Jake

Reminder: If you feel compelled to publicly defend something against criticism from strangers, it has probably become too tightly bound to your identity

When the fever breaks, you come back. Through the chalk of paracetamol I taste sleep in your mouth. I kiss you. You say, easy. The split inside my lip opens again.

My new meta-theory of meditation! I’ve been incubating on this for about five years. It all began when I measured my own brain during my postdoc in 2021. I was setting up a decoding pipeline for an EEG experiment, which was working extraordinarily well. On my brain, I could decode sounds from EEG activity near ceiling (~0.9 AUC). But then, when I ran the same experiment on other participants, the best I got was an AUC of 0.62. Why that happened haunted me for literally years. Then one day, I realized what the difference was. The difference was that, during data collection, I was meditating. Because that was something I just naturally did when sitting still and listening to sounds. I was intently focused on the sounds I was hearing, with an otherwise empty mind. So my brain was also focused and clear. And therefore, easy to decode. It’s pretty obvious in hindsight. So then I tested this on some existing preliminary data, and low and behold, participants during meditation showed better sound decoding than participants not. Now I just needed to figure out the mechanism and run a hypothesis-driven experiment. How does meditation translate to clearer neural signals? Well, think about how any basic meditation practice works. You selectively enhance some aspect of experience (i.e., signal), be it your breath, a mantra, the body, or awareness itself. You also selectively declutter or “let go” some other aspect, such as self-centred rumination and other pointless neuroses (i.e., noise). You enhance a present-moment signal and you release the noise. So a clear mind ought to be reflected in the brain’s signal to noise ratio and this makes the brain more decodable! If your intentions are clear; so is your brain. It better tracks the input. It better mirrors the world. The implications are fascinating. One surprising consequence is that the future of brain-interfaces might depend on the capacity to meditate. Because you can’t decode a brain that’s noisy. So being able to control machines with your mind might one day depend on your capacity to enact a clear mind. One of the most cited papers in the field famously criticized meditation for claiming to be a panacea. And yet, there is reason to believe that meditation is at least panacea-like, given it’s unusually broad applications for psychopathology and beyond. Why is that? Well, according to the present theory, the reason meditation is so generalizable is because many psychopathologies can be linked to poor neural f-SNR (think, obsessions, depressive rumination, anxious worrying, delusional thinking, etc.). Most of the things we suffer is a consequence of us losing touch with the signal manifold. We get absorbed in our self-generated ignorance; lost in the endogenous noise of our own creation. The second arrow. If we learn to practice mindfulness, for example, we begin to be able to agnatically select how much abstraction is appropriate for the moment. We begin to be able to skilfully traverse the hierarchy of the mind according to the demands of the present; letting go activity that hinders our ability to see clearly. But what about deeper insights? The more advanced practices and realizations we encounter in meditation can be framed as removing pervasive channels of noise driven by aberrant priors, e.g., those comprising a rigid self-model. There are entrenched habits in our minds that consistently warp our more direct experience with layers and layers of confusion. Potentially, unraveling these maladaptive priors through insight is like wiping a thick layer of grime from a mirror that has quietly distorted every reflection, allowing the whole field of experience to become clearer at once. Perhaps, then, awakening is a dramatic change in the generative model that leads to a non-linear boost in the brain’s signal-to-noise. This would go a long way in explaining the profound clarity that accompanies such shifts. The paper also provides extensive tools for objectively measuring a clear mind. We already have strong evidence that the SNR indicators reflect meditation depth better than both traditional linear and non-linear metrics (see comments). And here’s a really cool bonus finding: The meditative posture may act as a kind of inner neurofeedback device. The careful posture we maintain during meditation enacts a sensorimotor error-correction loop, signalling through prediction errors when the mind fails to track the present moment. A slumping posture reveals you’re in noisy territory (e.g., mindwandering), alerting the mind to return to the signal when bodily alignment falters. Empirical evidence, figures, and more below. Special thanks to @mihir_nath_ for spearheading the empirical work on meditation and the brain's SNR. Read the full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.29698

@RubenLaukkonen Me trying to look up the word 'agnatically' 🤔 Really exciting stuff Ruben, can't wait to dig into it ❤️

@vividvoid @ascetic_shadow Bet accepted. I will raise the financial stakes to $100 (donated to a charity or cause of the winners choosing). But before we decide on an adjudicator, can we operationalise misogyny? I'm happy to offer a def, but out of good faith I will let you offer the initial def

