In this episode, Shinzen Young speaks with Vita Pires, Ph. D., the Prison Mindfulness Institute executive director, about the intersection of mindfulness teaching with mathematical metaphors, the influence of language, the effects of AI on communication and spirituality, and the integration of mindfulness practices with neuroscience and technology.
Mindfulness teaching capacities and math metaphors.
Language, communication, and technology.
The impact of AI on communication and spirituality.
Mindfulness, neuroscience, and technology.
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Shinzen Young is a mindfulness teacher, neuroscience research consultant, and co-director of the Science-Enhanced Mindful Awareness (SEMA) Lab at the University of Arizona. His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting, and teaching meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Vermont in the burgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience. Shinzen is known for his interactive, algorithmic approach to mindfulness and often uses mathematical metaphors to illustrate meditative phenomena. He is the author of The Science of Enlightenment, Natural Pain Relief, and numerous audio offerings. https://www.shinzen.org/
Podcast Transcript
Vita Pires 0:03
Welcome, everyone. I'm Vita Pires, and I'm happy to be here today with Shinzen Young, Hello Shinzen.
Shinzen Young 0:11
Hello.
Vita Pires 0:12
I want to tell you a little about Shinzen before starting. Shinzen is a Mindfulness Teacher, neuroscience research consultant, and co-director of the Science Enhanced Mindfulness-Awareness lab at the University of Arizona. His systematic approach to categorizing, adapting, and teaching meditation, known as Unified Mindfulness, has resulted in collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Vermont in the burgeoning field of Contemplative Neuroscience. Shinzen is known for his interactive algorithmic approach to mindfulness and often uses mathematical metaphors to illustrate meditative phenomena. He's the author of The Science of Enlightenment, Natural Pain Relief, and numerous audio offerings.
Mathematical metaphors to illustrate meditative phenomena, could you kick us off with that?
Shinzen Young 1:12
Look into what's being said in category theory by people like Eugenia Cheng, Emily Riehl, Tai Danae Bradley, and Jade Masters; some amazing young mathematicians are out there. Forging math, like the general public, if they knew the philosophical depth of what these people are doing! Anyway, to give you something quick, a soundbite. Math is the perfect match to describe world mysticism. It's the math of meditation. And it's the hip math now. And I am trying to figure out what to make of it. It means something, especially since it's the same math that may help us understand the new AI. But that's a whole other conversation.
Vita Pires 2:44
So, to tie this into it, the theme of this summit is teaching mindfulness and the people training to be teachers of mindfulness. What are the capacities that teachers need to embody or be able to convey? I noticed that many people who come to teach want to teach mindfulness, but they don't want to do meditation.
Shinzen Young 3:12
Oh, forget about it. You're not teaching mindfulness. If you're not doing it. You're outside of the definition of a mindfulness teacher. I mean, that’s, ‘Forget about it’. That's what the wise guy is saying. ‘Forget about it’. You're not in the ballpark. It's like, 'I'm a scientist'. Okay. 'Do you have a degree?' 'No, but I smoke a lot of weed and sit in the hot tub, and I think I figured out how the universe works.' You can call yourself a scientist, but...
We can call it a citizen scientist. That is still a scientist, but not quite the same. So, I think you got the vibe on that.
Vita Pires 4:13
So, you mentioned a paradigm shift. So, we're in a paradigm shift now with the AI emerging very quickly for some people in VR virtual realities. What impact is that going to have? I know Vince Horne and others have come up with interactive mindfulness teachers from whom you can get guidance, and I sampled that. He gave me a sample of that, and I tried it because I was thinking, you know, I work in prisons, and they now have access to computers. So, I was thinking about its potential.
Vita Pires 5:10
You mentioned the tangible sense of conversational AI and how it can aid in mindfulness teaching. I'm skeptical of this.
Shinzen Young 5:26
Well, don't go on record too much about this till you see what happens in the next decade. But one piece of advice they give to science students, and I give it to our students, is, 'I know you're interested in science, theory, and application, but read the history of science a lot.'
