I finished re-reading A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine, and it is a book that never fails to give me something to ponder. Often I miss things that would seem to be obvious, and upon this particular re-reading, the single word tranquility has been resonating, because I caught a single sentence in the book that says something about how having a philosophy of life makes decision-making easier because one simply makes his decision based on his philosphy of life. In the case of the Roman stoics, if the attainment of tranquility is the centerpiece of a philosophy of life, then decisions ought to be made based on which option leads to tranquility. Sounds simple, but I hadn’t conceptualized it like that until just this week. I have to make a decision about something: Which of my options has the highest liklihood of yielding or adding to my sense of tranquility? I have never asked this question before when confronted with a decision. Not explicitly.
Tranquility, and pursuing that which will lead to tranquility also means avoiding that which will disrupt tranquility. Irvine points out that one of the major disruptors of tranquility is insatiability, which is hard-wired into us via the evolutionary process, and this is where Irvine’s approach to stoicism really shines. The ancient stoics, you see, placed “the gods” in an important role in their philosophy. They believed that humans were created by the gods, and that humans were different from other creations because the gods gave them the ability to reason. This was of course well before Charles Darwin and our updated understanding that humans are evolved creatures just like every other creature. Irvine updates stoicism to include this understanding. Our insatiability is easier to understand in this context to boot. Human evolved to be insatiable because those who were not insatiable were out-competed and relegated to the evolutionay dustbin. Same thing with our tendency to worry, to experience pain, fear, anger, etc. All traits that at some point in our development were winning traits, but can nowadays be seen more like evolutionary holdovers, and if tranquility is what one seeks, impediments.
I want to add some things to this mix, particularly interface theory as presented by Donald Hoffman. Humans don’t have anything like direct access to reality’s underlying code structure. The world we experience as real is just an interface that evolution has crafted for us for our fitness for the task of copying ourselves. We don’t see “truth”, and what we see isn’t false, but just emergent properties of a deeper physics that is completely hidden from view. We can’t see that deeper physics. It isn’t accessible to us, because that wasn’t what was best for our fitness.
The interface, then, gives us impressions, bringing in Marcus Aurelius and his treatment by Hadot in his The Inner Citadel, which is absolutely one of the must-read books in the rather small stoic library. I want to break down how this fits together. I get an impression. A phenomena presents itself to my consciousness, and this can come from externals, like going outside and noticing the weather, or it can come from the underlying machinery of the self, how one feels, whether it be angry or sad or depressed or happy and tranquil, or when a threat is detected; basically, any time information is relayed up to consciousness, it all must go through the interface because that is all we have. One can take an extra step, sometimes. Sometimes not, because the automatic takes over and the step can only come a little later. The step is the practice of assent. I feel hungry. It is bad. I must find food. Assent happens after the hunger pang, and before the it is bad. I feel hungry. Is it bad? No, it is neutral and I refuse to agree that it is bad. I’m not eating right now. Neocortex has spoken.
The practice of assent is really just trying to carve out a space using the neocortex to mediate and referee the more lower-level processes. Many of those processes are pre-linguistic, too, so communication is a bit mysterious, a bit strained, so progress can be slow and can only be measured over time, not in one-offs.
- Practice Negative Visualization
When stoicism was developed, it borrowed the best philosophy and techniques from competing schools, and the stoic themselves were expert pre-scientific psychologists of sorts, who understood that the hedonic treadmill was responsible for a lion’s share of human suffering. This is Schopenhauer’s Will to Life, and it is also evolution. It is Christianity. It is everything that promotes sexual reproduction and the process of copying oneself. The drives toward mates and status, all scripts installed in us by this relentless force, what we just call life. It uses us as vehicles, and then it spits us out, and it is all quite unceremonious. The first step is to recognize the hedonic treadmill, the insatiable need for externals, that we can never seem to get enough. The next step is to work to get off the treadmill, and this pretty much requires a steady practice to achieve.
Irivine notes that most of us just follow the default hedonistic philosophy and spend our lives trying to acquire the things that we believe will make us happy, and we seldom stop to notice that as soon as we acquire the things in question, another thing takes its place, and we find ourselves chasing an illusion. We can never find tranqility in the continual pursuit of externals. The remedy to this is to short-circuit our evolutionary programming by learning to want the things we already have, and we do this by practicing negative visualization. Irvine recommends we spend an amount of time every day imagining losing the things we have, such as our loved ones, our cars, our houses, and so forth, so that we will learn to appreciate those things while we have them, while simultaneously innoculating ourselves against the day that we do eventually and inevitably lose those things. The stoics remind us that everything we think we own are actually on loan (from the gods), and all of these things can be recalled at without so much as a moment’s notice. Our sons and daughters can die in car crashes. Our houses can burn down. And ultimately, everything that we find so important will one day be taken away from us by our deaths.
