Sadhguru‘s description of the “monkey brain” reminded me of my time with Cary Tagawa. Both his description of the “problem” (what I call tangent migrations) and our “is it possible, is it not possible” oscillations appear to conflate, rather than differentiate, our natural minds and our artificial minds.
His lens is beautiful and relevant to simple individual life in the natural world, but he doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference between natural, affectively resonant, self-other learning. and artificially abstract conventionalized self-other learning. The oscillations, the “problem” he points to is the oscillation between inner and outer reference. The iterative back-and-forth process that is so problematic to our natural being is essential (at least so far) to the functioning of our artificial mind.
We are the only species that artificially conventionalizes learning. Minds that have learned to learn through artificial conventionalizations learn to cycle through parabolic inversions (inside-out, outside-in) as the process of progressively stitching together the natural and artificial contributions to the stream of our consciousness – the stream of our learning. His description of the power of belief describes an affective commitment of such amplitude that learning becomes subservient to the belief.
While he talks about the positive effects one might have on proximal people, he doesn’t give any attention to our interdependence. We can’t and don’t exist alone. We learn to become who we become through affective resonance and communication with other people (until we begin artificially learning).
To be inwardly healthy we need to learn to be differently outwardly interfacing with the artificial dimensions of human life. Put another way, how we learn to be artificial (unconsciously automatically conform to outward abstract conventions) can cause us to become inwardly fragmented.
We all have natural minds. We all have artificial minds.
What do you think of your artificial mind?
I was writing the above when I encountered this (which just came out). Though I think I have some deep differences with Dr. Pinker, I respect him. That Sadhguru was in a deep-dive conversation with Pinker about “consciousness” piqued my curiosity. It’s a great watch (or listen). The differences between them are interesting to ponder. Interestingly, Pinker represents the artificial mind and Sadhguru the natural mind, and both fail to appreciate the role of learning in how we become who we become: