All Work & No Play

Transhumanism and the Spirit World

2022-05-18T09:18:00-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, a tweet was making the rounds among the secular because, to the ears of the materialist heathens, it sounds batshit. The tweet:

I'm against transhumanism as it's a possible gateway to the sprit world. We humans are less than insects there. Plugging into that world without the control to leave would be folly beyond imagination. You'd become a plaything of entities beyond comprehension or control.

He follows this up with:

Imagine your most challenging experience / "bad trip," except you can't leave. Ever. That's the end result of "transhumanism." No thanks.

The critical response was loud and predictable. Of the cliches employed, the most popular was "I'll have what he's having." I'd post some of the quote tweets, but they are all variations on that theme, so why bother? I'd rather get on to explaining some basic Christian theology so that my readers (estimated to be between zero and three people) will be prepared next time they hear a peep out of the strange creatures who comprise 50% of the American population but 100% of the bake-sale population.

Religious stories are mythic stories. The whole point of a mythic story is to tell you something important about human existence, something that benefits from being expressed implicitly in a narrative rather than being explained as philosophy. Often times what's being said isn't even understood except as a story. The modern literary genre of fantasy (like its grease-smudged cousin, science fiction) uses myth-like elements in mostly unmythic stories, as entertainment. It's the dance remix of myth. The individual sounds are similar, but the purpose is something foreign to the original material. Myths were not created to be entertaining, as anyone who watched the antediluvian abomination Noah will have found out.

Point being, we can't interpret religions the way we would modern fantasy. Christians believe in a spiritual "world," and it's no metaphor, but it's also not some kind of location that Doctor Strange steps into through a cheesy visual effect to battle an omnipotent being in the form of an equally cheesy, computer-generated homonculus. The spiritual world of the Christians is a world in the way the world of computing, the world of stand-up comedy, and the world of alcoholic spinster journalists are worlds. The best parallel I can think of would be the "quantum world" - ever-present, infused in all occurrence, yet not easily detected. It's no coincidence that would-be gurus invoke both as a means to cheap mysticism.

The spiritual world is the world of spirit detached from the material world. And "spirit" means mind, sometimes narrowly referring to consciousness. Mental phenomena are seen as fundamentally spiritual. Thus, the spiritual world really is ever-present, especially from the perspective of a human being. The Abrahmic religions believe that human beings are simultaneously spirit and flesh - that is, spirit and matter. This makes every person a kind of living miracle in these religions. This idea takes on cosmic significance in Christianity, where God Himself is flesh and spirit, in the form of Christ.

Christians also believe in a great conflict between the spirit and the flesh, which is one and the same with sin, and that the spirit, being eternal rather than temporary, needs to win that battle. Yet they believe that, ultimately, matter is a good thing. It is the right and proper state of a human being to be matter and spirit, together, in a material world that is a blessing rather than a curse. Although they have beliefs about a purely spiritual Heaven and Hell, they also believe in a future resurrection, at which point human beings are again made whole.

The transhumanists claim the consciousness of a human being can be "uploaded" to a computer, like a piece of software. If that is true, the mortality of the body is no longer an issue, we are promised. Our consciousness can be moved from one piece of hardware to another indefinitely. Back ups can be made. The implications of such a transformation are well known to anyone who has watched Black Mirror. In fact, I have to wonder how anyone who's seen that show could even blink an eye at Cernovich's tweet. It's really just stating the damned[sic] obvious, but I'll get to that in a minute.

It's clear that what secularists call consciousness is just the same thing the Christians are referring to with the word "soul." Christians may have some wild theories about the soul - such as, that it can be made eternally happy by dying while thinking Jesus was right - but still, they're talking about the consciousness. That means, if you can separate the consciousness from the body, as by uploading it, that constitutes putting your soul into the spirit world literally, not figuratively.

"OK," says the heathen, "I suppose I can tolerate talking about the internet as if it's the actual netherworld, but what's this load of hilarious crap about 'entities beyond comprehension'?" This touches on another aspect of Christian theology, one that crosses into psychology. We've all struggled with an impulse. I'm struggling right now to keep writing this blog post instead binging on whiskey, porn, and several orders of curry chicken wings. Maybe you're a saint and have to think back several half-hours to the last time you fought an urge, but if you say it was yesterday, you're a liar and you know it. Ask yourself this: when you fight an impulse, what are you fighting against? It's not you, at least to the extent that "you" refers to your consciousness. That's the part that's fighting not to give in. What's the opponent, then? Your unconscious, your subconscious, your instinct? Fine, but the fact is you made that up. You have no name or explanation for what it really is. Even if you can offer a quasi-scientific explanation for it (and you only sometimes can), it still doesn't make sense as an experience. The experience of it is always baffling. It's you and you alone, trying to do or not do something, and having a brutal time managing it. That urge won't just won't go away. It's real, it's undeniable, and it isn't you. It's a thing.

Go beyond the subjective, though. Where do these urges come from? I know your brain is doing it - I mean, no kidding. But why do you have that urge? Many times, it's because of influences. It's a food your mother made for you as a child; it's a stress reliever you discovered by binge drinking with your friends as a teenager; it's a habit you picked up from your coworkers, or a turn of phrase you lifted from a TV show. When the source of the behavior is small enough and verbal enough, we call it a "meme." But the broad, general category of these phenomena - these communicable thoughts and feelings - have no name. Not among the secular. But, to the Christian, they are spirits, angels, and demons. That temptation you feel is a voice (it is, isn't it?), and that voice corresponds to a real entity that has a nature. To traditional Christians, temptations are the will of demons who are trying to ensnare you. Some Evangelical sects roll up all experience of temptation into a single evil spirit, Satan. And that "voice" that tells you can resist, urges you to resist, that's an angel, or Jesus, or the saints. When you harm another person, you are embodying the will of demons. Having no bodies themselves, the evil spirits have hijacked the material of your body to do their bidding. This is what Christians refer to as "spiritual warfare."

Enter transhumanism. Imagine the barrier of the body is removed. The bad thoughts, bad intentions, bad habits, and bad groupthink are no longer limited by the physical facts of what one body can do to another. Neither time nor distance, weight nor scale, the bandwidth of nerves nor the finitude of neurons, have any bearing on experience of pleasure or pain. Watch Black Mirror again. Watch the really nasty episodes. Decide for yourself whether demons and damnation might not be the right ideas to describe what Britain's most psychopathic TV writer has imagined for you.

Bonus round question: Does Satan whisper promises into women's ears to manipulate them into getting abortions, as Marjorie Taylor Greene claims? This is left as an exercise for the reader. Meanwhile, reflect on how lucky you are to find yourself at this moment in history, and how much you have to look forward to as Big Tech becomes ever bigger and all-encompassing. Welcome to the Vortex, dear reader, like it or not!

Generation Erased

2021-02-27T12:53:00-05:00

Generational boundaries are a casual invention of the fourth estate, but they serve the useful purpose of giving names to cohorts. I am a member of Generation X, but barely - the senior Millennials are a mere six months younger. That fits me fairly well, culturally speaking. I was just old enough to watch the Berlin Wall come down and appreciate its meaning, but I was too old to have had an "emo" phase. Of the stereotypes associated with generations, most of the ones associated with Gen X apply to me.

Strangely, anyone under 40 may not even know what those stereotypes are - or were. In an otherwise agreeable editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes:

Coolness, skepticism, and a distrust of passion were boomer[sic] virtues (amid many boomer vices), maybe because their parents had seen the damage passion and unreason can do in the world.

I imagine America in the 1970s would have loved nothing more than to find these cool, skeptical, dispassionate Boomers, and give them charge over their unruly and violent generation. While they may have settled down in the decades since, they have hardly proved themselves incredulous. They invented the movement once known as "political correctness" that now claims to pursue "social justice," and the man most directly responsible for the Right wing's slide into emotionalism - Rush Limbaugh - was the definitive conservative Boomer.

The fact is, coolness, skepticism, and a distrust of passion were not only characteristic of Generation X, they were among its defining features. Gen X famously rejected the naive idealism of their parents' youth, as well as the corporate rat race in which the Boomers took highly profitable shelter after having their fill of sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and domestic terrorism. In what has become standard journalistic practice, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., himself a Boomer, writes his children's cohort out of American history. Assuming he agrees with the consensus that emotional reasoning and intransigence are primarily Millennial traits, his timeline would leave no place for us.

