Church of the Churchless

Neurons and synapses are what we are

Today I finished reading Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by making my way through a fascinating appendix that, in 24 pages, gives an overview of how the brain works.

It was a mind-blowing description of how, in broad strokes, the mind arises from goings-on in the brain. I'm not going to attempt to repeat what Sapolsky had to say, aside from sharing one of the illustrations in the appendix along with a brief quotation.

What neurons do is talk to each other, cause each other to get excited. At one end of a neuron are its metaphorical ears, specialized processes that receive information from another neuron. At the other end are the processes that are the mouth, that communicate with the next neuron in line.

The ears, the inputs are called dendrites. The output begins with a single long cable called an axon, which then ramifies into axonal endings -- these axon terminals are the mouths... The axon terminals connect to the spines on the branches of the next neuron in line.

Thus, a neuron's dendritic ears are informed that the neuron behind it is excited. The flow of information then sweeps from the dendrites to the cell body to the axon to the axon terminals, and is then passed on to the next neuron.

The illustration shows that there isn't a direct connection between the dendrite (ear) and the axon (mouth). That gap is a synapse. It is bridged by neurotransmitters, chemical messengers. I found a charming Neuroscience for Kids page that looks like it was made in the early days of the Internet. It has a quote at the bottom:

"You are your synapses. They are who you are."
--- Joseph LeDoux, 2002 (in Synaptic Self)

So true. That's the message in Sapolsky's appendix that comes through loud and clear, as it does in the rest of his book.

Most of us have the sensation that we are something ethereal, soul-like. Our thoughts, emotions, desires, hopes, fears, perceptions, and so much else feel like they're being fashioned from immaterial consciousness. 

But the neuroscientific truth is that our 100 billion or so neurons, each of which has thousands of connections to other neurons, producing what's been called the most complex entity in the universe, the human brain, is made of meat, as is the rest of our body.

I already knew this. However, reading the readable appendix brought it home to me in a stronger fashion than I'd ever experienced before. This doesn't take away from the marvelous capabilities of the human brain.

It simply places us firmly in the natural world inhabited by every other type of living creature. As Sapolsky says in his book, a flatworm with just a few hundred neurons learns in the same way as we do with our hundred billion or so neurons.

I don't find this at all disturbing. I find it exhilarating. We are part of the physical universe, not something separate from it. That oneness is an inspiring scientific fact.

Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have

A few weeks ago I wrote a philosophical post for my HinesSight blog: Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have. Here's an excerpt from the talk by William B. Irvine that I transcribed.

The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living. 

To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have and what you want will make you unhappy. Their insight was to realize there’s a second way to close the gap.

You can also close it by wanting what you already have. Let me restate that. Instead of working to get the thing you don’t have, spend your efforts learning to want the things you already do have. 

The Stoics would argue that the person who embraces the life that he happens to be living, even though the life is quite basic, is vastly better off than the millionaire who, despite living in a mansion, is convinced that he would be lastingly happy if only he replaced his Ferrari with a newer model.

Or perhaps replaced his wife of several decades with some young model. This millionaire, by the way, will likely be envied by many people. They will imagine that if only they were living his life, they would at last be happy. All their problems would disappear, and no new problems would arise to replace them.

These people are as deluded as the millionaire is. The primary difference between them and the millionaire is that the millionaire is on a more expensive and extravagant version of the hedonic treadmill than they are.

The Stoics said that one way to want what you already have is to practice negative visualization, where you imagine losing something in your life that means a lot to you. Even brief periods of negative visualization can lead you to value more highly what you already have, rather than longing for something more and better.

After writing that post, I bought a book by Irvine, The Stoic Challenge, that I've written one blog post about. I'm enjoying it.

Today I read a couple of chapters about anchoring and framing. These are psychological concepts that pertain to the Stoic approach to happiness. Anchors are notions that sink into the subconscious mind where they affect subsequent speculations about the world.

An example cited in the book is a store that has two options for selling shirts.

