Church of the Churchless

Detection of gravitational wave "orchestra" shows power of science

Since I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, I get frequent notifications of new stories on my iPhone. Some interest me. Some don't.

This morning it was a pleasure to be sent a story about how scientists were able to discover a background hum of gravitational waves, building on the first detection of these waves in 2015.

I've made a PDF file of the story, "The Cosmos is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find." It's well worth a read, having been written by a science reporter with a Ph.D. in particle physics. I'll share a few excerpts to whet your appetite for the whole story.
Download The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves Astronomers Find - The New York Times

On Wednesday evening, an international consortium of research collaborations revealed compelling evidence for the existence of a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves reverberating across the universe.

The scientists strongly suspect that these gravitational waves are the collective echo of pairs of supermassive black holes — thousands of them, some as massive as a billion suns, sitting at the hearts of ancient galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — as they slowly merge and generate ripples in space-time.

“I like to think of it as a choir, or an orchestra,” said Xavier Siemens, a physicist at Oregon State University who is part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, collaboration, which led the effort. Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

The findings were highly anticipated, coming more than 15 years after NANOGrav began taking data. Scientists said that, so far, the results were consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space-time to create what we call gravity. As more data is gathered, this cosmic hum could help researchers understand how the universe achieved its current structure and perhaps reveal exotic types of matter that may have existed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

“The gravitational-wave background was always going to be the loudest, most obvious thing to find,” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University and a member of NANOGrav, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. “This is really just the beginning of a whole new way to observe the universe.”

...To detect the gravitational-wave background, researchers took advantage of the lighthouse-like nature of pulsars spread across the Milky Way. “Our detector isn’t something you can build in a lab or even launch into space,” said Thankful Cromartie, an astronomer at Cornell University, during Thursday’s news conference. “It’s closer to the size of the galaxy.”

Pulsars act like cosmic clocks, emitting beams of radio waves that can be periodically measured on Earth. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that as gravitational waves sweep past pulsars, they should expand and shrink the distance between these objects and Earth, changing the time it takes for the radio signals to arrive at observers. And if the gravitational-wave background is indeed everywhere, pulsars across the universe should be affected in a correlated way.

Rather than build a dedicated instrument, the NANOGrav team took advantage of existing radio telescopes around the world: the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (before its fateful collapse three years ago).

In 2020, after more than 12 years of gathering data, the NANOGrav team released results from monitoring the timing of 45 pulsars. Even then, Dr. Siemens said, the researchers saw tantalizing hints of a gravitational-wave background, but they needed to track more pulsars for longer amounts of time to confirm that they were indeed correlated, and to claim a discovery. So the NANOGrav team approached colleagues through the International Pulsar Timing Array — an umbrella organization that includes collaborations based in India, Europe, China and Australia — and coordinated an effort to uncover the gravitational-wave background together.

This discovery shows why I love science so much. 

The researchers showed amazing creativity, competence, and dedication. They produced a scientific instrument the size of a galaxy by using data from pulsars spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy. This required a tremendous amount of teamwork from scientists across the globe. 

It's mind-blowing enough that the general theory of relativity says that gravity is the warping of space-time, which often is described as being akin to placing a heavy object on a stretchy piece of rubber. The object distends the rubber, just as mass distends the fabric of space-time. 

But to discover gravitational waves that traverse the universe at the speed of light, given how faint evidence for those waves is, that's beyond mind-blowing. A story on Space.com describes the precision that had to be achieved.

In the new research, the "critical evidence" that betrays the source of the signals to be supermassive black holes is a unique pattern found in the arrival times of pulses from a galaxy-sized cosmic antenna of nearly 70 millisecond pulsars in the Milky Way, according to a consortium of astronomers known as The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Gravitational wave signals from black hole binaries overlap "like voices in a crowd" and result in an incessant hum that embeds as a unique pattern in the pulsar timing data, scientists say.

Scientists extracted that pattern by observing lighthouse-like beams from pairs of pulsars. Using various radio telescopes like the now-collapsed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in Canada, they collected data about the timing of those pulses every month for 15 years. Then, they calculated the difference between the pulses' actual arrival times and their predicted arrival times — which they could estimate within 1 microsecond, comparable to measuring the distance to the moon to within a thousandth of a millimeter, scientists say.

It amuses me when religiously-minded people say that scientists aren't interested in finding evidence for life after death, consciousness existing outside of the brain, supernatural phenomena, and such. That's totally wrong.

Scientists are devoted to learning the truth about ourselves, our world, and our universe. This newest detection of gravitational waves shows the lengths scientists will go to learn something important about reality.

Believe me, if there was substantial evidence in anything supernatural, scientists would be falling over themselves in the rush to study this phenomenon, since it would overturn longstanding assumptions about reality.

But religion never comes up with anything newsworthy about the nature of the cosmos. That's because religions deal in dogma, not facts. Which is why I'm a big fan of science, not of religion.

Buddhism, pain and pleasure are not the same

I'm personifying Buddhism in the title of this blog post. But really I'm talking about how Rob Burbea viewed the Buddhist approach to dualities in his book, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising.

As noted in recent posts about the book, I like the way Burbea explains his subject, though sometimes he can be too Buddhist-geeky for my less-committed-to-Buddhism taste.

However, today my yellow highlighter kept making question marks in the margin as I read two chapters about "The Dependent Arising of Dualities" and "The Fading of Perception." I found much to like in the chapters, but also some that I didn't like.

Which meant I wasn't acting in accord with this statement of Burbea:

We could also say that in those ways of looking there is a measure of insight into non-duality, since the duality between objects and consciousness is seen to be false. Moreover, since in that view all objects, whatever their appearance, share the same essential nature, implicit too in this non-duality is the non-duality between things which seem to be opposites.

At first I thought that quotation was fine, since I viewed it in the way that Alan Watts often would talk about dualities such as good and bad, up and down, pain and pleasure, and such.

This uncontroversial perspective is that dualities, by definition, require both of the "duals" in order for either to exist. Good, by itself, would be meaningless. Good needs bad in order to stand out. Ditto for bad. So good needs bad, and bad needs good.

But then Burbea quotes the Third Zen Patriarch as saying, "Make the smallest distinction [between things], however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart." Burbea explains that rather cryptic utterance as meaning that we should "practise, over and over, a dropping of any preference for any pole of any duality that presents itself."

So we shouldn't prefer good over bad, or pleasure over pain, or love over hate, because preferences involve clinging, and clinging indicates that we haven't grasped the Buddhist tenet that actually the person clinging lacks a self that could possess the object of desire, and objects lack inherent existence anyway, which makes them not really real.

Now, later Burbea backs off the whole "dropping of any preference" thing, which is good, because it strikes me as both undesirable and impossible. After all, wanting to drop all preferences is a desire, a clinging to a Buddhist ideal. So is wanting to no longer want.

At the end of the second chapter I read today, Burbea said something that didn't elicit any question marks from me, since it made much more sense.

In realizing for ourselves this dependent arising and fading of phenomena, understanding its implication of emptiness, and then gaining some familiarity with viewing things directly as empty, a range and freedom of view is opened up to us. Describing how he practised, the Zen Master Lin Chi said:

Sometimes I take away the person. Sometimes I take away the situation or the thing. Sometimes both. And sometimes neither.

By 'taking away' is meant 'seeing the emptiness of'. Thus, among the options he listed, the first corresponds to a way of looking that sees the emptiness of self; the second to viewing phenomena as empty; the third to a lens that sees both the personal self and phenomena as empty; and the fourth takes both self and phenomena at face value.

Not impelled to always pick up and use the view of emptiness, free to look in any of these ways, we are freer, as understanding matures, to respond to any situation in any way that seems most helpful and appropriate.

This fits with my recent post, It's best to respond to most problems, not react to them. Reactions often are habitual and instinctual. In contrast to more thoughtful responses, reactions tend to be rooted in unthinking emotion or how we're used to dealing with a situation.

If a supposedly "spiritual" person is used to appearing as if they don't care about what happens to themselves or to others, because they've supposedly attained such an exalted level of detachment from worldly affairs, then they're going to act uncompassionately when say, a friend or family member is having a tough time and needs their help. 

I noticed this sort of behavior frequently during the 35 years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, headed up by a guru.

The RSSB teachings would approvingly quote the words of Jesus in Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” 

I thought that was a horrendous attitude, that a goal to leave this world behind and attain the glories of heaven required a commitment to detach from normal human activities, concerns, and attachments. I'd see RSSB disciples become rigid, dogmatic, and robotic as they tried to look like how they thought a devoted RSSB disciple should.

As Burbea says, our real goal should be to respond to situations in the most helpful and appropriate way. If that means crying along with someone who has just suffered a painful loss, then we should shed tears along with them. If it means celebrating with someone who has just experienced a highly pleasurable event, then we should share their joy.

The foundation of spirituality, the ground floor on which all else must rest, in my view is acting like a decent average human being. Without that base, whatever lofty structures we construct in our search for meaning will be deeply flawed.

Put another way, a genuine sinner is much more appealing than a fake saint. 

Spaciousness of awareness is a nice thought, but not reality

Buddhism, like all "ism's", can be irritating. But that's the case with everything in life, really. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

I resonate with Buddhist teachings.

However, as I make my way through Rob Burbea's in-depth examination of the Buddhist notions of emptiness, dependent arising, suffering, and such, some chapters in Seeing That Frees are too Buddhist-geeky for my taste.

Burbea, like some practitioners who are really into Buddhist teachings, strikes me as being akin to a car enthusiast who wants to fine-tune every aspect of a vehicle's operation. So his book goes into great detail about some issues that don't concern me much.

But Burbea is speaking in large part to readers who, like him, are really into Buddhism. He often refers to meditation during a lengthy retreat, something I've never done or wanted to do.