What's strange is how consistent and coherent this omission is. In virtually every mainstream narrative, the older generation is Boomers and the younger is Millennials, as if whatever is in between is immaterial. Members of Gen X are frequently shifted up into the older crowd when being attacked, like when we are dismissed with "OK, Boomer", or down to Millennials, like when we are recognized as proficient in irony or as having missed the windfall of growing up in post-war America. Like the media blackout of presidential candidate Andrew Yang - himself a Gen Xer who was frequently mislabeled a Millennial - this erasure of an entire 15-year cohort seems to be both universal and conspicuously unnoticed by the very profession that defined the generational boundaries in the first place. Do no members of Generation X have a large enough public voice to correct this strange nonsense? Whence the silence?

Perhaps the entire generation is counter-narrative. Whatever is counter-narrative does not exist, so far as the cultural gatekeepers are concerned, and the existence of Gen X gives the lie to multiple threads of the official orthodoxy. Most notable among these popular falsehoods is the claim that Boomers and Millenials are on opposite sides of the culture war. The fact is, while while the older generation is more conservative than the younger - as it always is - we find the Left of both generations to be mainly aligned, and likewise on the Right. Wokeness is different than political correctness in name only, and Ben Shapiro is primarily distinguished from Rush Limbaugh by his speaking style. Most of the conspicuous dissenters in the culture war are members of Gen X: Joe Rogan, Matt Taibi, Thomas Chaterton Williams, Douglas Murray, Bret and Eric Weinstein, John McWhorter, Sam Harris, James Lindsay, and Elon Musk, to name a few. Jenkins's three descriptors apply so aptly to most of those individuals that cultish cohorts both older and younger have come for their heads on multiple occasions. Perhaps Xers have been left out of the narrative precisely because we really are cool, skeptical, and dispassionate. The power of our geriatric elite is safe so long as cooler heads do not prevail.

Dogma, Part 4: How Dogma Spreads

2020-07-09T18:20:00-04:00

To spread, a dogma must include believer behaviors that cause it to spread. That means that, to avoid the confrontation with the Shadow that the dogma is supposed to protect against, the believer feels compelled to enact some behavior that proselytizes. This manifests most simply as an experience of discomfort when the dogma is contradicted, or when in the presence of a nonbeliever. On the other hand, for the target, an emotional need must be present that the dogma satisfies. In fact, it must seem to the adopter to be the least costly way to satisfy that need. Thus, the dogma-spreading behaviors the believer engages in must arouse or even create psychological discomfort in the target, and the dogma must be made to seem the cure for it. This can only work if acceptance seems less costly to the target than running away. This is one of the reasons friends and family members are such good spreaders of dogma. We stand to gain or lose the most in our relationships with them.

A target's rejection of the dogma is often met with anger. This is one of the basic strategies dogma uses. To be angry is to threaten social rejection, thus raising the cost of disbelief. It's also a seemingly natural way to react to disagreement. We learn to suppress it only because participation in a liberal, pluralist society demands that we do; we can be easily enticed to revert to it. In terms of Jung's categories, the anger of the believer communicates that the target's Persona is not adequate to the social situation, and needs to incorporate the dogma in order to remain functional.

A subtler strategy is to kindly introduce the dogma to the target, along with the implication that to disbelieve the dogma would be monstrous. Perhaps denying the dogma is equated to the denial of morality itself, like how the two meanings of "Christian" are conflated: it is the same thing to be a Christian (one who believes the orthodox religious teachings) and to be Christian (one who behaves as Christianity recommends, which is to say, morally). A simpler trick is the passive-aggressive version of the outrage response: hurt feelings. The softness of the dogmatic presentation activates the target's care instincts, so that the pain expressed at rejection is itself a threat to the Persona of the target. A girlfriend of mine told me about an encounter she had with an Evangelical Christian who asked, on the subject of Christ, "He died for your sins, and you don't even believe in Him?" It's an obvious con, and she knew it, and yet she felt guilty. Part of the trick here is that the apparent harmlessness of the believer is evidence that the dogma does not make one a monster. The target is forced into a dilemma - are these people monsters, despite their smiles and mildness, or am I the real monster? This can work even on healthy people, because a healthy person is never finished updating her Persona. Revisions are inevitably necessary. The dogma acts as a parasite on the healthy person's natural doubt of her own Persona's adequacy.

