Go Upstream
The parallel architecture of debugging, memory reconsolidation, and meditative insight
A few years ago, a friend was teaching me programming and introduced an unexpected analogy. Code, he said, is like a pinball machine, and data is like the pinball moving through it.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it clarified a useful mental model: code as a fixed architecture that interprets and processes a fluid, changing variable—data—to produce an output. Change the architecture, the variable, or both, and you change the output.
Code doesn’t always work the way we want; it produces unwanted outputs in the form of errors. The error-generating mechanism is often hidden, because if it were easy to see, we’d have already fixed it.
One way to fix an error is to add more code at the end: an additional operation that takes the unwanted output and transforms it into the desired output. When the error-generating mechanism is hidden, this is often the easiest, most accessible approach.
Patching code this way can work, but it results in messier architecture, especially with multiple downstream patches. A program “fixed” this way will always be more complex and less efficient than necessary.
The cleanest, most effective way to resolve an error is to go upstream to its source: find the hidden root cause of the unwanted output and modify or remove the original error-generating mechanism. The result is more streamlined, legible code that performs only the operations necessary to get the desired output.
Inner Architecture & Personal Experience
We have inner architecture formed through genetics, culture, and past life experience. This architecture interprets and processes new life experience the same way code does for data.
Inner architecture consists of structures, some of which are legible to us (conscious) and some illegible (unconscious). As these structures interpret and process new experience, they sometimes lead to unwanted outputs: cognitive, behavioral, emotional (the “output” can be entirely internal).
Hidden Structures
Persisting, repeated, or seemingly intractable unwanted outputs are caused by structures that are partly or fully illegible. Unhelpful patterns persist because what generates them is hidden in the unconscious. If it were easy to see, we’d have already “fixed” it.
Unconscious structures often form as a response to being hurt. If we get hurt, and lack the capacity to fully metabolize the experience at the time, the memory of the hurt is pushed out of conscious awareness. A protective structure then forms to prevent us from being hurt again in the same way.
In first grade, I was called upon to answer a question in front of the class. I didn’t know the answer, so I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Other kids found this funny, and I got embarrassed. A structure forms to avoid situations where I might get caught “not knowing the answer”, to protect me from feeling that embarrassment again.
Protective structures that form early in life, when we’re most likely to experience hurt we don’t have capacity to fully metabolize, often retain the psychological simplicity of a child. As circumstances change, they continue filtering new experience and pattern-matching it to old.
The filtering is often too broad: highly motivated to avoid pain, a protective structure identifies and reacts to anything that might, sort of, kind of have a similar shape to the original experience of hurt. The more intense the hurt, the more aggressive the filter. Structures that formed with a positive intent end up being counterproductive or dysfunctional.
You may recognize familiar patterns: a structure tries to protect you from heartbreak by never allowing you to open your heart to someone new, or a structure tries to help you avoid being caught unprepared by making you over-prepare until the window to act has closed.
In my example about “not knowing the answer”, the structure naturally leads me to avoid answering questions in class. But to a hypersensitive structure with an aggressive filter, almost any kind of open-ended social interaction can be interpreted as risking “not knowing the answer”. It might also lead to social anxiety, staying quiet in groups or avoiding them altogether, or fear of public speaking (all of which I’ve experienced).
Counteracting
One way to address unhelpful patterns is to try to counteract them. Trying to think different thoughts, keeping your phone in a different room, or forcing yourself to raise your hand in class are all examples of counteractive measures. When the upstream generator of the unwanted pattern is hidden in the unconscious, this is often the easiest, most accessible approach.
Counteractive measures can work, but they have the same disadvantages as patching code. They’re additive, and must be repeated each time the unwanted output emerges. Since psyches aren’t deterministic code, if we’re tired, out of routine, or forgetful, counteractive measures that require effort and willpower often just don’t work.
When unwanted patterns persist for long periods, requiring constant effort to counteract, it’s a sign the upstream generator is still running. New experience is being processed through an old structure, and the problem persists, no matter how much well-intentioned and effortful counteracting has been done.
Fortunately, there is another way.
Dissolving Schemas
Instead of counteracting unwanted cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outputs, we can go upstream and address the hidden root cause directly through the process of memory reconsolidation.
In memory reconsolidation, a protective structure is called a schema: a set of beliefs formed around a particular emotionally salient experience. The process involves identifying the schema, activating it, and then presenting it with contrasting evidence—something that disconfirms its built-in assumptions. When this is done effectively enough or enough times, the schema updates or dissolves and new experiences are no longer processed in the old way.
Memory reconsolidation is a cross-domain, method-agnostic mechanism for transformative change, defined as the elimination of unwanted symptoms without the need for ongoing effort (i.e. counteractive measures).
Continuing my example, perhaps I engage with my fear around speaking in front of groups using a parts framework. (In modalities like IFS or Aletheia, parts are a way of interfacing with schemas.) I notice a tightness in my chest associated with this part, along with a mental image of being caught not knowing what to say.
If I work skillfully with this part from a place of loving presence, the structure naturally begins to soften and melt. It may then reveal to me the original first grade memory that is the source of the schema. Either way, my fear around “not knowing the answer” diminishes, and speaking in front of groups becomes more available.
In the memory reconsolidation process, the schema must be made legible, but the emotional memory that generated it doesn’t need to be. The cause of an unhelpful pattern is the upstream structure that formed around an experience of hurt, not the experience itself. We can dissolve protective structures without knowing when or why they formed; for memory reconsolidation to work, it actually doesn’t matter.
