Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright

Chapter 1: Taking the red pill

• Three basic principles of design for natural selection to ensure gene proliferation:
  1. Achieving goals should bring pleasure so that they’re pursued
  2. The pleasure shouldn’t last forever—if people had eternal pleasure after one round of sex, genes wouldn’t proliferate as much
  3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1) than on (2), otherwise they may start asking what the point of fiercely pursuing pleasure is to just see it wane shortly after
• The way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting
• Dopamine is involved in the anticipation of a reward. The first time you eat a donut you receive a large dopamine spike; the next time you see a donut, your brain starts firing dopamine and baits you into eating more, however, this time the dopamine drops after eating it again. This is the delusion, or misleading nature, of your brain overpromising a reward

  Chapter 2: Paradoxes of meditation

• To be a successful meditator you can’t think of meditation in terms of success
• The people that meditation has the most potential of helping normally have the traits that make meditation more difficult (attention deficit, hot headedness, etc.)

  Chapter 3: When are feeling illusions?

• Feelings are designed to encode judgements about things in our environment. Due to evolutionary mismatches between ancient and modern life, feelings that were once optimized for our survival aren’t so
• The powdered donut we crave is not good for our health. Road rage, although momentarily satisfying doesn’t serve the same purpose (anger ≡ the arrow with a poisoned root and a honeyed tip). In a hunter gatherer tribe if someone took advantage of you, you would be right to lash back so you don’t get taken advantage of, and so that others don’t see you as exploitable. This is no longer the case with automobiles and large cities
• False positives are intentionally illusory, i.e., if a bush rustles next to you in rattlesnake country, you’re best to jump away in fear regardless of whether it’s an actual rattlesnake or not. This is your brain setting up the illusion before you can even process it in order to take care of your genes
• A social psychology experiment from the 1980s had people go out and talk to people, but with realistic scars puts on the faces of the subjects. Half the group had their scars removed, unbeknownst to the subjects, yet when they went and spoke to people, they still perceived others as judging them for the scars
• Our emotional intuitions were less often illusory in our evolutionary environment—making a fool of ourselves to our tribe that we saw everyday had consequences—but making a fool of ourselves on the bus in front of people we’ll never see again shouldn’t make us groan in despair for the next few days
• “Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our natural environment; the fact that we’re not living in a natural environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality; underlying it all is the happiness delusion”
• One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally designed to convince you to follow them, they feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively

  Chapter 4: Bliss, ecstasy, and more important reasons to meditate

• The “default mode network” is the network in which our mind wanders when it’s wandering, and it normally wanders into the past or future
• Retreats help as they deprive the default mode network of fresh fuel, so it’s easier to exist in an experiential mode
• Enlightenment is ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: what’s inside your mind and what’s out in the rest of the world. Mindfulness involves observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care
• Vipassana is also known as insight meditation, which tries to illuminate the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering/unsatisfactoriness, and the not-self. To see reality with true clarity is to develop a high enough resolution of insight into these three marks

  Chapter 5: The alleged nonexistence of your self

• Buddha’s early seminal teaching in the notself involved a systematic search of the self in the five aggregates: the body, basic feelings, perceptions (i.e sights and sounds), mental formations (i.e thoughts), and consciousness (the awareness of the other aggregates)
• Buddha mentions that if any of these aggregates were the self, we would be able to control them to avoid affliction, i.e., future suffering. We can’t modify the body, our feelings, and so on to avoid suffering—there is a lack of control which implies we’re more so along for the ride rather than a true CEO of ourselves
• One idea is that consciousness holds more self weight than the other aggregates, and letting go of all five aggregates disentangles consciousness from the other four
• In this sense, realizing the content of consciousness—thoughts, feelings, etc.—are not-self, then leads to a more contemplative than engaging relationship with the not-self
  • *Side thought: as we have broken away from our evolutionary environment, we must also break away from the feelings that no longer serve us, that had once served us well during those times**
• The ability to disengage from thoughts and impulses and perceptions provides the power to disown them, to redefine the bounds of yourself in a way that excludes them

  Chapter 6: Your CEO is MIA

• From natural selection’s POV, it’s good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself; to depict a rational and self-aware character. So, whenever your actual motivations aren’t accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation
• The two misconceptions of the self involve illusions about our selves and about ourselves: we think our conscious is more in control than it is, and we think we are more morally good and capable than we are
• The meditation process can be thought of as taking the conscious mind from speaker of the house to president, providing it an increased availing influence on behaviour