To an unhealthy target, or at least to one with strongly felt and unmet needs, the dogma offers projection, a way out of his anxiety over his failing Persona. The dogma projects the believer's flaws onto something else. This can be external (You're tempted by the devil, you've been bewitched) or internal (you believe with insufficient fervor). The projection can be anything, so long as it is a conscious concept, and the dogma claims to have firm knowledge of it. If those two conditions hold, the dogma presents as a complete and final answer to the mystery of the Persona's failure. Note that it isn't the flaw itself that the embrace of dogma repairs, but merely the anxiety produced by the awareness of the Shadow.

Some dogmas provide genuine benefits along with the psychological protection. Real religions, as opposed to cults, are an example. How many stories have we heard of the prison inmate who finds God and completely reforms his life? In a sense, rationality itself is such a dogma. It is impossible to justify rationality outside of the system itself; we accept it only because it protects us from uncertainty in the justification of our ideas. But it has the added benefit of actually improving those ideas, and even telling us about how justified our ideas are. (I say that from within the system, of course. You have to stand somewhere.)

The identification of belief with virtue is what sets dogma apart from genuine ideas, which can spread around without moral loading based on their apparent value as ideas. This is the power of reason: by separating belief from morality and social standing, bad ideas can be detected and discarded, even when dogmatic believers use all the tools in their arsenal against us. Reason is the anti-dogma.

The most effective method for spreading dogma remains the indoctrination of children. This is why every religion has its own schools. You will encounter few barriers if you attempt to insert the dogma into children's minds before reason has taken strong root, and you gain the advantage that they may never learn it at all. This is likewise why Enlightenment thinkers promoted the notion of universal education. Reason, adopted early, is an inoculation.

Dogma, Part 3: How Dogma Protects Us

2020-06-26T12:45:00-04:00

So, how does dogma protect us from the unconscious? This is complicated, and I haven't worked out a complete explanation, but these are my thoughts on it.

Prescription

First off, dogma provides prescriptions for various circumstances in life. We might say prescriptions - recipes for life that must be taken at face value - are a defining trait of dogma. Prescriptions provide a list of explicit steps that we can engage consciously, one after the other, saving us the time-consuming and potentially dangerous task of communicating with our unconscious in the act of exploration.

I remember when I was in my late teens and I embraced a libertarian philosophy in something like the style of Ayn Rand. It was remarkable how easily I could assign responsibility and resolve moral ambiguities with that mindset. Did I violate your rights? If not, it's on you to deal with it. Your emotions are your responsibility, not mine. And so forth. Every question answered in a flash. This was not just easy, it was empowering. I could make decisions with ease and confidence, since the possible ways a decision could be wrong were finite, knowable, and easy to check. The reduction in stress and the time saved were benefits that arguably outweighed the cost of sometimes making wrong decisions; that is, decisions that were seen to be wrong from a more mature point of view. I can only imagine how much more empowering my dogma would have been if it had the approbation of my social circles, as one would find in a religious community.

Moral exploration is costly, but how is it dangerous? Our sense of what is moral might shift, and we could discover that we are not the good people we thought we were. We may discover that the parts of us we hold most dear are in fact monstrous. Worse, a new morality can appear evil, and perhaps grotesque, from the standpoint of our current one, so that by adopting it we become "evil" ourselves. As horrified as we are when we imagine encountering monsters, it is nothing compared to the worst horror of all: that of becoming a monster.

Projection

A dogma cannot give us prescriptions for every circumstance, though. The unknown unknown is an inevitable part of our existence. To offer comprehensive protection, the dogma must go beyond prescriptions. Another technique of protection it offers us is the externalization of undesired unconscious forces, i.e. the Shadow. A concrete example, taken from Jung, is that of the elder family man who becomes enamored with a young red-head and runs off with her, recklessly destroying his marriage and alienating his children. If he'd been asked ahead of time (or afterward) if he'd like to give up his marriage for a fling with a young paramour, he would surely have refused. Thus, it's clear that his motivations arose from the Shadow. A thoroughgoing dogma, like Europe had in the Middle Ages, would allow him to externalize the aberrant desire. "She's a witch, and put a spell on me." This is known as projection. In this case, it has the added benefit of protecting him from punishment, but that's not always how it works. People practiced self-flagellation under that same dogma, projecting their sin - aspects of the Shadow they cannot control - onto their flesh, and ritually attacking it.

