The problem of problem solving

Jordan Harmon

All right, so I’m excited to be here with you. It’s it’s been uh A pleasure today to hear some of the other talks. And I was glad that Carl mentioned his talk, the kind of strange combinations. That comes out in transhumanist meetings. And I feel like I’m one of those kinds of strangers, in a way, coming from the world of psychotherapy and social work. I’m kind of an accidental transhumanist. When I came across the MTA several years ago, I had listened to a podcast and Befriended the person who was speaking on the podcast, and I saw that on Facebook they liked the Mormon Transhumanist Association. I thought, oh, that’s interesting. And in my head, I was thinking Mormon Transpersonal Association. Because transpersonal psychotherapy is the kind of kind of tr psychotherapy I was interested in. It has implications into spiritual growth and things like that. And as my first reaction when I saw what I was getting into with transhumanism was some of that fear and hesitation and reluctance and you know kind of like, wow, I like sci-fi movies, but I don’t know if I want to live in one kind of a reaction. But the more that I’ve listened to transhumanists, Lincoln and Carl and others, and your keynote speakers that you’ve had, the more I’ve said, okay, I think I really get what these guys are saying. I’m interested in it.

Jordan Harmon

So today I’m talking about the problem of problem solving. And another way to think of the problem of problem solving is to talk about the problem of our relationship to pain.

Jordan Harmon

So there are two types of problem solving I’d like to delineate here. First, there’s the primitive part of our brain that wants to fight or flee from the source of pain. This is problem solving of an evolutionary survival. It is reactive, instinctual, primitive, and very functional. You know, it’s a big reason why we’re here right now.

Jordan Harmon

The second kind of problem solving with pain is that the evolved part of our brain wants to make meaning for why pain is there, and it wants to problem solving what we problem solve what we can do about it. Our prefrontal cortex allows us to reach back into the past and forward into the future and to interpret, plan, imagine consequences and to weigh pros and cons. This works for many problems that we encounter, but it exacerbates emotional and psychological pains. The more we try to control these kinds of pain, the stickier the relational frames they arise from become. and the more we become trapped in our minds and unable to live our lives how we really want.

Jordan Harmon

Our internal experience, so before I go there, we can see Obviously, we’re these rational creatures, and yet we still have many problems in how we whether it’s governing ourselves, how we interact with different people, how we interact in our own homes and in our most important relationships.

Jordan Harmon

So our internal experience is vast with countless thoughts, emotions, urges, and moral judgments which flow through and interact each other in a variety of ways. Mind chatter, we might call it. Maybe this has something to do with the qualia that that uh Brett was talking about, but I’m not quite sure. We’ll see.

Jordan Harmon

Contextual behaviorists refer to this mind chatter as relational frames, which are a vast network of cognitive linguistic associations that are unique to the evolved human brain. RFT researchers have tested language learning in humans and animals, and so far their theory has held up. The theory is that human cognition and language learning is unique because of our ability and natural tendency to derive arbitrary relationships between any two or more stimuli. This tendency allows the sophistication of our imagination in our construction of the worlds that we inhabit

Jordan Harmon

But this blessing comes with a curse. We conjure pain and we compound it into suffering through relational framing and through our reaction to the pain. Religious traditions have been trying to deal with this problem of suffering through contemplative practices for thousands of years, and with some success. Western medicine has come around to this idea as mindfulness meditation, yoga, and other forms of contemplative practice have been rigorously studied and found to be much more than stale tradition or a New Age fad.

Jordan Harmon

The behaviorists think they know why these contemplative practices help us become more flexible in the face of pain and free from unnecessary suffering And they’ve developed a set of principles designed to focus on enhancing this kind of flexibility in the service of value-driven lives. Acceptance and commitment therapy, called ACT, is the technology that is a natural outgrowth of the theory, relational frame theory. It is a set of principles and processes that rely heavily on mindfulness and acceptance strategies, values clarification, and making decisions based on the pragmatic question of what works. It’s kind of like a mashup between Stephen Covey and Buddhism, but rather than a religious or self-help origin, it comes from the science of behaviorism.

Jordan Harmon

The processes addressed in ACT help us hack the evolutionary problem of problem solving. The focus is not on changing the content or form of our pain, but rather our relationship to the pain. ACC’s main purpose is to promote the enhancement of psychological flexibility.

Jordan Harmon

So, to understand psychological flexibility, it might help to understand a little bit Of psychological inflexibility, or what we might say, what causes unnecessary suffering in this framework. Psychological flexibility is a new construct in the world of behavioral health interventions. It is defined as the capacity to contact painful private experiences while continuing to make decisions in the direction of one’s cherished values.

Jordan Harmon

As an outcome variable, psychological flexibility has been found It has been found to be predictive of health outcomes across a number of treatment issues, including anxiety, depression, substance abuse, weight gain, mental health stigma, chronic pain, and psychosis, among other treatment targets. It’s emerging as a more important treatment focus and target than a reduction of symptoms. And so again, we’ll talk a little bit about psychological inflexible and what’s happening there.