That said, I should give Burbea some slack.

For everybody in my Tai Chi class, which has no beginners, is really into Tai Chi, as is my instructor, naturally. Thus the details about weight distribution and placement of the body in Tai Chi moves we examine would annoy someone who just wants to relax and move in a flowing manner. 

Which makes my Tai Chi about as geeky as Burbea's book about Buddhist teachings is.

Today, though, my interest in Seeing That Frees perked up again when I got to a chapter on "Emptiness and Awareness." Awareness fascinates me because awareness, or consciousness, is all we are, really. 

No awareness, no us. No awareness, no connection with either the world within or the world without. Even if our heart beats and our lungs breathe, without awareness we are essentially dead. Unconsciousness is an inkling of death if it is temporary; truly death if it is permanent. 

Burbea has a pleasingly subtle take on awareness. I'll try to describe the "Emptiness and Awareness" chapter as briefly as possible, though "brief" is often hard for me to attain in my posts about this book.

He starts off with the notion that many forms of spirituality make a central part of their teaching: awareness is like the vast empty sky that contains clouds and other phenomena, yet remains apart from what appears within it.

As it opens and becomes more steady, it can seem more and more that all phenomena appear to emerge out of this space of awareness, abide for a time, and then disappear back into it, while the space itself can have a sense of profound stillness, or imperturbability, to it. 

Burbea then talks about the benefits this view of awareness as a vast empty space can have for us, as people trying to understand ourselves and as meditators. Awareness as the container that can hold any kind of object of awareness is a simple, appealing notion.

Yet there is a "but" to this.

When the perception opens in the kinds of ways described earlier, the tremendous sense of peace, freedom, and beauty that it may involve can often affect a meditator profoundly. It can be very tempting then to suppose that what is experienced is somehow ultimate.

...Perhaps it is surmised to be truly transcendent, truly free of all conditions that arise in it. The notions of emptiness and the space of awareness may get equated, so that the space of awareness itself is regarded as 'Emptiness'.

Similarly, because the experience of the space seems to accord with various descriptions one might have heard or read, it is also relatively common for this awareness to be referred to, for example, as the 'Ground of Being', as the 'Cosmic Consciousness', 'Big Mind', 'The One Mind', 'The Absolute', 'The Unconditioned', or 'the Unfabricated'.

And since a sense of divinity often permeates experience, a practitioner may begin to speak in theistic terms.

Burbea then makes the entirely reasonable point that having a thought or feeling about the "vastness of awareness" is still an object in awareness, not awareness itself. In fact, he believes, as I do also, that it is impossible to be aware of awareness itself, for we only can be aware of contents of awareness.

Can you imagine being aware of pure awareness? I can't. For awareness without an object or content of awareness would be a void, a cipher, a nothing. There would be no difference between it and death.

So almost certainly "pure awareness" is a fantasy, for a fantasy can be an object of awareness.

Burbea then says that there's an alternative approach to viewing awareness as an empty space that holds all objects of awareness. 

All things can seem at that point to share the same 'substance' as awareness, and all experience may be seen as essentially a 'manifestation of awareness'. Then, not just the knowing, but the content of experiences too is sensed as having the nature of consciousness, being made of the same 'stuff' as awareness.

In other words, says Burbea, moments of consciousness can be seen as having both a knowing and a known aspect, with the knowing (consciousness) and the known (the perceptual object) lacking any essential difference.

This makes sense to me.

Again, there is no way to know anything about an object without awareness of the object. So awareness does seem to take on the qualities of the object. Even if a mechanism like a telescope, microscope, or whatever captures the perception of an object, unless a conscious knower is aware of that perception, it doesn't exist for us humans.

Burbea writes:

Whether the attention is wider or more narrow, the key to this way of looking is to recognize that what is seen or experienced is just that -- an experience -- and then see it that way -- as an experience, a perception -- rather than in the usual way of looking, which carries with it the imputation of a solid object 'out there'.

However, in the end Burbea says while both ways of looking at awareness are useful for a practitioner, they make awareness into something it is not: an entity with inherent existence. Meaning, actually awareness is fabricated or constructed just as everything else in existence is.

Both of those views are available to us. In practice, we may sometimes have, and encourage, a sense of awareness as separate from its objects, and this view can be very helpful; and at other times we may have, and encourage, a sense of the sameness of objects and awareness, and this view too may be helpful.

In both cases, however, as part of this view, a nature of awareness has been asserted which will not ultimately stand up to scrutiny. We will see, eventually, that the nature of awareness is neither the same as nor different from its objects of perception.

...Even though it may be regarded nominally as 'not a thing', because it is not materially substantial, an intuitive belief in the inherent existence of awareness has not been destroyed yet. Nevertheless, this fundamental omission does not alter the fact that both views may be ways of looking that support a great deal of letting go, of freedom, peace, and heart opening.

And they may, if employed skillfully, act as stepping-stones to deeper insight and a fuller realization of emptiness.

My weird dream points to the fluid boundaries of self

Most of us believe that our self -- leaving aside what that word truly means -- is something solid and real. But there's plenty of evidence all around us that calls this assumption into question.

Which is an understatement.

Because that evidence actually demolishes the notion of an enduring unchanging self. So those who claim that notions about awareness, consciousness, or soul point to a self that is a fixed North Star in a constellation of change have a lot of explaining to do.

For mental illness can markedly change the contours of a person's self. So can dementia, where someone becomes a very different person after their brain stops to function as it should. Psychedelics can alter our sense of self big time. And then there's dreaming.

Dreams are fascinating because almost always (lucid dreams are a rare exception) the dreamer feels that what they're experiencing in a dream is true, regardless of how freaking weird that dream may be.

Last night I had a dream that was so powerful, when I woke up from it my first impression upon opening my eyes was that I was a different person from who I was when I went to sleep. It took a minute or two for my memories of myself to return fully to my awareness.

During that time I was in a strange halfway state between the decidedly weird dream and my usual existence. It reminded me a bit of the passage in the writings of Chuang Tzu where he wonders whether he was a man having a dream of being a butterfly or a butterfly having a dream of being a man.

I also thought about this passage back in 2011 after waking up from a dream, as I wrote about in "I dreamed within a dream. Felt a lot like reality."

Last night, I didn't dream within a dream. I was just totally immersed in the dream. It had a school theme, which my wife tells me she often dreams about also. I guess school used to be so important to our youthful self, it comes up again in our dreams when we're much older.

In my dream I was late for school. It was unclear what school. Sometimes it seemed like elementary school, sometimes like high school, sometimes like college. Which covers all my schooling bases.

I couldn't find any socks. I looked everywhere where socks should be. They weren't there. But I did find shoes. White shoes. Dirty white shoes, though. Mud all over them. I tried to clean them up so I could go to school. However, all my attempts at cleaning failed.

Heading to breakfast, I couldn't find the vegetarian Little Links (a Loma Linda product) that I eat almost every morning. Looked everywhere. No Little Links. But there were lots of strange people in the place where I lived.

Somehow that seemed normal. Dreams are that way. Weird seems normal. I didn't know what my school schedule was. I knew that I was supposed to attend some classes, but I had no idea what classes I was supposed to go to. 

Another problem was that I was behind in the classwork, even though I couldn't remember the classes I was supposed to be doing work in.

There was more to the dream, of course. These are just some themes in the dream that I jotted down upon waking. It was reassuring when I woke up and, after a brief period of confusion about who I was and where I was, realized that I couldn't be late for school because I was all done with school.

What struck me, though, was what I mentioned above: how real dreams can feel even when their content makes little or no sense and is highly fantastical. 

Which should make not only me, but everybody who remembers some of their dreams, wonder what in our daily waking life that seems so real and true, actually may not be. For we all have a sense of rightness about our everyday experience.

Is that sense justified? Arguably we have no way of knowing, since if everyday life is akin to a dream, it will seem absolutely real and true until we wake up from it. Assuming this is possible. 

Until that possibly possible moment comes, all we can do is just act in accord with what we perceive as being real and true, in the same fashion as I fruitlessly looked for socks in my dream.

Thankfully, in my waking state I realized that they're still sitting in my socks drawer.

It's best to respond to most problems, not react to them

It's a fitting day to be writing about reactivity, given that at the moment the fate of five people in a submersible craft that was on its way to view the wreck of the Titanic, some two and a half miles down in the ocean, is unaccounted for.

Meaning, the craft hasn't been located after it lost communication with the mother ship about an hour and a half into its descent. By this time, it's estimated that if the five people are still alive, they're about to run out of air.

That's a truly horrendous situation.

It'd be extremely easy to panic, which would cause their air to run out sooner since panic causes rapid breathing. So hopefully they're finding ways to respond to their predicament in a skillful fashion, such as by making sounds that could be picked up by sonar, than reacting in unhelpful ways.

Reactivity comes up in many of the books about Buddhism that I've read. It's a really practical subject, since everybody, I'd say, has moments where we react to somebody or something with little or no consideration, and then regret our reaction later.

Snap/quick reactions, of course, often are entirely appropriate. I've been watching the NCAA men's baseball championship series on TV. Good hitters can react to a 95 mph pitch with amazing speed and grace. Pitchers can react to a baseball hit like a rocket right at them by catching the ball with their fast reaction time.

If someone attacks us in a dark parking lot, we need to be able to react quickly to that aggression. If a car is going to hit us, we have to react instinctively without thought. But...

Mostly in our civilized world we're reacting to people and things that don't really threaten us, neither physically nor mentally. They may bother us, like someone saying something disparaging, but typically there's no need to react with the energy and drive we'd need if a lion was chasing us.

Stephen Bachelor has some good observations about reactivity in his book After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age. Here's some quotes that ring true to me.

