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The modular model of the mind, though still young and not fully fleshed out, holds a lot of promise. For starters, it makes sense in terms of evolution: the mind got built bit by bit, chunk by chunk, and as our species encountered new challenges, new chunks would have been added. As we’ll see, this model also helps make sense of some of life’s great internal conflicts, such as whether to cheat on your spouse, whether to take addictive drugs, and whether to eat another powdered-sugar doughnut. Perhaps most important for our purposes, thinking of the mind as modular helps make sense of things you hear from Buddhist meditation teachers, such as that “thoughts think themselves” and that appreciating this fact can be liberating. But the modular model of the mind has one big problem: its name. The word module begs to be misinterpreted, so before we get into the workings of the modular mind, let me try to preempt misunderstanding by listing three ways you shouldn’t conceive of modules:
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
To repeat an earlier point, in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), Dr. Bandler makes a distinction between the "metamodel" and the "Milton model." The meta-model, continually revised, updated and expanded, consists of the class of all scientifically meaningful statements available at this date. We should revise our meta-model every day, by keeping in contact with others in the same predicament. Since Scenario Universe always and only consists of -as Bucky Fuller said non-simultaneously apprehended events (coherent space-time synergies), such continuous feedback appears necessary.
If everything happened at once, we would know Absolute Truth at once; but since spacetime events happen non-simultaneously, we need feedback.
The "Milton model," on the other hand, named after Dr. Milton Erickson, "the greatest hypnotist of the 20th Century," consists of the class of all scientifically meaningless statements that "magically" make us feel much better, or much worse - or, in occult language, the class of all blessings and all curses.
(General Semanticists call it the class of all purrs and all snarls.)
Email to the Universe
Robert Anton Wilson
As former Stanford wrestling coach Chris Horpel teaches, the best route is to shun this tough-stupid behavior and instead adopt a toughsmart approach, where you leverage both your toughness and your intelligence to pursue your goals.
Extreme Balance
Joe De Sena, Ben Askren, and David Sacks
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