Becoming Enlightened Algorithmically
A new vision of spiritual awakening.
“Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”
- Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator
You probably fall into one of two camps. In one camp, we have those who believe there is an experiential state we might call spiritual enlightenment. This state represents a complete transcendence of ego, illusion, attachment, and/or suffering. After its attainment, the enlightened can finally see “the true nature of existence,” break free from the limited survival mode of the mind, and blow out the candle of suffering. It is typically thought to be achieved through years of dedicated meditation, and eventually, a sudden click into a radically new state.
In the other camp, we have those who think this is bullshit. No such liberated state exists, and anyone who thinks it does is drinking the generic fruit beverage of spiritual lunatics and charlatans. We may be able to get a little better at dealing with life, but not radically transformed. The realities of ongoing suffering and dissatisfaction are inevitable, and the ancient claim of enlightenment is mythology.
My goal is to propose that perhaps both of these camps are wrong… or right. We’ve just been thinking about it all wrong. Imagine, if you will, that we live in an alternate world in which there is only one musical instrument. The instrument is called the piano pod, and in this alternate world, everyone has one in their living room. The piano pod is exactly like a piano, except that in order to play it, you have to open a door on the front of it, sit down inside a room only large enough for one, and shut the door behind you. You’ll have to set your claustrophobia aside for this one. The piano pod has completely opaque and soundproof walls, so only the person inside can see or hear her own performance.
Being that the piano pod is otherwise exactly like a piano, most people who sit down to play find that it is incredibly difficult to create music that doesn’t cause them to envy the deaf. You may find that even when you persist for months, you remain in a state of frustrating incompetence.
To make matters worse, the piano pod world is full of obvious con-men claiming they can help you become amazing at the instrument overnight if you’ll just hand over some hard-earned money. While some seem more credible than others, it is clear that anyone who claims to have achieved piano pod greatness could be lying opportunistically, trying to impress others, or delusional.
Unlike in our reality, it is entirely reasonable within the piano pod world to believe frustrating incompetence to be the only possible state. Not being able to witness someone playing the instrument with incredible artistry and skill makes it easy to believe such people do not exist.
The piano pod world represents our current reality, and our minds are the instruments. We don’t know what is going on in other people’s heads. We don’t ever know for sure how another person’s subjective experience compares with ours. The most we can do is observe their behavior and take their word for it. But neither our frustrating incompetence nor the quick fixes promised by sleazy gurus are proof that the rabbit hole of psychological optimization does not exist. And the great innovation of pod-less pianos in our world reveals just how musically masterful it is possible to be. We have all heard brilliant musicians who make it very hard to let ourselves off the hook.
Having heard the work of great musicians, you may still conclude that these virtuosos have some kind of genetic gift the rest of us lack, and that playing this instrument skillfully simply isn’t possible for you. Although it’s true that genetics plays some role in musical ability, we simply don’t observe regular people putting thousands of hours into musical practice and not getting really, really good. We know it is possible to become great on the keys by practicing diligently and applying the right methods. And we can see that the path of artistic mastery goes deeper and deeper, never really reaching a limit besides the laws of physics.
The “10,000 hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell suggests that the great talents of people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and the Beatles are not simply the innate gifts they are often assumed to be. They can be understood as the result of many hours of development, often falling around 10,000 hours. It may not be a mathematical theorem which infallibly dictates success in any field, but the rule goes a long way to explain just how crucial practice and diligence are, even for seemingly supernatural ability. It has even been demonstrated that the very belief in neuroplasticity, in the idea that our abilities are not fixed, can be the determining factor in our success. People who view their strengths as malleable are found to be more successful in their endeavors and more fulfilled in life.
I see no reason the principles of neuroplasticity should not apply to the improvement of our subjectivity. Our neurons don’t play favorites in terms of the tasks which can be improved. It would require more of a leap of faith to believe that the principles of human psychology made an exception for this particular area. If our sights are clearly set on the reworking of our own thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors, what is stopping us from gradually rerouting the neural pathways of well-being?
No, neuroplasticity does not prove we can suddenly click into a state of undisturbed bliss. The story of the ego and its transcendence is seductive enough to warrant careful scrutiny. We all love single-cause explanations of our problems and their solutions. But this sudden shift beyond our limits simply is not consistent with a modern understanding of human psychology. I think some of the ancient mystics may have been right about their own radically superior subjective experience. They were just wrong in the particular way they conceived of it.
Psychological mastery can be systematically pursued in fully rational terms without any difficult concepts, or the transcendence of concepts entirely. Just as the concept of suddenly snapping into a state of musical mastery after years of practice seems incompatible with current psychological understanding, doing the same with our minds seems implausible. The Buddha may have been the Beethoven of his psychological state, but Beethoven got to where he was gradually, and still fell somewhere on the endless continuum of musical mastery by the end of his life.
Our mental behaviors were selected to serve specific functions. We get jealous because it helped our ancestors retain mates. We dogmatically accept flawed beliefs because it allowed our predecessors to bond with their tribes. We get addicted to substances because the compounds within them offered a higher chance of survival. There doesn’t have to be a core defect at the root of all of our problems or a single solution to free us from it. We can modify and optimize the individual functions, features, and flaws of our minds a la carte, and this process, when practiced over time, can lead to the algorithmic enlightenment I’m proposing.
Neuroplasticity gives us the ability to gradually improve at things through consistent and sustained effort, and mastery is a relative term which does not indicate that one can reach a point at which no further progress can be made. By becoming intimately aware of the mistakes that we would like to relinquish — by working out the disadvantageous habits and building advantageous ones, we can develop the ability to increasingly determine our own subjective experience.
Although humans did not in any way evolve to play any instrument, it has been shown that with enough deliberate practice, we can overcome our incompetence and move closer and closer to mastery. The trained musician can play music in a way that looks and feels so natural that the audience would swear it was what she was made to do. And the biological forces which developed our minds, though our values and well-being were not their concern, have placed no barriers to reprogramming our psychological operating system toward a new purpose. The path of self-mastery can be followed to great heights with enough practice. The only problem is that until now, we haven’t known what we were practicing.
