iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Never forget when William James said that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer remind him “of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.”

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Thanks! I'm mostly just a Martin Hägglund shill around this these days. I obviously agree that the abundance of time both used to be the big thing, and would be nice as part of today's discourse, though my sense is actually implementing it is a question of power. Curious how you both see it?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Please participate in my very rigorous user research: If you hear "contemplative science and practice," what does that mean to you?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Wrote about the ~abundance agenda~ The book has this errant mention of shorter workweeks & shared profits, neither of which will follow from what it actually covers. But we can still deal an abundance of time & worker power into the agenda — why not try? open.substack.com/pub/musingmi...

open.substack.com

Abundance is up for grabs

Progressives should help shape it.

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Imagining the bygone days where...*one major assignment per couple of years* (???) could pay a writer's rent in NYC........

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

How do you find the Sennheiser noise cancelling?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

does anyone have strong preferences on good over-ear headphones?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

This is pretty neat — the eruption of phenomenology in the West through a “planetary synchronicity,” in Varela’s phrase, across Husserl, James, & the Kyoto School boys

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

I wrote about advanced meditation research, my mom's curious recovery from brain surgery, Abhinavagupta's metaphysics, & the surprisingly plausible case that minds are, to some literal degree, made of wonder. musingmind.substack.com/p/are-minds-...

musingmind.substack.com

Are minds made of wonder?

I'm beginning to suspect it's strangely plausible that awareness is something like wonder incarnate.

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

If you want frontier research on the upside of breathing, James Nestor reports the relevant scientific field has "next to nothing." Pulmonologists "focus on emergencies...that's how the system works." To focus on positive capabilities, guess you've gotta go hunt in the wild

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

I wish more great novelists would decide to read the canon of classical economics & tell us what they think. From Marilynne Robinson's Is Poverty Necessary: "Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests."

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

checking phone for 20min reset ~5 days worth of deepening into meditation mind-space, & took another ~18 hours to (not even) recover from. considering most of us never go 18 hours (let alone 5 days) w/o phones, how much of our mind-regions are just unknown to us?

https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/insights-from-a-week-long-silent/

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Dig this bit from Levin's paper on biology & buddhism — as evolution enables living systems to pursue larger goals, that also creates cognitive space for progressively more complex causes of stress to unfold

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

thrilled to announce that about ~650 pages into Infinite Jest, my mind began to detect something like the contours of a plot, and I’m now on track to greatly exceed my ~20 pages/year average pace

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Good time to go finish the book then! (Thanks for writing it — loving it so far)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

I'm also realizing that entrepreneurialism's success in conflating the "heroic spirit," or the most valued and elevated human pursuits, with economic activity probably has a lot to do with why American culture largely abandoned caring about the project of being able to choose more leisure time

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

(you can tell how thoroughly disconnected the idea of a "heroic spirit" was from any economic or commercial activity, maybe until the rise of entrepreneurialism, as @erikmbaker.bsky.social's new book documents)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

a little note from Adam Smith: “These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished..."

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

May we all feel each moment of existence with as much gushing adoration, reverence, and sacrality as financial planners feel towards Roth IRAs

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Anyway, now I have to ask: do normal adults wear undershirts with suits/tuxedo shirts?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

When I was a freshman in college, I tried walking into a frat party — some guy with flowing black hair and a button down opened to his sternum stopped me, grabbed my collared shirt, stared down my chest, and sneered: “Never wear an undershirt with a dress shirt again.”

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Bookchin’s take on the abundance agenda — a sheer abundance of goods that would ‘explode capitalism from within’ by permitting the expression of preferences for forms of life that don’t need to also fetch a living wage off of labor markets

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

There's a fun conflict in how different groups think about awe/wonder. The 'science of awe' sees it as an evolutionary tool; others see it as a deeper subjectivity that has to shine through evolution's other mind-tools; & psychedelic science think we evolved to keep wonder within a middling range.

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Reposted by Oshan Jarow

Clayton Page Aldern @compatibilism.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Really appreciated this clear-eyed view onto the predictive processing account of meditation from @oshan.bsky.social: www.vox.com/future-perfe... Have some work coming in this space... stay tuned 📺

vox.com

How meditation deconstructs your mind

Want to learn how to meditate? Scientists have a new theory that might change how you practice.

