It's just pixels on the screen until you create an image

• Her friends think Mimi is a great catch; she is beautiful, affectionate, and very smart. Sadly, she is better at attracting intimacy than keeping it. Her previous lovers claim her jealous rages drove them away. Mimi claims that her anger was an appropriate reaction to the inconsiderate actions of her boyfriends, for example, “catching him staring at other women.” Mimi’s problem looks different to her friends than it feels to Mimi. She’s right to say that they don’t understand; they only see how things look from the outside; they don’t have access to what she sees and how she interprets it. But Mimi doesn’t understand her puzzle either because she only experiences how it feels from her first-person perspective. Her friends can see that some of her boyfriends were good guys who really did love her. She can’t see that the traumas of her childhood distort her interpretations of her lover’s actions.  To know herself well enough to exert an intentional influence on how she reacts to the things that happen, she has to observe her reactions and their triggers from the inside [how it feels] and from the outside [how her reaction fits into the ongoing sequence of cause-and-effect].
• Most people see Mr. E as a gifted problem-solver. He shares that opinion and attributes his many successes to his “smarts” (his ability to figure out how to get to the outcomes he wants).  While he may look successful, he doesn’t feel that way. He sees himself as a failure because he is on the verge of losing everything important to him — his family and financial independence – if he fails once more —and the smart money says he will].  In contrast to his ability to predict and control the people and events on his job, he cannot control himself.

Problems resulting from excessive appetite [Mr. E.] and excessive emotional reactivity [Mimi] look simple when viewed from the perspective of friends and family, but solving it seems impossibly complex when you experience it from the first-person perspective.  Both Mimi and Mr. E. can figure out how to get what they want in other domains of life, but they repeatedly fail to get what they want most.  Observers can plainly see the cause of each of their problems:  Their passions distort their perception resulting in wrong judgments.  Errors of judgment that result from misperception are unfortunate but not puzzling; they happen all the time.  However, the reality that our heroes have created for themselves is perverse. Each is a good problem-solver and routinely overcomes problems that appear far more complex, yet they repeatedly fail to solve their most important problem. The puzzle I invite you to solve is:  Why do good problem-solvers like Mimi, Mr. E., and possibly yourself fail to learn the lessons that objective reality is trying to teach them? The keys to the solution to this puzzle are careved above the entrance to the Temple of Appollo at Delphi.

The moment when your interpretation flipped from one image to another, you realized the first image that appeared in your mind was only one possible interpretation of the array of pixels on the screen. The image in your mind changed in the absence of any changes on the screen. That’s because there are no images in the natural world, they exist only in your subjective reality. When you look at these graphics, your eye and brain transform the raw sensory data [the pixels] into meaningful interpretations [the images]. This third-person, abstract understanding of visual perception differs from the first-person experience of perception. While they are mutually exclusive [you can only use one at a time], you can switch back and forth when you choose. Most of the time, the demands of reacting to the things that happen force you into the default, first-person perspective. The demands of navigating through treacherous territory demand that you regard your map as accurate. When you have to react to the things that happen, you are forced to accept the bogus premise: My experience of reality is the same as reality.

As the illusions illustrated, the images you experienced are not the same as the pixels that made them up. The creative process that transforms the pixels into images invariably creates something that does not exist in the pixels. The Map-Territory Fallacy [confusing the map her nervous system creates for the territory it is attempting to depict] is an intrinsic feature of maps. Lewis Carroll’s map, with the scale of a mile to the mile, is free of this fallacy and is, therefore, perfectly useless. The familiar bad outcomes our heroes arrive at indicate that their maps are worse than useless! Instead of discarding these maps, our heroes seem to become more dogmatic about the validity of these maps over time.

The fallacy that “my experience of reality is the same as reality” is the definition of the Soul Illusion. Normally, painful outcomes correct the misjudgments that caused them, but mistakes that result from being taken in by an illusion are different! Mr. E continues to act as if gambling will work out well despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Mimi’s ability to maintain an intimate relationship isn’t improving with experience. On the contrary, her history of failed relationships strengthens her conviction that those who are supposed to love her will ultimately betray and abandon her. They don’t benefit from the painful education in cause-and-effect because learning doesn’t prevent them from being taken in by the same illusion the next time.

What she regards as reality is her creation, not Nature’s. She doesn’t have immaculate perception! The ultimate source of Mimi’s misery is not her misjudgments per se but her certainty that they are correct. While she considers herself data-driven, her insensitivity to evidence and reason when it comes to affairs of the heart is striking. She gives assent to unlikely interpretations of reality on the basis of insufficient evidence and is unwilling to change her interpretation despite substantial evidence that her current perspective is not serving her well. As long as she regards her current perspective as the only or the correct perspective, she will remain stuck in a cause-and-effect sequence that reliably takes her to unwanted outcomes.

The transformation of the elements of visual sensation into meaningful images is a metaphor for the creation of subjective reality from the full range of stimulus elements.  Optical illusions demonstrate that while you assume you are perceiving reality directly, you are experiencing a fiction created by your nervous system to make sense of the pixels on the screen. The first-person experience of being fooled provides some inoculation against the pathogenic assumption that your perception and judgment accurately represent the way things really are.  Optical illusions only fool you at a superficial level.  I doubt you were really taken in by optical illusions posted here;  you probably immediately recognize them for what they are.  Labeling them as “Optical Illusions” is unnecessary for all but the most gullible observers.  In contrast, the Soul Illusion is never labeled.  You are not really fooled by optical illusions; you are really fooled by the Soul Illusion.  At the critical moment of action, your judgment, no matter how wrong it may look from other perspectives, will feel exactly right.

Optical illusions demonstrate (harmlessly) that you can be taken in by the assumption that you see things as they are.  The illusions that result from the premise of first-person perception: “My experience of reality is the same as reality,” put you at risk for flagrant errors of judgment. Versions of the Soul Illusion include:

• The illusion of certainty — Mimi is more certain about her interpretations of her lover’s actions than she should be considering the evidence.  This illusion is responsible for the gullibility and dogmatism that pervade this domain of her life.   She considers herself to be data-driven, but in matters of the heart, she is uncharacteristically insensitive to data.  This shows up as two dispositions that thwart problem-solving:
  • Gullibility — She gives assent to the belief that her lover is interested in other women on the basis of insufficient evidence.
  • Dogmatism — Once she regards that belief as true, she resists logic and evidence that contradicts it.
• The illusion of state permanence — After a relapse, Mr. E judges the costs of gambling to be greater than its benefits. Assuming that he will always feel the same way, he commits to never gambling again and expects to have no problem honoring it.

Mr. E attributes his disastrous financial situation to bad luck; Mimi blames her history of failed relationships on her “loser boyfriends.” Friends and acquaintances are more likely to attribute their recurring failures to internal causes such as stupidity or a disease.   In either case, they would be powerless to change their course intentionally.   If, on the other hand, they study the chain of cause-and-effect that led them to disastrous but familiar outcomes, they can use what they learn to solve the problem that is diminishing the quality of their lives.

Their recurring patterns of self-sabotage have a silver lining.  We get several examples of the sequence to study.  To maximize the payoff of their expensive educations, they will examine cause-and-effect from the outside [the dispassionate perspective of the researcher] and from the inside [their first-person experience of the events and their reactions to them].

To become familiar with this method, we’ll attempt to observe Mr. E’s recurring pattern of vowing abstinence and then violating the vow from both the first- and third-person perspectives.  Readers who have never been challenged by an excessive appetite for a substance or an activity may judge his puzzle as a simple one.  If you are fortunate enough to be in this category, you’ll have to exercise your cognitive and imaginative faculties to appreciate why this puzzle is so complex for those who need to solve it.   So, suspend your disbelief and pretend that you are Mr. E  shortly after a relapse.  See if you can create imagery with enough clarity and detail to alter your current psychological state.   If you were able to get a feel for his frustration, self-loathing, or shame, you might grant that he was sincere when he vowed he would never gamble again.

To get a feel for why he violates the sincere vow, use your imaginative faculties once again to approximate his motivational state when he was “on the road to get away from it all and just a couple of hundred miles from Vegas.” See if you can increase the state-dependent distortions of judgment by accepting his internal dialogue as valid: “I’m not going to gamble.  I need a break from the stress I’ve been under, and a four-star hotel room for fifty bucks [instead of a dingy Comfort Inn in the middle of nowhere] is the right way to use my vacation time.”

Like the rest of us, Mr. E is bound to obey the laws of cause-and-effect.  Researching the sequence of external events and internal states that take him to the familiar unwanted outcome will enable him to work with these laws to promote preferable outcomes.   But he doesn’t feel he needs to do the research.  The grandiose dogma that his current experience of reality is the same as reality distorts his judgment even when in a contrite state following a relapse.  He doesn’t need to study cause-and-effect from a different [third-person] perspective because he is certain that now he knows the truth and will never gamble again.