Protection from ignorance

Jung's notion of the unconscious contained an ambiguity. He saw the unconscious as the set of phenomena of which we were not conscious, but could be. Does that refer only to phenomena within us, or does it include external phenomena of which we are as yet ignorant? It's a difficult question, because it requires us to define "internal" and "external" from a psychological perspective, and there's no obvious way to do that. You might want to say that internal things must occur in one's brain, but that reduction doesn't match how the mind works. The philosopher Andy Clark argues that the brain is merely one piece of "cognitive technology" used by the mind. Other such tools include paper and pen, photographs, the placement of objects in one's home, the positions of one's hands, algorithms running in a computer, and even the brains of other people. All of these things can store or process information which can be accessed by various means (reading, looking, talking), and can be integrated seamlessly into the thought process, conscious or unconscious. When asked at a talk what it was that was using these tools, Clark responded, "It's tools all the way down." I believe this comports with Jung's view of the mind's relationship to the world.

When Jung says that dogma protects us from the unconscious, then, he doesn't just mean it turns our attention away from the demons within. It also covers our eyes to the threats posed by our ignorance of the world. Germs were unknown in the medieval period, but the dogma tells us pestilence is the result of sin, either of the populace or of the king, and we already know we can externalize sin and "deal" with it. Foreign ideas or practices, to the extent that they contradict our own, may be dismissed as the work of the devil. Importantly, this has the knock-on effect of keeping us unconscious of the falsehood of the dogma. Falsifying evidence is explained away.

More difficult than the falsifying evidence are the contradictions within the dogma. Contradictions are inevitable, since dogmas are optimized for psychological defense and not for truth or logic. The user of dogma must practice sustained cognitive dissonance. God loves us, yet he will send most of us to Hell, where we will be in agony for all eternity. While it's true that you may love someone and yet subject them to corrective punishment, you clearly cannot love someone and subject them to eternal, irrevocable punishment. Believers often sustain this contradiction by changing the logical definition of the word "love" to allow for God's wrath, while keeping the emotional associations with the word; then shifting back to the old definition as soon as the uncomfortable contradiction is out of sight. This is one of the many forms of irrationality the dogmatic use to maintain their beliefs. Anyone who's tried to debate such a person would recognize a long list of such things. They work because the relief from discomfort that the dogma offers is more motivating than the desire to be consistent or intellectually honest.

To the extent that a dogma can fully insulate the user from confrontation with the Shadow, it is essentially invulnerable. This is maybe one reason why arguing doesn't work. Argument is a direct appeal to the conscious mind, and, as such, the dogma is already fully prepared against it.

Dogma, Part 2: The Unconscious is Scary

2020-06-19T19:43:40-04:00

So what's so scary about the unconscious that we would need protection from it? It's necessary to understand Jung's notion of the Persona and the Shadow. The idea is, as a child, you learned to engage in moral behavior mainly by striving to be socially accepted. While you may have had some kind of formal moral instruction, your behavior was trained mainly by the reactions of other people, especially adults. That moral and social set of traits - that personality or personalities that you inhabit when you face the world - is referred to collectively as the Persona. The Shadow is all the impulses, thoughts, and other cognitive artifacts you either suppressed or did not develop in your pursuit to become a socially acceptable and moral being. We therefore perceive and even feel the Shadow as undesirable and dangerous. In fact, the impulse to reject the Shadow is the very thing we have to develop in order to create an acceptable Persona, and thus become decent people. But since we cannot reach a perfect state, adapted for all possible futures, the Persona is necessarily temporary. We have to change if we wish to continue improving our lives, or deal with new circumstances. And that inevitably means we will have to adopt behaviors currently located in our Shadow, and probably suppress some behaviors in our Persona. This is dangerous to us by definition.

