Meditative bliss states are the opposite of reward hacking
There’s a kind of meditation that feels really, really good, called the first jhana. It’s not the same as an orgasm, but it’s comparable in intensity. Your entire body buzzes, like goosebumps on steroids. Your mind is a surging flood of euphoria. It takes some practice to get there (and this post isn’t about that) but once you do, you can stay there as long as you like.
“That sounds scary and addictive” is a reasonable first reaction.
For sure it can be scary. Newbies often have trouble entering the ‘bliss state’ for more than a second or two because it’s so surprising and overwhelming that their reflective mind yells something must be wrong with me, how can this be happening and kicks them back out of it.
Addiction is rare. Instead, the blissee gets excited about the newfound experience and spends time on it regularly for some weeks. Then they start to lose interest. They also become less interested in other addictive habits, like having an extra slice of cake after dinner, or using recreational drugs like alcohol for social reasons.
This is weird. It clashes with our usual intuitions about how pleasure grabs our attention and coerces us to seek it out – the intuitions that stop many of us from taking heroin for fun on the weekends.
So what’s going on here?
The first jhana is maximally pleasurable, but minimally reinforcing. This makes sense if there is a distinction between how our brains want, versus enjoy.
Wanting is about some thing. My nose perks up at the first hint of dinner. My eyes flicker around the room and pick out things I might want to eat, or games I might want to play, or people I might want to have sex with, or doors I might follow to other rooms, and so on.
Liking is just an internal state. A sign that says “Like!” pops up; enjoyment occurs. Maybe the sign pops up when we get something we want; but maybe that’s not a strict rule.
The first jhana is anti-addictive because it cultivates enjoyment that’s free of any particular desire – the internal state, unhooked from external temptation. By entering this state, we get embodied evidence that undermines the map-territory confusion which says that enjoyment lives in the external object of desire, and can’t be had without that object. Actually, the enjoyment lives in you. The object is incidental. Another object, a more healthy or virtuous object, could do just as well.
As long as you haven’t internalized that, the objects of your desire hold a tyranny over your mind. Your current conception of what you should desire might be pretty good, but in hindsight it’ll still be inadequate. And you are at its mercy. But when you know that whatever you currently desire doesn’t hold a monopoly over your enjoyment, then you have the freedom to make better choices with less fear of personal sacrifice.
Naively, the first jhana looks like reward hacking. But for human brains, addiction means being hooked-in to sensations from the world. The first jhana teaches us to see beyond that.