Plan A is to price the shirts at $32 each. Plan B is to price the shirts at $40, then have frequent 20% off sales. The benefit of Plan B is that the $40 price gets anchored in the minds of customers. Then when the shirts go on sale, customers think they're getting a good deal if they pay $32 for one.

Framing is related to a Stoic adage, "What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about the things." Meaning, we have a choice in how to frame or look upon a situation. Irvine gives the example of a doctor telling you that you have the choice between two medical procedures.

One has a one-month survival rate of 90%. The other has a 10% mortality rate in the first month. Obviously both are equally risky, but most people find a choice framed in terms of survival more attractive than a choice framed in terms of death.

Though I've got about half of Irvine's book left to read, it seems pretty clear that negative visualization, anchoring, and framing all point to the view that, as noted above, what keeps us dissatisfied with life isn't so much what is objectively happening with us but how we subjectively look upon our situation.

As you might expect, given my strong atheist leaning, I feel that most religions, mystical paths, and supernatural forms of spirituality are harmful to lasting happiness -- even though they admittedly can produce short-term satisfaction by making grandiose promises about returning to God, enjoying heaven, basking in unending bliss, and such.

The problem with putting such lofty goals in the minds of believers is that the goals serve to raise expectations about what is possible to achieve, even though there's no evidence for God, heaven, or unending bliss.

Once we view life through the frame of "this world sucks but a better one awaits," we're akin to someone with a decent middle-class income who falls prey to a huckster who promises much greater riches by following their illusory recipe for wealth.

From being happy with what they have, they now look upon their life as seriously lacking. This is similar to Christian missionaries who tell previously content members of a so-called "primitive" tribe that they are filled with sin that has to be washed clean by believing in the sacrifice of Jesus. 

Suddenly their contentment is reframed as ignorance of their fallen nature that must be redeemed by embracing Christianity. This same game is played by gurus who proclaim that they've been sent to save souls, leaving aside the not-insignificant fact that evidence for soul is lacking, much less the need to save this nonexistent entity.

Concepts can't be avoided and are different from thoughts

I've continued to make my way through Rob Burbea's excellent book about Buddhist teachings, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising.

As noted before, Burbea goes into considerable detail about his subject, sometimes more than I'm capable of appreciating -- since I'm a fan of Buddhism but don't consider myself a Buddhist.

Then I come across some passages that truly do resonate with me. Here's a sampling. 

This discussion of concepts impressed me because it fits so well with the modern neuroscientific theory of predictive processing by the brain. Basically this says that the brain is constantly making predictions based on prior experiences and sensory inputs.

So models and concepts are a basic part of human cognition. Burbea writes along very similar lines from his Buddhist point of view. He holds out more hope than I do that concepts can be mostly or entirely eliminated from consciousness, while correctly asserting that normally they are integral to experience.

Some conceptual constructs are so subtle too, and so unconsciously woven into the fabric of perception, that without a corresponding subtlety of discriminating awareness they will escape unnoticed and will continue to operate unchallenged.

Conceptuality of all kinds wields its power even when the thinking mind is quiet. To drop thought, then, is definitely not, necessarily, to drop conceiving: thought and conception cannot simply be equated.

Indeed, unlike thought, conception is actually a part of our normal and basic experiencing of anything, as we shall later discuss. And since all of our normal conceiving actually involves, implies, and is supported by, the intuitive conceiving of inherent existence, deep and full relinquishment of concepts is not possible without insight into emptiness.

This insight into emptiness, in turn, requires at least some meditative handling of concepts... Essential to the approach that looks at fabrication is an understanding of the implications of what one sees happening in meditation -- an active inquiry into the dependently arisen nature of transformations of perception.

Here's some passages along a similar line regarding how perception is experience.

Let us stress again though that 'perception' here means more than the act of verbally labelling an object in the mind. Animals do not have vocabulary. Yet still they perceive and discriminate. And at times they feel fear and suffer in relation to what they perceive.

We have a perception of an object even when we have no word for it, or when the mind is free of thought. Perception is experience. And the act of perceiving is the forming of experiences.