  Chapter 7: The mental modules that run your life

• An experiment was done where some men were shown pictures of beautiful women and some weren’t, and then tested on their willingness to delay gratification. The men whose mate acquisition modules were primed were found to be less willing to delay gratification—evolutionarily, men who saw signs of near-term courtship take advantage of any near-term resource acquisition. Though the men were conscious that it was just a photo and experiment, the underlying modules of the mind still influenced behaviour
• Men when placed in the presence of women rather than men, were found to be more inclined to rate accumulation of wealth as an important career goal

  Chapter 8: How thoughts think themselves

• Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists. Vipassana emphasizes mindfulness, Tibetan often steers the mind toward visual imagery, and Zen sometimes involves pondering those cryptic lines known as koans (a paradoxical anecdote or riddle)
• Most of the thoughts that wander during breath work involve mental modules relating to mate-acquisition, status enhancement, taking care of kin, tending to friendships, modules that have been designed by natural selection to encourage survival. Another default module is imagining an escape in the future (i.e., enjoying a cold beer, playing video games, etc.) which are inventions that circumvent evolution’s logic, as they hack in directly to the reward centre
• Thoughts arise due to a game being played between different mental modules, where eventually a winner takes hold of the conscious mind and presents the thought to your mind. Because these modules do the work outside of consciousness, the thoughts kind of surface out of nowhere
• Thoughts analogy: thoughts are like watching a movie, we get pulled into the story and feel so many emotions—excitement, fear, love—and then we can sit back and see these are just pixels of light projects on a screen. It’s the same with our thoughts, we get caught up in the story and the drama of them, forgetting that they are like a movie: they are not really happening
  • This analogy can help provide power to choose which thoughts are healthy and productive, and which unhealthy thoughts we can let go of
• One speculation is that the mental module that receives the honour of display to consciousness is the thought with the strongest associated feeling—whether it be pleasure, jealousy, regret, and so on. Feelings could be the labels to thoughts, labeled “high priority”, “low priority”, etc., and natural selection will determine that importance. If you’re a day away from an important presentation, preparation related thoughts are high priority, hence the high associated anxiety

  Chapter 9: “Self” control

• Decision making is less rational than we think, and more so based on feeling. Studies from Stanford/MIT showed that when people were shown products to buy, their brain activity mapped to an emotional centre—in the nucleus accumbens for attraction, and the insula for aversion. Information is transformed into feelings before decisions are made
• Prior to thoughts, animals were primarily driven by feelings—the brain provided positive feedback for things like eating, and negative feedback for things like being eaten. As animals and societies evolved, thoughts came to provide a way in which to navigate decision making in more complex environments
• When practicing self control, we are not necessarily being more rational, but rather fortifying the feelings against the temptation. Natural selection wants us to live a long and healthy life and wants us to eat foods with certain kinds of tastes. Struggling for self control is a clash between these values of natural selection
• Since all these deliberations are done subconsciously, why does the conscious participate? One theory is that if anyone challenges you or asks you why you did x, you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale. It also helps to share reasons with others to get their feedback prior to decision making
• Initial battles between mental modules end up disproportionately strengthening the winning module. In the case of self discipline, if we give in to a temptation, and are rewarded, our resistance to that temptation will atrophy over time. This is because in our ancestral environment, when, for example, a questionable sexual advance was rewarded, it would make sense to encourage it more. If it failed and you were ridiculed, it would encourage inaction in the future to avoid becoming a laughingstock
  • In other words, natural selection designed modules that get stronger with repeated success, and uses gratification as it’s working definition of success
• The RAIN technique (Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Nonattachment) is a mindfulness technique used to treat impulses and addiction. When distracted during work, you might think: No, don’t think about that—back to work! The mindful approach is to say: Go ahead, engage in that thought. Close your eyes and imagine how it would feel to open YouTube, examine the feeling of wanting to go to YouTube. Examine it until it loses power, then…back to work!
• Weaken impulses by not fighting it; instead, let it form and observe carefully. Hatred is also an impulse; it tempts us to engage in it because historically it was beneficial to undermine our enemies—and that would be rewarded with a good feeling. Treating it mindfully also provides a way to reduce the power of that impulse lever

  Chapter 10: Encounters with the formless

• Our perceptions are constructions of the world around us. Our perception systems sense light particles to see and sound waves to hear, to infer about our environment from afar. For example, our visual fields have a 2D basis, which combine to construct an inference of our 3D field. Optical illusions find loopholes in this inference to trick the mind into seeing something unusual
• A sound by itself is passive, not active, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So, to make it unpleasant, you must attach a judgement or feeling to it
• Everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it. We build our perceptions on stories, and mindfulness meditation is a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can separate truth from fabrication