To go against the stream is to find yourself going against the force of innate reactivity. Mythically, this force is described as the "army of Mara," which is composed of "sensual desire; discontent; hunger and thirst; craving, sloth and torpor; fear; doubt; hypocrisy and obstinacy; renown, honor and ill-gotten fame; and the extolling of oneself and disparaging of others."

Today we would understand these forces as part of the legacy of biological evolution, the embedded instincts and drives that enabled our ancestors to succeed in the competition for scarce resources and survive.

...But if such instincts are neurobiological functions of our organism, it is difficult to understand how they can be systematically overcome -- "cut off like a palm stump," as many discourses claim, "never to arise again." 

Although Buddhist orthodoxy insists that these forces and drives have been eliminated in arahants and buddhas, another, less prominent thread in the canon offers a more intelligible account of the ceasing of reactivity. 

...By learning how to stabilize attention and dwell in a lucid space of non-reactive awareness, we gain the freedom to see the forces of Mara as thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and stories that naturally arise because of the impact of the environment on the senses of a conscious creature.

From that perspective, we see a cascading array of transient, impersonal events that -- provided we do not energize them by identifying with them -- will fade away as soon as their charge is exhausted. They are not overcome by destruction; rather, we must understand how they arise and play themselves out.

The dharma, therefore, involves bringing one's wayward thoughts under control, establishing mindfulness and concentration, then setting out to realize one's goals in the world. 

Mara, the personification of reactivity, is conquered not by eliminating every last reaction from one's mind but by finding a way to become impervious to his attacks. We acquire freedom from reactivity yet without the reactivity ceasing to occur. If we observe these impulses and do not feed them, they will die down over time and diminish in frequency. 

...As long as we are embodied in flesh, nerves, and blood, reactivity will be part and parcel of what it entails to be human.

...The challenge presented by the fourfold task is to learn how to differentiate between reactivity, in which one blindly follows a familiar impulse, and responsiveness, in which one chooses to act in a way that is not conditioned by the impulses of greed, hatred, and confusion.

...Anyone who experiences something that "is immediate and clearly visible" must be alive in a human body and as subject to sickness, aging, and death as everybody else. Thus here what is called "ceasing of suffering" is not actually the ceasing of suffering, but the ceasing of reactivity. 

The Buddha's dictum "I teach suffering and the end of suffering" could thus be rephrased as "I teach suffering and the end of reactivity."

...The Buddha himself complains of physical ailments, the frustration of having to run an organization, the discomforts of old age, and the pain of dying. As long as we have a physical body, we will experience suffering.

...What Buddhists trumpet as the "end of suffering" cannot therefore mean what it says. Not only does it make little sense, the discourses themselves clearly state that it means the end of reactivity. To let go of reactivity and behold its ceasing is certainly no easy task, but at least it is something to which we can aspire, whereas the end of the suffering will remain a pipe dream for as long as we are pulsating, breathing, ingesting, digesting, defecating bodies.

More interesting observations from "Seeing That Frees"

I'm continuing to enjoy the book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. (First post about it is here.)

It's clear that Burbea knows a lot about meditation, Buddhist variety, and is skilled at communicating his knowledge both to his students in person and to the world at large through his book. 

There's so much of interest in the six chapters (out of 31) that I've read so far, I find it difficult to decide what to share in my blog posts about the book. So I'll focus on some of what got special highlighting as I make my way through Seeing That Frees with pen and highlighter in hand.

In a chapter about "The Cultivation of Insight," I liked what Burbea had to say about the limitation of unobservable entities.

Third, however, it is important to stress that, as we are defining it here, only what is actually perceivable to a practitioner qualifies as an insight for that practitioner.

I may, for example, feel anxious when I check my bank balance and see that there is no money at all in my account. But refusing to believe the bank statement and simply choosing to believe instead that I have a million dollars in the account would not in itself constitute an insight here, even if it did have the effect of reducing my suffering.

More generally, any introduction of a belief not based on perception, or similarly, any introduction of notions of unobservable entities would also, strictly speaking, be excluded from this particular definition of insight.

Fourth, and related to this last point: Rather than being based on faith in the experience of another, or upon blind beliefs -- even 'Buddhist' beliefs -- about how things are, insight, as we are defining it, is based primarily on personal experience of what decreases dukkha [suffering].

When there is insight, the seeing melts dukkha, and that release of dukkha we can feel and know for ourselves.

Samadhi is a term that I don't often think about in my own meditation practice. Burbea is helping me to understand that while it sounds exotic, being in a foreign language, it's actually fairly simple. Samadhi is concentration, basically. With concentration comes pleasure, usually.

For me samadhi is a lot like flow -- absorption in doing something either mentally or physically to the exclusion of other possible doings. Here Burbea relates concentration to defabricating the stories our brain tells itself about what's being experienced.

This fits with how I felt driving my Subaru Crosstrek into town today along the six miles of twisty, hilly, two-lane road that connects our neighborhood with Salem, Oregon. When I was simply concentrating on how the car was moving under my control, there were no stories about driving in my mind. There was just driving. And that felt good.

It typically takes a good deal of samadhi practice and insight to reverse a misconception of what is actually happening in a state of 'concentration'. For at first it understandably seems that such an altered state of unification and well-being is arrived at by ignoring phenomena other than the chosen object, so that these other phenomena, both inner and outer, are repressed from the consciousness at that time.

It might seem too that, replacing them in their absence, with much 'huffing and puffing' and strenuous effort, an altered pleasant state is constructed.

Is that really what is happening though? A state of samadhi is indeed still a constructed, fabricated state. But keen investigation, reflection, and a pondering of the relationship it has with letting go suggest that it may be more accurate to understand samadhi as a spectrum of states that involve progressively less fabrication than a more 'ordinary' state of consciousness involves.

It may not be obvious for quite a while but any state of samadhi is to some degree a state of letting go, of reduced craving. And the deeper the samadhi, the deeper and more comprehensive the letting go that it involves.

As we shall come to see through the insight practices, less craving results in less fabricating. Therefore any state of samadhi is a state of less fabricating, less building of the perception and sense of the self and of the world. If we understand how to contemplate it, samadhi itself offers profound insights into fabrication and dependent arising.

Spaciousness is a powerful means of lessening suffering, pain, unease, discomfort. Here Burbea explains how that happens.

Whenever there is any grasping or aversion toward something, indeed whenever any hindrances are present, the mind is, to some degree or other, in a contracted state. It has, so to speak, been sucked in to some perception, some object of consciousness, has shrunk and tightened around it. Generally we experience this contraction in the mind as an unpleasant state, as dukkha. 

We can notice this contraction, this constriction of the mental space, in relation to both internal and external phenomena. It will be evident, for instance, with regard to some unpleasant sensation in the body, like tiredness, or a difficult emotion, such as fear. And we may also detect it in social situations, if a certain relationship is charged.

The clinging mind contracts around some experience, and then, because the mind space is shrunken, the object of that grasping or aversion takes up proportionately more space in the mind. It thus seems somehow larger, and also more solid -- its size and seeming solidity both corresponding to the degree of contraction in the mind.

With the object appearing then bigger and more solid, and the experience of contraction being painful to some degree, the mind without insight in that moment will usually react unskillfully.

It will unconsciously try to escape the situation by increasing the grasping or aversion, in a way that only keeps it stuck or even makes things worse. For unfortunately this further grasping keeps the mind space contracted, or contracts it even more. This makes the issue, the perception, still larger and more solid, setting up a vicious circle in which the mind is trapped.

About all this, for now, we simply want to point out that it can be very helpful, when the awareness is unwisely sucked in in this way, to pay attention deliberately to a sense of space. Noticing space opens up the perception, and can begin to dissolve the vicious circle. Even attention to external physical space can help us open and ease the constriction of the mind, and can create a sense of space around an internal experience such as bodily discomfort or a difficult emotion.

As we have stated before, space is not emptiness, and emptiness is not a space of any kind. Rather, our investigation here is simply into how the mind gives solidity to experience and fabricates dukkha through the very ways we relate to, see, and conceive of things.

We are gradually learning to untangle the tangle of suffering. And again, like all deliberate shifts in the way of looking, the more we do it, the more accessible it becomes. The more we practise inclining the mind to notice space, the easier it becomes to actually open up some space in the perception and experience some relief.

"Seeing That Frees" -- a great book about Buddhist emptiness

Shamil Chandaria's talk on the Bayesian Brain and Meditation that I wrote about recently is a gift that keeps on giving. For on one of his slides there was a small image of a book by Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising.


I recall that Chandaria mentioned it briefly, but he certainly didn't dwell on the book. I figured, correctly as it turns out, that the book was in line with the ideas about the brain that Chandaria was talking about, so I decided to order a copy from Amazon.

It took a while to arrive, maybe because Seeing That Frees was published in Great Britain by Hermes Amāra Publications. I just looked up the publisher, which must be part of the Hermes Amāra Foundation. 

The Hermes Amāra Foundation (HAF) was established in 2019 at the request of the late Buddhist Dharma and meditation teacher Rob Burbea (1965 - 2020). Its main role is as custodian of his extensive body of teachings, which exist in the form of audio talks, interviews, online seminars, podcasts and the book Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. HAF also exists to support the teachers and community of practitioners (sangha) engaging with Rob's teachings.

Burbea died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54. I feel grateful that he wrote such a magnificent book before he died. This morning I read the first 28 pages, which comprise the "Orientations" section. I've read many books about Buddhism, including several about emptiness. 

Burbea's writing, thinking, and approach are exceptional.

I can tell that much already and am looking forward to making my way through the rest of the book. It definitely is a classic in the Buddhist genre. His foundation has many examples of his writings and talks, so that's another way to learn about his approach to Buddhism.

It's fascinating that the book (The Experience Machine) I wrote about in "Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be," along with a couple of follow-up posts, is so compatible with the notions of emptiness and dependent arising in Seeing That Frees.

When modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism end up with the same conclusions even though one has a scientific approach and the other a philosophical/spiritual approach, that gives me more confidence that both are pointing to something true about reality and the human mind.

Plus, in just the first 28 pages my own mind was blown by what Burbea said. Here's some excerpts from those initial chapters, which end with some mind-blowing passages that I found strikingly original, though solidly within Buddhist teachings. It just was a fresh way of looking at emptiness for me.

Revered in the tradition as the 'crown jewels' of the Dharma, the Buddha's teachings on emptiness and dependent arising point and pave the way to the most beautiful possibilities for us as human beings. Their realization brings a truly radical revolution in our whole sense of existence in a way that opens up a profound and extraordinary freedom.

Emptiness -- in Pali, sunnata, in Sanskrit, sunyata, which may also be translated as 'voidness' -- is deep and subtle, however, not easy to see or explain, and in many respects it is even counter-intuitive.

...It might also be imagined that voidness is some kind of thing that can be obtained, but it is not a thing. Nor is it a state of mind or a state of consciousness. 

...We assume, in a way that involves no thinking, that our bodies or this book, for instance, exist independently of other things and independently of the mind that knows them. We feel that a thing has an inherent existence -- that its existence, its being, inheres in itself alone.

Believing then that this real self can really gain or lose things or experiences which have real qualities, grasping and aversion, and thus dukkah [suffering, discontent, pain], arise inevitably. 

...We can, at least for now, define emptiness as the absence of this inherent existence that things appear to naturally and undeniably have... A thing is 'empty' of its seemingly real, independent existence. And all things are this way, are empty. This voidness is what is also sometimes termed the ultimate truth or reality of things.

...Unquestioningly but mistakenly then, we intuitively sense and believe in this inherent existence of phenomena in 'real' experiences of a 'real' self in a world of 'real' things. Now, in itself, this may strike some as a rather abstract or irrelevant piece of metaphysical philosophizing. 

But as alluded to earlier, the complete dissolution of this error in our sense and understanding of things is the deepest level of what the Buddha calls the ignorance or fundamental delusion (Skt: avidya; Pali: avijja) that we share as sentient beings. We cling, and so suffer, because of the way we see.

...But we do not cling to what we know is not real. Thus when, with insight and wisdom, we realize that something is illusory in some sense, we let go of any clinging to it -- of chasing it, trying to hold onto it, or trying to get rid of it. Since clinging brings dukkha, in this release of the clinging there comes release and freedom from dukkha. 

...A ferocious and hungry-looking tiger appears in front of you seemingly about to leap. The distress of a reaction of terror there would be quite understandable. But if you notice on closer inspection that this tiger is not real, that it actually is a holographic projection with accompanying sound recording from a nearby hologram projector, the fear and the problem simply dissolve.

...The Buddha's assertion that things are beyond existing and not existing is not easy to fully comprehend. One of the keys that can unlock our ability to realize, more than just intellectually, this mystical way things are is tied in with an important way in which our holographic tiger illustration is limited.

For that illustration gives no suggestion of a certain aspect of the illusory nature of things -- how all appearances are fabricated by the mind. 

...A 'lie' is a 'fabrication' we say. And this is also the fullness of the Buddha's meaning. When he proclaims that things are fabricated, he is declaring much more than the simple fact that they were put together from other building blocks as causes and conditions. He is pointing more radically to their illusory nature.

...The world of inner and outer phenomena is, in some very important sense, 'fabricated', 'fashioned', 'constructed' by the mind, so that it is somehow illusory, not real in the way that we assume, and not independent of the mind that fabricates it.

...As the Buddha discovered, not even appearances, but the 'whole show' is fabricated, including the mind with its various factors and its consciousness. Thus he also declared the illusory nature of any and all awareness, any consciousness of anything. 

...It is not that while everything else is fabricated by the mind, the mind itself is somehow real, a really existing basis for the fabrication. The mind, whether conceived as mental processes or 'Awareness' -- even the awareness that we can know as vast and unperturbed, that seems natural and effortless -- is also fabricated in the process.

We find, in the end, that there is no 'ground' to fabrication.

And as if that were not cause enough for amazement, we eventually also recognize, taking this exploration of dependent arising deeper and deeper still, that even this profound realization of the fabricated nature of all phenomena is only a relative truth.

Fabrication itself is empty too. Ultimately, it turns out we cannot say that things are fabricated, nor that they are not fabricated. We cannot even say that they arise and cease, nor that they do not arise and cease. 

What we come to understand is that the way things truly are is beautifully beyond the capacities of our conception. Practicing with dependent arising forms a thread, though, that can be followed to such great depths. For in doing so, insights of greater and greater profundity are progressively opened, until this thread ultimately dissolves even itself. It leads and opens beyond itself.

...What the Dharma thus teaches, and what we will discover for ourselves as practice evolves, is that absolutely everything is empty, without exception.

The self is empty. So too is the body, and the whole material world, together with its constituent elements, its subatomic particles, fields, and forces. Also all our inner experiences, emotions, and thoughts, and even whatever experience we might have through 'bare attention' that so much seem as if they are 'direct experiences' of 'things as they are' -- indeed, whatever is perceived, as the Buddha said, is empty.

...While at first these may have seemed strange ways of looking at things, and still probably involve some effort, the mind begins to gravitate towards exposing the emptiness of this and that, of situations and perspectives that we would have solidified before.

To the heart is revealed a sense of beauty in the open, space-like nature of things. More able to shift ways of looking, less locked into any perspective, it wants to see the emptiness. Gradually conviction builds, based firmly on our experience.

The beauty of "We don't not care" rather than "We don't care"

Sometimes a television program can get a moral point across in a few minutes of entertainment that is more clear and convincing than a lengthy ethical treatise.

That happened to me last night when my wife and I were watching an episode of season 3 of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+.

Before I share a clip of that scene, a bit of background. 

Colin, one of the soccer (football, to most of the world) players on the professional team Lasso is coaching, inadvertently revealed that he was gay, homosexual, to the team captain, Isaac, when Isaac saw some photos on Colin's phone.

Isaac then gave Colin the cold shoulder, ignoring him and even acting nasty toward him during the first half of their soccer match. I thought Isaac was being homophobic. Not true. We later learn that Isaac was upset that Colin hadn't told him he was gay.

At halftime, after the team had played poorly, a fan yelled that they were all a bunch of faggots -- a derogatory term for a male homosexual. That set Isaac off. He charged into the seats, accosting the fan, which led to him getting a red card and being ejected from the game.

During the team's halftime meeting, Lasso asked why Isaac acted that way. Someone said that maybe it was because Isaac was gay. But Colin then revealed to the team for the first time that he was gay.

The reaction from team members: "We don't care." That spurred Ted Lasso to relate one of his folksy stories in order to convey a message to his team. 

What struck me about this little speech was how while "We don't care" was supposed to express support for Colin, that actually was a weak gesture for their gay teammate. 

Sure, we don't care that you're gay is much better than we dislike that you're gay, but it's way worse than we care about you and will support you. Which is why Lasso put it as "We don't not care." Because they actually do care about Colin.

The meaning I took away from this is that we shouldn't sit on the sidelines when someone or something we care about is being attacked or threatened or denigrated or ignored.

To give a churchless example, it isn't enough to say that we don't care if someone has a spiritual belief different from our own. That's a wishy-washy sentiment of neutrality, really. Rather, as the tagline on this blog says, we should wholeheartedly support and care about spiritual independence. 

This is why I started this blog about nineteen years ago: I was fed up with religious fundamentalism that believes in only one way, the fundamentalist way. I wanted to do something about dogmatism and blind faith, which I consider to be dangerous both for individuals and cultures.

But this doesn't mean accepting everything someone says about their chosen belief system, in the same way that even though Colin is supported by his teammates in his gayness, they can still criticize Colin for all kinds of other things, including how he plays in a soccer match.

On this blog, I care about truth. Even as I support commenters in choosing their personal spiritual or religious beliefs, I can critique those beliefs when they appear to be objectively untrue -- because truth is important to me.

And naturally they can critique my blog posts for not being true or making sense. 

When caring is present, rather than not caring, a lot can be forgiven. In the Ted Lasso episode, Isaac and Colin drift apart. Then they come together again after Isaac goes to Colin's house and apologizes for the way he acted.

This is tougher to do in cyberspace, since that lacks the physical intimacy of face-to-face communication. Still, caring, really caring, is equally important in our social media and internet encounters.

Yes, I often fail to keep this in mind when I feel strongly about something I care about, and someone else has another way of looking at it. However, deep down I know that they care as much as I do. We just care about different things in different ways.

If we can agree that we all care about caring, hey, that might be as good as it gets in this often crazy realm of cyberspace. The most important thing is to keep on caring, because apathy is much worse. 

Passionate disagreements can be bridged. Apathy, not caring, is a void that can't be bridged.

Experience is all there is for us. Praise be to nonduality!

Once again proving my adage that I don't need to buy nearly as many new books as I used to, now that I've realized that every time I re-read a book, it's as a new person, I'm back to taking another look at David Loy's Nonduality. 

(That's a newer edition; I have the 2010 version.)

It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the book in my aptly titled post, "Nonduality" is a great book about a fascinating subject. In that post I shared links to three previous posts about the book, the first written in January 2015.

Because I've been writing recently about how nonduality is viewed by Shamil Chandaria in the context of Bayesian predictive processing by the brain, those thoughts are making the book feel fresh again.

