nobody has an individual will. In many posts on this blog I have assumed the opposite: that you must look within yourself in order to find out what you truly want—to find your True Will. I have now come to realize that I was constructing a mirage. In reality, your will is not some mystical individualistic force within you that demands excavation by digging into the depths of your "self." Rather, it is the dynamic result of everything you have … [Read more...]
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