Think of it another way. We have no fear of the unconscious when we encounter it solving crosswords because, although we don't know precisely what it is going to do, we know the kind of thing it will do. Using our verbal imaginations will produce unforeseen words, but it's very unlikely to provoke ecstasy, send us into a blind rage, or construct a convincing delusion about our identity. We could call the territory of the unconscious that contains the crossword-solving part of our minds the "known unknown." If it were a box, we wouldn't know exactly what we'd find in the box, but we'd know where the sides of the box were. Life in general, though, poses problems to us of every imaginable variety. The whole point of a mind is to be a general purpose problem-solver; as a result, we are forced to encounter the "unknown unknown." There is no box, and, in the general case, no limits. This is where we may find ecstasy, rage, and delusion. And what will we do when we encounter them? By definition, we don't know. As children, we learned to limit our behavior to what is physically safe and socially acceptable, partly by limiting our reactions to extreme emotions, but mostly by limiting the emotions themselves. No remotely healthy adult allows himself to get as angry as he did when he was three years old - not under any normal circumstance, at least. But, in the wilds of life, nothing is guaranteed. An explosion is possible, and it could ruin us.

Dogma, Part 1: What is the Unconscious?

2020-06-10T23:09:05-04:00

This is the first in a series of posts I'm writing about dogma as explained by Carl Jung, and what it tells us about the current state of the world. He said, in essence, dogma is a tool to protect ourselves from our unconscious. To understand what that means, we have to first understand what is meant by "conscious" and "unconscious," which is the subject of this first post.

The usual definitions of consciousness in terms of self-awareness or subjectivity are abstract, philosophical, and vague. I'm fond of the definition put forth by Julian Jaynes: consciousness is what you're conscious of. That may sound like a cheat, but let's see how we can apply it to common experience. Consider doing a crossword puzzle. You read the clue, look at the boxes the clue is for, think of some words that might go with the clue, and see if any of those will fit in the boxes. On its face, it seems like a good example of a fully conscious activity, as it requires a great deal of concentration, and you can't do it in the background while paying attention to something else. Yet, by Jaynes's definition, very little of the process is conscious at all. When you read the clue, what are you actually conscious of? The appearance of the words, the sound they make, and their meaning - at most. You have no awareness of the work you're doing to turn the symbols into sounds, the sounds into words, and the words into meaning. If you're a literate adult, you automated all that long ago.

Solving the puzzle, though, is clearly the part that requires high concentration and creative thinking. But is it conscious? Try and think of what you really experience as you try to solve a clue. You might even try doing a crossword puzzle for a few minutes, and pay attention to what it's like. When you "think of some words," what are you doing? If you're like me, you're not doing anything. You're staring at the box, waiting for a word to occur to you. And then - poof! - you've got a word. If it doesn't fit, repeat. Ironically, the most mentally active part of puzzle-solving is also the part most opaque to your consciousness. As Julian Jaynes said, consciousness is not necessary for thinking. Not only can we think via an intermittently unconscious processes, as we do when solving puzzles, we can think without being conscious at all. Major scientific breakthroughs have occurred while a scientist, stumped on a problem, went for a walk, and thought about something else. Then, just like a guess in crossword puzzle - poof! - the solution occurred to him. The great mathematician Ramanujan famously received many of his deep theorems in his sleep. What's more, he claimed they were told to him in his dreams by the goddess Namagiri Thayar. And why shouldn't he have thought so? He wasn't thinking up those theorems, was he?

That brings up an important feature of the unconscious: it's not under our control, and so it's generally not experienced as the self. When we experience a spontaneous insight, for example, we say it "came to" us, or "occurred to" us. We feel ourselves as in some sense passive participants. Jung believed that gods, far from being explanations for natural phenomena, were really explanations for interior, unconscious experiences, much like Ramanujan's mathematical muse. Jung also said, "Unconscious things of which we do not become conscious, are experienced as fate." Fate is the external projection of whatever it is that's causing us to live a life whose course we cannot affect. In reality, it's very likely this predicament is caused by some thought or behavior that we are not aware of, and need to bring into our consciousness before we can make progress.

