Quick question for you. I wonder if, in your view, there are any other prerequisites to beginning (not getting thru, just even starting) this deep self work besides mental space and focus? Is there a certain level of basic education or skill necessary, awareness of the brain or maybe the skill of critical thinking? That question has me really fascinated right now. If you have another article on that I’d be so grateful if you’d point me to it!!
Great question. There is obviously a lot to say here that I couldn't fit into one article. But I tend to think that there are minimal pre-requisites in terms of formal education or skills. The biggest challenges to getting started are going to be: 1) recognizing that you have a problem 2) strengthening the desire to change 3) taking these problems seriously enough to set aside your free time to work on them knowing it will be difficult 4) having the concepts/language you need to make progress.
Regarding 4, you need to get started to find out where your roadblocks are. Do you keep getting stuck on the same idea or phrase? Do you feel like you lack the concepts you need to go deeper? Once you identify these personal limits, then you can go to work on those and seek out the concepts or practices you need to go deeper
I really appreciate how you frame self meta programming as more than slapping new ‘positive’ code on top of unresolved conflicts. Your language around “searching yourself” and deconstructing a birth worldview gets at something most self help misses: you can’t just paste new scripts over old ones and expect deep conflicts to disappear.
From a control theory perspective, what you’re describing looks like a life of continuous regulation. Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), for example, models us as systems that are always comparing “how things are” with “how we want them to be” and acting to reduce the mismatch. Behaviour isn’t so much something we produce in response to inputs as it is the means by which we keep our experience within acceptable bounds. Even when we’re “running old programs,” there is still a closed loop of perception–comparison–action quietly at work.
In that context, your idea of a mental firewall isn’t just protection from incoming information; it’s what creates enough quiet bandwidth for us to sense the right error signals. From a PCT standpoint, without periods of reduced disturbance it’s hard to notice what we are actually trying to keep under control: which perceptions really matter to us, and where chronic conflicts are silently burning energy. A firewall, in this sense, is a higher level control system that regulates what gets access to our attention so that we can see which “programs” are worth keeping, and gently retune the ones that no longer fit our present life.
Where PCT adds something to the programming metaphor is in how it treats autonomy and change. You write of humans as programmable biocomputers who can become self meta programmers. A PCT lens would agree that we are shaped by early environments, yet emphasises that we are never merely passive code bases. The moment an organism has its own internal “reference signals” for how things should be, it begins to resist disturbances and act to maintain its own preferred perceptions. In other words, a kind of autonomy is already built into the architecture of control: we are always, at some level, doing our best to keep certain aspects of our world as we want them.
PCT also offers a slightly different angle on how “reprogramming” happens. Rather than a central editor rewriting code line by line, we have an intrinsic reorganisation process: when important internal variables (e.g., safety, relatedness, integrity) stay far from where they’re biologically “supposed” to be, the system starts to randomly vary its internal wiring and keeps the variations that reduce this intrinsic distress. Conscious self work like the deconstruction and reconstruction you describe can direct attention to parts of the hierarchy, making them more available for change. However, the fine grained rewiring is less like a clean refactor and more like an ongoing, error driven search for better ways of maintaining what matters.
So, from a PCT angle, your call to become a self meta programmer is deeply resonant, and also precise: we are already controlling countless perceptions all the time; the task is to discover which perceptions we have been trying to control (often unconsciously), where they are in conflict, and how to shift our higher level commitments so that our “life program” serves us rather than tearing us in two. Your essay captures the spirit of that project beautifully; I argue PCT provides a more explicit model of the loops and conflicts underneath.
This has essentially been the project I have been laboring on for over a year now. Trying to change your identity is pretty hard and can feel very destabilizing. Lots to chew on here, thanks.
Quick question for you. I wonder if, in your view, there are any other prerequisites to beginning (not getting thru, just even starting) this deep self work besides mental space and focus? Is there a certain level of basic education or skill necessary, awareness of the brain or maybe the skill of critical thinking? That question has me really fascinated right now. If you have another article on that I’d be so grateful if you’d point me to it!!
Alisha,
Great question. There is obviously a lot to say here that I couldn't fit into one article. But I tend to think that there are minimal pre-requisites in terms of formal education or skills. The biggest challenges to getting started are going to be: 1) recognizing that you have a problem 2) strengthening the desire to change 3) taking these problems seriously enough to set aside your free time to work on them knowing it will be difficult 4) having the concepts/language you need to make progress.
Regarding 4, you need to get started to find out where your roadblocks are. Do you keep getting stuck on the same idea or phrase? Do you feel like you lack the concepts you need to go deeper? Once you identify these personal limits, then you can go to work on those and seek out the concepts or practices you need to go deeper
Love this reply. Thank you!!
Thank you Paul, loved where this made my mind go. Such a deeply interesting and important topic.
I am so glad to be aware of you and your writing.
Thanks!
I really appreciate how you frame self meta programming as more than slapping new ‘positive’ code on top of unresolved conflicts. Your language around “searching yourself” and deconstructing a birth worldview gets at something most self help misses: you can’t just paste new scripts over old ones and expect deep conflicts to disappear.
From a control theory perspective, what you’re describing looks like a life of continuous regulation. Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), for example, models us as systems that are always comparing “how things are” with “how we want them to be” and acting to reduce the mismatch. Behaviour isn’t so much something we produce in response to inputs as it is the means by which we keep our experience within acceptable bounds. Even when we’re “running old programs,” there is still a closed loop of perception–comparison–action quietly at work.
In that context, your idea of a mental firewall isn’t just protection from incoming information; it’s what creates enough quiet bandwidth for us to sense the right error signals. From a PCT standpoint, without periods of reduced disturbance it’s hard to notice what we are actually trying to keep under control: which perceptions really matter to us, and where chronic conflicts are silently burning energy. A firewall, in this sense, is a higher level control system that regulates what gets access to our attention so that we can see which “programs” are worth keeping, and gently retune the ones that no longer fit our present life.
Where PCT adds something to the programming metaphor is in how it treats autonomy and change. You write of humans as programmable biocomputers who can become self meta programmers. A PCT lens would agree that we are shaped by early environments, yet emphasises that we are never merely passive code bases. The moment an organism has its own internal “reference signals” for how things should be, it begins to resist disturbances and act to maintain its own preferred perceptions. In other words, a kind of autonomy is already built into the architecture of control: we are always, at some level, doing our best to keep certain aspects of our world as we want them.
PCT also offers a slightly different angle on how “reprogramming” happens. Rather than a central editor rewriting code line by line, we have an intrinsic reorganisation process: when important internal variables (e.g., safety, relatedness, integrity) stay far from where they’re biologically “supposed” to be, the system starts to randomly vary its internal wiring and keeps the variations that reduce this intrinsic distress. Conscious self work like the deconstruction and reconstruction you describe can direct attention to parts of the hierarchy, making them more available for change. However, the fine grained rewiring is less like a clean refactor and more like an ongoing, error driven search for better ways of maintaining what matters.
So, from a PCT angle, your call to become a self meta programmer is deeply resonant, and also precise: we are already controlling countless perceptions all the time; the task is to discover which perceptions we have been trying to control (often unconsciously), where they are in conflict, and how to shift our higher level commitments so that our “life program” serves us rather than tearing us in two. Your essay captures the spirit of that project beautifully; I argue PCT provides a more explicit model of the loops and conflicts underneath.
This has essentially been the project I have been laboring on for over a year now. Trying to change your identity is pretty hard and can feel very destabilizing. Lots to chew on here, thanks.