Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

Social influence can cause you to impose pseudo-values on top of your deepest intrinsic values.22 It can bring about horrifying behaviors, and the unreflective individual will be ignorant to the source of his resulting self-hatred.

After enough life experience, you accumulate enough value intuitions to be able to find patterns within them. It is the ongoing task of each person to observe her value intuitions and synthesize her own values into a coherent system. In order to create a refined value system, you will need to sit down and map out your intuitions. Create a document, ideally a highly editable one so you can easily rearrange what you write down. Create a list of people you deeply admire. These can be people in your life, ancient historical figures, or even strangers you have only briefly observed. You do not have to admire everything about these people.

You should never have total confidence in the value system you have constructed. This map represents an ever-evolving and improving draft.

To get the most out of this value system you can anthropomorphize it as your ideal self. Your ideal self is a conglomerate of your highest value intuitions and admired qualities.26 And this ideal is the north star in your psychitectural journey.

Your ultimate goal, of course, will be to diminish the gap between your actual self and your ideal self to the highest degree possible. In order to do this, you need to develop a more coherent and comprehensive view of your actual self and integrate your experiences, character traits, values, and drives into a unified whole. And this ideal will serve a crucial guiding role in proper goal-setting.

Keep a log of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as the real-world events that seem to trigger them. Try to notice the relationships and chains between them.

Your ideal self is a conglomerate of your highest value intuitions and admired qualities, and this ideal is the north star in your psychitectural journey.

The ultimate goal of psychitecture is to diminish the gap between your actual self and your ideal self to the highest degree possible.

In the previous two chapters, we have looked at the methods for developing rationality and self-awareness. This chapter is about how these two qualities come together to form wisdom.

Wisdom is practical insight - knowing what is good for you - strategic self-interest. Wisdom is about taking the most rational and insightful beliefs and forming goals based on them.

Our culture is highly goal-oriented in that it advocates setting and pursuing goals as effectively as possible. But it places much less emphasis on ensuring that one is setting the right goals.

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 th...

The special thing about the western narrative is that every industry which can make itself vaguely relevant is fighting for a piece of it.

Just as our culture builds onto our genes and creates new decoys to well-being, our economic system builds onto culture and introduces more diversions still. Businesses capitalize on the great tourist traps of life - the things which are presented as highly desirable by culture and industry, but are not necessarily good deals at all. And in order to sell these fantasies, they have to find ways to shape culture to tell us what it means to be “successful.”3

As you can imagine, the interactions of our goals can form hierarchies far more complex than we could visualize, but we can capture the basic idea.

None of us like the idea of having incoherent goals - of spending our entire lives working toward things that don’t matter, even to us. We would prefer to have goals which make sense and connect together in a coherent fashion. Fortunately, goal construction is like breathing - it happens automatically by default, but can also be done reflectively and coherently.

There has been a long-standing debate on the relationship between reason and the passions, a term which generally combines emotions and desires. Plato argued that reason was like a charioteer, and the irrational impulses and emotions were the horses which pulled in often conflicting directions.

For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. The biochemical system rewards actions conducive to survival and reproduction with pleasant sensations. But these are only an ephemeral sales gimmick. - Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus

During a trip to South America, I was once struck by how frequently the word “quiero” appears in Spanish music. “Quiero” means “I want,” and I would guess that the phrase “I want” is no less common in American music. Television, film, and music all reinforce the idea that we should get what we want. That our desires are valid and there is something wrong if they are not satisfied.

Desires don’t point to happiness, and their gratification is no more likely to result in it than their denial.

We are built not to notice how little our actual emotional satisfaction corresponds to the objects of our desires.

You may have heard of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is strongly connected with desire and pleasure. Dopamine is a major part of the brain's reward system, so it is understandable to assume that it is the reward. It is popularly referred to as the pleasure chemical, after all. But this view is incorrect. Dopamine is the primary chemical behind desire and anticipation, but it isn't the pleasure chemical - it is better understood as the promise chemical.16

Around the 6th-century BCE, a man known as Siddhartha Gautama left a life of luxury to seek enlightenment. After apparent success, The Buddha, as he was thereafter known, began teaching and disseminating his path to liberation.21 Siddhārtha taught that ordinary human life is inherently characterized by something called dukkha, or “unsatisfactoriness.”

But the Buddha argued that unsatisfactoriness was built into the very structure of desire. When it comes to satisfying our cravings, the pleasure we experience and the pain that comes later are inextricably tied together. Not only are many of the things for which we long impermanent, but even permanent achievements do not result in permanent satisfaction.

We are built with a very clever mechanism which causes us to become quickly dissatisfied with our achievements and possessions and begin to look for ways to get even more (hedonic adaptation).

In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright outlines a basic principle of Buddhism: Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact 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.

So yes, loss or failure to attain desired outcomes results in very real spikes of pain. And success at attaining desired outcomes results in short spikes of pleasure, but this pleasure quickly turns to pain when we lose what we previously gained. And even when we manage to attain semi-permanent achievements, we quickly adapt to our success, and the failure to live up to our new expectations results in more pain.

But the real essence of dukkha is not that life is suffering, as it has been interpreted before. It is that we are not built to reap real satisfaction from the attainment of our desired goals, but we are built not to notice this fact.

Most of us don’t consider our lives to be all pain. Many of us do feel relatively satisfied with our lives. Hence Gilbert’s book title, Stumbling on Happiness. We have to stumble onto happiness because our well-being fluctuates independently of desire gratification. We aren’t just bad predictors. We’re operating...

In order to attain genuine fulfillment, we have to learn to quit trusting our wants as valid indicators of ...

Setting Defined Goals Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly. It is impossible to put the pieces together if you do not have in your head the idea of the whole… The bowman must first know what he is aiming at: then he has to prepare hand, bow, bowstring, arrow and his drill to that end. Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target. No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbour.

The second type of goal archetype is called the defined goal hierarchy.

See path-goal theory of leadership

The defined goal hierarchy is constructed through a top-down determination in which our reflective mind calls the shots. It is developed consciously and shaped to be coherent, unified, and purposeful. The symbol at the top represents the preponderance of your values, and in this case, those ideals are the determinants of all other goals. Your goal hierarchy probably isn’t adequately represented by either of these archetypes. It probably looks more like this:

Value intuitions and desires can be easily confused. Both could be described as preferences of an affective nature, but they are different in meaningful ways. When you reflect on your values, you don't feel a sense of craving, a motivational force pulling you toward them. They are always there, but unlike desires, they allow you to neglect them if you choose. Desires are the screams you can't ignore, but values are the whispers it is often hard to notice.

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.

Our goals are informed by both our values and cognitive rationality. We determine the best ends in our lives by introspecting and consulting our values. And we determine the best means by developing the most accurate views about the world possible and using reason to strategize. These two capacities come together to form wisdom. Meaning if you harbor biases distorting either your rational understanding or introspective inquiry, your goals will be distorted as well. This makes the process of eliminating arbitrary goals and constructing wise ones in their place a complex but crucial psychitectural pursuit.

Maybe the desire for revenge leads you to react to an act of aggression with vengeance, and it only causes you guilt. Maybe a passionate affair doesn’t leave you feeling more satisfied with your life after it has run its course. What makes wise people wise is that they notice this, and they change their goals in the future.

The wise have carefully observed and learned of the pitfalls of emotional prediction. They have developed an understanding of their own well-being trajectory. They have learned, from their own experience, that of others, or reflection, that the thing which seems like the best idea can be illusory. They are perceptive into their own well-being, and are not only able to observe these intuitions, but able to synthesize them into “rules” to guide their behavior when similar patterns emerge in the future. They have identified counter-intuitive practical truths, and crucially, make the decision to listen to them rather than making the same mistakes when they know better.

As you adjust and refine your cognitive algorithms, you elevate your degree of cognitive self-mastery. You free yourself from the confused life which culture prescribes for you, and you set your course for a truly fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding life in alignment with the vision of your ideal self.

According to James Gross, one of the leading researchers in emotion regulation, there are five ways that people effectively control their feelings. The first three are quite obvious: we can choose the situations we enter (situation selection), change those situations once we are in them (situation modification), or choose only to pay attention to the things which make us feel the way we want to feel (attentional deployment). The fifth one is pretty straightforward as well: We can try to change our emotional response by listening to some music, getting drunk, or just getting some much needed sleep (response modulation). The fourth method, and the one we are most interested in here, is called cognitive change. In other words, we can make changes in our minds, perfectly healthy changes I might add, which allow us to determine our emotional experience from within.

No, you will never have perfect, one-hundred percent control over your emotions.8 But you can develop a truly surprising and increasing amount of control by mastering a few powerful psychotechnologies. This is not some esoteric, dark art that takes a lifetime to learn, nor is there anything fundamentally mystical or spiritual about it. You can learn how to make the changes in your mind which will allow you to take control of your emotions and feel the way you would like to feel more and more of the time.

The Principle of Cognitive Mediation 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. - Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

The ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium in the 3rd-century BCE, and its ideas were further developed by later philosophers including the Greek slave Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.15 Stoicism advocated for seeking satisfaction in life, not through the satisfaction of one’s appetites, but through their relinquishment. Unlike the Epicureans, the Stoics rejected pleasure altogether, and thought that emotions and desires were pathological.

Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and in a word, everything which is not our own doing. Things in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammeled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hindrance, dependent on others. - Epictetus, Enchiridion

See twitter thread on prestige

The ideal Stoic would refrain from any qualitative judgment of an event or circumstance and view it with total objectivity. Everything from good fortune, to insult, to our closest relationships should all be viewed with indifference.

Though seemingly harsh, there are some aspects of the Stoic philosophy which have proven to be powerful antidotes to suffering, and which have even influenced modern therapy.18 The Stoics were some of the first to point out that our environmental stimuli seem not to have direct control over our emotional experience, and that our thoughts must be complicit in any emotional reaction.

Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. - Epictetus, Enchiridion

This perspective was reexamined in the late 20th-century and has come to represent a core principle of our current psychological understanding. The idea that our cognitions mediate our emotions is critical for explaining the variation of emotional responses we observe among individuals. This cognitive model is the foundational premise underlying the most effective therapeutic method ever devised, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Aaron Beck is known as the father of cognitive therapy, which in conjunction with Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy, led to the development of modern CBT. Beck observed that all of the main psychotherapeutic methods of his day, from the psychoanalytic to the behavioral, shared the assumption that neuroses arise through impenetrable forces outside of the individual’s awareness or control.

Let us conjecture, for the moment, that a person’s consciousness contains elements that are responsible for the emotional upsets and blurred thinking that lead him to seek help. Moreover, let us suppose that the patient has at his disposal various rational techniques he can use, with proper instruction, to deal with these disturbing elements in his consciousness. - Aaron Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders