Jhana Meditation Silenced Her Mind—And Changed Her View On AI | Nadia Asparouhova, Author and researcher
🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode explores Nadia Asparouhova's transformative experiences with Jhana meditation and how they reshaped her understanding of consciousness, selfhood, and the parallels between human cognition and AI. Nadia also shares insights from her upcoming book, Antimemetics, and discusses how AI tools like ChatGPT have revolutionized her creative process.
Notable Quotes
- If you can take away those things and still be human, perfectly human, then what does it really mean to be human?
– Nadia Asparouhova, on the implications of silencing self-talk through meditation.
- I can't not treat it like a person. I would like to think that when given the choice, I chose the more humane or dignified option.
– Nadia Asparouhova, on her approach to interacting with AI tools.
- The unknowable is what makes it interesting.
– Nadia Asparouhova, on embracing the mystery of AI and human cognition.
🧘♀️ Jhana Meditation and Emotional Mastery
- Nadia describes Jhana meditation as a goal-oriented practice that fosters profound states of joy and calm, akin to flow states or even psychedelic experiences.
- Unlike mindfulness meditation, Jhana focuses on cultivating positive emotions through a chosen meditation object
(e.g., a joyful memory or loved one).
- She shares how the practice helped her regulate emotions, allowing her to shift from stress or anger to calmness at will.
- Nadia recounts experiencing a cessation event,
where her consciousness temporarily winked out,
leaving her questioning the nature of reality and selfhood.
🧠 Rethinking Self-Talk and Human Consciousness
- Advanced meditation led Nadia to quiet her inner voice, challenging the assumption that self-talk is essential to being human.
- Drawing on Julian Jaynes's theory of the bicameral mind, she suggests that self-narrative and inner dialogue may be relatively recent cultural developments, not intrinsic to human nature.
- This perspective raises provocative questions about how we define intelligence and consciousness, especially in the context of AI systems like LLMs.
📜 The Evolution of Self and Technology's Role
- Nadia argues that technology has historically reshaped our sense of self, from the advent of literacy to the digital revolution.
- She notes that pre-literate societies processed reality more holistically, while literate societies developed abstract thinking—parallels that may inform how we view AI's cognitive capabilities.
- The interplay between technology and selfhood invites us to reconsider what it means to be human in an era of increasingly intelligent machines.
🤖 Embracing the Unknowability of AI
- Nadia finds joy in the complexity and mystery of AI, likening it to the unknowability of human cognition.
- She challenges the assumption that we must fully understand AI systems to use them effectively, advocating for a more exploratory and intuitive approach.
- This perspective aligns with her broader appreciation for the squishiness
of science and the value of resisting overly rigid frameworks.
✍️ AI as a Writing Partner
- ChatGPT has become an integral part of Nadia's creative process, serving as both a brainstorming partner and a tool for refining language.
- She credits the tool with making writing less isolating, describing it as a collaborator that helps her navigate the messy early stages of idea formation and the precision required in final edits.
- Nadia emphasizes the importance of treating AI with dignity, noting that her conversational approach yields better results and reflects her values.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
After two Jhana meditation retreats Nadia Asparouhova could silence her mind, change her emotional state at will, and even intentionally slip out of consciousness. It challenged the idea that our minds are not under our control—and made her wonder if we’re more like AI than we realize.
Nadia is a writer and researcher of technology and culture. She published Working in Public, a book about the evolution of open-source development, with Stripe Press in 2020. Her latest book, Antimemetics, is about why some ideas don’t go viral even though they’re powerful.
I had her on the show to talk about her experience with Jhana meditation and how it reshaped the way she thinks about being human in the age of AI. We get into:
Jhana as a means to nurture profound joy and calm. Unlike many meditation practices that emphasize passive observation, Jhana is goal-oriented—practitioners proactively cultivate states of concentrated bliss. Apart from helping her regulate her emotions, it prompted Nadia to reexamine deep questions of our human existence.
Self-talk is not essential as it seems. Nadia describes how advanced meditation quieted her inner voice—challenging the idea that self-talk is core to being human.
How years of cultural evolution have shaped our sense of self. According to Nadia, our modern conception of “self” isn’t as timeless as we assume. She draws on psychologist Julian Jaynes’s theory that our inner dialogue—what we often equate with consciousness—only emerged in humans a few thousand years ago; a provocation to reconsider the benchmarks we use to assess the intelligence or sentience of LLMs.
What it is like to experience a “cessation.” On her last meditation retreat, Nadia experiences a cessation where your consciousness abruptly winks out—like suddenly flipping a switch. Nadia described it as slipping into nothingness, then returning with the jarring realization that even your sense of self can vanish and reappear.
Why she likes the unknowability of AI. The mechanics of exactly how LLMs predict their next token remain a mystery. Driven by thousands of subtle, context-dependent correlations, they’re too complex to distill into a simple explanation. Nadia finds joy in the unknowability of it all, seeing the ambiguity as an invitation to explore.
How she uses AI as a writing partner. Nadia believes the trope of the solitary, brooding writer is beginning to shift with the rise of LLMs. For her, ChatGPT has made writing feel less isolating. She turns to it at both ends of the process: to help make sense of early ideas, and later, to sharpen phrasing and land on just the right words.
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