The analogy of man to computer has been made many times by many people. I want to look at the programs that human beings run in their minds that cause suffering and find out what can be done about it. Thinking is an experience, so these thinking apps are also experiences. These programs can be seen as trojan horses that take up brain resources, eventually crashing the computer and producing anxiety and depression. I will create an abbreviated version of this page in time, but for now, some of the writing will be thick.
App 1. Emotional selfish memory. Let your emotional memories fade if they will.
In our present, we have memory. Memory is the storage of impressions of different arrangements of objects, since physical objects change their location and make relative changes in other objects. The objects that affect us, as they move, make impressions that are maintained in the brain, and which the brain refers to in the present. The brain is always in the present, it's physical structures have been affected by the movement of other matter.
The memory of pain lengthens it, gets us into the habit of routine, trying to avoid that pain, but actually drawing us near to it every time we retrieve that memory. Memory will act in us without effort. When we apply effort to it, we are ever in dread and anxiety. So, when possible, we leave memory out of our emotional lives, let the memory of past traumas fade away effortlessly. That memory will act when it needs to, but we should not give it artificial importance and persistence and say "I will never forget X", because what you are vowing to is that you will always be miserable and we shouldn't give any person or situation that kind of power to make us miserable.
App 2: Self-focused Time. Be in the present awareness.
We know of time by memory. If we didn't have memory, we would always be in the present and would have no concept of time. Scientists are not sure if time exists or not. The universe rather appears to have multiple configurations, and we call time to be when we experience different configurations, or change. However, all configurations are one, none better or worse and the sum of all configurations are the universe. If the universe has a limited set of configurations, then time is an illusion. If it has infinite configurations, then time may be real.
Time for us, is simply memory and a concept of the future, and that concept is the past. So we become stuck in the past, the familiar, just like a rat will make his nest and return to it, and to hunting spots that have worked before. This is balanced with exploration, which often has an antidepressant effect or cause. Some persons, as the age, become fixed in limited action loops, through mental stagnation, beliefs, memories, that they are stuck reliving over and over again.
If the universe is a limited set of configurations, the present contains the past and future, so there is no need to dwell on them, but to keep focused on awareness of the present. If you have had the pain of a breakup of an important relationship, do not resist mourning it if you have the capacity to mourn it. If you don't, similarly, don't attempt to produce an artificial mourning in hopes of social conformity. If someone dies and you are not at all rattled, don't attempt to be miserable or question if you cared and bring unnecessary suffering upon yourself. However, if you mourn, remain in the present, feel it fully, observe it, and continue to observe in the present as it withers away as all feelings do. Don't say, "I will never forget," again, that is equivalent to, "I promise to always be miserable." Do not give artificial persistence to it through rumination, if you have the capacity not to. Also, don't blame oneself if you do not have the capacity. My attempt is that my words may influence you to be happier, but if they do not, it was just not meant to be so don't take on unnecessary blame if you cannot. What does not happen, could not happen.
Emotional attachment to time and memory is a trojan horse that will crash the computer of the mind. The past cannot be changed but you can take up brain resources worrying about it. The future is unknown, and likewise cannot be changed, and if you worry about what fears could happen, you can worry infinitely, there will not be enough brain resources or lifetimes to worry about all the things that will happen, and that will create an infinity loop that will take up all brain resources and crash the computer, creating anxiety, depression. So, be in the present, the past if over, the future is unknown, all you ever have is the present. Also, affective forecasting as it is called in psychology, that is, prediction about how we will feel in the future, has been shown to be a failure in humans. You never know how you will feel in the future and the best prediction is how other people who are already in a situation feel. For example, if you say, "I will feel great when I am finally a doctor or lawyer," yet if studies say doctors and lawyers are notoriously stressed and have very high suicide rates, then probably that is how you will feel once you are a doctor or lawyer. You may have better reasons for doing things, than the false forecasting of emotional states.
App 3, Regret - Let regret fade.
The regret app, makes us feel ontologically like we should go back in time and change something. Obviously we can't do that. What it is really for is to cause us to do better in the future. That being the case, we can safely let regret fade once the lesson has been learned. Regret is a trojan horse with loops that will crash the computer.