It’s not stupidity, a disease, or the perverse motivation to fail that causes our heroes to repeat the same errors without learning from them.  It’s the dogma that their current experience of reality is the same as reality.  Mr. E voluntarily goes to Las Vegas because he feels certain that he can stay at a casino and resist the temptation to gamble. Later, he will feel certain that he can gamble a little and walk away whenever he wants to.   He has been witness to a lot of data that contradicts this conviction.  Nevertheless, he feels confident that he will control himself this time and a valid lie-detector test would show that he is telling the truth.

For Mr. E, gambling elicits strong emotions; intimate relationships do the same for Mimi, which suggests a reason why their dogmatic insensitive to data and reason is most prominent in these domains.  The sincerity of their beliefs enhance their credibility, but ,mean nothing.  Mr. E. is certain that he can stay at a casino without gambling.  It’s a safe bet that

the range of state-dependent phenomena — including perception, appraisal, memory, and response tendencies — will change when he is in the casino and temptation is near. Even though his judgment about the advisability of gambling ranges from “I can do it” to “I cannot do it,” he is always certain that his current appraisal is valid. During the remorseful state following a relapse, he can’t imagine ever thinking that gambling would be a good idea. But now, outside the casino, he can’t imagine ever believing that he can’t control himself.  The odds are that he will once again learn a familiar lesson: “Gambling leads me to bad outcomes.” But once again, it will be the remorseful Mr. E who receives the painful education, and he won’t be in the driver’s seat during the next high-risk situation.

To exercise mindful influence over how he reacts to the things that happen, he must know himself from the inside and from the outside. Researching the sequence of external events and internal states that led to previous relapses from two perspectives: How cause-and-effect looks now, in retrospect, and how it felt then.  This research requires the collaboration of the perspective of a dispassionate researcher and the first-person perspective that only you can contribute. 

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

— Marcus Aurelius

To get the most out of a novel, movie, or other work of fiction, suspend your disbelief and take in the information as though it were true.  By allowing yourself to be taken in by the fiction, you can fully access the emotional experience the artist is attempting to elicit.  In exchange for granting this assent, you get to be entertained.  In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson is trying to scare you, and since you are reading it for entertainment, you want to be scared.  So, the two of you collaborate to evoke the experience of terror for the thrill of it.  The magic happens when each collaborator does their job skillfully.  Stephenson did his part by using his words evocatively, but unless you invest your attention and imagination to transform these words into meaningful images and stories, they mean nothing.  If you were able to access the terror you hoped you would, you did your part well enough to induce Intentional Trance Formation.

Stephenson’s ability to evoke terror by creating fictional stories pales compared to Mimi’s.  The thoughts and images she created during the 20 or so minutes she spent waiting for her boyfriend to show up for their date (or at least call to explain his absence) were sufficient to elicit a radical change in her emotional state.  Once she transformed into Ms. Hyde, she was no longer the warm, supportive woman who he had been attracted to; she had been transformed into a monster who chased him away.  Ironically, the bogus assumption that her partner would eventually abandon her initiated a sequence of internal states and external events that transformed what had been fiction into fact.

Not all self-sabotaging patterns have this recursive feature, but all involve Unintentional Trance Formation.  Mimi doesn’t want to drive her  lovers away, but, as she explains to her friends and family, “I can’t control my emotions.”  Nevertheless, without requiring drugs or any other external assistance, her faculties of imagination and concentration were sufficient to work herself into an emotional frenzy.  In this altered psychological state, she changes from a sweet yet sophisticated Mimi into a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.  Mimi is the one who initiated the transformation that made her prophecy come true!

Perceiving an event is like taking a photo.  When the photographer triggers the shutter, the photo records how the world looks from the point of view of the camera.  There are many possible camera angles from which to photograph a particular subject.  Professional photographers purposely position the camera to achieve an outcome that serves their aesthetic or commercial intentions.  There are many possible explanations for Mimi’s boyfriend’s tardiness.

In contrast to the photographer, Mimi didn’t choose a perspective from which to interpret her boyfriend’s failure to show up for their date.  Her perspective was chosen for her by a factor outside of her control:  Salience.   Rather than directing her attention to the interpretation most likely to be true or the one most likely to promote an advantageous outcome, her attention was captured by the most salient [attention-grabbing] interpretation.  In the subjective reality induced by this interpretation, the sweet yet sophisticated Mimi had transformed into a monster with thin skin and sharp claws.

Ironically, Mimi’s body could only produce the malevolent potion if her faculties of imagination and concentration were sufficiently well developed.  Mimi has the capability to take advantage of her cognitive talents rather than be handicapped by them, but only if she learns how to use them.   Mimi’s development may have been set back by her unfortunate childhood, but now she is an adult.  Like the rest of us aspiring adults, she can enhance her ability to mindfully influence her emotions and appetites by practicing Hypnotic Suggestion.  So, I invite you to use the  “Heavy Leg Script” from the venerable Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale to structure your first-person experience of intentional Trance Formation.