The conscious mind is our most recent adaptation, and, as such, takes up relatively little real estate. If you apply the Jaynes definition of consciousness to your own experience, you'll find that almost all of your thinking is done unconsciously. Your consciousness is a thin veneer on top of a vast and powerful machine, made from both inborn abilities and tendencies, and behavior you've automated during your lifetime.

In the next post, I'll talk about what it means to protect ourselves from the unconscious, and how dogma allows us to do that.

Notes on Cal Newport's Deep Work

2020-04-12T22:30:00-04:00

What follows are my notes on Cal Newport's book, Deep Work. He defines deep work as, essentially, work that requires concentration, and that cannot be done well in the presence of frequent distractions. I mainly focused on the advice I found useful from the second part of the book, entitled "The Rules." I included reasoning and examples only when they seemed essential. Newport's rules each have many parts, and are meant to be adopted in sequence. Each one builds on, and is more involved than, the previous one. Where I've used Newport's words exactly, I've attempted to indicate that, but I'm mostly repeating him throughout. The formatting is inconsistent - I may come back and fix that later.

I highly recommend reading Deep Work yourself. Newport writes concisely, so most of the book is genuine content that is worth your time. The notes below leave out many enlightening and helpful arguments and examples. Hopefully they will nonetheless be of use.

I. Work deeply

A. Your approach to depth

He describes four "philosophies," but the only one that seems reasonable for a typical working person was what he called the "rhythmic philosophy" - namely, do deep work every day.

Use a calendar to keep track of the days you worked. As a young comedian, Jerry Seinfeld kept a calendar on which he would cross out the day only if he wrote a new joke that day. The goal was to make a "chain" of days as long as he could, and thus write that many new jokes.
Work at a set time for a set period. Try, for example, waking up early and writing before going to your job.

B. Ritualize

Make rules for everything. Great minds "think like artists but work like accountants." In Robert Caro's office, everything is governed by rules. Where his books go, where he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on the wall, and what he wears there. All routine. "I trained myself to be organized."

Where you'll work and for how long
How you'll work once you start work - structure work with rules and process. Ban internet usage. Require words per quarter-hour. Otherwise, you'll have to "mentally litigate" what you should or shouldn't be doing every time.
How you'll support your work - Food/exercise/coffee, environment/organization/cleaning

C. Make grand gestures

J. K. Rowling rented a luxury hotel room to finish Harry Potter, because she had a hard time concentrating. Alan Lightman goes to a Maine island without internet and phone. Nobel-prize winner William Shockley locked himself in a Chicago hotel room for a week to finish his transistor design. Peter Shankman finished a book by flying to Tokyo, drinking a coffee, and flying back. He could work deeply on airplanes.

D. Collaborate

Distraction destroys depth, but, when reasonable, leverage the "whiteboard effect" - i.e., have a back-and-forth with someone.

E. Follow the disciplines of execution

Clayton Christensen wrote a book called The Four Disciplines of Execution, about running a business. The same advice can perhaps apply to an individual's work. Here are his four disciplines:

Focus on the wildly important - "The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." Pick a small number of ambitious but highly meaningful goals, and focus your deep work only on those goals.
Act on the lead measures - "Lag measures" measure the success of what you have done, "lead measures" measure the behaviors that will lead to success in the future. In our case, time spent in deep work is the key lead measure. Accomplishment of milestones - book chapters written, for example - are also lead measures.
Keep a compelling scoreboard - Record and track the lead measures in a visible place, like Seinfeld did with his calendar. More on this from Cal Newport
Create a cadence of accountability - For an individual, there is no one else to hold you accountable to your measures, so conduct a weekly scorecard review. If you aren't reaching the goals you want at the rate you want, try and find changes to your process that can help you meet them.

F. Take downtime

Shutdown your work brain when it's time to stop working. No checking email, no thinking about problems, no replaying conversations, nothing. You leave it completely until the next day.

Reasons for daily downtime:

Downtime aids insights. This is obvious to anyone who's had an insight. They don't happen when you're trying for them.
Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply. Studies show taking peaceful breaks improves concentration.
The that evening time replaces is usually not that important. Studies show that even well-practiced experts in their fields cannot work deeply for more than about four hours in a day. If you go on working late, you aren't working deeply.