I've re-read (or actually re-re-re read, given the different colors of my highlighting in the book) the first few chapters. That reminded me that Loy, who based the book on his doctoral thesis -- he's well qualified both intellectually and spiritually, since he's been a student of Zen for over twenty years and is a Zen teacher -- finds four aspects of nonduality.

The negation of dualistic thinking. The nonplurality of the world. The nondifference of subject and object. The nonduality of duality and nonduality.

His main focus is on the non-difference of subject and object, which also is what Chandaria focused on: the nature of human perception. It's a neuroscientific fact that we don't see the world as it is, but as we experience it. 

Meaning, our senses aren't objective transmitters of what's out there in the world, nor of what is in here in the body. For the brain is constantly predicting what will be perceived based on our prior experiences and what the senses are communicating to the brain.

Experience is all there is for us. If we don't experience something, it can't exist for us. So this easy to understand principle, which is unarguable, forms the foundation of nonduality. 

There are, of course, objects out there in the world that aren't us. We're not talking about idealism here, where mind or consciousness is the sole reality. All I'm pointing out is that nothing exists for us apart from our experience of it. 

Fortunately, we humans have very similar minds and senses. That allows me to approach a traffic light and be very confident that, absent an intoxicated or distracted driver, other cars are going to stop if their light is red and proceed if their light is green, with yellow being an indicator of an impending red light.

Thus even though each of us is necessarily limited to knowing only our own personal experience, the similarities in how we perceive and understand the world allow us to generally inhabit a shared "objective" world. I use quotation marks because there is no truly objective stance we can take to reality.

Nonetheless, here's how I put it last year in Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is. 

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

Meaning, we are subjective beings in an objective world. Or at least, what sure appears to be an objective world.

No one knows what it is like to be us other than ourselves. I can do my best to describe how I feel about something, but in the end, all that describing can't encompass my direct subjective experience of that feeling.

Same is true for you. Same is true for everybody.

We are subjects to ourselves, and objects to other people. Each of us assumes that other people also have a subjective life, but their subjectivity is off limits to us, as our subjectivity is off limits to them.

Nonduality doesn't alter those facts. However, it does allow us to bridge the gap between ourself and the world, since the perceiver, perception, and what is perceived sure appear to be nondual, a unity. They all fit together into a seamless whole, even when we don't consciously realize this. 

Science is another way of achieving a shared understanding of reality. For even though scientists are bound by their own inherent subjectivity of personal experience, science has rules and methods for assessing the validity of experience -- as when a scientist reports their observations of a seeming new fact about reality.

Assertions of that sort are put to an inter-subjective test.

A group of scientists looks at the report and critiques it, studying what has been claimed, looking for inadequate conclusions that don't fit the data. While every person inhabits their own experiential reality, it takes a village of scientists to decide whether an assertion about our shared reality holds up.

This is much like the legal system where facts and the law combine to serve as the criteria for a decision by a judge or jury. Facts are detailed observations or experiences. The law is more constant, a benchmark against which the facts of a case are held up to decide innocence or guilt.

Religion is a vastly less reliable guide to knowing the nature of reality since it is largely based on personal experience lacking the validation of others. If someone claims to have experienced God, there's not much that can be said to that person but "that's nice."

It's not like going to Paris and claiming to have experienced the Eiffel Tower. That's a much more credible claim, since the Eiffel Tower is known to exist. 

Nonduality of subject and object, of what's perceived and the perceiver, isn't a free pass to asserting that reality is whatever we experience it as. After all, as I noted before, nonduality doesn't say anything about  how the world really is.

A psychotic person who hallucinates visions and voices is having a nondual experience -- of their own mentally ill mind.

This gets us into the nonduality of duality of nonduality, where it must be realized that as appealing as nonduality may be for us, a genuine nonduality encompasses the duality of objects that exist, or fail to exist, independent of our experience of them.

Phenomenology can deconstruct religious dogma

While I said in my last post that I'd be moving on from the subject of predictive processing, I'm only going to go halfway there. Because I want to explore something that stood out for me in one of the slides I shared in that post from a talk by Shamil Chandaria about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation."

This is how I described the blue box with various terms for Non-Dual Awareness and its associated orange'ish note in my previous blog post.

Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says are similar phenomenology (meaning, as experienced) yet with different metaphysical narratives. That's for sure. Brahman, God in Hinduism, is very different from Buddhist emptiness -- which means the interdependence of all things, none of which possess inherent existence in their own right.

Now, I'm not sure how similar the phenomenological experiences of non-dual awareness actually are. But before talking about that, here's a definition of phenomenology.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.

So assuming non-dual awareness does exist, where basically there is just a unity of experience instead of (1) an experiencer and (2) something being experienced, Chandaria considers that those experiencing non-dual awareness who use terms in the blue box from various spiritual and philosophical traditions all are having pretty much the same subjective experience, even though the terms point to different metaphysical narratives or dogmas.

I like this idea.

It rings true to me, though given the inherently personal nature of subjective experience, it would be difficult to prove that a Christian who feels the presence of Jesus when she stands on top of a  mountain, totally absorbed in the majestic beauty of her surroundings, is having the same non-dual experience as a Buddhist atheist who feels the emptiness or interdependence of those same surroundings.

In other words, it is when we frame a non-dual experience of unity between subject and object within a theological, philosophical, or some other system of thought that differences appear, even though the phenomenological experiences themselves may be very similar, if not identical.

I can't resist relating this to the criminal indictment of Trump that the United States Justice Department released a few days ago. Sure, it's quite a jump from non-dual awareness to serious legal charges against an ex-president, but my mind, like all minds, works in mysterious ways.

Political junkie that I am, I've been avidly following the reactions of Republican and Democratic leaders to the news of the indictment. Let's assume that they all have read the indictment, which runs 49 pages, but doesn't take very long to read given copious white space in the pages.

The indictment is akin to low-level phenomenology. It lays out some basic evidence about the case against Trump. The details and photos in the indictment are damning. Anyone who cares about national security and keeping our nation's military secrets safe should feel alarmed at what the charges against Trump are, and the evidence backing up those charges.

(This isn't all the evidence the government has. More surely will be revealed at Trump's trial.)

However, many if not most Republican leaders, including Trump himself, have been focusing on higher-level dogmas. I call them that, because there's really no facts to back them up. They're just ways of looking at the indictment that distract from the evidence presented in it by the Justice Department.

So Trump calls it a witch hunt. Other Republicans decry the weaponization of the Justice Department to go after Trump in an unfair manner. There's false claims that Biden ordered the indictment, ignoring that a special counsel was appointed to oversee the investigation into Trump's handling of secret documents, and a grand jury authorized the indictment.

Thus while there is little debate about the facts in the indictment, which are virtually indisputable, there's lots of debate about what the indictment means. Is it a valid way of holding Trump accountable for his willful retention of sensitive documents (my view), or is it a nasty way for Democrats to punish Trump because they hate him? (the view of most Republicans)

My point here is that the closer we come to raw experience and raw facts, the more agreement there should be on those low-level aspects of life. When we enter the realm of higher-level abstractions and dogmas, there is more room for disagreement.

At any rate, I like the idea that underneath all of the differences between the world's religious theologies and philosophical ways of looking at the world, there's a fundamental human unity that manifests when experience enters a state that is variously described as flow, absorption, non-duality, and such.

More simply put, a mother who can't stop gazing at the newborn she holds in her arms, so absorbed in the infant that the two of them appear to her to be one, is having the same experience as other mothers, whether they be committed Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, or atheists.

A summary of Shamil Chandaria's "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation"

Don't worry, Church of the Churchless visitors who aren't as interested as I am in the hot new neuroscience theory of predictive processing by the brain, which is why I've been writing about Andy Clark's book The Experience Machine recently.

I'll be on to other topics soon. But not quite yet, since I want to share some of what I learned by watching Shamil Chandaria's talk on YouTube about "The Bayesian Brain and Meditation." I heard Chandaria and Sam Harris engage in a fascinating conversation on Harris' Waking Up app. 

That led me to watch Chandaria's talk, since he's knowledgeable about the whole predictive processing thing, and also an avid meditator based on what he said to Harris. So I figured I might learn something about a topic that's been a subject of debate on this blog: whether it is possible for the human brain to function without filters or models. 

I and a frequent commenter said no, it isn't. Another frequent commenter said yes, it is. So this is why I bring up that subject in my observations about some slides from Chandaria's presentation that I'm sharing below in the form of screenshots.

The theory of predictive processing by the brain fascinates me because it explains some things about the brain in a clearer fashion. For example, Harris (who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience) noted in his talk with Chandaria that there are ten times more top down connections between the brain and senses than bottom up connections.

Meaning, the brain is giving a lot more information to the senses than the senses are giving to the brain. This is at odds with the traditional way of looking at this: the  senses communicate what's in the world to the brain; the brain then cognizes about that information; then the motor part of the brain decides on actions in accord with what the senses are saying.

Actually, the  reverse is true, according to prediction processing theory. The brain, which has no direct connection to the world, is continually making predictions about what is out there based on prior experience and sense data. Errors caused by a mismatch between a prediction and sense data are what the brain pays most attention to, not sense data that matches a prediction.

The first part of Chandaria's talk was a bit drier and more technical than the part about meditation, because that initial part centered on what a Bayesian way of looking at things consists of. Key concepts include priors, or expectations, which basically is a prediction before new data is available. Sensory data then combine with the priors to produce a judgment about what is happening in the world.

(I've probably garbled what Bayesian statistics is all about, since I'm no expert on it. Watch the first part of the video for an expert explanation.)

These are the families of meditations discussed by Chandaria: the Attentional Family, the Deconstruction Family, and the Constructive Family. 