Jordan Harmon

So first, going back to relational frame theory, where we tend to get stuck in the language and the thoughts that become more painful to us. And this we call this cognitive fusion. So there’s certain words or thoughts or experiences that arise inside of us that we are more fused to, we are more stuck to. And when we’re more fused to something, our behavioral repertoire narrows, so we have less freedom to act in accordance with our values. So I could say a string of words here. I could say ornithology or shoelace or certain words, and there wouldn’t be much fusion for most of us. But I could say other words like terrorism or ISIS. Or some other things, and of course, individually, contextually, everyone has different experiences, so different things will be fused in different ways. that cognitive fusion is stuck and stuck to and over-identifying with our thoughts, our emotions, and our sensations.

Jordan Harmon

And it’s related to experiential avoidance. We’ve heard a little bit about escapism today and some of the worst elements of maybe of tech or religion or culture. drives us towards escapism. But experiential avoidance is basically doing anything mentally or behaviorally that is trying to help us escape our experience as it is. The extreme of this, of course, is addiction. And a more mundane experience of experiential avoidance that we probably all have partaken in is maybe procrastination. Or you could also think of thought suppression. There was a great talk a few years ago by Elder Uchdorf where he talked about not judging people, and he talked about imagining the thought, the stop sign, which is actually a method in cognitive and behavioral therapy. That’s a great message, except for that a lot of researchers have found that thought suppression works in the short term, but it actually further stigmatizes the thought that’s arising. So if you judge yourself for judging, it might actually mean that you’re more susceptible for judging without knowing that you’re judging. And so experiential avoidance, whether it’s mundane like thought suppression or procrastination or an extreme like addiction, can also narrow our behavioral repertoire and take away our freedom to act.

Jordan Harmon

Having our minds stuck in the past or the future. Now, of course, nostalgia isn’t evil or remembering or thinking back and planning for the future is not wrong as well. But oftentimes, we get stuck in the past or the future, and this can be problematic for us because we’re living here and now.

Jordan Harmon

Values confusion is another part of this process of fragility, where we forget what matters to us at our core and we start acting in ways that conflict with really who we are at our core. And then another process here of inflexibility is inaction or impulsivity. And the last one is this idea of the sense of self or self as ego or a conceptualized self. So this is relating to the ways in which we, again, over-identify with certain labels or certain aspects of ourself. And the process is to create more barriers and more divisions between people and within ourselves.

Jordan Harmon

Like in therapy, the way this works is a person having the thought, let’s say, I’m worthless, right? So I am worthless. They’re identifying with this sense of self is worthlessness. And there’s certain, for all of these, there’s certain practices you can take people through to help reverse these harmful. processes that send tend to naturally happen. And that’s what psychological flexibility is all about.

Jordan Harmon

So where we had cognitive fusion, we do practices that help people defuse from their thoughts. And it has to do with noticing thoughts rather than clinging to them, opening up space for thoughts, for emotions, for difficult experiences. acceptance and willingness on the other side of experiential avoidance, where we’re able to experience whatever it is, whether it’s painful or pleasant, and we have an openness and a willingness to what is there. And of course, those too you can see in contemplative practices. Present moment awareness, being in the moment, in your physical surroundings with the people or the things or the places that you are. Values clarification, knowing what matters, and committed action, doing what it takes. And then the last, the sixth process here. And these aren’t necessarily in a specific order. People describe these in different orders. Self as context, which is a different sense of self, rather than self as ego or the the conceptualized self. Self as context is connecting with a sense of pure awareness or consciousness. So some of these are kind of hard to describe scientifically, but the research on the ways that these are addressed in psychotherapy or in ACT show that there is a lot of benefits to addressing these different processes and that psychological flexibility is increased.

Jordan Harmon

I’m convinced that these developments in contextual behavioral sciences are revolutionary in their approach to helping at the micro level of the individual and in psychotherapy. It’s an evidence-based practice that’s emerged and is growing faster and faster in terms of its use in the VA and other places. I’m also interested in how these processes might play out at the macro level and with regards to our relationship with technology and religion.

Jordan Harmon

You can kind of see on the left side here the acceptance, willingness, cognitive diffusion, and with the middle, there’s kind of an emphasis on What you might if you’ve known more much about contemplative practices, mindfulness, and maybe Eastern philosophy, Eastern religions. On the right side, there’s kind of this Western emphasis. And that’s one way to think of it with the action. So there’s a dialectical kind of both and thing going on here.

Jordan Harmon

With cognitive diffusion, I’m imagining technologies that could help us hold our cultural narratives respectfully and lightly rather than getting fused in a way that narrows our relationship to evolving narratives. Are there technologies that will reinforce a flexible relationship with the cultural language and topics we are unhealthily fused to? Echo chambers are not the answer here. Kendall Wilcox’s Far Between Project, where he interviews in a documentary style Mormons who identify both as Mormons and homosexual is a great example to me of a technologically enabled project that’s that’s addressing an issue that’s dis uncomfortable for people in a community and which helps us loosen our fusion and helps us be open in a faithful and productive way.