@ascetic_shadow It's fine by me. Also, if someone can find a single misogynistic post I've ever written, I'll send them $5

i’ve seen people say this a fair amount on the timeline but never provide a single example or story. it bothers me because it seems less like a whisper network and more like a concerted attempt to slander someone because others don’t like his opinions. can you share anything so people can make up their own minds rather than just “trust me he’s a sexist narcissist, you should ostracize him?” at this point i really don’t know if it’s just that women are triggered by his gender posts or if there is actually something to be concerned about. all the posts i’ve seen reek of woke 1.0 but i am open to that not being the case. apologies to @vividvoid if this just opens you up to more slander but i feel like the slanderers need to show their hand so we know if they are bluffing

@KennethFolk Was he ever really there 🤔 nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opi…

Bob Dylan is still alive.

@vividvoid @ascetic_shadow Perhaps my interpretation was unfair. But do you see why, from outside your worldview, broad claims about “most women’s sexuality” and feminine essence/archetype language can read as sexist or reductive?

@Bigtimenormal @ascetic_shadow I don't think that's a reasonable or charitable read of the post

@nuanceexists @vividvoid @ascetic_shadow Valid point, but I’m not saying the dynamic is sexist. I’m saying the post takes a real dynamic and generalises it into a theory of “most women’s sexuality,” using specialness/worthlessness language. That’s the reductive/sexist part to me

@Bigtimenormal @vividvoid @ascetic_shadow what's described in the post is *feeling* special or worthless as an aspect of sexuality. the former is a very normal need and the latter comes up in relation to that normal need, though less often. it's not a tiny minority of women who have such needs.

@ascetic_shadow @vividvoid Appreciate the genuine engagement ❤️ I’ve softened from “Vivid is sexist” to “his posts can read as sexist outside his worldview.” The harm-reduction defence is partly valid, but he’s posting publicly, not to a private audience of men drifting into resentment

i think all of this was very well written. as i read i was able to see things from the various perspectives which is not an easy thing to accomplish. thanks for taking the time and care to break it down. when i think about it from these different framings i can see what you mean. if we were going to evaluate it purely on what it says i think some of the holes you poked in it would affect my view of it, but i think beyond just “what does it say about women?” thinking about “who is this for?” is important. i tend to think of the audience for these kinds of tweets as men who hate, or struggle to love women, and they are hung up on some of the things like what vv mentioned. in my book shifting from that to vv’s prescribed framing would be an improvement.

@nuanceexists @vividvoid @ascetic_shadow Naming true things isn’t sexist. Overgeneralising from some women/some contexts into “most women’s sexuality,” then framing it as specialness-or-worthlessness, is where it gets sexist

@Bigtimenormal @vividvoid @ascetic_shadow a fairly common occasional need. naming true things isn't sexist

@vividvoid @ascetic_shadow You’re arguing against a different point. “Some women enjoy consensual roughness in loving relationships” is not sexist. “Most women’s sexuality works through needing to feel special, and when she’s not special she needs to be treated as worthless” is the sexist/reductive bit

@Bigtimenormal @ascetic_shadow Just checking: you've never had a woman - who really loved and trusted you - ask you to be a little rougher than normal with her? And you've never heard of a woman who wanted this from time to time in otherwise safe, loving relationships? This whole notion is rank sexism?

@ascetic_shadow @vividvoid If you lean egalitarian or social-constructionist, the language of female essence/archetype can feel sexist because it idealises women as symbolic beings rather than treating them as ordinary individual agents.

@ascetic_shadow @vividvoid I think the broader disagreement is a worldview clash. If you’re gender-essentialist/traditionalist, Vivid’s posts can read as empowering and true

Me thinking about asking a question at a dharma talk: what an erudite question, not only will this clear up any doubts or obstacles in my practice, it will be of immense benefit to all other beings. Me asking the question: me me me me me me me my my my my my me me

@TVachaW @QiaochuYuan buddhismandai.com/conference Registration for this is closing soon, for those interested in this niche

@QiaochuYuan Apparently Mingyur Rinpoche had some hot takes on AI and consciousness recently:

have any other major religious leaders done anything similar yet? does the dalai lama have AI hot takes? much to ponder