Navigating Ideas with AI

After two Jhana meditation retreats Nadia Asparouhova could silence her mind, change her emotional state at will, and even intentionally slip out of consciousness. It challenged the idea that our minds are not under our control—and made her wonder if we’re more like AI than we realize. 

Nadia is a writer and researcher of technology and culture. She published Working in Public, a book about the evolution of open-source development, with Stripe Press in 2020. Her latest book, Antimemetics, is about why some ideas don’t go viral even though they’re powerful. 

I had her on the show to talk about her experience with Jhana meditation and how it reshaped the way she thinks about being human in the age of AI. We get into:

• Jhana as a means to nurture profound joy and calm. Unlike many meditation practices that emphasize passive observation, Jhana is goal-oriented—practitioners proactively cultivate states of concentrated bliss. Apart from helping her regulate her emotions, it prompted Nadia to reexamine deep questions of our human existence. 

• Self-talk is not essential as it seems. Nadia describes how advanced meditation quieted her inner voice—challenging the idea that self-talk is core to being human.

• How years of cultural evolution have shaped our sense of self. According to Nadia, our modern conception of “self”  isn’t as timeless as we assume. She draws on psychologist Julian Jaynes’s theory that our inner dialogue—what we often equate with consciousness—only emerged in humans a few thousand years ago; a provocation to reconsider the benchmarks we use to assess the intelligence or sentience of LLMs.

• What it is like to experience a “cessation.” On her last meditation retreat, Nadia experiences a cessation where your consciousness abruptly winks out—like suddenly flipping a switch. Nadia described it as slipping into nothingness, then returning with the jarring realization that even your sense of self can vanish and reappear.

• Why she likes the unknowability of AI. The mechanics of exactly how LLMs predict their next token remain a mystery. Driven by thousands of subtle, context-dependent correlations, they’re too complex to distill into a simple explanation. Nadia finds joy in the unknowability of it all, seeing the ambiguity as an invitation to explore. 

• How she uses AI as a writing partner. Nadia believes the trope of the solitary, brooding writer is beginning to shift with the rise of LLMs. For her, ChatGPT has made writing feel less isolating. She turns to it at both ends of the process: to help make sense of early ideas, and later, to sharpen phrasing and land on just the right words.

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:01:15

2. The beginning of Nadia’s journey with Jhana: 00:02:34

3. How Jhana is different from other meditation practices: 00:05:51 

4. Jhana reframed the way Nadia thinks about being human: 00:09:52

5. How Nadia integrates her experience with Jhana into her life: 00:14:16

6. Nadia describes her experience of the final stage of Jhana: 00:16:44

7. Why our modern sense of self isn’t as timeless as you might assume: 00:19:11

8. How new technologies can be a mirror to ourselves: 00:23:53

9. Nadia embraces the feeling of not knowing how AI precisely works: 00:33:55

10. How Nadia uses ChatGPT to make writing less isolating: 00:38:03

Links mentioned:

• Nadia Asparouhova: https://nadia.xyz/ 

• Her deep dive on Jhana meditation: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas 

• Nadia’s book: Working in Public, Antimemetics

• Books about how new technology can change our sense of self: The WEIRDest People in the World, Listening to Prozac