Information abundance is creating an imbalanced GAN in our minds

The human creative process is similar to a Generative Adversarial Network, where your internal "generator" creates something novel and your "discriminator" evaluates the creation. The interaction between these processes is the engine of creativity.

In machine learning, these models are notoriously tricky to train because you must maintain a delicate equilibrium as the generator and discriminator co-evolve.

Our modern information-rich environment has disrupted this equilibrium, over-training discriminators and under-training generators, imbalancing the GAN in our minds and hindering creativity.

On the generator side, we are simply too over-stimulated for it to turn on. This topic is overdiscussed, so I won't linger on it, but I do worry about the consequences of replacing every idle moment with stimulation. It has reached a point where television producers are telling their writers to make the content more "second-screen watchable" because the consumer is expected to be watching it while scrolling or gaming because god-forbid a thought manages to squeeze through a gap in attention. There are just too many easily-accessible, highly-dopaminergic temptations. Our "default mode network" has been subjugated.

On the discriminator side, the information firehose of the internet results in consuming an unnatural amount of other people's creative output, filtered by recommendation systems tuned on your preferences to expose you to the best that creators around the world have to offer.

The human brain finetunes itself in response to information, increasing the "resolution" at which it metabolizes that information. There is a profession called "chick sexing" (pause for giggling) where people learn to instantly recognize ridiculously subtle anatomical differences between the sexes of newborn chickens. The visual acuity necessary to power this "discriminator" just naturally develops once you've inputted enough of that specific visual information into your brain. A similar phenomenon can happen to those of us who are chronically consuming information in creative domains. We build a very powerful discriminator, which we experience as a refined sense of taste. Like a musician who has dedicated so much of their brain to processing music that they find pop songs mindnumbingly boring and prefer to listen to experimental microtonal jazz.

I consumed books voraciously as a child. I would read every single moment I possibly could--during meals, on the bus, during class, while walking, and in lieu of sleeping. As a teenager, this expanded to written content on the internet.

As an adult, I've had a desire to write--mainly to make myself visible to others so that I could find my tribe. Unfortunately, this was an uphill battle against my natural inclinations. I am so far on the "shape-rotator" side of the spectrum that my inner monologue isn't even in the form of language. Any attempt at writing induced psychological pain as it inevitably produced content that fell very far short of my expectations, influenced by the vast ocean of high-quality content I had consumed throughout my life.

I suspect many constantly-online-from-a-young-age people experience something similar. It is paralyzing to develop taste before having the skills necessary to immanentize that taste.

I found a solution accidentally while practicing jhana mediation.

The esoteric mental states known in Buddhism as the "jhanas" have been getting a growing amount of attention in some rationalist-adjacent communities. It turns out that, if you're skilled enough at meditation, you can induce an extreme drug-like bliss using only your own mind. I figured it was worthwhile to look into this claim and learn to access the jhanas myself, and there was a rather unexpected consequence of learning to access these states: the complete obliteration of writer's block.

After starting to practice this style of meditation, a flip switched and words were suddenly pouring out of me. This resulted from two distinct phenomena:

1) The silence and boredom of long meditation sessions amplifies the creative side of one's mind. I could feel my brain desperately craving stimulation and then settling for stimulating itself--playing with ideas, producing stories, imagining conversations. My thoughts grew louder, clearer, and more abundant. My inner world became richer.

2) Relaxation is a skill, and it is developed rapidly in this style of meditation. The ability to not only relax the body but also the mind--shutting down background cognitive processes that you weren't even conscious of--is incredibly useful. When writing, you can apply this skill to turn off the inner critic, resulting in the kind of relaxed, playful mindset that is conducive to creating a first draft. I found that when I turned this cognitive subprocess off, writing became incredibly fun.

Essentially, I gave space for the generator to naturally strengthen, and learned how to intentionally weaken the discriminator, letting creativity flourish.

For those of you who are also in the "weak-generator, strong-discriminator" quadrant, I recommend adding more boredom to your life and practicing relaxing the mind (maybe attend a jhourney retreat). My discriminator still looks back on this essay with disgust, but at least the generator is finally training.