Know what has happened before. It is something you don't want to ignore. Look at the history of our species and what we know for sure. Communication has been a big, big thing for us. First is the acquisition and evolution of language. Yeah, are there biological communications and semiotics in nature? Sure. But grammatical languages with syntax and morphology. No, that's just us. And we know the brain changes the skull, the vocal organs, the ears, everything had to change it. And the archaeologists are sorting it out. We went through a biological process. And we've got language now.
By combining that with tools, we've developed cooperation and specialization. We're not just a family huddling in a cave; we've got a village, rows, and crops, and we're off and running. Then someone comes by an advanced writing. Well, not quite that simple. But writing arises from the alphabet and other writing systems. I don't know if people are aware of how awesome the history of the alphabet is. It was invented in essentially what is now Syria and Lebanon. And it's spread to Japan. In Buddhism, they use Sanskrit on graves and other things. And it spread, of course, all the way through Europe and to the Americas. One invention from one little part of the Mediterranean, but writing completely changed us.
What's next? The printing press was invented in China. However, the social implications happened in the West. Have you noticed a trend here? It's all about language. Then, the internet. No one saw communication, language, and graphical user interface coming. You're looking at me. This was sci-fi when I was a kid. Dick Tracy had a wristwatch, you could. Now that's a retro thing that costs you money to have a Dick Tracy that works because everyone has one. In my lifetime, what we're doing now is sci-fi, but that changed things.
And now smooth conversational interaction with something that very soon will be unless you've got some expert thing going on, you won't be able to tell the difference. There'll be software that will spot the difference, hopefully, almost certainly, I would think. But it's already happened that they're accusing each other now in the elections of faking the candidate's voices and sending that, oh, it's just the beginning. But don't worry; it will all end well. Now, this mechanized reasoning, mechanized fact check, is at a superhuman level already.
Anyone can get access to 3.5 for free. Anyone for $20 gets 4.0, and 4.0 will be free soon enough. There is a trend. So look at the trend here. Most of the big shaking things that have happened to our species are around verbal communication. In spiritual communities, there's always been resistance to the next step in verbal technology. And then there's not a resistance because they realize, hey, I want to get in on this, too.
So initially, things and scriptures weren't written down; you memorized them. It's passed down by memory. And early Buddhism was that, as far as we know, it wasn't written down for quite a while. Still, in India and some places, there's resistance to even writing things down, and then there's going to be resistance to publishing them.
There's a concern, but don't think of the new AI as a diminished human teacher. Think of it as a vastly improved book you can interact with. And your human teacher has all sorts of human flaws. I don't care who they claim they are. They're screwed up in some way. And you know what? The AI can be tested until it isn't? It won't be if you don't build a teacher's ego into it. It won't ever teach you its ego. It'll just keep the good stuff. So I'm looking to it as improved communication. It's interactive.
Shinzen Young 13:21
Are you afraid to read a book if you don't have a teacher? Well, people were in the past were. So that's what I have to say about that. I'm not saying you shouldn't fear the new AI. It's unknown. Be afraid; be mindfully afraid. And also be very, very hopeful. It's not AI. It's not artificial intelligence. It's automated reasoning. And automated fact-checking for everyone. Why is it not a good thing?
Vita Pires 14:12
About ten years ago, I was involved in the Second Life-virtual reality. I had a meditation group there. And so, you know, you're in an avatar; I think I told you about this in Providence; we had lunch, you're in an avatar, and other people from all over the world would come, and we'd sit and do meditation together every day. People thought that was so weird on the outside, like, 'What!, You are you doing that?" But I knew that the mind's capacity to project itself into a visualization would feel completely embodied and real because the ambient sounds, the visuals, and the people as avatars are there. It was a very profound experience sitting at a computer screen with people in Bulgaria, just as an ordinary thing to meditate with them virtually. Many people said that it wasn’t real, but it was completely real.
The other thing is to remember when Thich Nhat Hanh said the Sangha would be the new Buddha. How is that going to show up in this new world we are shifting into rather quickly? The Sangha can also be problematic.
Shinzen Young 15:33
The Information Age constantly emphasizes how connected everything is. It is forcing the whole world to evolve into a Sangha, a community that is functional and highly functional in communication. The connectivity that defines our age is forcing us to become a global Sangha. That's what I have to say.