- Practice the trichotomy of control
Phenomena can be categorized in three ways: 1. Things over which we have no control. 2. Things over which we have complete control. 3. Things over which we have some, but not complete control. If something is outiside of our control, only a fool would spend time on it. Instead, Irvine notes, we should adjust our internals, which are somewhat within our control. I add this: That consciousness, the part of us that is intentional, that can be aimed, that part is within out control, but it is sometimes short-circuited by the underlying systems. The interface gives me and impression. I practice assent. Is this within my control? No? Then it is nothing to me. Is this within my control? Yes? Then, what is to be done about it? And one decides what to do about it by asking the question: Will this lead to tranquility? This way, we don’t spend time worrying about things we can change anyway. We say aloud to ourselves, This is nothing to me.
We practice this one all the time, many times a day. It never really ends. We run this triage process, and we talk to the lower systems about it once we’ve made a decision. Let me give an example: Let’s say I lose my job. That is almost certainly going to upset my tranquility if I agree with the first impression that losing my job is a bad thing. My mind my reel from it. My life is over. I’m totally screweed, in a sort of chain reaction. We don’t need to let it spiral, though, not necessarily, because by combining negative visualization and using our triage to place it in the correct category, and then by pronouncing the decision of the neocortex, “this is nothing to me,” we can perhaps cut this worry time down, and over time and with practice, maybe we can get it down quite a lot, and maybe, just maybe, our inner citadel becomes more and more resistant to the movements of externals. That’s the idea.
- Practice fatalism about spacetime
This is an extension and ties in a specific aspect of how we live as persons on this planet, as one of the dominant emergent properties is spacetime. We experience reality as a causal chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. We are born, we live for a time, and then we expire. We can’t change the past, so we must let it go, and it ought have no power to upset our tranquility in the present, as the needle rides the groove. This is where I will invoke the gods, to help model it. We can take the fates as a good representation of the gods here, that they are spinning our record. They choose the tune and when to play it, and they take the record off the player. We are just along for the ride, the species that can observe the music as it is being made. That’s pretty much all we can do. We add our own music, and we talk about it, but we are just a part of the bigger symphony, chosen by the gods themselves.
Example: I just had a thought about my ex-wife, something she did ten years ago, and it upset my tranquility. Why would I allow that to happen to me if I can prevent it? The thing that happened ten years ago cannot be changed, and here you are a little disturbed by it, believe maybe it could be changed if only you suffered enough. It’s silly.
In a block universe such as this, the past is written in stone, and so is the future. It isn’t some unfolding free-for-all, but an already-pressed record of things. You don’t have any control over that, either. You don’t have any control over the way you’re going to die or even what you’re going to have for lunch tomorrow. It’s already been decided. You’re just the observer.
You want to get okay with whatever is coming. Just bring it on.
- Practice voluntary discomfort
This is where one starts making his body align with the philosophy, where it truly becomes a practice, and I would say from my experiments with it, gives one the greatest chances at experiencing stoic joy. The idea here is to deliberately challenge the inner sloth, the part of you who just wants things to be easy and comforable. I walk on the treadmill. I never want to walk on the treadmill, and I can hear that inner voice, that pull, to say home, go back to bed. It is always a battle between the practicing stoic who values the benfits that come with regular exercise and the lazy man who doesn’t want to do anything that causes exertion. Camping is also good volunary discomfort. Experiments with depriving oneself of expensive food, like avoiding fast food, like eating simple fare like salads and easily obtainable meats and cheese. Calorie restriction and only eating when one is good and hungry. There are so many possibilities here, and they represent chances for one to practice mastery over his body. This, one hopes, also prepares one for harder times like sickness and eventually death.
- Memento Mori, premeditatio malorum
The ending is the same for everyone. Death. That’s when it all ends. And in the meantime, as you live, you’ll watch people you know die. We’ve done a lot to shield ourselves from this in modern life, but it is there, looming, nonetheless. I have a ceramic skull on my desk from the Mexican day of the dead tradition, and it is there to remind me that I am going to die. That’s good for several reasons. Firstly, it lessens the weight of things. I mean, what is so important that it has to upset me, when all I’m going to do is die, and then nothing matters anyway. Things only matter to me, and I am nothing at all but a talking ape who is certainly going to die. Lighten up.
And it is also good practice to keep that thought pretty close. I happen to think the ultimate test is in death, how one goes about it, if he has a choice about going about it. It ought not upset our tranquility. It is an external, just like every other external.