I have walked and run regularly in these woods over the past ten months but the snow made familiar paths unfamiliar. Only my knowledge of where I had been and which way I had turned gave me that sense of seeing oneself as a dot on a map that one gets when the environment is new. Instead of thinking, 'I know this path and will come out by the line of big beeches.' I was instead aware of which way I would need to turn at the next junctions to get where I wanted to go. It's queer how very different the experience was.
The constructivist theories of cognition suggest that the brain is always making predictions and most of what one 'experiences' is a kind of simulation created by the predictions. Things stand out when they do not fit with the prediction and that is when learning happens. It's also when fear and uncertainty can happen. It might be a lot more comfortable to live inside the hallucinated web of one's own predictions rather than having to forge a new path.
I was reminded of this when I sat down to meditate. With the Muse headband, the calm states of mind that it infers from my brainwaves are - I suppose - when I have my eyes closed in a quietish place and am focusing on my breath. Think about it: the predictions the brain needs to do in this situation are really limited - inhale (and what that feels like) and exhale (ditto). Of course it's pretty calm. The more I am able to inhabit the hallucination, the calmer.
Now, when I am in that calm place, the app gives me a tweety bird. This can knock you off track - the brain didn't predict that! BUT if you are in a state where somehow you are allowing for breathing and tweety birds, then the tweety birds don't knock you off track. Then what happens is that if the tweety birds stop, the old brain gets its knickers in a twist and it's rather tricky to persuade it to allow for breathing with or without tweety birds. The brain has to be like Schrodinger's Cat... kind of... in predicting p and not-p at the same time.
If you can master the brain being willing to predict both p and not-p... well, that's way cool... you wouldn't be put out by anything. The question is, could you still learn in this state? If the brain isn't excited, if it is just accepting what's thrown at it, then.... does it cease to create a world mapped onto reality or does it create a world more accurately mapped onto reality?
Of course, what's really difficult here - well, one of the things - is this: WHO is persuading the brain to accept p and not-p? That suggests that I and my brain are discrete. But we're not. We could differentiate these things by saying my 'will' attempts to focus' my awareness' and my 'thoughts' seek to encourage my 'prediction faculty' to accept p and not-p. I'm not sure this helps.
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