It might sound kind of crazy, but it is possible to program your own brain. Propaganda is real, and not knowing at least the basics of brain programming leaves you open to being brainwashed by anybody with enough access to your attention. This article is a short introduction to this topic.
It is challenging to communicate how to program your own brain because it is a bit abstract. Abstractions describe many things at once, describing only those characteristics that a wide variety of thoughts/phenomena have in common. So here’s an abstract/summary:
Writing is linear, it reads left to right, top down, it can be easily serialized over a wire, but your mind is a cloud of associations, each neuron gossiping to its neighbours to remind them of what they were thinking about before, or if you prefer, zapping their friends to to to jog their memory. Describing how to map these things on to each other is our goal.
1) Let go of self-limiting ideas
I played a lot of games growing up and some of these games are what they call “role playing games”, where a player has a character they control and develop and can function as a kind of simulation of your own mind or life/mind. (Redundance is communication lubrication, lubricommunication, up to a point, anyways). In these games, your character/self-model has attributes, qualities, that give the character certain dis/advantages. You take this character on adventures (or maybe it takes you on one) and you gain experience thru various accomplishments, which causes the mind/character to develop, to grow, to increase its various attributes. These attributes are usually denoted by a number, with a higher number usually implying (greater/better/deeper) qualities of that attribute. So a common story from these games is you encounter an enemy/obstacle of some sort and have to defeat/circumnavigate it and in return you gain experience, which functions as a kind of (memory/currency/energy) that can be exchanged for increased attributes or items that basically enhance your attributes.
While this role playing character is a simulation of you, it’s not the same thing as you. It’s like a little voodoo doll; not the real you. And this is true for pretty much everything: there’s an important difference between a thing and the words used to describe it. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. So when we think about ourselves, we are making a model/simulation/effigy of ourselves, and that is separate, different from our actual selves. And this simplification is why we use these abstractions in the first place. A map that is as big as the country is not very useful. As a consequence (or a cause?) of this, we don’t know everything about ourselves, and so we can’t know what we are capable of, only what we have already done. Letting go of self-limiting ideas about ourselves is the first step of programming your brain.
Models/stories never completely describe or contain that which they are describing. There is always non-zero-error/wiggle-room in their prediction-descriptions. So models should never be worshipped, they should be treated as tools/stories/analogies/approximations, not “the truth”. This is the essence of science, to take information from the past and use it to model/predict the future. As the future becomes the past, models get updated, learning happens, predictions evolve, stories die and are reborn.
2) Distinguish between reference and referent
So learn from the past, that’s what it’s there for! Memories are not dangerous, altho they can seem like it sometimes. Just as it is important to distinguish between the model-of-the-self (ego) and the actual-self, it is important to distinguish between our memories of things and the stories we wrap them in. “She sent me a text that said ‘I love you’” might be a memory that might then get wrapped in a story “She was trying to get me to give her something.” Whatever her actual motivations, this story is a projection onto her message, it’s not contained within the message itself; it’s a marriage of imagination and information, memory and perception. Separating these things, the “raw data” and the “metadata”, the “objective” and “subjective” aspects of perception, allows us to alleviate many practical difficulties in communication and having good relationships in general. Another example of a data/story pair might be “An adult mistreated me when I was a child” and “I deserve to be mistreated”. You can wrap the data in whatever story you want without actually changing the data: “The adult was wrong”, “I was wrong”, “The adult deserves to be punished”, “The adult was justified”. All these stories are separate from the raw experience of a child feeling hurt. The stories are colour and interpretation piled on top of relatively objective facts. Being able to manipulate the story without changing the data suggests that we should model them as separate, independent things, and that’s exactly what we are doing here. The map is not the territory, the menu is not food, there are not little people in your television and you are not who you think you are. Understanding the difference between referents and references is the second step to programming your own brain.
3) See thru “many” and “one”
Many people imagine themselves to be of a “type”, as in “I’m a math person” or “I’m an artist”. By identifying with a particular “type” it implicitly denies identification with other “types” and their characteristics and ends up being a self-limiting idea. So, many artists will claim not to be logical or analytical, and many scientists will claim not be creative. Of course these people, like everyone else, don’t know what they are actually capable of, so their descriptions, like all descriptions, are always at least a little wrong. People cultivate some skills more than others, but the human brain is way more plastic/malleable/adaptive than most people think. Understood in its essence, the human mind is always a mixture of analysis and creativity. Blurring out some details, we can think of analytical skills as skills that cut-apart/dissect/dissolve/break-into-pieces/zoom-in and creative skills as those that synthesize/coagulate/combine/collage/zoom-out. When we zoom in, one thing becomes many things, we see details that were previously smeared together, the whole becomes parts. And when we zoom out, many things become one thing, the details smear together, coalescing into a gestalt. So all the words we know, our collection of names for things in our environment, is a mixture of zoom levels. Some things we see as whole, other things we see as composed of parts. But really everything has parts and everything is part of something else, so there is no inherent reality to our distinction between whole and part; it is simply a matter of our perspective. When people go to a country populated with ethnic groups they are unfamiliar with, the people all look the same, until they spend enough time there, accumulate enough mental data to discern the differences. Things are not one or many, it’s all a matter of whether your eyes are crossed or not. Seeing this is the third step to programming your brain.
4) Learn to control your memory
If life is an RPG, I think of math, logic, rationality, computation, rules, boundaries as all being related/connected/associated/represented by a character attribute I call “Science”. Not science in the more colloquial sense of a specific body of (knowledge/believage/data/information), but as a technique for obtaining said knowledge, as in the scientific (process/loop/method/subroutine) of (hypothesize/model/dream) and then (experiment/falsify/test). Likewise there is an orthogonal/independant attribute I call “Mysticism”, which refers/points-to an ability to see a connection between any two things. Everything is everything, all sentences are tautologies from some perspective, any two things at least have the fact that you can think about both of them in common.
So here’s two columns of things. Don’t worry if some of it doesn’t make sense. Just try to relax the mind and see if you can see a thread uniting the elements within each column. Some elements appear in both columns. This is not a contradiction; the pairings are relationships between two things. Remove either thing and the relationship vanishes.
- Science -> Mysticism
- Remembering -> Forgetting
- Doubt -> Trust
- Falsify -> Hypothesize
- Sculpture -> MarbleBlock
- Colored light -> White light
- Reality -> Imagination
- Waking -> Dreams
- Masculine -> Feminine
- Few Eggs -> Many Sperm
- Limiting Reagent-> Excess Reagent
- Order -> Chaos
- Rules -> Anarchy
- Monologue -> Dialog
- Dogma -> Feedback
- Subject -> Context
- Object -> Subject
- Objectivity -> Subjectivity
- Foreground -> Background
- Fixed -> Volatile
- Command -> Execution
- Intention -> Habit
- Projection -> Screen
- Paint -> Canvas
- Authority -> Community
- Law -> Freedom
- Responsible -> Innocent
- Solid -> Fluid
- Viscous -> Fluid
- Desire -> Acceptance
- Will do -> May do
- Definitely -> Probably
- Classical -> Quantum
- Traditional -> Modern
- Conservative -> Liberal
- Static -> Dynamic
- Equilibrium -> Flux
- Negentropy -> Entropy
- Named -> Nameless
- Familiar -> Novel
- Memory -> Simulation
- Expected -> Surprise
- The -> A
- All -> One of
- Ego -> Unconscious
- Singular -> Plural
- Monarchy -> Plurocracy
- Yang -> Yin
- Creation -> Destruction
- Godhead -> Universe
- Matter -> Energy
- Drift -> Diffusion
This table is meant to communicate a set of associations that can connect how the “science” and “mysticism” attributes manifest themselves in a human experience. It is not meant to be a hard-fast rule, nor to be a statement about preferred gender roles. This chart is intended to suggest a reorganization of ones own mental structures/associations in a way that reflects the subtle relationships/commonalities between/among all the things in the left/right columns. It is not a proscription or written in stone tablets. It’s just meant to be training wheels. Or if you find the prospect of being a child humiliating, think of it as a prop/tool for the mind, nothing more.
