/**
 * file: journal_karbytes_26october2024.txt
 * type: plain-text
 * date: 27_OCTOBER_2024
 * author: karbytes
 * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN
 */

The dialogue between “karbytes_0” and “karbytes_1” displayed below this paragraph was generated and finalized on 26_OCTOBER_2024. A followup (and rebuttal) to that dialogue is featured on the web page at the following Uniform Resource Locator: https://karbytesforlifeblog.wordpress.com/journal_karbytes_27october2024/.

* * *

karbytes_0: “How much is too much meditation? How much is enough meditation? What is meditation?”

karbytes_1: “Too much meditation is what feels like a waste of time to the practitioner of that meditation. Not enough meditation is the chronic condition of being unaware of one’s own motivations and internal mental workings (and hence living as a puppet controlled entirely by circumstances which are (relatively) external to one’s own mind and by authority figures other than one’s own self). Meditation is the deliberate practice of paying attention to (mostly (if not entirely) involuntary) stimuli including one’s own sensory input (e.g. visual signals and auditory signals), one’s own psychosomatic phenomena (e.g. emotions and ‘body load’), and mental activity (e.g. thoughts and dreams) and making that deliberate focusing of attention on present-moment stimuli (which are each fundamentally transient or cyclical in nature) one’s main activity during a particular time period.”

karbytes_0: “Does practicing ‘enough’ meditation increase the practitioner’s free will?”

karbytes_1: “Yes, practicing ‘enough’ mediation (but not ‘too much’ meditation) will lead to an increase in the practitioner’s free will; at least at the level (of reality) where free will (which is also referred to as agency) emerges as a virtual object rendered by relatively unconscious and relatively deterministic processes. That is because meditation frees up cognitive resources which would otherwise be spent on other processes such that the practitioner of that meditation can later (and more consciously) re-direct those cognitive resources towards processes which that practitioner thinks are more conducive to achieving that practitioner’s goals (as opposed to spending such cognitive resources in a more reflexive and less consciously-chosen manner). At sufficiently macroscopic or at sufficiently microscopic levels of information processing, free will (i.e. agency) presumably does not exist. (One corollary I could make, however, is the hypothesis I have which posits that sufficiently intelligent (or sufficiently complex) information processing agents can literally initiate deterministic causal event chains and, hence, be godlike in a deistic sense by, to some extent, willfully creating phenomena out of literal nothingness merely by thinking and/or desiring such phenomena into existence).”