Shinzen Young 16:35
I have somber humor sometimes. Hopefully, I have sober optimism.
Vita Pires 16:41
Okay, how does that look? What are you cautioning people against here to look for?
Shinzen Young 16:47
You can't predict the future. The further out you go, the more speculative your prognostications become. So, I see an alignment between the new biotech and the new AI. And the old, contemplative-based psycho-spiritual growth path that is very, very old. I see these things aligning with something very good in the future. All that means is that I can connect the dots and say, Okay, we'll do this and this. And if that happens, we can do this. Over here, someone else is doing that and that. And if that goes this way, it'll match what we're doing. And so we go. I can map out a possible scenario that is completely scientifically plausible. No mythology involved. That's all. If this happens, we can do this.
But when I look back at the network where we started many years ago, all the connections seem to have been made that I wouldn't have thought could bring us to this moment at all. Because things are looking very good, I can see how if we continue to get lucky, we need three or four more 'lucky's. And we could do something to help the future.
So, I can see and describe that path in a scientifically plausible scenario. So that gives me some optimism. The sober part is it's about the future. And so this is the caution. Not to believe people who say they know for sure what's gonna happen. It's so terrible, or it's so good. So I have optimism, but it's sober. If there is one thing we've learned from science, it's the humility of uncertainty. It's all oversights. It's baked into science. Lots of science. So hey, you know, deal with it.
So I'm optimistic. I may sound crazy, but I hope I'm not a crank.
Vita Pires 20:28
So, what is the current state of bio-modulation that could aid in mindfulness teaching? What is the current state? What are the technologies available?
Shinzen Young 20:39
Oh, well, you ask about the current, but you also should ask about the future.
Vita Pires 20:44
I hear what you're saying, 'This depends on this.' It sounds like dependent origination in reverse. But what can we expect to happen very shortly?
Shinzen Young 20:57
Well, two things are trending. One is very interesting. I'm not sure where it will go. The other one is the field I'm working in, where they can find me online and my friends, it's very easy to find what we're doing. So, the field we're working in is Ultrasound—ultrasonic Neuromodulation. Or you could call it Transcranial Ultrasonic Neuromodulation.
Shinzen Young 21:31
So that's reversing Ultrasound. Instead of imaging with it, we use it to influence the functioning of the nervous system.
Vita Pires 21:43
Oh, and is that showing a lot of promise?
Shinzen Young 21:48
Showing a lot more promise than I would have ever expected. But that's a long story. But if people are interested, we're all over the internet. That story is not hard to track. There are no secrets. It's just a lot more promising than I would have ever thought. But I won't come out and say we've got it yet. But it's looking good. If we get it right, we may be able to facilitate the acquisition of equanimity substantially, even by beginners.
Shinzen Young 22:34
That would be big because equanimity is your central contemplative skill. So that's what we're shooting for. And it's not just me and Jay Sanguinetti. It's a whole bunch of our friends all over the place. Many senior mindfulness scientists are whistling this tune now, including me. So anyway, what you want to watch is optogenetics.
Vita Pires 23:11
Optogenetics.
Shinzen Young 23:14
Yeah. That's light. But light combined with genetic modification.
Vita Pires 23:26
It's fascinating. That's sci-fi. Ultrasonic, Transcranial Ultrasonic Neuromodulation is coming soon to your doctor's office.
Shinzen Young 23:44
Most likely.
Vita Pires 23:45
So, is that something that could replace the psychedelic craze?
Shinzen Young 23:49
You know, that's what I was going to mention. The other thing is psychedelic therapy. And that has some relationship to what we do, but that's a long conversation. Yeah, so what we're doing is cutting-edge. But once you mix being able to use optogenetics, it means humans, computers, electromagnetic radiation, and the human genome will enter into a closed-loop conversation to determine what form humanity will take. And I'll leave it at that.
Vita Pires 24:59
Wow. What advice do you have for humans in general? I'm not even going to say meditators. Do you have 'Hold on to your seats!'? What is your advice or recommendation?
Shinzen Young 23:49
Equanimity is purity. That's what Mr. Goenka says.
Shinzen Young 25:29
Thank you. This has been lovely.
Vita Pires 25:31
Thank you Shinzen.
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