Jordan Harmon

With acceptance and willingness, I believe that one of the biggest challenges currently and in the future of our species is basically our individual and communal tendency toward experiential avoidance. I work mostly in the field of addiction And the logical trajectory of experiential avoidance is addiction, and we don’t see addiction decreasing. We see it increasing. It’s increasing at the individual level, and there’s some feeling that it is happening at the macro scale as well. We speak of fossil fuel dependence, obesity. epidemics in a supersized culture, compulsive pornography viewing and sexual objectification, surveillance state leanings, binge watching our favorite shows on Netflix You know, I’m sure most of us none of us have ever spent more time on Facebook than we wanted to, right? So there’s all these ways that we are avoiding and controlling our experience in ways that maybe we don’t always feel like we’re actually choosing.

Jordan Harmon

These macro level addictions can be characterized with Marxist critique as damning opiates for the masses. And like personal addictions, they carry harmful externalities. So I think this includes some of the most harmful aspects of our relationship to religion and technology, and the extent to which our scientific technological and religious projects are in the service of controlling our internal experience is the extent to which we create hell, both in our minds and in our societies on earth.

Jordan Harmon

With present moment awareness, this is an area where it’s easy to see how religion and technology has problematized present moment awareness. Removing us from our physical presence and hurling us into dreams of an afterlife or a digitally enabled escape into second life. I contend that there is need to be present in our physical bodies and with our physical surroundings, unplugged from technology, and that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and now is the time. Technology or religion used to escape the present moment is taking us away from that heavenly now. We are alive and saved in the moment, and we remember the past and we hope and plan for the future. for the future in our present moment awareness.

Jordan Harmon

With values clarification, we’ve heard a lot of value statements today, and I think It’s great things that I’ve heard today in the talks. I think there seems to be a kind of golden rule, love, at the core of most cultures. And yet, how do we translate this love and acceptance and growth into our broader and emerging contexts? There’s a lot of values conflicts that come up. progress versus sustainability, freedom versus security, liberty versus equality, all individuality and collectivity. There’s many dilemmas that come up. And the tensions between these values, I think, can be productive, and we need to practice some of that acceptance, willingness to stand in a place that Parker Palmer calls the tragic gap. This place where you’re letting go of trying to coerce or force someone else to hold your same value or your same plan, and you’re able to stand in between and hold that kind of hope.

Jordan Harmon

There’s a few philosop uh philosophers, thinkers who I think are really relevant here, and they don’t come from the field of transhumanism or Mormonism or contextual behavioral sciences, but they’re just people who I’ve been interested in following. Roberto Unger and Nassim Taleb are two thinkers that come from differing sides of the political spectrum, and they discuss systems of reforms. that may be relevant to cultivating a kind of social psychological flexibility.

Jordan Harmon

With committed action, it is important that with its committed action is important with but without other aspects of psychological flexibility, our actions become misguided. We cannot be paralyzed by the fear of messing up, and yet we don’t want to be taken under the allure of the illusion of work. Accomplishments and goals without valued direction is at best a sentence to the hamster wheel of tedium, and at worst an exercise in spiritual death.

Jordan Harmon

With self as context is an interesting one. The overview effect spoken of by astronauts who have spent time earth gazing provides an example of how technology can help facilitate an enlightened sense of ourselves. This is also true with James Lovelock’s formulation of the Gaia hypothesis, that Earth is best understood as a single self-regulating system. In Mormonism, we have the helpful concept as being creations of and children of God. We can expand our notion of self and family to all creation and then hasten the work of defending the family. Defending from whom? From us, of course, and our problem-solving impulse. Defend how? With love. Or, in other words, activating the Atonement and becoming Zion. Human beings and all creation are inherently valuable in this framework. The more we attempt to see ourselves and others through compassionate, loving eyes, the more we are experiencing this kind of expansive self as context.

Jordan Harmon

In closing, I wonder if as a species, and this comes with some of my resistance at times to transhumanism, I wonder Are we like the toddler who innocently wanders with young siblings into the parents’ closet and finds a loaded gun? How can we grow up and learn the radical evolution that the figure of Jesus taught nearly 2,000 years ago? That radical evolution he taught was paraphrased by him in his instruction of the greatest commandment, love God. And most radically he taught that love of God is synonymous to love for fellow man, which includes love for our enemies. The enemies that we must be learning to accept and experience compassion for come in many forms. Most importantly, they come in the forms of our own thoughts, feelings, and desires that are unwanted. And fused, and caused the problem-solving impulse to do its thing and compound pain into suffering. Learning to love this internal enemy is critical to being free from its power over us and leads to a life lived. With fullness and joy. This is what contextual behavioral science has discovered. Change the relationship to our pain rather than the pain itself. Change the contextual function rather than the form. Compassion for our enemies, both internal and external, is more powerfully transforming than any form of control or problem solving. And this is counter to, and perhaps, a part of human evolution. We are too often still operating on the impulse that enemies from the micro to macro scale are threats to fight or flee from, and engaging in continual unrighteous dominion over our own internal experience. in our personal relationships, in our communities, and across ideological divides is an old story of humanity that must give way to a new one.

Jordan Harmon

Thanks.