Focused attention meditation is what most people think of when the subject of meditation arises. The dim objects in the thought bubble on the left represent the variety of things in the world that attention could alight on.

If a meditator focuses attention on a single object, such as the breath (the nose image), then other objects receive less attention. Or in the jargon of predictive processing, a decreased precision weighting -- which probably should just be called "weighting."

Deconstruction meditation such as some forms of mindfulness, analytical meditation, and koan practice is different in that the goal is to descend in the hierarchy used by the brain to model the world. For example, on the far left of the slide is a row where the top level is entire faces, the middle level is parts of faces, and the bottom level is parts of those parts.

The brain constructs a face by taking raw vision data and processing it upward from lines, curves, and such, to eyes, lips, nose, and such, ending up with the highest level of a complete face. Deconstruction moves in the opposite direction. Chandaria used the example of saying "dog" twenty times in a row rapidly until the word becomes a mere sound, not a symbol for a canine. (The slide does this with "flowers.")


Now, while it might seem that deconstruction is in line with the idea that the brain can function without filters or models, note in the slide above that Chandaria calls raw body sensations and raw sounds "low level models." So even raw sensory data is still minimally processed by models in the brain.

And of course it is difficult to imagine being able to function as a human with only raw sensory data. Even newborn infants quickly move away from the "blooming and buzzing confusion" William James termed their initial experience of the world as pure sensation. Who would want to live as a newborn for their entire life?


Probably the closest Chandaria came to talking about something that believers in the brain being able to function without filters or concepts would applaud is when he spoke of awareness as being the substrate on which the generative prediction processing model arises. Of course, it seems obvious that awareness or consciousness is the foundation of all experience, without exception.

This gets us into some murky philosophical and neuroscientific waters, since it is unclear what non-dual awareness actually consists of, or what awareness consists of. Is it possible for there to be awareness without any object of awareness? Some people believe in this. Me, I don't, but I could be wrong about this. 

At any rate, non-dual awareness is much more of a spiritual or mystical notion, than a neuroscientific one. 

Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, is one of the spiritual notions (in the blue box) that Chandaria says are similar phenomenology (meaning, as experienced) yet with different metaphysical narratives. That's for sure. Brahman, God in Hinduism, is very different from Buddhist emptiness -- which means the interdependence of all things, none of which possess inherent existence in their own right.

The orange'ish note in the middle says: "NB Awareness itself is empty. It's not a thing. Tendency to reify it." [I"m confident this is a typo, since he is talking about ND, nondual, awareness.) So whatever non-dual awareness is, it isn't a thing. Chandaria also said "Everything is a construction," which supports my contention that the brain doesn't function without filters and models.

The thought cloud with a bunch of objects in it shows that non-dual awareness, as Zen teaches, is simply the union of subject and object where awareness isn't divided into (1) an experience of something by (2) an experiencer of that thing. There's just experience.

Chandaria presented an interesting three-dimensional model of meditation. (Not mediation.) Thr three dimensions are attention, non-dual awareness, and deconstruction. Note that under deconstruction he speaks of brain functioning becoming opaque rather than transparent. Meaning, the goal is to understand how the brain constructs reality instead of having this be automatic.

The peak meditation that combines all three dimensions to the greatest extent is in the upper top right corner: "Deep non-dual absorption state. Minimal Phenomenal Awareness (MPE). [Or MPA; Chandaria could use a proofreader for his slides.]


Chandaria said there are only a few people working on predictive processing models of meditation. He included references to two papers, one of which he was an author on. He didn't explain this slide in any detail. Guess you have to read the references.

Meditation, along with psychedelics, is a way of reconstructing ourself after deconstructing ourself. The discussion in blue also supports my contention that the brain always is going to use filters and models. But it's possible to use our knowledge of the brain to reshuffle our assumptions, expectations, predictions, and such about the world.

Chandaria calls this entering into a reprogramming mode. There's still a program running in the brain. The outputs are just more to our liking, hopefully.


This was one of his last slides. Again, Chandaria says that our experience of the world is a construction, which strongly implies filters and models always will be with us, since those are the brain's construction tools.

But we have the ability to make our experience as beautiful as possible. 

How to hack your brain with predictive processing tips

Well, I've finished the book I've been writing about recently, Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

I enjoyed it a lot. In this post I'll share some tips from the final chapters about how we can use the theory of predictive processing to improve how we experience life. This is a leading theory of modern neuroscience, with references to it popping up in many places.

For example, here's how a review of The Experience Machine in a recent issue of New Scientist starts out.

On a building site, there is a scream of pain. A worker has jumped down from scaffolding and landed on a long nail that is now emerging from the top of his boot. In clear agony, the man is taken to hospital, where his footwear is cut away to reveal that the nail passed between his toes without even breaking the skin.

The pain was entirely in the man's head -- yet it was very real to him, a paradox explained by Andy Clark in his new book The Experience Machine: How our minds predict and shape reality. 

In contrast to what we might expect, and what neuroscientists used to believe, the way we perceive the external world isn't just based on raw data coming in through our senses. It is a merging of our brains' predictions combined with that new data.

Known as predictive processing theory, this is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience at the moment, and it has been described as a grand unifying theory of the brain.

On Sam Harris' Waking Up app for smartphones, yesterday I finished listening to a fascinating two-hour discussion between Harris and Shamil Chandaria, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, University of Oxford.

If you've ever thought of giving the Waking Up app a try, this audio discussion would be a great way to see some of what it offers. The app says that I can invite a friend to try the app for 30 days. Here's a link that supposedly unlocks that offer: https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/SC548CF28

Don't know if it will work for you, but it's worth a try. If it doesn't, email me (address is in right sidebar), and I'll share the Waking Up invite with you that way.

Harris and Chandaria talk about the brain from first principles; Bayesian inference; hierarchical predictive processing; the construction of vision; psychedelics and neuroplasticity; beliefs and prior probabilities; the interaction between psychedelics and meditation; the risks and benefits of psychedelics, Harris' recent experience with MDMA; non-duality; love, gratitude, and bliss; the self model; the Buddhist concept of emptiness; human flourishing; effective altruism, and other topics.

You also can hear the first part of their discussion on YouTube. And seemingly all of it if you sign up for a certain YouTube channel.

Now, on to a necessarily brief rundown of some tips that Clark shares in his book. These aren't new by any means, but they take on a different flavor when viewed through the lens of the predictive process theory.

One that especially resonated with me is realistic optimism. 

The common idea, taking us all the way from short-term motor control to long-term goal-directed action, is that we are pulled along by our own highly predicted future states -- such as the state of drinking the coffee, arriving at that airport on time, or improving my surfing skills. This in turn requires a kind of informed optimism.

We must at some level strongly predict that we will occupy the states that we can plausibly attain and that best realize our goals. We will then act in ways designed to eliminate errors calculated relative to the optimistic-yet-realistic prediction that those goals are achieved. Realistic optimism is thus the order of the day.

...[Predictive processing] suggests that the way we see and experience the world is quite routinely shaped and guided by our own (often unconscious) predictions and expectations

Then there's expecting relief, which includes placebos. 

Since experience is always shaped by our own expectations, there is an opportunity to improve our lives by altering some of those expectations, and the confidence with which they are held. For as we have seen again and again, it is only confident predictions (even if they are ones hidden from conscious view) that get to exert a real grip on the shape of human experience.

...Confidence in a given intervention reflects our confidence in the person (and the larger establishment) offering it, but also the nature of the intervention itself. Injections and surgeries, being considered relatively "powerful" interventions, clearly demonstrate this effect... Remarkably, patients receiving the placebo surgery reported similar amounts of relief as those undergoing normal surgery.

...A fascinating range of cases involves the use of "honest placebos." In these cases, potent predictions of relief can still be activated despite the person knowing perfectly well that there is no standard or clinically active ingredient present.

The power of self-affirmation is real. 

Just as placebos and rituals can impact the deep prediction engines that sculpt human experience, so too can verbal interventions of various kinds. Cases in point include the strings of comforting words uttered by someone well-trusted (for example, in the context of talk therapy), but also the words we ourselves use, either actually uttered or in inner monologues, to frame our own thinking. 

In these and many other ways, the careful use of language has the capacity to reach into the heart of the experience machine. A well-studied example is the positive, performance-enhancing power role of self-affirmation. 

...We also can use words to frame and reframe our own experiences and anxieties. This is another potent tool whose powers and mechanisms can now be better understood. For example, consider that prickly rush of adrenaline so often felt before going onstage or delivering a speech. We can practice attending to that feeling while verbally reframing it as a sign of our own chemical readiness to deliver a good performance. This can lead to more relaxed and fluent behavior.

Lastly, meditation and the control of attention.

Properly used, psychedelic drugs offer a way to step back from our usual daily doubts and self-concerns, providing what has been described as "holiday from the self."

This is also one of the key effects of meditation, a practice that likewise quiets the ego, as evidenced both by verbal reports and by dampened neuronal responses in areas (such as the default mode network) associated with introspective self-consciousness -- the same areas in which activity was seen to be dampened by the action of the psychedelic drugs.

It is unsurprising then that the meditative route to the effects is itself now being understood using the tools and constructs of predictive processing. Focused-attention meditation provides a good example. In focused-attention meditation, practitioners learn to maintain attention on a single object such as the breath.

In predictive processing terms, upping the precision on that sole reliable object inevitably results in dropping the precision assigned to all other states, effectively down-weighting all the rest of the information flowing in from the senses. Once this skill is acquired, thoughts, memories, and sensations can also arise without capturing attention.

This means they can be experienced in a way that is helpfully disengaged from our normal tendencies to react and respond. A bodily itch or a disturbing thought may still arise, but it is not experienced as an immediate call to action, such as scratching or rumination.

