When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is
called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task,
like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And
you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up
and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by?
Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you
actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of
your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit
memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and
then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing
information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you
enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake
consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in
itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow,
and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a
pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of
timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that
state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm
saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind
is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does
that, that's the awake consciousness.
It’s when we train our subconscious mind to simulate reality so well that it accurately stays ahead of what’s happening in real time.
A smaller example of this is reactively catching something that was knocked off a table and realising what you are doing in the moment without having triggering the reaction consciously.
UT2003/4 fights can be very taxing mechanically
the engine physics explanation is explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls
being unable to execute this during a match like a duel means being at a massive disadvantage.
example of good strafe jumping coupled with a plasma jump to secure map/item control and pressure the opponent on the back-foot. https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592
Compared to an RTS, yes. Compared to tactical shooters like CS, no. Once you reach a certain level of aim, movement and the associated mechanics become the main distinguishing factor along with using the sounds in the game to track your opponents position and conceal yours.
Hah, that description kind of reminds me of Gunz, where some bugs in the game lead to players being able to climb walls, basically fly around and attack rapidly while moving.
Here's a timestamp in a video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/zvC67kmYxPA?t=82
Though it was a third person game. Imagine creating an entire way of playing a game because of bugs in your code, though.
I see it's still a thing in CS:GO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsPf8eSW3k
And I'm 95% confident that surf maps were one of the inspirations behind Titanfall. Here's a completely broken tool-assisted speedrun of the obstacle course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXtggqe6oo0
Maybe this is somewhat related to the subject of the post: detach consciousness from what I am doing and the pain gets a little detached too. However I doubt it would work with serious levels of pain.
The traditional approch is pain killers and some meditation.
VR helps a lot.
On two front : it distract your brain and it can teach you how to reach that distracted from the pain state by yourself.
My understanding is that a large pourcentage of the neurons are specialized in image processing. And that keeping those busy with exploring a VR world avoid to have those neurons re-assign to ponder about pain.
I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
This means it's a state of mind / brain / CNS that can be entered and sustained for many hours. An ability to do that on demand, or at least predictably, would be of a huge practical interest. The ability to avoid the opposite, low-performance state, equally so.
With billiards, when I'm "in the zone", it feels like the early stages of an out of body experience where my mind starts to feel slightly decoupled from my body and I know that my body knows what to do to make the shot. I can then "tune out" and trust my body.
With soccer, I'll be running at high speed and my mind knows I want to cut inside and nutmeg the defender (pass the ball throw a small gap in their legs and collect it on the other side). Then suddenly, it just happens. Something notices the tiny window of opportunity and just executes the move. The process of consciously analyzing the rapid feet movement, the speed of the ball, the field, the distance to the goal, the position of the other defenders, etc. is just too slow. This process feels faster and often I feel almost surprised that I just did it. After I collect the ball on the other side, things slow back down to normal speed and sometimes I'll laugh in disbelief.
If I had to explain the process of either to someone else, I'd struggle because it seems like a deeper, innate physical knowledge rather than something I can formulate and explain at an intellectual level.
In that sense, it feels similar to walking. You don't explain to someone how to walk, they just practice it over and over until they can do it without thinking. So, it's kind of like that but with more complex movements, plus the serotonin boost of accomplishing a goal.
I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
After a certain point, performing a complex task subconsciously becomes routine and one needs to sort of “level up” to a more difficult version to notice the flow state. The subjective experience is that the activity “slows down” and feels easier, allowing your conscious mind to wander.
You see this even within sports, where the best athletes need the biggest races / competitions / events in order to feel the same way they did when they were younger learning the sport. The best surfers seek out the biggest waves, or the hardest moves, or both.
“… is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
As Bruce Lee said in the movie: „Do not think, feel”
As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick.
I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
Replicating it tends to involve just getting on with the task at hand, without too much thinking about the end goal.
Anything you've practiced sufficiently becomes like breathing or walking. You don't consciously think about these things, you've done them for so long they just happen. The memory of them is so embedded in you that you don't really have to actively work to recall it.
