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The most powerful way to improve the brain at this point in history is through its software: Through your thoughts and actions.
We can modify and optimize the individual functions, features, and flaws of our minds a la carte, and this process, when practiced over time, can lead to the algorithmic enlightenment I’m proposing.
Neuroplasticity gives us the ability to gradually improve at things through consistent and sustained effort, and mastery is a relative term which does not indicate that one can reach a point at which no further progress can be made. By becoming intimately aware of the mistakes that we would like to relinquish - by working out the disadvantageous habits and building advantageous ones, we can develop the ability to increasingly determine our own subjective experience.
The mind’s software can be understood as a system of interconnected and interacting behaviors and tendencies. This system determines who you are and how you live your life. And when delusion, distortion, or tampering affect parts of it, the resulting problems can corrupt the entire operating system. But making improvements can have a chain reaction as well, and we will look at the mechanisms for consciously embedding positive functions and programming out the undesirable functions.
Have an unwavering will for executing whichever actions were judged to be the best.
Our goal is not freedom from the algorithms that make up our minds, but the autonomy to transform the algorithms which don't serve us into algorithms which do.
orient yourself toward gradual optimization.
Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.
And we will come to understand why a lack of clarity into your values will prevent you from realizing the deep well-being you are capable of attaining.
Beliefs don’t exist in isolation. They are entangled with one another, so changing one belief may threaten a large portion of the full map.
You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.
With Bayes’ Rule in your thinking toolkit, you can replace this type of algorithm with a more accurate one. To make use of Bayesian revision, or updating, you would assign a likelihood to an existing hypothesis or belief and probabilities to reflect those likelihoods. When you come across new evidence, you try to determine how much this new information should alter your confidence.
(attribute substitution).
(just-world hypothesis).
fundamental
The strength of a person’s spirit [can be] measured by how much truth he could tolerate… to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened.
And by questioning all of your beliefs and assumptions, you can inoculate yourself against the pain and confusion of facing the facts, and your worldview can become more and more robust.
evidence suggests it is surprisingly easy to be delusional about our own self-interest.
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The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with yourself.
Believing you are not the creative type will prevent you from taking on creative projects and proving yourself wrong.
If you have never engaged in deliberate introspection, self-examination, or philosophical inquiry, it can be said that none of the values with which you identify are actually your own. You initially inherited your moral framework and direction in life from those around you.
To truly be able to claim that your values belong to you, you must go through an extensive process of uprooting the relics of your early indoctrination and examining them with critical rigor.
The goals that you have set for yourself may be ones sold to you by the larger culture - ‘Make money! Own your own home! Look great!’ - and while there may be nothing wrong with striving for those things, they mask the pursuits more likely to deliver true and lasting happiness. In this case, your priority should be to discern which goals will make you happy in the long term and to follow them.
We naturally acquire beliefs about which goals are worth striving for from our culture just as we acquire beliefs about the world, and every culture has its own “success” narrative.1 This narrative assigns arbitrary milestones that deem people “successful” after they meet them. And we’ve all heard our culture’s success narrative a thousand times.
Dopamine is responsible for the anticipation of pleasure that compels us to act.
examples that our cravings, short-term or otherwise, are decoys to well-being.
transpire. This illusion, and the resulting mind-set of perpetual aspiration, makes sense as a product of natural selection, but it’s not exactly a recipe for lifelong happiness.
In order to attain genuine fulfillment, we have to learn to quit trusting our wants as valid indicators of what will genuinely satisfy us. If we could learn to ignore our desires, or better yet, use them, and understand the real mechanics of satisfaction, we could take our well-being out of the hands of chance and maximize it.
Although we all look to our emotions to determine desirable goals and evaluations, making decisions with your emotions and without reasoning is known as the affect heuristic, and results in some of the most profound mistakes humans make.
But if you look around you and see a life that looks like a cookie cutter - one that would seem to the Hamar community like blind conformity to arbitrary “success” milestones, it may be time to pause, reflect, and make use of wisdom.
The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you an immediate feeling of satisfaction but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences.
Emotions often lead us in the opposite direction of our highest goals, cause us to act in ways we later regret, and force us to suffer when there is absolutely no benefit to doing so.
The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.
(response modulation).
I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.
My students and I have found that truly happy individuals construe life events and daily situations in ways that seem to maintain their happiness, while unhappy individuals construe experiences in ways that seem to reinforce unhappiness.
Cognitive restructuring is the fundamental tool of emotional psychitecture, and psychological research has found it to be highly effective for eliminating negative emotional responses.
In order to choose long-term well-being, we have to resist the urge to indulge in our own pain.
quash desire-based emotional friction.
But the useful purpose of asceticism is to down-regulate a perpetual desire for anything extrinsic. By utilizing this practice, you can break dependencies and make yourself more emotionally robust. Simply choose something on which you feel you are overly reliant, and intentionally limit or sacrifice the gratification of the associated desire. Though it may feel like self-punishment, minor and temporary acts of self-denial can be fully grounded in self-compassion.
The idealization of suffering by both philosophers and popular culture has done a great disservice to people by normalizing and perpetuating experiences that would be better left behind.
Emotions exist for the purpose of triggering adaptive behaviors.
Our emotions should only be considered useful to us insofar as they serve our personal goals.
If you can program your software to remember the futility of worry as soon as it arises, you can gradually eliminate it from your emotional vocabulary.
Self-control, or self-regulation, is the peak of the behavioral realm, and represents the final piece of the puzzle of self-mastery.
behavioral self-regulation deserves to be regarded among the highest of human strengths.
It should be understood at this point that our ancestral, genetic programming can be a great hindrance to well-being, and these problems are often amplified in modern society.
They provide us with new temptations that make it harder for us to make deliberate decisions about how we spend our time.25 The problem with the modern world is that it optimizes for our drives, not for our values.
Without cognitive self-mastery, the opinions of others deeply influence and manipulate ours. They lull us into dogmatic beliefs which may or may not be accurate. And they cause us to believe certain paths in life will lead to well-being when all they lead to is monotony.