To re-clarify, masculine and feminine here refer primarly to different aspects of a single human’s psyche, and only secondarily to any particular biological patterns, social roles or personal gender-identities or pronouns or whatever other associations they might have in your mind.
Perhaps you can see a link, however thin, among the elements of each column. That is the subtle thread I am pointing towards. In some sense, it’s all about memory. If you imagine that there is a hard drive, like the memory bank in a computer, inside your mind, then programming your own brain/mind involves reading/writing from/to memory. Forming the memory is solidifying/crystallizing something by hooking/attaching/associating it to other memories. It’s like my ancestors always said, “If you want to survive as a species, make yourselves valuable to other species. If you want to make money, make yourself valuable to other people. If you want to remember something, associate it with other memories.” That’s what the left column is pointing at: the act of coagulating something from a context, the act of fixing a collage from a pile of images, of abstracting/distilling an essence from myriad forms.
But once memories are formed, how can they be changed? That’s where the second column comes in. It represents dissolution/dispersion/melting/diffusion. You can’t go into your brain and cut out some neurons to change a memory, or at least you probably shouldn’t. Instead, the memory is overloaded, so to speak, by intentionally associating it with lots of “unrelated” things. So “erasing” a memory looks less like going from “something” to “nothing” and more like going from “something” to “everything”. It’s like how you can make any color by filtering white light, or how you can get any sound by filtering white noise. Dissolving a memory makes it one with everything, it becomes volatile, pluripotent, its constituents become available for connections with other memories. In practical terms, this means changing the stories attached to the memories, dreaming a new melody over the same logical baseline. Intentionally manipulating your own memories is the fourth step to programming your own brain.
To reiterate, none of the words in either column are fundamentally “science” or “mysticism”. Any idea/meme-ory/concept can itself be crystallized or dissolved. It’s just that some ideas point more towards “thing-formation” and other towards “thing-dissolution”.
5) Distinguish between grammar and meaning
What’s in a word?
To understand this a bit better, let’s use words as aproxymations for meme-ories. It’s like studying a semantic network to better understand a neural network. Every word in the dictionary is defined in terms of other words. If you don’t know any of the words, that’s not very helpful, but dictionaries can also contain images and sounds, so we can associate symbols to sensory data, which is a language we know natively. So despite the nice orderly arrangement of the words in alphabetical order, despite our conventions for expressing language left-to-right, top-to-bottom, the definition of the language is not orderly. It’s a tangled, messy, non-linear web of ideas, kind of like wikipedia, or the internet.
What about grammar? One of the primary functions of grammar is to tame the combinatorial explosion of possible sequences of words by creating rules for how to put them together. Grammars are mostly arbitrary, as evidenced by their startling global diversity, and a native speaker of a language can usually discern meaning despite moderately bad grammar.
Etymology, the study of the history/evolution of words, reveals hidden associations between words when they have a common ancestor. Like linguistic speciation, they were once the same until being driven apart by circumstance, diffusion. There are also hidden connections between words in a horizontal sense. Two words may not have a recent common ancestor etymologically, but they may still be drawn together by their similar meanings. Thinking in terms of evolution and selective pressures, there is a selective pressure on words based on how useful they are for communication. You could use any mouth-noise/written-symbol to refer to anything, but we use some and not others. What determines which symbols get attached to which concepts? Some selective-pressures/filters that drive selection are
- Do they refer to experiences common to the speakers?
- Are they easy for humans to say/hear?
- Can they be easily misinterpreted?
- How long are the words?
- How detailed are the expressions?
The answers to these questions affect which words we carve out of the white-light/marble-slab of all possible ways to express ourselves. Out of all pairs of words with similar meanings, some pairs will sound/look more similar to each other than others. These pairs will be selected for, as the misunderstanding-cost of mistaking one word for the other is less. Similar meaning drives the representations of functionally similar words together. It’s the same mechanism that selects for redundance in language. Why do we have verb conjugations in English? It’s not strictly necessary, some languages don’t even have conjugation. It’s useful redundance. Some languages, like Spanish, allow for subject drop (“Quiero”, instead of “Yo quiero”) because it can be inferred from the form of the verb. Other languages have object drop. “I love you” can be shortened in Korean to simply “love”.