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

The Other Place can still produce gems

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

This is “The Matter of Wonder” by Loriliai Biernacki — it focuses on how Abhinavagupta’s flavor of panentheism could link up with some new ideas in the philosophy of materialism today (I’m about halfway through, some great stuff so far)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Totally agree — I don’t think there is “a” goal. Just a whole landscape of interesting things that are possible. And whatever’s at the deeper end, happiness/flourishing are bad proxies, I think. But all proxies I’m aware of are, so it’s a bit of a pickle

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

thanks, glad you dig it, Andy!

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

no better season than scheming season. the adjacent possible is huge

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Today’s my last day at Vox, which means I’m entering scheming season. It’s a wildly exciting time to be writing about consciousness & economics — there’s so much to do, explore, & write about. Don’t know what’s next, but if you want to chat or collaborate: oshanjarow@gmail.com

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

When I emailed the authors, it turns out: it's not that the effects of meditation trail off. Instead, the goals and motivations for practice tend to change over time, something the authors have seen in later research, and teachers like Tucker Peck have seen in students, too.

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Psychologists surveyed 1,668 long-term meditators, investigating how the benefits of practice change over time. Across life satisfaction, psych. distress, positive affect, & negative affect, they found most benefits show up in first 500 hours of practice. Which I found odd..

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Each installment has a Q+A w/ an expert; a teacher, or researcher. Here, Shamil Chandaria shares how the new generation of meditation science actually got started by drawing insights from psychedelic science. (Shamil is a treasure, the whole q+a is full of goodies)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

The emerging science of 'advanced meditation' can be framed in a pretty simple story: meditation deconstructs the predictive mind. But why would we want to do that?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

There are basically two stories being told about meditation. The one that gets most of the attention: meditation can make you something like ~10% happier. The other: it can make you something like 10 *times* happier. And yet, most popular attention goes to the former!

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Threading a few of my favorite bits from the meditation series:

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

In a cross cultural study of experiencing awe, “the individual self was twenty times more likely to be the source of awe in the United States than in China.”

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

“Too beautiful to be wrong”

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

* this sort of thing would be less of a problem in an economic situation where workers had enough bargaining power to actually voluntarily choose one mind-sculpting schema over another. Being forced into one on threat of deprivation is a barrier to “progress”

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

From the outset, entrepreneurial culture was a social technology designed to transform worker consciousness into something more conducive to business. (Which could* be fine, so long as it’s explicit, so we can ask: what kinds of minds do our economic conditions produce?)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Wrote a 5-part series for @vox.com on the science/practice of deep-end meditation — a bridge to step beyond basic mindfulness. Q+A's w/ meditation teachers & researchers, practices, & essays sketching the emerging, surprisingly accessible field of 'advanced meditation' www.vox.com/pages/more-t...

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Oof, I’d love to know. How much we extrapolate from rodent research? The drab, always indoors, almost always solo ‘set and setting’ enshrined in current protocol as normal? What about you?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

The idea that humans could be motivated to labor by finding their work meaningful, or by releasing their “creative impulse” through work, was, at least in part, a product of early 20th century social engineering (Erik Baker’s excellent “Make Your Own Job”)

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

there's a meandering lineage of books that try to explicitly analyze the relationship between the structure of society & the structure of mind — or economics & phenomenology. anyone have tabs on good additions to the canon?

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

The 60s were a wild time — giving LSD to patients both before and after having parts of their brains removed.

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

People do not need to be force fed your idea of what humanity’s new values should be. They just need to be able to afford a dignified life without having to sacrifice their values in order to sustain it. People can work out values for themselves given the time, space, and institutions to do so

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

So many big-picture, meta-whatever, Game-(n+1) stories about how humanity needs a new value structure or operating system or narrative or whatever would be more impactful — I think — if they just funneled into this very simple strategy: Build political institutions against economic insecurity

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

It's frankly unsettling how great a time I had in the Bay Area. The people, the trees, the meditation scene, the little village of cabins with roving turkeys. Look at this tree and tell me you are not bewildered. and don't even ask me about the moss

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Oshan Jarow @oshan.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Perhaps you’ve heard of Marx’s idea of “labor power” as capitalism’s twist in our inherent potential for purposive labor. But have you heard of Abhinavagupta’s “delight power,” aunmukhya, the innate eagerness of all objects perceived in the light of consciousness?

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