App 4. Choice / Freewill / Blame-repent-blame loop
Choice is the experience of the process the brain goes through while appraising actions of which it is not easy to tell which of predicted outcomes are better. When someone puts a gun to our head and forces us to do something, we don't consider that much of a choice or an exercise of freewill because we feel like we did not have a choice because the prospect of being shot in the head or other body part is so much worse, the decision is made for us, but really, it's not otherwise different than any other decision to take an action. One could have decided to be shot or take his chances. What we call reality is a simulation run on our organic computer, and choice / freewill are crude descriptions of this simulation, yet we come to believe they are absolute realities. What we observe about the universe is that it appears to be deterministic. It could also be random. Neither of those admit of freewill, and it is only our received programs and language that even tempt us to want to make such a claim. There is no freewill. We just haven't come up with a better way of describing our experience.
In a deterministic universe, that which has happened, could not possibly have been different. Humans behave deterministically, so blame is not an ontological reality. It is a program that we use that has the effect of urging us to punish others when they do something to harm others or the group. We secondarily use it to blame ourselves, but alot less. Therefore, blame is only needed so long as you need it in order to identify and correct your behavior or the behavior of others. Once enlightened, you will not need it at all. You will be able correct behaviors without emotional dwelling on the issue.
Since one's actions are not perfect or complete from a self-in-time view, incomplete action-freewill- responsibility-blame-repent-incomplete action becomes an infinity loop that will take up the resources of the computer of the brain and crash the brain, producing anxiety and depression.
App 4. Self
Self is the ultimate app. When we were babies, self was not yet fully installed. We simply experienced the world without awareness of being separate from it. We would examine our own hand for as long was we would the object we hold in it. We were simply a perspective, the world, and other people. When I look at my baby niece, 1 year old, I see her face and am aware of myself and she smiles. I imagine as she does this, she sees herself smiling, but in fact, all she sees is me smiling, she is little aware of herself smiling. As far as she knows, I'm almost always smiling because that's what I look like when she looks at me. Anyway, the self program contains these other programs and negotiates between them.
The self program develops over early childhood and either continues, grows, diminishes, or expires. We are predisposed to develop it genetically in our DNA and epigenetically. When we are kids, we merely observe and react naturally. People give us a name that we learn to respond to. They assign our actions to us, mostly our negative actions because they pose a greater threat to our safety. We learn to control this conceptual entity that we call ourselves. Without this concept their is just our simulation, our world-perspective. Sometimes, under the influence of some drugs, the self dissolves or diminshes, and their is just pure choiceless awareness. Some drugs diminish the self, make you feel a part of everything but leave you the ability to become a self.
Drugs of course have negative impacts on health, they are not needed to dissolve the self and we can lose the self and retain the ability to be selved as needed for technical goals and survival. These programs need to be balanced. They should not be taken as an absolute reality. They are part of our programming and simulation. You should have control over them, to use when needed, and discard if they are totally unnecessary.
Lesser apps that can create viral infinity loops that will crash the brain
1. Absolute right / wrong. There is not absolute right / wrong.
These are functional definitions which can apply to actions, they are not absolute. They depend on what we decide are beneficial versus injurious, they aren't just right or wrong, no matter whether they are beneficial or harmful. There are actions that are beneficial to our continued existence, and things injurious. If you believe they are absolute, their can be no end to blame, and your computer will crash.
2. Belief - Have no belief. Use information without any absolute belief in it.
Belief is an attempt to escape from something one fears but claiming to know something exists or is the case which is not in evidence, such as god or heaven. You simply don't know, but you usually disregard what others have made up, so you should do so in the case of god, heaven, nirvana, etc. You can face reality without fear with choiceless awareness. You will have no need of belief. Since belief is a delusion, reality will continually provide evidence that your belief is wrong, you will be endlessly wondering why god allowed your family members and yourself to suffer, why bad things happen to good people, etc, and your brain will crash.
Belief also leads to a stagnant brain. When scientists, who are supposed to be free of belief, begin to believe in their theories, they stunt the progress of science. As one grows older, when one has belief, one begins to grow not wiser, but dumber, because one has stagnant beliefs, reliving the same pattern of thoughts, becoming a caricature of oneself. Instead, keep the mind young by having no beliefs. You can use information and weigh the probability that it may be useful without having belief.
3. Accomplishment / Achievement motivation - Replace with meaning motivation
That's all for now. Leave comments on other toxic apps that crash the brain.
