an introduction to meta-cognitive processes
two years ago i entered a state of zero certainty, questioning everything. but not in a good sense - i was feeling desperate, groundless. what could i trust, if i see how easily i fall into illusions? what is life, really? what am i, really?
i was fighting to keep an open mind, with no judgments or beliefs. i was compulsively trying to discover what is true and what is “the truth”.
i remained in this state for over a year. looking back, it’s interesting to see how it’s during this type of crisis that we usually start looking at the world and relating to it differently.
during this time, it became clear to me that when we're navigating reality, we're never dealing with the truth itself. we're always dealing with our projections of what is. we're always filtering things.
we may experience glimpses of the truth, but as soon as our mind kicks back in, we're dealing with a thought, a memory, an abstraction, a form.
so here, in the now, what is here?
there's the perception of a being and of an experience.
from these perceptions, we create a whole world of ideas, language and matter.
instead of jumping into hard-to-grasp metaphysics, i wanted to know practically, what are the fundamental elements present in my experience of the now? what is within my ability to influence and what's not?
two perspectives emerged:
1) self and other
i perceive myself as a human, living with other humans in a natural world and a human society. these things have patterns, structures underlying them.
how come isn't there a "guide to the human being" and a "guide to human society"?
there are multiple areas of knowledge that tackle each of these, that although complementary, they're all taught separate from each other.
disciplines like biology and psychology explain aspects of the human being.
sociology and economics explain aspects of society.
philosophy tries to do both, while producing seemingly conflicting worldviews all the time. (hey, at least they’re trying! lots of wisdom there.)
there are people working on interdisciplinary fields, but a lot less people working on arriving at transciplinary resolutions. one of these interesting people is ken wilber, who created what he calls "integral theory". but let's skip this for now.
at that time, what i arrived at was:
right now i'm experiencing my sense of self, which can be broken down into 4 parts:
1) mind
2) feelings/emotions
3) body
4) energies/unconscious elements/higher mind/spirit
i also experience myself amidst something, in fact, two things:
1) an environment
2) multiple systems
what do we, as humanity, know about these things?
it was appalling to me to realize how little i knew about each of these things. and i saw myself as someone who actually tried to understand things deeply and had spent the last 5 years of my life trying to figure out how life works.
people across generations have spent their lives studying these topics, but somehow, the best insights are hidden. you always need to get out of the mainstream.
what would it be like then, to map out what each philosophical system, spiritual tradition and academic discipline, has to say about each of these topics?
definitely something i’ll be working on for the rest of my life.
but on a more practical note, 2 years ago i discovered a question that became a guiding question for me - how can i optimize these things (all of these elements of self and other) to help me, instead of hinder me?
being careful to not fall into the relativistic traps of “what is it to help? isn't it just a perspective too?”, i let go of my need for certainty and decided to work with the odds.
regeneration as it works in nature is a good compass. healthy systems produce good results. there’s abundance. why isn’t that my natural state?
maybe it is, and i’ve just dragged away from it. isn’t that what many spiritual traditions say? let go of the baggage you acquired as an ego. you are not that.
the path though, seems to be quite complicated and confusing at times…
so i started pursuing this idea more deeply. how can i optimize the fundamental elements of my reality to benefit myself and others?
that's when something that i bumped into many years ago came to mind.
2) meta-cognitive processes
i was 15 years old, trying to decide what to do with my life. what courses did i want to do? what experiences did i want to have? what career did i want to pick? i had many options at hand, but couldn't decide on one.
when i tried to decide, i'd quit quickly because it didn't feel like it was the "right" thing.
none of the options that were being presented to me, even what i was interested in, didn’t feel right. programming, game design, philosophy, business management, languages, economics.
it took me a while - some months starting and quitting courses, starting and stopping projects, to figure out that for me, the approach was much more important than the subject.
i saw that i wasn't interested in having a career in one of those fields, nor even in the intersection of them. what i wanted to learn wasn't any of those topics, but how to best learn any topic.
but it wasn't simply about "learning how to learn". unfortunately, the more i looked into experts in learning, the more i saw that most of them talked about this topic coming from a very narrow perspective.
i felt a strong sense of sadness and repulsion from that.
from this experience, i made an observation.
learning how to learn isn't about applying the best tools or strategies. the process of learning happens all the time, naturally. it's much more about creating the right conditions for it.
this, alongside a big realization i had at the time, made me have my first glimpse of what i'd come to study and understand as a mental model later on.
as i was just starting to explore my own consciousness and question what life is, i suddenly realized that "life is action". i felt called to life, to the realization that unless i'm unconscious, i'm always acting. and that my actions bear responsibility.
this realization was super visceral, and it made how i felt clear to me - i was lost. i had no idea of how i should act. coming from a non-religious background, this question got me started studying religions, philosophy and ethics, trying to discover how other people approached this problem.