Language certainly may be a part of this process of fabricating experiences. Indeed this fabricating role of words may also be explored in practice: with mindfulness it is sometimes possible to separate the labelling of an experience from the experience itself. 

For instance one may see the mental labelling 'pain' as separate from the sensations. Or see the labelling 'fear' as separate from the bodily experience of the emotion. Doing this, sometimes the unpleasantness of the sensations is reduced. Or what was interpreted and felt as 'fear' becomes 'excitement', for example.

It is evident then how the labelling consolidated and intensified the experiences. But such verbal labelling is only one ingredient in the fabrication of experience, one ingredient of what is involved in perception and then only sometimes.

As we have stated several times, perception is experience, or appearance; and we have uncovered much more fundamental ways that it is fabricated, empty, "a mirage". 

For we have seen that the appearance of an object depends on the way of looking. A pain can be perceived as a pain, as flickering atoms of sensation, as an impression in awareness, as nothing, or as unfindable, dependent on how it is fabricated by the view.

Pure awareness, Burbea says, is a fantasy. Citta, our state of mind, always requires an object.

And having seen and contemplated the fading of phenomena, we might now question the whole notion of 'just being' even more cogently. For we can ask: would any such experience of 'just being' really be an experience of non-doing?

Something has to give me the sense of experiencing being. To experience being, I have to experience something. To 'be' is to 'see'. But as practice reveals, to 'see', or experience, something -- any thing, 'inner' or 'outer' -- a degree of clinging is needed.

And as has been made clear, even the subtlest clinging is a doing. A sense of being requires some perception, some experience; and any experience involves the doing of clinging. To be is to see; and to see is to do.

Thus although it might at first seem compelling, on deeper investigation the apparent dichotomy between being and doing is in fact illusory. Being is not any more fundamental than doing, because being is doing.

Very similarly, from all that we have discovered and discussed so far, it is obvious that various related notions -- such as 'Pure Awareness', 'basic mindfulness', 'The Natural State', or 'Presence' (as something basic, pure, and 'non-interfering') -- are simply no longer tenable. They cannot be ultimately true.

Whenever anything is perceived that perceiving involves fabricating through clinging and avijja. And what is perceived is always coloured and shaped by the citta in some way or other; there is no state of the citta even conceivably able to reveal an objective, independently existing, reality of things as they are in themselves. 

"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.

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.

Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences.

Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon realized that his surroundings were perfectly quiet. What had happened was that his partner had gotten a smartphone app that plays a birdsong rather than a traditional alarm.

After hearing the birdsong app for several days, Clark's brain had played a trick on him. Here's how he describes the trick, followed by a summary of his book's thesis.

I now find that I quite often awake well in advance of the start of the actual alarm, already seeming to hear the faint onset of those prerecorded chirps. These are genuine auditory hallucinations, caused by my new, strong expectation of waking to the subtle sound of the birds.

There is probably nothing sinister about my proneness to this hallucination. It has long been known that hallucinations, both auditory and visual, can be quite easily induced by the right kind of training. 

But these, as well as a myriad of other intriguing phenomena, are lately falling into place of signs of something much larger -- something that lies at the very heart of all human experience. The idea (the main topic of this book) is that human brains are prediction machines.

They are evolved organs that build and rebuild experiences from shifting mixtures of expectation and actual sensory evidence. According to that picture, my own unconscious predictions about what I was likely to be hearing as I awoke pulled my perceptual experience briefly in that direction, creating a short-lived hallucination that was soon corrected as more information flowed in through my senses.

That new information (signifying the lack of birdsong) generated "prediction error signals" and these -- on this occasion at least -- were all it took to bring my experience back into line with reality. The hallucination gave way to a clear experience of a silent room.

But in other cases, as we'll see, mistaken predictions can become entrenched and contact with reality (itself a complex and vexed notion) harder to achieve. Even when there are no mistakes involved, and we are seeing things "as they are," our brain's predictions are still playing a central role.

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.

This book is about those balances and an emerging science that turns much of what we thought we knew about perceiving our worlds upside down. According to that science, the brain is constantly trying to guess how things in the world (and our own body) are most likely to be, given what has been learned from previous encounters.

Everything that I see, hear, touch, and feel -- so this new science suggests -- reflects hidden wells of prediction. If the expectations are sufficiently strong, or (as in early chirps of the bird alarm) the sensory evidence sufficiently subtle, I may get things wrong, in effect overwriting parts of the real sensory information with my brain's best guess of how things ought to be.

This does not mean that successful sensing is simply a form of hallucination, though the mechanisms are related to those of hallucination. We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses.

But it casts the process of seeing -- and of perceiving more generally -- in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain's best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory inputs as a guide.

With the prediction machinery up and running, perception becomes a process structured not simply by incoming sensory information but by difference -- the difference between the actual sensory signals and the ones the brain was expecting to encounter. 

I'll be interested to see if this is reflected in the rest of the book -- I've only finished the first chapter -- but it makes sense to me: that religious or mystical experiences occurring entirely within one's own mind, not out there in the world, are especially prone to being hallucinations resulting from strong predictions, or expectations, of what should occur.

After all, as we've seen in the above excerpt from Clark's book, what keeps the brain in close touch with reality is sensory information that corrects erroneous predictions about what ought to be perceived. 

So if a religious believer is engaged in closed-eyes meditation with the expectation that their devotion will result in experiencing God, Jesus, the astral form of their guru, divine light/sound, or whatever, and their brain manifests such an experience, there's no way for that person to use error-correcting sensory information to bring "what appears to be" into closer correspondence with "what actually is."

I said closer correspondence because in one of the last pages I read this morning, Clark dispels the notion that there's any such thing as reality "as it is" -- a favorite saying of many spiritual writers that I'm pleased to see makes little sense. Here he's talking about pain and other sorts of medical symptoms, but his point applies generally.

Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body "as it really is." Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean. 

Instead, there exists a deep continuity between cases where expectation and attention create symptoms (as we saw earlier) "from whole cloth" and cases where they also reflect the operation of some more standard form of disease and injury. Functional disorders simply lie at one end of this spectrum.

If you want to experience how your brain uses prior experience to predict current reality, check out these examples of sine-wave speech.

First listen to the brief SWS (sine-wave speech) audio. Probably you can't make any sense of it. Then listen to the original audio. After you hear the original, listen again to the SWS audio. If you're like me, and probably you are, now the SWS audio will be quite clear, since your brain has the experience of the original audio to predict what the SWS audio is saying.

Slow deep breathing and smiling -- two ways to feel better fast

Recently I listened to a guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my Calm iPhone app where she led listeners through an interesting exercise that taught me something new about breathing.

First Levitt had me breathe for a minute, using my usual breathing. I recall that no counting was done with this first exercise. Then she asked listeners to breathe more slowly, and to count those breaths for a minute that she timed. I had six in and out breaths during that minute.

Then Levitt said to breathe slowly again, but to extend the duration of each in breath by inhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be taken in, and also to extend the duration of each out breath by exhaling more deeply when it seemed that no more air could be expelled.

She timed that minute also. I had four in and out breaths during that minute.

Levitt then talked about how deep breathing of this sort activates a relaxation response in the brain. So she recommended using the extra-deep-breathing technique if someone is anxious about a doctor visit, presentation at work, or whatever.

I've been experimenting with this in my own life and it does seem to work, seemingly for two reasons.

One is that the body does respond to slow deep breathing by relaxing, since fast shallow breathing is associated with a stress response, as when you're worried about being attacked by a stranger on a dark deserted sidewalk.

The other reason is that slow deep breathing, where I inhale and exhale more air past the point where I usually think I've done a full inhalation and exhalation, requires me to concentrate on my breath -- which means my mind isn't full of thoughts about a situation that is making me anxious. 