Consider enacting a shutdown ritual, to mark the end of the work day for yourself. Save your work, clean up, whatever. Make a list of tasks for the next day. (Having a plan for achieving a goal both helps you achieve it and relieves you of some of the cognitive burden involved.) When he's finished his ritual, Newport says out loud, "Shutdown complete."

II. Embrace Boredom

A. Take breaks from focus, not breaks from distraction

Distraction rewires us to crave more distraction. It's much harder to move from distraction to focus than the opposite. You can retrain your mind for focus instead of distraction. The more you do it, the more you are trained to do it, and the better you do it in the future. So, instead of scheduling time to focus, schedule time to be distracted, and don't permit it outside that time.

This works even if your job requires lots of distraction. Just schedule lots of it
Regardless of how you schedule it, keep all other time absolutely free from internet use
Scheduling internet use at home further trains your mind for concentration

B. Use time pressure

Consider one of your deep-work projects. Estimate how long you would expect it to take. Now set a hard deadline drastically shorter than this time. Force yourself to work deeply in all the parts of the day you have available for the purpose. Force yourself to do more, and with more intensity, than is comfortable.

C. Problem-solving meditation

Take time when "you're occupied physically, but not mentally," such as when walking, exercising, or taking a shower. Use that time to think deeply about one well-defined problem in your work. The goal is not primarily to solve the problem, but to further build the muscle of concentration by forcing yourself to think deeper and deeper about the same problem. It takes several sessions to see results, but Newport offers these suggestions:

Be wary of distractions - You are likely to have unrelated thoughts about seemingly more interesting problems come up, and you have to put them aside, and get back to the main topic. This is similar to returning to your breath in meditation.
Be wary of "looping" - You will tend to rehash aspects of the problem you've already worked out. Again, you need to bring your mind back to moving deeper, into territory you have not yet explored.
Structure your deep thinking - Identify the elements or variables in your problem first, then come up with the "next step question" - the question you have to answer to get on with things. Once you've solved the sub-problem this question poses, review what you've figured out.

D. Memorize a deck of cards

Newport suggests following the steps in this blog post to teach yourself how to better organize and structure you deep thinking.

III. Quit Social Media

Rather than recommend quitting all social media wholesale, since it has its uses, Newport suggests taking "the craftsman approach to tool selection:"

Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative effects.

He gives three strategies for implementing this rule.

The law of the vital few - Identify the broad, central goals in both your professional and personal life, and, for each goal, the two or three main that help you progress with it. Then, for a given social media tool, rate the impact the tool has on each of those activities as "very good," "very bad," or "little impact." Use this as your yardstick for the tool.
The 30-day anti-trial - Don't use the tool at all for 30 days. At the end, ask yourself if your time would have been substantially better if you had been using that tool. Then ask if people cared that you weren't using it. If the answer to both is "no," get rid of it.
Don't use the internet to entertain yourself - Put more thought into your leisure time. If you chose to be entertained for two hours, you'd probably choose a book, a movie, or a conversation over dicking around online.

IV. Drain the Shallows

This is the section where Newport basically recommends overhauling your entire life.

A. Schedule every minute of every day

Make a schedule at the beginning of every day indicating what you are going to do for the entire day. This isn't set in stone, but, when you deviate from the schedule, update it. He then gives some techniques for avoiding being buried by the work of perpetual schedule-updating.

My friend at work does this, but I wonder for how long. I'm not planning on attempting it, myself. It's the kind of ambitious plan that attracts my desire for self-reform, but ultimately overwhelms me, and becomes more of a deterrent to action than a help. Instead, I'd like to institute an "Army day" - one day a week where I do like he says, and schedule rigorously. If I get the hang of it and it's helpful, I can always do it on additional day, or every day.

B. Quantify the depth of every activity

If you have a schedule for the day, then you can rate each block of time by how "deep" or "shallow" it is. He defines shallow work as tasks which are mentally undemanding and often performed in a state of distraction. He suggests rating activities by asking yourself how many months it would take to train a relatively smart newcomer to do it.

The rest of his suggestions are specific to office-work, and don't mean much to me in my own job or personal projects, so I'm skipping them.