Perceptual Architecture & Sense Data
We have perceptual architecture that interprets and processes sense data (sight, sound, touch, etc.). Sense data is not coherent in and of itself; this architecture compiles it to form what we take to be perceptual primitives like objects, movement, and distance.
This happens at a micro-phenomenological level, so subtle and fast that it precedes our awareness of its output: the output is coherent subjective experience itself. Rapidly and reliably this compiling—agglomeration—creates the sense of ourselves as a subject situated in a three-dimensional world of space, time, and objects.
Example: you see a bird and hear it chirping. It seems like the chirping is coming from the bird, but there is in fact a subtle and rapid “gluing together” of the sight and sound sense data to create this perception.
You can try this yourself: close your eyes and pay close attention—what in your immediate experience actually indicates to you that the sensations of your face are your face?
Try it now.
You may notice, accompanying the sensations, a subtle mental image of your face, or inner dialogue saying something like, “I can feel my cheeks and lips” or, “What do you mean? That’s my face!” But without these other forms of sense data, and the agglomeration between them, there is nothing inherent or coherent about the face sensations in and of themselves.
Something Not Quite Right
Sensations arrive in experience pleasant or unpleasant; perceptual architecture also assigns valence. We don’t get to decide what feels good or bad, just like we don’t get to decide that we want more of one and less of the other.
Since experience is an ever-changing mix of both, there’s an intrinsic push-pull—we want the good to stay (but it goes), and we want the bad to go (but it’s here). The wanting is also micro-phenomenological, a subtle movement away from what is here and toward something else, a grabbing for something somehow better but just out of reach, something that could be there but that is not actually there.
Wanting things to be different than they are means being dissatisfied with the way they actually are. A slight, constant, underlying feeling of something-just-not-quite-right, like having the tiniest of pebbles in your shoe, very fine, almost sub-perceptual, but with reverberations that run all the way up through the stack of perception.
The dissatisfaction is there as soon as we’re aware of any moment of experience, feeling blended with and inseparable from it. Our default system setup is error-generating, and the mechanism is hidden because it’s embedded in upstream perceptual architecture. In practice, it always just feels like there’s something fundamentally not-okay about any moment.
We’ve all experienced this at a gross level: wanting something because we believe it will satisfy us, reaching it, finding it lacking, and still the desire to get to something better, to be ultimately satisfied somehow, is there. This happens moment-to-moment as well.
More of the Same
One way we try to fix this is to change experience into different, better experience. Just as dissatisfaction seems subtly, inherently in actual experience, ultimate satisfaction often seems subtly, inherently in potential experience.
Patching what feels missing in current experience with future experience seems like the only option, making it the easiest, most accessible approach.
It never works, because any experience we can change the current one to is downstream of the same perceptual architecture. Anything the wanting wants contains the same wanting, and therefore the same dissatisfaction. It’s like trying to fill a hole that can never be filled, meet a need that can never be met, reach something that forever remains just out of reach.
Chasing better experience may sometimes feel like it kind of works, but it’s never a robust answer to a perennial problem.
What a Clever Trick
Dharma practice enables us to go upstream and directly address the root cause of the dissatisfaction. One way to think about meditation is as a way of increasing legibility into our perceptual architecture. The deeper we practice, the further back we go.
In coding and inner work, the error-generating mechanism must be found and understood before it can be worked with and resolved. Meditation collapses the distinctions: clear seeing of perceptual architecture is meditative insight. Finding, understanding, working with, and resolving are all one intervention that leads to freedom.
In practice, this usually happens a little at a time.
Example: I’m sitting, after building up some concentration and sensory clarity I begin following the instruction to “look for the center of experience”. The center usually seems to be in the head, so this involves a lot of fine-grained examination of head sensations.
With sufficiently clear seeing, there is no center to be found, and I’m laughing because how could these sensations ever have been a self? What a clever trick, the cosmic joke, pulling the wool over all our eyes. And with this seeing, some sense of that center diminishes, a perma-contraction relinquishing, disappearing, dropping, falling away, and with it a sense of lightness, freedom, openness, liberation. Everything becomes a little “thinner and lighter”, and moment-to-moment experience contains less dissatisfaction.
Insight is variously described as a letting go, a dropping away, a removal. Because there’s no getting outside of perception, what sees the error-generating mechanism is seeing an aspect of itself. When perceptual architecture clearly sees through self-harming delusion, it tends not to go back to performing the self-harm.
What’s so radical about the dharma is that it goes so far upstream as to address the mechanism that makes it even possible for it to seem like there’s a problem with any moment of experience.
A Lot of Trouble
These three information processing architectures share analogous characteristics. Each architecture processes a changing variable, contains hidden error-generating mechanisms, and has lower-friction yet suboptimal methods for patching unwanted outputs. Each has more challenging, yet worthwhile, methods for going upstream to address the hidden generator.
This helps us understand efficacy in two domains: resolving issues at the level of the personality structure (cleaning up), and resolving issues at the level of perception or consciousness itself (waking up).
With memory reconsolidation, you free yourself of the structures that misinterpret new experience, downstream symptoms resolve, and you no longer need to counteract them.
With meditative insight, you free yourself of fundamental delusion, suffer less moment-to-moment, and you no longer try to satisfy dissatisfaction-containing experience with more dissatisfaction-containing experience.
Go upstream. You really save yourself a lot of trouble.
Thanks to Daniel Kazandjian, Carmen Lau, Matt Southey, Romeo Stevens, Roger Thisdell, and Daniel Thorson for reading drafts of this.
Work with me: I help people working at frontiers go upstream to address unhelpful patterns at their root, and discover inner resources to bring into daily life. Learn more.
Great read - thank you