This is different from merely following my breath, something I've been doing for a long time in my mindfulness and meditation practice. A BBC story (registration may be required), Why slowing your breathing helps you relax, talks about this difference.

Recent scientific research has shown that while quick, shallow and unfocused breathing may contribute to a host of problems, including anxiety, depression and high blood pressure, cultivating greater control over our lungs can bring many benefits to our mental and physical health. Intriguingly, scientists are finding that a particular frequency of breath – at around six exhalations a minute – can be especially restorative, triggering a “relaxation response” in the brain and body.

...Indeed, you may be forgiven for wondering whether breathwork is simply another name for mindfulness, given that many meditation courses already encourage participants to focus their attention on their inhalation and exhalation.

Mindfulness, however, tends to involve passive observation – “watching the breath” – whereas breathwork requires you to actively change the way you breathe. This includes ensuring that you breathe with your diaphragm (rather than the movement of your chest) so that you can fill your lungs with more air, while consciously slowing the pace of your breathing from your resting average.

According to practitioners, those slow, deep breaths set off a cascade of physiological responses that accelerate your descent into a more complete state of relaxation, compared to more passive mindfulness exercises.

“It acts as a speed ramp into the meditation practice, helping to calm the mind quicker so that you get more bang for your buck while meditating,” explains Richie Bostock, a breathwork coach based in London whose book, Exhale, will be published later this year. “In fact, I call some of the routines I teach ‘Meditation on Rocket Fuel’ because of the profound effect it has on calming the mind quickly and getting you to that place of no-thought.”

I just ordered Bostock's book, so will have more to say about this subject after I try the breathing exercises he recommends. Here's another article from Harvard Health Publishing to peruse, Relaxation techniques: Breath control helps quell errant stress response. 

This is a great example of how the mind and body are intimately related. We are physical beings having a physical experience, not the oft-quoted and misleading We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. That way leads to some serious pitfalls, including a dissociation between our mind and body.

Smiling is an even easier thing to do than control the breath. Research shows that smiling can trick your brain into feeling happier, something that seems true when I try it. Here's another story that makes the same point: Forcing a Smile May Improve Your Mood, Study Suggests.

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations. 

I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book.

It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them.

So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain was fooled by Adolf Hitler; why the CIA was fooled by a Cuban spy, Ana Montes, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency; why sophisticated investors were fooled by Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme; why college officials were fooled by Jerry Sandusky, a molester of students.

In each of these cases there were ample warning signs that something wasn't right with how someone was acting. But those warnings were mostly ignored. Why?

Largely because of the dynamics of Truth-Default Theory. Gladwell writes:

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It's a profound point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. 

...You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

We default to truth because we humans are highly social animals.

Homo sapiens wasn't the strongest species in the beginning of our evolutionary history (nor are we today, absent our technology). A saber-toothed tiger could tear us limb from limb. However, early humans were able to band together into cohesive groups. Together, we could accomplish much that an isolated individual couldn't.

That drive to be social, which is still very much with us, required trust. If humans had an innate propensity to doubt other people, it would be very difficult for us to form lasting groups: a tribe, a nation, a society, a sports team, a political party.

And yes, a religion. 

Religions benefit from Truth-Default Theory. When someone hears about a religious teaching from another person that they trust, they're inclined to accept it as being true. Jesus loves you. He died for your sins. Believe in Jesus and you will enjoy eternal life in heaven.

As someone learns more about their chosen religion, likely they won't believe everything about the faith that they've embraced. But as Gladwell noted, those doubts aren't going to make someone become an unbeliever in their religion, since they don't have enough doubts to do that. 

Until, they do. Then they probably will deconvert from the religion.

This describes my religious trajectory. Even though in college I was fooled by a crazed Greek Yoga teacher with a Christananda ashram who thought Jesus was talking to him, that experience of being disillusioned by a spiritual "guru" didn't stop me from jumping right into the religious arms of another guru soon after I escaped the grasp of the Greek guy.

