
Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic? - bsbechtel
http://nautil.us/blog/can-a-wandering-mind-make-you-neurotic
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orthoganol
I can think of like 5 different ways that you could define "a wandering mind,"
yet the author just takes it for granted and acts like we all "get it," even
though the definition you choose might change the conclusions she reaches and
the nature of the discussion.

It's just that vagueness that characterizes discussions about consciousness or
subjectivity. It makes me think we have an incredibly long way to go before we
accurately model the human subject, which is a prerequisite to any meaningful
AI.

~~~
mbrock
You may be interested in this paper by Hubert Dreyfus, "Why Heideggerian AI
failed and how fixing it would require making it even more Heideggerian."

[http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf](http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf)

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versteegen
Thank you! A very interesting and insightful criticism of various approaches
to AI, especially what we can learn from GOFAI. Do you have any other papers
to recommend?

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arstin
You might check out stuff from John Haugeland, who coined "GOFAI" back in the
80s. Here's a nice essay I quickly found online (that's sort of indirectly
about AI) for example:
[http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/haugeland/Mind+...](http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/haugeland/Mind+Embodied+and+Embedded.pdf)

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thewarrior
I'm EXACTLY like the daughter mentioned in the article. My ruminations make me
more creative and poetic while making me careless and depressed.

Does anyone here have any ways I can tackle the downsides of being this way ?

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mbrock
What's the one thing you actually enjoy doing that does take your out of your
recursive depressive thinking for a minute?

Do more of that thing every day. Do less web surfing and less rumination.

It's all about mental habituation.

Allow me to randomly speculate that in your mental world, reading some
Intellectually Fascinating Article has an extremely high priority, whereas
eating dinner is just some stupid thing your body demands, and so because of
this configuration of like/dislike or attraction/aversion you tend to chow
down whatever is easiest so you can get back to the Fascinating Article.

That habit becomes deeply learned by your neural networks, reinforced by daily
training. Fortunately your species has evolved the mysterious capacity of
thinking and willing, so you can in fact make decisions that are
counterintuitive to your own neural training.

You may find that you need some violent tactics such as temporarily cutting
off your internet supply. That snaps you back to reality (oh, there goes
gravity). Makes it way easier to focus on prepping veggies.

Isn't part of the problem that electronic or thought-based stuff moves too
fast, is infinitely elastic and offers too little real friction-based
resistance? Which leads to a stagnation of patience with actual passing time
and physical reality. So I suggest doing whatever requires and encourages
patience. Cooking is a great example because if you try to do it as fast as
possible you will burn your garlic and that can very effectively train your
neurons to chill out and do one thing at a time.

~~~
plonh
Depressive thinking existed before the Internet.

~~~
mbrock
Agreed. I don't know much about those times though and I can only really speak
to what I'm familiar with.

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workitout
I think the answer is yes. There's an old saying, idle hands are the devil's
workshop or something like that. The mind needs to be nurtured and guided just
like muscles or it will fall into disarray. Creative pursuits help keep the
mind focused. That and some good FPS games.

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csn
Books and video games have really helped me not to think when that's needed.

"Worrying about misfortunes that will never happen" is also called "risk
analysis" in securityspeak. Sure, a neurotic mind can find you those bizarre
edge cases but it can also become a burden when you're needed to reset and
tackle a new problem.

~~~
greggarious
"I'm not perseverating, I'm threat modeling!"

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Tilgore_Krout
I've definitely noticed this, and the cause was never really a mystery to me.
Seems like the brain and nervous system would have evolved to benefit from an
optimal balance of intro vs extroverted time spent. During externally oriented
times the brain is occupied on a task so it would make sense for any anxiety
or fear centers to be engaged. While the brain could best utilize downtime by
analyze past mistakes or ruminating on things. The fear mechanisms of the
brain i would guess use discomfort and aggitation to help spurr on adaption
and problem solving. like a neural network stuck in the training phase, too
much time spent worrying inward would distort the system and cause problems

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mbrock
David Abrams wrote a book called _The Spell of the Sensuous_ (1996) that's
related.

The subtitle is "Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World."

TL;DR: modern life is rubbish; go hiking.

Humans grew up in "nature," whatever that means. Basically they were inside
systems they didn't make. They had to understand rivers, trees, birds, stars,
plants, all kinds of stuff. At first they didn't even have language, and
before symbols, life was vivid and dynamic; there was no alienation.

Some people were (some people still are) shamans. Their job was to commune
even more interestingly with the non-human world. For example they would study
birds so much that they could imitate them and kind of live among them. They
would develop complex ways of interacting with plants.

> It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip
> out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular
> culture—boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and most
> importantly, the common speech or language—in order to make contact with,
> and learn from, the other powers in the land.

Hunters also had intimate connections with nature. Spend enough time in the
forest and you and your culture will develop sensual intuitions based on
subtle bird sounds, so that you can tell without thinking that there is a
large mammal thataway, from the way the birds are moving and chirping.

> Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own
> human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old
> reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We still _need_ that which is
> other than ourselves and our creations. The simple premise of this book is
> that we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

> Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of
> human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all
> too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix
> of sensations and sensibilities.

