The Mind as a Function

Epistemic Status: reflecting on reflections of reflections of reflections

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Per Eckhart Tolle's, the Now moment is a state of complete, undistracted presence, focused entirely on what is happening right now, without attachment to past memories or future worries. This shift in focus helps dissolve the "ego," which thrives on time-bound identity and thought. By embracing the Now, one enters a state of peace and acceptance, releasing the mind’s constant narrative and aligning with a deeper, timeless essence beyond thought. This present-centered awareness, according to Tolle, is the key to inner stillness and freedom from suffering.

Eckhart Tolle's now moment makes a lot of sense. The present moment is all we have. Thoughts about the future or past are just the mind modeling the past or future in the present.

The more we think about the past or present the more we escape into what is essentially a virtual reality world. Not that different than an online game or an addiction.

But I want to propose a model of the this that is more practical.

"Be in the present" moment isn't something that you can just do and meditation practices tend to have a lot of ritual and woo around them.

This is the model of the mind as function. One that takes in the environment and produces a personal sensation of consciousness.

f(environment) = conscious-experience

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The final conscious experience is all we can ever experience. Everything we do to improve ourselves like working out or studying or making money, all of it can only affect the "environment" or context from which conscious experience is created.

For example, if you have a lot of money, multiple phds, and 6 pack abs, but your day to day is packed with managing others or flows of money, then your conscious experience is mostly filled with management tasks.

Do you actually like this kind of management?

We already know how to consistently generate a background feeling of anxiety and fear from any context.

And while modifying the function of the mind to generate perfect equanimity in all situations can be a worthy goal...

A more practical understanding for most people is realizing how much effort we spend on modifying our context to change how others perceive us.

That is, we create models of others and then use these models to predict what kind of personal changes result in positive outputs from those models and then pursue those changes and hope that we are modeled positively by their true models by feeding their reactions into our model of their model of us and if it's positive then we good about ourselves.

This is insane.

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