Michael Pollan

I want to pick up on something you said in there about the sequencing, about how feelings often precede thoughts.

There's a great piece of research you bring up

that is research done on meditators who are asked to note when they're interrupted in their meditation by a thought.

I actually find this to be a problem with meditation for me, which is that there's a lot of meditation that is about open awareness or trying to watch things happen non-judgmentally.

But the very act of having awareness...

is very clearly changing what is happening in my brain.

So the more awareness I have, the more my brain feels slightly, or my mind feels somewhat controlled.

And the less awareness I have, the more I'm gonna get these sort of little wisps of mentation.

Well, I guess one of my deep and fundamental questions about being a human being is why I attend to what I attend to.

If I could go and talk to the algorithm in my mind in the way that increasingly you can go tell Claude how it is you want Claude to act, I would change the algorithm.

I would worry less about interpersonal conflict in my life.

I would spend a lot less time thinking about whether or not people are mad at me.

But there is some process by which I hate the term global workspace theory as a description of what is going on in the mind.

It's so bloodless and built on personal computers in 1998.

Yeah.

But that idea that things are competing...

And somehow or another, some part of my mind is running some kind of process to decide what comes into the spotlight of attention.

And if it's really shocking, there's a car accident next to me or... Yeah, there's shortcuts.

Yeah, like all of a sudden it'll move me there entirely.

But moment to moment, there's some kind of competition and what comes up...