The crucial event Abrams goes back to in order to explain the current
detachment is the invention and spread of the alphabet, that is, the way of
writing that is abstracted from natural symbols. Alphabetic literacy initiates
a profound shift; McLuhan agreed. We begin to build an abstract world of ideas
that is enormously powerful, and we also kind of lose touch with "reality."

> Plato, or rather the association between the literate Plato and his mostly
> nonliterate teacher Socrates, may be recognized as the hinge on which the
> sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to
> orality gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered
> by alphabetic literacy. [...]

> By continually asking his interlocutors to repeat and explain what they had
> said in other words, by getting them thus to listen to and ponder their own
> speaking, Socrates stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded
> by orality, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were
> accustomed. Small wonder that some Athenians complained that Socrates'
> conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray's electric shock.

The climbers I know love it almost like religious people love their faith. It
does become a "lifestyle." They start saving up money for vacations in Spain
and France and anywhere with big serious boulders. Some also get into
spelunking. Most of these people that I know are otherwise academics and IT
professionals, and climbing is a way for them to restore something ancient and
combat alienation and burnout.

> Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity
> between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds
> in upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with
> the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract
> mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof
> and arbitrary. [...]

> We may think of the sensing body as a kind of open circuit that completes
> itself only in things, and in the world. [...]

> The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself
> inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial
> field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human
> body and the animate earth.

Exercise for the reader: come up with a way to coexist with technologies and
thoughts as if those things were landscapes, mountains, animals.

~~~
simpsond
Go hiking. I do this a few times a week to get away from the desk. I still end
up thinking the entire time, but my thoughts are much more positive. I end the
hike feeling refreshed and happy every time.

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EGreg
I often think that everything is going to end. Especially when I'm up at night
and playing video games, after a long day of work. Something about game worlds
ending probably makes it more likely for me to have an existential angst, but
the biggest reason is how much Judaeo-Christian RELIGION I have been exposed
to and trying to find the truth among contradictory worldviews.

I am NOT depressed (at least in the colloquial sense of the term) since I
definitely feel intrinsically happy most of the time when nothing special is
happening. I don't really need anything except good health in order to be
happy. However, I tend to take things to their logical conclusion way more
than other people, and as a result I see both upsides and downsides most avoid
talking about. My mind naturally tries to find the main factors to explain a
phenomenon, rather than accepting what's told to me.

The thought that all this will come to an end is scary to me. It leads to a
conclusion which I guess also comes out of depression: what is the point of it
all? I can accomplish so much in this world and then if I die and everyone who
experiences it will die, what's the point ultimately? If you knew the entire
world was ending in 3 days due to a meteor, say, would you labor every day on
a giant novel, no matter how good it is? If not, then isn't it all just a
matter of scale?

Perhaps I have to learn to love the journey instead of the destination.

Perhaps I have to liken not being around in 700 years to not having been
around 700 years ago. But life moves forward and now that I'm here, my self
preservation instinct makes me dread someday not being around. Because while
the world will continue, for me it may as well be a fantasy world.

Also I look around at the cultures of the earth engaging with computers and
cellphones and promiscuous sex and all the other stuff. A lot of it is
addictive and exciting, but once you wean yourself off of it you realize how
non essential it is. So what is the point of any worldly things?

I must say, the fact that religions have existed stably for thousands of
years, as well as various philosophies (Buddhism, Stoicism) seem to teach
similar things. A detachment from the cares of this world, and a focus on
something "greater".

But what if this is all there is?

And what if there is an afterlife and we spent our lives believing the wrong
religion, and must face some consequences?

These are thoughts I find scary.

Especially the last one.

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pessimizer
From reading the title, you would think that the article was going to
speculate about cause, but it seems to completely ignore it and just beg the
question. Does being neurotic give you a wandering mind?

There's little or no experimental evidence that "thought" causes anything:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism)

edit: Wikipedia is scary specific
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_mental_causation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_mental_causation)
:)

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UhUhUhUh
The writer seems to express the worry that one type of mind is more efficient
when the going gets tough (i.e. initial description of the two characters).
This is an entirely different question. The assumption that so-called
"neurotic" minds, wondering or whatever, will have less adaptive reactions to
the circumstances is false. It is regularly contradicted by reality (e.g.
history). There is just no reliable prediction to be made about how someone is
going to behave based on the criterion presented.

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abhi152
+1 for the first two paragraphs. Though I am not a psychologist I have seen
your observation to be true in many cases. I would classify this line as gold
"while my son’s mental life is closely connected to the outside world, my
daughter spends much of her life inside her own head". I have never met a
person who has many outward connections and is depressed the assumption is
that those connections are real.

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Nrpf
Is it possible to have both? Quiet your mind and be in the moment for physical
stuff but call on its rumination powers to think when needed?

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digitalzombie
Wandering not Wondering, title is a typo.

Read the title thought it was silly, double check the link's title and yeah,
typo.

~~~
Aardwolf
Agreed, please fix the title who can, it's confusing. Thanks :)

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robbrown451
My mind wonders whether you actually meant "wandering"?