Possible interpretations of sensory input are continually battling for your attention because the winner gets promoted to be your subjective reality while the others pass away in oblivion.   Viewed from the perspective of what’s good for you, the battle is between the most salient interpretation of reality and the interpretation that would evoke the motivational/emotional state best suited to your current challenge. 

When Mr. E is sufficiently distant from his last relapse, stimulus elements related to the thrill and satisfaction of gambling periodically drift into the stimulus pool, and when they do, they attract his attention [the definition of stimulus salience].  If he gives in to the temptation to allow his attention to be sucked in, a recursive process, similar to audio feedback, will rapidly and powerfully amplify his motivation to gamble.  If his favorite uncle were still alive, he would have suggested that Mr. E redirect his attention to more useful thoughts,  But that wouldn’t have been as much fun as allowing his imagination to run with the imagery and so taste the vicarious thrills and pleasures of being in Vegas once again.   Investing his imagination and attention in such fantasies elicits a payoff that is similar to the thrill he gets when he is actually gambling.   This experienced thrill is a manifestation of biological secretions that transform the ex-gambler — who finally learned the lesson that he couldn’t control himself at the casino — into the gullible rube who feels certain that he will control himself this time.   

Mr. E, in his four-star hotel room in Las Vegas, was in a different trance than when he was on the road and appraising the pros and cons of a side trip to Las Vegas.   The pros included amazing hotels, restaurants, and nightlife, and the cons included the danger he would relapse back into gambling.  Since he sincerely felt that he could and would control himself, the cons were trivial.  So, he decided to enhance the quality of his life by taking that side trip.   Will it work out the way he predicts? 

The smart money says, “Hell no!”   Nevertheless, it is not impossible for him to act as he said he would, but unless he does something radically different, he will follow the predictable path to the usual outcome.   To follow a more advantageous path, he would have to use his knowledge of how cause-and effect operates in his subjective universe to influence the sequence of external events and internal states.  There are several ways for him to influence the causal chain intentionally.  His best shot is to work with his perspective the way a photographer artistically positions the camera.  Even if he did, it would be unrealistic to expect Mr. E’s puny ability to aim his attention to win the battle against the highly salient local temptations.  Mr. E is advised to show respect for his challenge and take control of his attention at the first sight of Nevertheless, volitional control of attention is a skill that strengthens with practice.  To practice directing your attention, choose a target for it and concentrate on that thought or image despite the more salient distractions that seek to capture your attention.  Naturally, your will to maintain control of your attention will often be overpowered by a distraction that is momentarily more salient.  The strengthening exercise is to recapture your attention and direct it back to the intended target.  You can use a mantra as the target, or the “heavy leg” audio, or simply count your breaths.  The objective is to exercise your ability to choose what occupies your consciousness.

Pavlov (does that ring a bell?) conditioned a dog to salivate when he rang a bell paired with placing acid in the dog’s mouth.  After a few pairings, the dog salivated whenever Pavlov rang his bell.  The mechanism of Pavlovian conditioning turns out to be a good model for conceptualizing self-control of one’s passions.   Just as the sound of the bell caused Pavlov’s dog to secrete saliva, thoughts and images of her boyfriend abusing her trust caused Mimi’s neuroendocrine system to secrete the potion that transformed her into Ms. Hyde. 

Pavlov had control over the dog’s salivation because he, not the dog, chose when to ring the bell.  Mimi’s trance formation is unintentional because she, like the dog, doesn’t decide when to trigger the conditioned reaction.  Her reaction was determined by the stimulus that captured her attention.  The most salient information — not necessarily the most important or helpful information — will capture her attention and induce trance formation. 

Through no fault of her own, the unfortunate events of her childhood conditioned Mimi to react to the things that happen in intimate relationships in ways that are poorly matched to the task of establishing a secure and loving relationship as an adult.  She can’t undo the past, but she can know herself well enough to exercise an intentional influence over how she reacts to the things that happen.   

To induce trance formation intentionally, use your imagination to pretend that a reality that would cause the intended experience is true. So, to intentionally induce the subjective reality that your right arm is heavy, pretend it is made of lead; to induce the experience of lightness in your left arm, pretend that Helium-filled balloons are tied to your left wrist, pulling it upwards.   In the battle for which side captures her attention during the critical high-risk situation, images that signal potential abandonment are far more capable of inducting transformation than their competitors because Mimi is not pretending it’s true; She is certain.