What we call "muscle memory". You've done some actions so often that the action stops being "Put a finger on this fret, pick this string, wait this long, now lift the fretting finger, ..." and becomes "play this song/scale/technique". The whole performance becomes a single action in your mind. It stops being "hit the keys W O R D" and becomes "type 'word'".
And then when you focus on it again, you start noticing the individual actions and you again have to think about every piece of the activity.
I think with you, it sounds like you needed something to lower your inhibitions a bit. Just enough to trust that you're going to do the thing. And normally, you don't trust yourself, so you focus on the steps of the action. It's why people say they perform better after getting slightly inebriated. They're no longer hindered by their inhibitions.
Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
Writing about those atypical experiences is quite difficult. It seems our language heavily assumes the default unmindful experience so doesn’t have precise ways to express the opposite.
According to Advaita, there is no separate self/person, except as an abstraction made out of identification with various phenomena that arise in the field of consciousness. Once you see this (LSD helps), it is immediately self-evident that this has always been the case. Think Decker at the end of Blade Runner realizing he's a replicant. The person ("you") realizes they have never been anything more than a collection of phenomena.
Accepting this enables one to sit back and rest as consciousness, observing without involvement as the person's life lives itself in a perpetual flow state.
I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity.
If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.
As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.
When I write SQL, it feels like the code pops in my consciousness magicallyfor me to lay down. This also means that I can very much explain and justify why I wrote Python code the way I wrote it, but I can't do that for SQL, I can just show that it works.
I am experienced in both, and I feel I write both with the same ease, I don't think it's due to me struggling with programming.
"people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision."[1]
In short, Libet's findings may have been an experimental error related to noisy brain activity.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...
Speech is similar. By far one of the coolest little experiences you get when learning a foreign language (that's outside your language family) is when speech that is completely incomprehensible, as in you can't even make out words or separations, somehow one day just 'clicks' and becomes a series of mostly unknown but distinct and recognizable phonemes.
- In kindergarten we had to pack away the learning materials at the end of the year. I have a distinct memory of just shoving the little papers with words on them into the folder. I thought I was going to get into trouble for not doing it properly. I couldn't read the words and didn't understand which order the words and letters had to be in. The next year when I came back to school I could read.
- After living in Italy for a few months I was sitting in a car with the radio playing. All of a sudden I could understand what they were talking about on the radio without any visual cues. It was a breakdown of an economic report on employment that was performed by the government. The only word I knew before traveling to Italy was "ciao".
Trying to listen in on conversations on the bus/train in Rome was also interesting. Sometimes if the people were talking softly I couldn't tell if they were talking english or italian. My internal voice switched to Italian. Because I learnt italian verbally I had a local accent. I would observe the expression on peoples faces as I started reaching the limits of my abilities to communicate during a conversation. A Look of confusion would slowly take over until they remarked "oh.. your not from here". Even once I left Italy I would express reactive words like "stop!" "look out!" etc in italian not english.
I don't claim to be an expert in the area, but it seems that non-determinism in nature seems to rebut that possibility. At the subatomic level, to a systemic level.
Meanwhile the idea of a deterministic universe masked by a fake belief in in our own consciousness is something of a deeply pessimistic thought.
If we everything has been determined, and you are just an observer within this deterministic vessel, then there's absolutely no reason why ethics should have any consideration, among other problems.
I'll just settle on the existential dread that I've been making the wrong decisions...
When you first learned to type, you did it consciously, again and again until a different part of the brain started to trigger the muscle movements. It's almost like returning to the awareness of the movements, opens up the programming process again and so the system slows.
The idea of sensory gating is very interesting, too. The structures of the brain that limit some of that input from the world - there is so much of it, it's overwhelming. The brain should focus on some of it at a time, within a sort of bandwidth limit, or it gets frazzled. A problem with this mechanism is said to be related to autism disorder. It's also possible to induce a reduction of this sensory gating process with psychedelics.
It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text.
I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.
What's interesting is sometimes it's also not "contagious". And how much of that is placebo? All of it? Probably but any actual thinking about it is usually only at the sub-conscious level. Except sometimes the coach or bench brings it up and then it's not.
The psychology of sports is endlessly fascinating.
I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Te...
The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.