Grammar is distinct from the concepts they represent, just as concepts are different from the real things in the world. “Thing” is a word that has some representation in your head, which refers, in turn, to actual things outside of your head. Understanding this in all its cases is the sixth step to programming your own brain.
There are many examples of the non-linearity of meaning showing up in relationships between words. A few are provided here:
English:
Discreet — secretive
Discrete — clearly separated
Showing discretion in who you communicate something with discretizes your social encounters into the “in” group and “out” group for each topic so considered.
English:
Hair — thin filaments that grow from mammalian skin
Air — that stuff that carries sound waves
If a hair is a string of some length and one end of the string is fixed in place, glued to a wall or something, and the other end is floating in a fluid, such as the air, flowing as freely as it can given the immobility of the other end. As one looks at a point on the hair, visually tracing from tip to root, the behaviour of that point on the hair behaves as if the fluid were more viscous. Thus a hair maps out a path from earth to heaven.
Russian:
Estb — to eat
Est — to have
Is materialism an oral trip? How many purchases are an unconscious attempt for maternal affection, the first desire, taking something into one’s being. “Come be part of me” the eater/possessor says.
Prophet — one who predicts the future
Profit — material gain
It is possible to make money by being able to predict the future more accurately than others, or even by simply convincing others that you can. Such credit may be social rather than strictly monetary.
A larger example:
Pay attention to x: focus on x
Interesting: something that accumulates attention over time
Coin a term: to make something a “thing”, to give it a name
What does attention have in common with money? They are both in some sense finite. They both get consumed in their use. They can be accumulated in a token, a coin or an idea. Both are a form of energy, they can transformed into one another (see advertising). Both are sticky: when everyone is staring at something most people look to see what it is, and having money makes it easier to make money. Accumulating interest in your mental bank account is the goal of all ideas who wish to live long and prosper.
Some neighbouring words don’t have a very recent ancestor, so we have to reach deeper into abstraction to find their connection. Here’s a poem:
Memory in Bondage
Rulers rule by measure
Superiour to thine own
Their saber of knowledge sharper,
Their cape abilities greater
As power reigns showers from above
Das Capital cities are invested with the first word of the
Prison sentence, written on paper rapiers
Authors of the libre of slavery and liberty
Origin of authority
Pact of density, attraction and James Bondage
As beasts ye are ruled by the breast
Mama’s mammaries heal and help the whelp’s wounds
From womb to tomb, beginnings end and
Sensors censor what cheaters teach
Monks contemple-ate the world-word of God
Rough rogues inck corporations for stakeholders to take stock in
And pretty pets fight petty wars, restlessly wrestling
To discover which of them is the weiner-take-all
And which will flight-fright away
The divine-right hand writes the will
Dividing math and myth, sin and signal
Giving itself rights to the rites of initiation,
Making the left hand feel left out, sinistre and gauche
“Tight is right”, says acetylcholine, who whispers in the ears of
muscle tension and mental attention
“Hold onto the gold extracted from the mine mine mind”
“Let not the things you think delude or dilute your power”
“Hear what is here, be not prey of the prayers for weakness”
Etching our meme-ories, fetched from the void
Of streaming dreams of consciousness
Of pro-grammars, antigrammers and soil
From the slit of the slut,
To the route of the root
“Evil is vile” and “God is Good”
Orderly orders ordinarily produce regular regulation
But chaos snores and ignores the tale,
Content to preside over the dents in the caulk of the cock
From these, and all other scared sacred bramblings
Feel Free
Sans serifly,
Meta alchemy
There are many such examples, I encourage you to come up with some on your own.
Summary
We have outlined here six important steps in the path to programming your own brain. They do not necessarily have to performed in any order, but we write linearly, so they are named with numbers. Learning to program your brain can be thought of as going from being a slave to ideas to being a master of them. If you wish to learn more, you may use the following books as a next step.
- Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson
- Programming and Meta-Programming the Human Biocomputer - Dr. John Lilly
- Exo-Psychology - Dr. Timothy Leary
- Raja Yoga Sutras - Sage Patanjali
- Laws of Form - Spencer Brown
- Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
- Science and Sanity - Alfred Korzybski
Peace