“how should a human being behave” in a logical and non-dogmatic manner.
somewhere in the midst of this investigation, i found the OODA loop.
for those unaware of it, it’s a somewhat simple framework that emerged as a way for cadets to know how to act and orient themselves in battle:
observe → orient → decide → act
+ learning happens during all the steps
i came to see that this framework describes not a mental model to be followed, but the fundamental processes of our cognition. therefore, meta-cognitive processes.
perception → sensemaking → decision-making → action
+ learning happens during all the steps
i saw this as a very basic, but fundamental cycle. at that point in time, i just noticed that we're always doing these things, consciously or not. therefore, if we could optimize these processes, everything would be optimized in turn.
it took me 4 years to start seeing these as "meta-cognitive processes" or "consciousness expansion steps".
ps: i won't do a deep dive into this framework and its applications in this article, since this is just an introduction. but i'll just cover the basics next.
if we look at these elements as fundamental processes of life, we can see how we've most likely developed tons of unconscious patterns for each one of them throughout our lives. it's just how we operate in life. we figure out a way that works and run with it.
but if we stop and ponder - what would be the ideal, optimal way of doing this? is there such a thing? - a new world of possibility opens up.
we can see these processes as parts of ourselves that we can redesign to better serve us. redesigning ourselves, on a very practical level.
what i was trying to understand during that initial spark of questioning at 15 years old, was that what i’m truly interested in is redesigning the fundamental aspects of ourselves to be more conscious, effective, efficient, and fulfilled.
and then do that not just internally, but with the reality around us.
in case you’re interested in this too, this framework can provide a solid foundation to do that.
this sort of self design focused not only on our “selves” (who we are), but also on what we do and the world around us, is part of what today i came to know as ontological design - the design of being, self and other.
but that’s something we’ll cover in a lot more depth in the future. :)
…
so, to summarize and connect the dots:
1) reality has some basic elements that we don't need to jump into far-reaching metaphysics to be able to observe and use this knowledge to transform our experience of life.
an interesting way to visualize this is to consider:
what am i?
an individual, with an interior and an exterior world.
- mind / brain
- emotions / feelings
- sensations / body
- consciousness / energies
what is the medium that i'm in?
i live in a collective environment, which has interior and exterior dimensions too.
- social systems (language, concepts, ideas, rules, agreements, collective imagination)
- technological systems & infrastructure
- physical environments
a great question that can be asked is: how can i design these elements to be allies on my journey?
* ken wilber has a great framework to visualize the dimensions of reality - what he calls 4 quadrants - and what i just applied here. it's a simple 2x2 matrix considering the individual and collective vs the interior and exterior dimensions of reality.
it's very intuitive, but if it's your first time seeing this, i hope you’re able to understand this application. it's also worth it to take some time to truly understand and appreciate the depth of it.
in my next article, i'll apply this framework again, so you'll probably understand more about this framework if you just read it. but regardless of that, i recommend reading this article, which covers this framework while giving a brief introduction to his integral theory.
2) you, as a being, have basic processes that were developed automatically and unconsciously, but that can be improved drastically.
one way of doing this is by creating meta-systems - i.e. systems that help you perceive, make decisions, act and learn better. i've been working on this for many years and will introduce more concepts, frameworks and tools in the next articles.
another way is to simply bring awareness and intention to improving these processes. make some post-its, write these words somewhere and stick them on a wall. let's exercise that creativity :)
concluding thoughts
just keep reading my posts. lol
i'm trying to distill a lot of the most impactful information i gathered over the years in a small space, so it might sound crazy or not so clear at first. but if you bear with me, we're going to explore multiple perspectives, tools and ways to transform reality, in its multiple dimensions. it's going to get a lot clearer soon.
for now, i suggest you play around with this framework - perception, decision-making, action, learning. how’s your perception and experience of such processes? how could it change?
i hope this has been enjoyable. let me know if you have any questions or comments below.
cheers.