  Chapter 11: The upside of emptiness

• The Capgras delusion is when someone assumes that a loved one has been replaced with a replica when it’s the real person. The emotions, or essence, normally associated with the perceptual information of that person have suddenly lost their value and the delusional person goes “crazy”
• We ascribe value to things based on the emotions they evoke, this is “essentialism”. A tape measured once owned by a famous person is inherently more valuable than an ordinary tape measurer, despite the objects being materialistically identical
• An experiment with professional wine tasters showed that when labeling the same wine as premium bordeaux and standard, the premium was thought to taste better. We value things based on the stories behind them, but this in turn masks the truth about what we’re experiencing. Had these wine tasters not been deluded, they would have experienced the truer taste of the wine, i.e., that they were identical
• Some describe the emptiness idea as “full emptiness”, where sometimes not seeing the essence, or story, of things allows you to be drawn into the richness of things, their raw beauty
• Brain scan studies, where subjects responded to the taste of the same wine labeled as $90 and $10, found that the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) was more active in the $90 drink. This region’s activity correlates with pleasurable experience. However, regions associated with sense tasting were not affected differently. The mOFC seems to be where the story, and hence expectation, mixes in with the raw sensory data to provide the “hedonic” experience of flavour

  Chapter 12: A weedless world

• Fundamental attribution error is attributing others behaviour to disposition, not situation; we locate the badness in others, not in their environmental factors
• It makes sense that in a self-serving way, we attribute behaviours we see to people’s dispositions—seeing them as possessing a good or bad essence that is most in our interest to see them possessing. We neglect that their behaviour could be different around others. Conveniently, our allies have essence-of-good and rivals an essence-of-bad.
• We have an essence-preservation mechanism that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behaviour than our allies. This makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference or even satisfaction, as natural selection has implanted a sense of justice into our brains
• Experiencing your feelings with care and clarity allows you to choose which ones to follow—like joy, delight, and love. This selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people
• The ultimate aim of Buddhism is not to become completely unemotional, i.e., emotionally flat. It rather enriches emotional life, so that one becomes more emotionally sensitive, more happy and joyful. One can respond to things in the world in a freer, more happy, more delightful way

  Chapter 13: Everything is one (at most)

• In the four noble truths, Buddha lays out that the basic cause of dukkha (suffering) is tanha (thirst, craving, desire) and that tanha is unquenchable and leaves of thirsting for more of the same or for something new
• The more tanha one has, the more distinct the bounds between the self and the object of the tanha. Emotions involving tanha seem to point to an unspoken boundary between the self and the desired or undesired scenario; thus, tanha will not only indicate but also create and drive the sense of self-other boundedness
• The interior perspective of not-self involves inspecting feelings and detaching from them. The external component of not-self can be thought of as follows: as the grip of desires—tanha—wanes, so does the sense of self that distinguishes you from the rest of your environment, so that the not-self experience extends outwards
• A refrain appearing in Buddhist texts is that of the three poisons: greed (general thirst for pleasant experience), hatred (aversion toward anything), and delusion. The two sides of tanha are a craving for pleasant and an aversion to the unpleasant. This in turn emphasizes the sense of self, which in the Buddhist sense is a delusion

  Chapter 14: Nirvana in a nutshell

• Mindfulness meditation enables the liberation from conditions, i.e., the chains of causation that otherwise shackle you. The things in your environment—the sights, sounds, smells, people, news, videos—push buttons and activate feelings that set in motion trains of thought and reactions that govern your behaviour, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate
• Enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what. Mindfulness is more introspective, with lessened ability of rigorous proofs, but invokes rational inquiry of the thoughts and feelings arriving to consciousness via external stimuli

  Chapter 15: Is enlightenment enlightening?

• A rebellion against an oppressive enemy focuses the mind and steels you for the struggle ahead. In the context of Buddhism, this enemy can be seen as natural selection, the engineer of the delusions that control us, it built those delusions into our brains
• We have a right to decide, like Neo of the Matrix, that our values differ from the force that controls us, and that we want liberation from it
• One element of enlightenment, the exterior version of the not-self experience (in which bounds between internal and external experience dissolve), involves abandoning one of the most basic precepts built into us by natural selection: that I am special by virtue of being me
• Working towards enlightenment involves loosening the grip of natural selection over you. In the exterior sense, everyone on the planet thinking that they are more special than everyone else is absurd; it can’t be that everybody is more important than everybody else: rejecting this notion must move us closer to the truth
• Identifying with these thoughts and feelings, which are used to proliferate genes, is another way of asserting our specialness. In the interior self case, cease self-identifying with your thoughts and feelings, reject natural selection’s values
• The view from nowhere—impartiality (not thinking one’s perspective is as important as anyone else’s)—still involves concern for the well-being of all sentient beings. This concern would be evenly distributed such that no one’s welfare is more important than anyone else’s (equanimity)