For those following the comment game, Spence Tepper lost

For those who have been following the interesting exchange of views about consciousness and the brain in comments on a recent blog post, I'm pleased to present the final score on a debate about whether there's evidence that awareness can be free of filters and concepts.

Commenter Spence Tepper ended up without scoring a debate point due to his religious dogmatism. Commenters Appreciative Reader and myself scored numerous debate points because we used facts and logic. Tepper never actually played the debate game, choosing to ignore calls to produce evidence for his assertion.

Bottom line: you can't win a game unless you're willing to play the game. Calling out "I won!" from the sidelines is a spectator sport, not a genuine sport.

Here's how Appreciative Reader put it in his typically courteous and reasonable fashion.

Hey, Spence.

Most of what you say now, in this last comment, is reasonable, and I agree generally with most of that, I guess.

Except! Except, that isn't what this was about, was it. You'd claimed, originally, that meditation enables us to bypass the model-building thing of our brain, and bypass those mental filters to apprehend reality directly. That extravagant claim of yours is what Brian had flagged, and asked you to substantiate. And pre-empting exactly this kind of bobbing and weaving, I'd wondered if you could do that, without changing the subject etc.

(Here's your own words, that Brian had quoted there: "...if we can go to that place of awareness within ourselves free of filters, a place where filtering and conceptual reconstruction do not function, who knows what we may experience? Maybe God? But no label would work there. Maybe reality directly. Maybe pure experience of the moment. Maybe the moment is eternity." And you've said similar, often enough, other times as well.)

If you'd been able to substantiate that claim, then that would have been fantastic. I'd have been first to accept it, and change my mind and my worldview accordingly. If you hadn't been able to do that, even then, had you directly admitted that that isn't evidenced, but merely how it appears to you, personally and subjectively, and what some religious traditions teach, fair enough, no harm done. We'd then have known clearly where we stand. And nor would that have detracted from your experiences --- except we wouldn't be then looking at them as (allegedly) a "direct" apprehension of reality.

As it happens, you did neither. In your reply to Brian, you simply doubled down, with this further extravagant and unevidenced claim thrown in: "You have experience but it is often entirely beyond the thinking brain, and so without impression, zero memory. You think you saw nothing. But thinking is the problem. You saw something, you can't think of it. (...) You'll have to Grok it. Sartori it."

Once again, the claim that in meditation you experience something that is beyond the thinking brain. In as much as these words of yours are linked to what you'd said before, presumably you mean to imply that this is that direct apprehension of reality, that you'd referred to earlier.

In other words, all you did was to "substantiate" your extravagant claim, with yet another extravagant and unevidenced claim.

--------------------

And now, now you present to me very reasonable comments, very wise views on meditation, and indeed evidenced opinions on meditation. All of which I agree with. Except none of them have anything to do with that original claim.

The one part of your comment now that does directly deal with that original claim is where you say: “Part of that reality reconstruction the brain does all the time. We don't have to be a willing, mindless participant in that.”

That’s worded kind of ambiguously, but it seems to indicate that meditation allows you to go outside of the reconstruction, the model building, that the brain does. In which case it’s simply you repeating your original claim, yet again, in different words, instead of substantiating it. (And yes, like I said that's worded ambiguously. If you didn't mean to convey that by those words, then fair enough, I take this last back. But in that case, again, this has nothing to do with your original claim at all.)

As for the Mayo Clinic link, it’s a cool article, and I enjoyed reading it. But it’s simply a general article written by the clinic staff, a kind of overview of meditation, and it doesn’t come close to providing the kind of evidence we’re talking about here; and nor does it actually claim, either, that meditation helps you apprehend reality directly and minus the filters of mental model-building.

-------------------------

It's a straightforward issue. You know my views on meditation. I'm a fan, and in fact a practitioner and aspirant myself. I agree that meditation is generally beneficient, in terms of what you've discussed here, and more. In general I'm interested in knowing more about all of that, sure.

But the issue we're focused on at this time is this: Can meditation enable us to bypass the model-building via which filter we apprehend reality indirectly, so that we might be able to apprehend reality directly? That had been your claim. Can you substantiate it? If not, then I don't see the issue with clearly admitting it, and retracting that original claim. (And nor do you need jettison that POV altogether. You can always present it, instead, and if you like, as a speculation, maybe, rather than as fact. We can speculate all we want, about whatever we want, why not, as long as we're clear that speculating is all we're doing.)

Not to force the issue beyond this! And apologies if any of my comments in this thread appeared less than fully courteous. Absolutely no offense intended, Spence. Cheers.

Here's a brief overview of how the brain works by Anil Seth

I realize that some people don't resonate with Andy Clark's writing style as much as I do. So for those who find the excerpts I've been sharing from Clark's book, The Experience Machine, to be unduly confusing, here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 about the views of a neuroscientist, Anil Seth, with views similar to Clark's.

Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it's dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note.

I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from.

It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious skeptics commenting on this blog. Definitely makes for more entertaining comment discussions than if everyone had the same views. 

So when I criticize Tepper's perspective on how the brain works, I'm not judging him. As I often note on this blog, if people who embrace God and supernatural entities simply said, "This is what I believe," I'd have little or no problem with that, since I used to believe the same thing.

But when statements of facts are made without evidence to make them up, or when someone changes the subject when they're pressed to provide evidence about an assertion about our shared objective reality (as opposed to their personal subjective reality), then I feel a duty to challenge that person.

Here's what Tepper said that kicked off what I view as a defense of objective truth as currently understood by modern neuroscience.

And if we can go to that place of awareness within ourselves free of filters, a place where filtering and conceptual reconstruction do not function, who knows what we may experience? Maybe God? But no label would work there. Maybe reality directly. Maybe pure experience of the moment. Maybe the moment is eternity.

Those four "maybe's" don't bother me much. What caught my eye was the first sentence, an assertion that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. This simply isn't true. Again, using "true" as meaning the best understanding of neuroscience at this moment in 2023.

Andy Clark, a highly experienced and respected professor of cognitive philosophy puts it this way in his book, The Experience Machine, which I've been writing posts about recently. Clark buttresses his 228 page book with many references to neuroscientific research.

What we see, hear, and feel -- even when everything is working exactly as it should -- is never a direct reflection of the state of our own body or the wider world. Instead, the world and body we experience is always part construct: a product of your conscious and nonconscious predictions.

So there's no doubt that Spence Tepper was wrong when he claimed that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. But you might be thinking, what's the big deal with him being wrong? Here's my answer.

Tepper shared some later comments about how meditation changes the brain. Sure, it does. But neither meditation nor any other sort of spiritual practice can completely change the nature of the brain. Every experience changes the brain, not just meditation. Yet Tepper is claiming a sort of special superiority in religious experience that I find very troubling. That attitude leads to dogma and prejudice.

There's a real danger when people believe they have a special relationship with reality or God that other people lack. That's what Tepper was promulgating, and I consider that this goes against the laudable belief in equality that should be the hallmark of human culture.

By "equality," I mean that without exception, each of the eight billion humans has the same basic constituents of life. Yes, our bodies and brains differ. Some people have highly functioning brains and bodies; other people have problems with how their brain or body functions.

But we don't think that Albert Einstein had a completely different brain than anyone else. Nor do we think that a highly skilled runner who can complete a marathon in record-breaking time has a completely different body than anyone else.

And unless we're deeply infected with a religion virus, we don't assume that some people have an extra supernatural addition to their being that allows them to perceive reality from a higher perspective that us ordinary people lack.

Yet that's what Spence Tepper was assuming, apparently about himself, when he said that awareness can function without filters or concepts, and that maybe, just maybe, this special capacity allows someone with that sort of awareness to know God.

Let's consider how unlikely this is.

For in order what Tepper said to be true, the foundations of modern science would need to be overthrown. Given what neuroscience understands about experience always, not sometimes, being filtered through a mesh of our past experiences and present predictions, pure awareness of the sort claimed by Tepper would have to be supernatural, non-physical. 

And there's simply no evidence of this. Sure, there's lots of talk about consciousness being separable from the body and brain, but no proof of this.

Lastly, it is false that meditation or any other practice can prevent nonconscious influences from affecting how we perceive the world, even if it is possible to become more aware of conscious influences. Clark writes:

Expectations, many of them unconscious, are always at work as our brains construct our experiences. Such effects are inevitable and can be extremely helpful. 

This is obvious. What kind of life would we have if all we possessed was the sort of unfiltered non-conceptual awareness that Tepper not only wrongly believes exists, but is desirable? 

You wouldn't recognize a loved one, because you'd have no concept of "this is my spouse" (or child, or friend, or whoever). You wouldn't be able to drive a car or use any sort of device, because you'd have no concept of what it was for or how it worked. You wouldn't have any sense of the past or future, since those require memory or anticipation, both of which involve concepts.

But religious believers don't think much about the implications of their crazy beliefs. Because those beliefs cause them to feel special, and superior to the poor unenlightened humans lacking their divinely inspired understanding, religions prosper by setting themselves up as places where ordinary people are transformed into Very Special People.

This isn't all that different from forms of prejudice that we're all familiar with. Which is why religiosity is so dangerous. Instead of embracing the truth that all humans are part of the same Homo sapiens family, faiths founded on supernatural myths foster division in much the same way that African-Americans have been viewed as inferior.

Whenever certain types of people are viewed as inherently different than other types, prejudice and discrimination have a fertile field to grow in. That's why I feel so strongly that religious beliefs which assume some humans have a special relationship with God or the supernatural, while other humans don't, are so dangerous.

Bluntly put, I don't see myself as anything special, because that's the truth. Spence Tepper does see himself as possessing special mystical knowledge, and almost certainly that isn't true. Again, I don't think Tepper is a bad person for feeling this way. I used to feel that way myself.