I talked about this in "My strange RSSB initiation story." The beginning of that 2008 post has clear echoes of Truth-Default Theory.

A few days ago I talked about how I came to have doubts about the guru-centered faith, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I followed diligently for over thirty years.

One of the commenters on that post asked a question about why I was so gullible in accepting teachings that, in retrospect, seemed so unlikely to be true.

I responded that all of us believe things which we're mistaken about. Discarding worn-out beliefs and accepting new ones is part of life's maturation process. I also said that to attempt to answer that question I'd need to tell the tale of how I came to be initiated into the RSSB fold.

This is a strange story. I don't think I've ever shared it on the Internet, though I've told it verbally quite a few times.

Important truth: what we need isn't God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying.

I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way.

Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life.

Here he describes his take on spirit.

We don't have to add anything extra or overtly "spiritual" to find deep connection with another person. Spirit emerges in our relationships through our everyday words and actions when our attention is in the present. 

We go beyond minds and bodies by fully present with our own body and mind. When we completely inhabit the shared here and now of this world, we find connection that transcends here and now, beyond space and time.

OK. I doubt that Gillihan means this literally, since being in the present doesn't really take us beyond space and time. I'll grant him that literary license, though, since it can seem like we're beyond space and time.

What bothered me much more was how he felt the need to say this on the final page of his book, which obviously won't resonate with the many readers who don't share his devotion to God.

The integrated approach of Think Act Be that emerged from the intersection of my trials and my training has been discovered by innumerable people across the millennia. Thomas Merton captured it beautifully in New Seeds of Contemplation:

"The 'spiritual life' is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete [person] who is in God and with God and from God and for God."

I suppose Christian readers of his book will like that sentiment. I sure didn't, especially since it contradicts Gillihan's statement that spirit emerges when our attention is in the present -- no need for any illumination by God.

However, as I said, on the whole I enjoyed his book a lot. I especially liked his emphasis on not expecting to gain anything from mindfulness and meditation other than a better relationship with our experience of the life we already have.

Gillihan writes:

Most of us seek security and belonging in a home outside ourselves. We look for it in relationships, in work, in acclaim or material things. In reality, the home we long for is always right here. It doesn't exist anywhere else.

"This is a country whose center is everywhere," wrote Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation. "You do not find it by traveling but by standing still."

But that doesn't stop us from searching for it everywhere except where it is, as if we were tearing the house apart trying to find the keys that we're holding in our hand. The answer must be out there somewhere, something more than just ourselves, because we're convinced we're not enough.

...So much of our suffering comes from struggling to find something more. More than myself. More than the person sitting across from me. More than this house, this table, this meal, this spoon. More than this moment.

I've also been reading a book by physicist Alan Lightman, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. In a chapter about consciousness and the brain, he describes an experience that was thoroughly materialistic, yet spiritual in one of the ways Gillihan uses that term. 

Near the end of my conversation with Professor Koch, I described an experience I had some years ago. I was out on the ocean alone in a small boat, late at night, coming back to my home on a small island. It was a clear night, and the sky bristled with stars. No sound could be heard, except for the soft drone of my engine.

Taking a chance, I turned off the engine. It got even quieter. Then I lay down in the boat and looked up. 

After a few minutes my world dissolved into the star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. Awareness of my self and my ego disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them.

And the vast expanse of time -- extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die -- seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt part of something much larger than myself.

After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up. I asked Professor Koch whether he thought such an experience could arise from mere atoms and molecules.

"First, it is a true experience," he said. "I call these mystical experiences. You can get them in near death experiences, you can get them with a drug called 5-MeO-DMT, you can get them when you meditate. We know that our brain can produce love and hate. This is another experience that the brain can have. And experience shows that our brain can produce all the feelings of love and hate, of ecstasy, of feeling connected."

Absolutely. The brain does this with no God, with nothing supernatural. Just with 100 billion neurons interconnected with about 100 trillion synapses. 

Gut-directed hypnotherapy: example of the mind-body connection

In one way, the whole idea of the mind-body connection doesn't make sense. After all, it isn't as if the mind is one thing and the body is a different thing.

