Mindfulness
You can’t be living intense at every moment.
We practice mindfulness, and we think you should, too.
Intense activities like BASE jumping and flying in combat can certainly help you become a better problem solver, but lets be real. If you take this much risk all the time, you probably won’t live long enough to help solve the world’s biggest problems. Mindfulness, I have found, helps me understand my own consciousness in a very similar way to flow state.
The Mind
Mindfulness is the practice of understanding one’s own mind. On the internet and at the book store, you will find a million authors and two million perspectives on what mindfulness is and why it is effective. This section simply discusses my personal experience with mindfulness meditation. Much like flow state, my mindfulness practice has revealed distraction in my life.
I got into mindfulness meditation through Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” app. It should be said that mindfulness is a way of life, not simply a form of mediation. One cannot practice mindfulness in their everyday life, though, without first learning about it via meditation. One must be guided through the mindfulness practice, initially. Once it is found, it is possible to experience at any time and in any circumstance.
In the most basic sense, to me, mindfulness is the ability to recognize that one’s conscious mind is not, in fact, in the driver’s seat. We feel like it is. I always thought that I was in control of my thoughts until I started to explore mindfulness. Don’t believe me? Try it. Sadly, there is little benefit in me explaining much more than that. The only way one can benefit from mindfulness is to put in the work to truly explore one’s own mind.
One reason I prefer the “Waking Up” app is that it approaches mindfulness and meditation in a completely secular way. There is no need to study or accept any religion or specific teacher in order to understand the practice. Many teachers of mindfulness come from Buddhism or Hinduism and may bias their practice for this reason. I prefer a totally secular approach to studying the contents of my own mind, and I recommend this approach for beginners.
Neuroscience
The hard problem of consciousness:
The study of the brain from a biological perspective is not necessarily directly tied to the study of consciousness. Consciousness is a mystery, we don’t know how or why it arises. Studying the brain has helped us, as humans, better understand why we do the things we do. Our experience can definitely be better understood through a biological understanding of the brain. Still, we do not know why a particular ordering of cells known as neurons spontaneously produces the feeling of “being”. The simplest explanation of what it means to be conscious is that “the lights are on”. There is something that it is like to be that thing. The thing has an experience.
What causes certain things to have the lights turned on and other not to? Is all life conscious? Plants respond to stimuli. Is there something that it is like to be a plant? Is a bee conscious? What about air? Rocks? The hard problem of consciousness (the problem is that we don’t understand what gives rise to it) bridges the gap between science and philosophy and morality.
We might not know why things are conscious, but we know that consciousness exists. This knowledge should affect how we behave in a world full of conscious beings.