I just view Tepper as having bought into a perspective where he, and I gather others like him, have a superior way of knowing that's off limits to the rest of us. But maybe I'm wrong about this.

I'll change my mind if Tepper states that his brain and awareness are just like everybody else's: imperfect ways of understanding reality that nonetheless do a pretty damn good job of letting us live life pleasantly most of the time without anything supernatural about them.

How the brain makes predictions come true

Before discussing the subject that's the title of this post - how the brain makes predictions come true -- I'll shoehorn in a related personal story about my check ordering saga.

Recently Columbia Bank, which my wife and I use for a checking account, was bought by Umpqua Bank. For many years I've ordered checks for our Columbia Bank account when the supply ran low. Last month was the first time I'd ordered checks with Umpqua Bank on them.

Balancing our checkbook about a week ago, I noticed that we'd been charged on May 17 for the cost of mailing the Umpqua Bank checks I'd ordered. That got me to wondering why the checks hadn't arrived.

After that bit of wondering, every time I opened our mailbox I'd look to see if the checks had been delivered. But day after day, no checks. When May became June, I started to worry that the checks had been lost. 

Yesterday I decided to contact the web site that produces and mails checks. Looking for a way to do this, I noticed a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page. One question was about what to do if a check order hasn't arrived. 

The advice was to log in to your account, then click on an "order status" link. I did that. And was surprised to find that the checks had been delivered. Which I immediately remembered had happened. 

So how is it that I kept looking in our mail for checks that were sitting in a drawer in our house? Here's my theory. As noted in my first two posts about Andy Clark's book, The Experience Machine, modern neuroscience says that the human brain is constantly making predictions about the world.

(See here and here.)

Thus rather than perception being an objective mirror of the outside world, the brain is using past experience to predict what is most likely to appear in a given situation. Discrepancies between that expectation and what is actually perceived are errors that, ideally, lead us to fashion a more accurate understanding of what's there.

In my case, I didn't have any experience ordering checks with Umpqua Bank on them. So even though all of my Columbia Bank orders had arrived without a problem, my brain wasn't as confident about the May check order.

When I saw the charge for the checks on our bank statement, a sense of "something is wrong" popped into my head. I didn't think that thought. It just appeared in my mind with a convincing sense of rightness. 

From that point on, "something is wrong" formed the prediction in my brain when I opened our mailbox. Every day no checks were there, that strengthened the prediction. Of course, the problem was that there actually wasn't a problem. 

But I needed an external push to realize that -- the FAQ about not getting a check order. For my brain was in a closed loop founded on a basic error: that the checks hadn't arrived. Sure, most people reading this are probably thinking, "You're a fool for not looking in the drawer."

No argument there. However, I never thought to look in the drawer where we keep blank checks because my brain was saying that the checks hadn't arrived with a sense of certainty that resulted in me looking for the checks every day we got mail.

Bottom line: the brain works in mysterious ways.

Regarding how the brain makes predictions come true, here's how Andy Clark describes the basic process. It shows how perception and action are much the same, since each uses prediction and error correction to do their job.

To see how this works consider a simple action such as turning my head to see the seagulls out of my office window.

...The sound of the gulls, and the fact that I'm now looking for a nice example of prediction-based action control, makes me want to look out the window and see the gulls. I do so.

In predictive processing terms, what happened is this. The sound of the gulls, and my need for a familiar example, made me strongly predict looking toward the gulls. The best way to get rid of the resulting prediction errors (which were many, since I was still actually looking at my busy computer screen) was to turn my head just so and move my eyes just the right amount. 

...The deep unity (under predictive processing) of perception and action should now be apparent. There are two different, but equally effective, ways to minimize prediction errors during our encounters with the world.

The first is by using prediction errors to help us discover the best guess about how things are out there in the world. But the second is to act so as to make the world fit some of our predictions. Instead of finding the prediction that best fits the sensory evidence (perception), you now find or create the sensory evidence that best fits the prediction.

ln the case of my supposedly missing checks, my brain initially had made a prediction that the checks hadn't been delivered after I noticed that our account had been charged for them. Yes, that prediction was wrong, since the checks had been delivered and were sitting in a drawer.

But it felt right.

And every day I opened our mailbox and saw no checks, that perception made the prediction seem even more right. It was action that corrected the errors being made. Once I realized that the checks had been delivered, and that I'd forgotten putting them in the drawer, I walked to the drawer, opened it, and picked up the packet of Umpqua Bank checks.

Now the new prediction -- the checks were in my possession -- had been confirmed with no errors.

As I get deeper into The Experience Machine, I'm learning some ways we can improve our relationship with the world and ourselves. That will be the focus of my next post about the book, which I'm enjoying a lot.

Here's a fresh way of looking upon attention

I'm continuing to read and enjoy Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. It's one of the best books about modern neuroscience that I've ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of them.

My first post about the book laid a foundation for these subsequent posts, as I get deeper into The Experience Machine. This is a one sentence summary of the Big Idea discussed in the book -- which makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

In a "Psychiatry and Neurology" chapter, Clark talks about prediction errors. Those are the difference between what the brain expects to perceive, given sensory inputs and prior experience, versus what is actually perceived.

Ideally those errors are reduced as we learn more about the slice of reality we're attending to.

But sometimes they aren't, which can create problems for us, big or small. Here's how Clark explains this. It won't be completely understandable, since I'm just sharing small excerpts from his book, but you should get the gist of his message.

Varying estimates of precision alter patterns of post-synaptic influence and so determine what (right here, right now) to rely on and what to ignore. This is also the way brains balance the influence of sensory evidence against predictions.

In other words, precision variations control which bits of what we know and what we sense will be most influential, moment by moment, in bringing about further processing and actions. Expressed like that, the intimacy of precision and attention is apparent. 

Precision variation is what attention (a useful but somewhat nebulous concept) really is.

For example, suppose I want to find a needle recently dropped in a bed of hay. According to predictive processing, my brain ups the precision-weighting on specific aspects of the visual information that would indicate a small silvery object, thereby increasing my chances of success.

That's what attention, if these accounts are correct, really is -- attention is the brain adjusting its precision-weightings as we go about our daily tasks, using knowledge and sensing to their best effect. By attending correctly, I become better able to spot and respond to whatever matters most for the task I am trying to perform.

Precision estimation is thus the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence. 

But what happens when precision estimations misfire? This would skew the impact of different bits of sensory evidence, and of different predictions. Precision estimation is the brain's way of telling itself where, and by how much, to place its bets.

When this goes wrong, our brains will bet badly; they will misestimate what to take seriously and what not to take seriously, thereby generating false or misleading experiences. This is exactly what seems to be happening with functional disorders. In these cases, unwilled misallocations of precision act as self-fulfilling prophecies.

Predictions of pain or impairment become highly overweighted, and those predictions overwhelm the actual sensory evidence, forcing experience to conform to our own hidden but misplaced expectations.

I found examples of this to be fascinating.

As I said in my first post about the book, it's going too far to say that this proves that we create our own reality. However, our brains definitely shape our experience of reality, sometimes in disturbing ways. "Functional" here means that there is a loss of function without evidence of systemic, or structural, damage of disease.

There is good evidence that misfiring precision assignments (unusual patterns of attention) play a role in many, perhaps all, functional neurological disorders. For example, simply distracting the sufferer by making them direct their attention elsewhere often makes functional (but not structural) tremors vanish. 

...This creates a version of the famous "refrigerator light illusion." You might infer that your fridge light is constantly on just because the light is on every time you look inside. But actually it is the act of looking (opening the door) that turns on the light.

Similarly, you might believe you have a near-constant tremor because the tremor is always there when you pay attention to it. But if the tremor is actually in whole or in part the result of the process of "predicting and attending" itself, that assumption may be wildly wrong.

...Strongly anticipating pain, numbness, weakness, or other symptoms alters patterns of attention (precision-weightings) in ways that can either amplify or entirely generate the experience -- which then seems to confirm those very expectations. 

...To make sense of these self-constructed feelings of pain, numbness, weakness, or paralysis, sufferers may start to suspect deep hidden causes -- such as persistent hidden illness. These new beliefs then further reinforce the expectations of those symptoms, reinforcing the cycles of aberrant attention.

...This is rather like the case of the performer with stage fright whose true abilities are masked by their own mounting expectations of failure. The circularity is daunting. Every new instance of stage fright confirms the expectations of failure, and those expectations ensure that the instances of failure accumulate.

Recognizing this circularity is, however, often the first step in breaking the cycle, as we'll see later when looking at ways to "hack" our own predictive brains. 

For lots of people, pain is an unpleasant part of their daily life. Clark speaks about pain in this chapter.

Individuals will differ in how they assign precision to bodily signals, including those associated with pain and disability. Moreover, living with a condition for a long time enables idiosyncratic expectations (for example, about severity in different contexts) to arise and become ingrained.

This means that even where there is some standard structural cause such as a bulging or herniated disc in someone with back pain, the way we experience our symptoms may over time come to involve large doses of mindset and expectation.

In a certain sense, chronic pain at that point is perhaps best considered not so much as a symptom, but as the disease itself -- the very state that needed to be addressed. 

...It shows us exactly why, as leading pain theorist Mick Thacker puts it, we need to move away from thinking of pain as a simple sensation, a direct signal of damage or potential damage, to a view of pain as a perception.

Like all perceptions, it takes shape only thanks to the precision-weighted interaction of predictions and current bodily signals. It is that process of combination that provides the wiggle room that enables persistent pain or impairment without damage, threat, or disease.

This is not to say that everything will respond to changes in expectations. It won't. But attention and expectation are key players in the construction of all our experiences of health and illness, and this is true even when standard structural causes (damage or disease) are present.