Reflections on Episode 3, The Map Is Not The Territory
Jason : I reflected mostly on the map of “career”. All the beliefs that go into this map and how profoundly and insidiously it has affected my own life. Maybe we can talk about this in this fourth episode???
About a myopic focus on outcomes and mistaking the map for the territory…I need to clean this up. It is kind of a brain dump.
We talked about how humans like to be predictive. More specifically, we like to think we can control and manipulate variables in our environment in order to achieve certain outcomes. This may be true, to an extent, under certain conditions–such as a low variable set–or when one only considers limited influence over outcomes. For example, trying to manipulate or control general or specific physiological outcomes through the structure of workouts in a training plan focuses on a (relatively) narrow variable set and yields limited control.
Where we get in trouble with problematic thinking around outcomes and control is when we think we can predict and control multi-variate outcomes like races. In fact, I believe we over-invest our energy in focusing on things we can’t really control. Too many things are outside of our control on race day. Our outcome expectations often subsume so many of these variables that are out of our control and this sets us up for disappointment. We’d do better to focus on the variables we can control and then construct our outcome goals around those variables.
Steve: I concur whole-heartedly.
I feel like we covered the basics pretty well.
If you want we can add the following:
One of my athletes, Alex Brenner, added a comment to the new community space dedicated to this podcast. If you want to access that site, just subscribe at rungnosis.com & we’ll add you to the community.
Alex:
Great episode! I thought it was funny when you guys started talking about consciousness and riffing on the fact that it's hard to define what is "conscious" let alone what consciousness itself is or how it's produced by the human brain. Steve says something about how the different theories of consciousness would "blow your mind," and how we shouldn't trust anybody who claims to know anything about it with certainty.
That all hit close to home for me because it's the reason why I quit neuroscience! 🙃 After four years of undergraduate study and two years working in a research lab, I personally felt that the consciousness question ("The Hard Problem") is sort of a dead end as far as scientific research goes, and it serves as a pretty good launching pad for someone (me) to start exploring philosophy instead. There's no real consensus about what consciousness even is, or whether it's something that's even exclusively possessed by living organisms (well-respected figures in the field believe that all matter may possess "consciousness" and that it's not a question of *whether* something is conscious but *the degree* to which that thing is conscious). The human brain is limited by the fact that it is a piece of hardware trying to make sense of the software that comes pre-loaded on it, and I think that if we ever do make a breakthrough in terms of The Hard Problem, it'll come from an AI black-box rather than a team of neuroscientists. So now I'm in law school.
One other thing that I wanted to tack onto a was the mention of the simulation argument, because I think it's really interesting and useful in this convo. Steve mentions that Elon Musk had brought it up recently - if you're interested in digging deeper I would read Nick Bostrum and David Chalmers' ideas about it instead.
The barebones version boils down to the question "do you believe humans will ever be capable of creating highly realistic computer simulations of reality?" If you do, then the possibilities are that we 1) we do make those simulations, or 2) humanity collectively decides never to actually go ahead and create a reality simulator. If you think 1 is more likely, math says we're probably living in a simulation now. If humanity creates ONE single simulated reality that's so detailed that the residents of the simulation can't tell the difference, then that means there's a 50% chance that we're in that one now, and a 50% chance that we're living in the "real" reality. Knowing how humanity is though, we probably wouldn't just make one - the real odds would be 1/X that we're living in the "real" reality, where X is the total number of simulations that are *ever* run. If you think of something like the Sims computer games as an example, then there would be hundreds of millions of simulations, with only one "real" reality - making it super unlikely that that's the one we're currently in. Especially if those simulations also become capable of creating simulations themselves.
Obviously there's no way to know whether or not any of it's true (and importantly it doesn't really matter if any of it is), so the whole thing is just a thought experiment, but I think it's a really interesting angle on the conversation about the "map" not being the "territory." If you want a better explainer that goes into more depth, this podcast episode does a great job of really driving home the nuts and bolts:
I listened to the episode & found it fascinating. In fact, I have to admit to being convinced that the Simulation Argument is a valid point of view that should be considered seriously. Give it a listen!
Now onto the main topic.
The Self, Identity & Soul
Jason: Identity and Groundedness: As we discussed in the last episode, Identity is another map to be aware of…
I’d like to explore the meaning of this concept. What is identity? How is it related to the concept of the “self”? I don’t have strong answers, if any, to these questions so I think it will be fun to explore the questions in an open dialogue. Currently, I find the Buddhist perspective of the nonself to be the most compelling thought on this topic. Are there other traditions/philosophies related to this subject that you want to highlight?
Steve: This is such a huge topic that it’s hard to know exactly where to start but I was recently thinking that the loss of the concept of soul in the past 150 years & how the psychological concept of self has supplanted the soul. Of course, that takes us down an entirely different train of thought due to religious & spiritual connotations around the concept of soul. But I think I, for one, feel much more confident saying that I have a soul than I have a self.
This is especially interesting to me because psychology is now considered a the scientific study of mind & behavior, but its etymological roots are in something far more mysterious & incorporeal.I find it ironic that Psyche was the Greek goddess of the soul & now is considered not to even exist.
I think there is a through line here from an idea of an essential nature that has throughout time immemorial been considered immortal. Perhaps some of our deeper questions around how identity is a source of suffering but also something we have a very hard time relinquishing if we are trying to lose our sense of self.
it’s a very complicated topic.
Jason: Is identity something as shallow and univariate as what we do or is it something deeper and more complex (gender, role (parent, partner, etc), profession, relationships, etc)? Is there a clear answer to this question? What happens to identity when we see that all the inputs are, like identity, additional map layers constructed by humans?
Steve: It certainly seems there is a developmental aspect to the self, based on the study of psychology, where we take on a self concept as children, in order to become whole persons. Ironically, it is this self-concept that then should be overcome in order to find fulfillment. This seems like such a waste or at least a misuse of our energies. Is there something deeper here? Or is it part of the overall evolutionary plan?
Jason: Is a strong identity important? What are some downsides of having a strong sense of identity? How can one build a strong identity that helps keeps them “grounded”?
In Western societies, we are inculcated from a young age to think about the question: “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Career days start in elementary school and follow us all the way through college and graduate school. So, from elementary school, we are compelled to begin staking out our identity and to pursue this childhood dream as a career (another problematic map and a point for further discussion).
For many of us, I’m a doctor or I’m a lawyer or I’m a firefighter or police officer becomes the mainstay of our individual identity. Our sense of self and self-worth becomes tied to this identity and then layered over that are metrics about our performance–arrests, cases closed, lives saved from burning buildings, cases won, lives saved in a hospital, etc–which adds or detracts “value” from our self-worth in the context of our identity.
This structure draws our ego into the puzzle which pushes us to try to achieve more to improve our self worth. This happens with running in just the same way. If we identify as a runner, then our ego must push us to become a “good runner” which requires us to track metrics and measure performance in relation to others.
Figuring out how to transition to groundedness should be fun. I say we let the conversation lead us there naturally.
So, what happens to our sense of groundedness when we can’t measure up to the expectations we place on our performance within the context of our identity? Or what if we can longer practice the thing (law, sports, etc) that defines our identity? Can you see the map of identity here and how easy it is to mistake the map for the territory?
Buddhism and Self
The Buddhist view on identity is that the notion of self and any attendant identity is delusional and one of the single greatest sources of suffering for humanity. Ajahn Chah said, “You have to consider and contemplate this [non-self] slowly, you can’t just think about this or your head will explode.”
*Identity can be static, the human experience is not.*