The mind basically is the brain in action. The brain is part of the body. So obviously there's a connection between the mind and body, since they're different aspects of the same entity. 

But most people, me included, do view the mind as something more ethereal than the cruder body.

Our thoughts and emotions seem to be distinct from the flesh, blood, and bone of the body. Even though I know that thoughts and emotions are just as physical as my hands and feet, this is difficult to believe given the inherent subjectivity of mind.

Because I have a sensitive digestive system -- I've never been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) though I have symptoms of this -- I found it interesting when my 52 year-old daughter, Celeste, told me last summer that she's been told she has IBS.

Celeste mentioned that she'd been advised to follow the FODMAP diet, though she's been reluctant to do this because she likes so many foods that aren't advised by FODMAP, such as avocados. 

I downloaded the FODMAP app and made some changes to my diet that have alleviated most of the irritating symptoms of my own IBS, assuming that's what it should be called. Then I came across a mention in a science magazine of the Nerva app that uses hypnotherapy to alleviate IBS symptoms.

I've tried hypnotism a few times and didn't find it very useful. But I found the theory behind the Nerva app to be intriguing, so I've been using it daily for the past four weeks in hopes that I could get back to eating some of the foods that I'd eliminated from my diet.

The basic idea is that Irritable Bowel Syndrome actually isn't caused by a problem with a person's digestive system, because almost always they have a normal digestive system. Instead, the problem lies is miscommunication between the brain and the gut.

Most of us have experienced the brain-gut connection. For example, if we're stressed about giving an important presentation at work, we may feel "butterflies in the stomach" as we get up to speak. This shows that the mind and digestive system are linked quite closely.

The web site for the Nerva app says:

The app includes daily short readings, along with a 15-17 minute hypnotherapy session. One of the goals is to disrupt a negative brain-gut/mind-body feedback loop. This pertains to problems other than IBS, clearly.

Say we feel stressed. One of the ways that stress may manifest is physically. In the case of IBS, maybe we feel some stomach pain. That gut pain then leads to more mental stress, because now we're not only stressed for the original reason, but also because of the stomach pain.

So the brain can affect the gut, and the gut then can affect the brain. Left unchecked, we can spiral into a negative feedback loop. The idea of hypnotherapy -- and this also seems to apply to some forms of meditation -- is to break that cycle by introducing positive thoughts and feelings into the brain as regards the gut problem.

This happens consciously, though the real benefit seems to occur as those positive thoughts and feelings wend their way into our unconscious, creating more beneficial patterns of thinking and feeling largely outside our conscious awareness.

Apparently it doesn't matter if someone isn't highly suggestible with hypnotherapy. That's good, because while I feel relaxed during a session, I never enter a state where I'm not completely aware of my surroundings and what's going on.

Nerva says:

How does hypnotherapy really work?

Hypnosis involves entering a state of absorbed attention where you become hyper-focused on specific stimuli (such as a feeling or a memory) led by suggestions from a hypnotherapist.

During hypnosis, suggestions bypass the critical mind allowing you to subconsciously 'fix' the miscommunication between your gut and brain (how your brain and gut send and receive nerve impulses). These suggestions teach you automatic skills that can help you self-manage IBS symptoms.

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren't about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. 

It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the new year.

This quotation from the book that I included in the previous post lays out what's at stake here, according to Rosenberg, a philosopher at Duke University and codirector of the Duke Center for Philosophy of Biology -- a pleasingly cool title.

What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.

It's this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can't happen at all. The brain can't have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that matter.

When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong. 

Don't misunderstand, no one denies that the brain receives, stores, and transmits information. But it can't do these things in anything like the way introspection tells us it does -- by having thoughts about things. The way the brain deals with information is totally different from the way introspection tells us it does.

Seeing why and understanding how the brain does the work that consciousness gets so wrong is the key to answering all the rest of the questions that keep us awake at night worrying over the mind, the self, the soul, the person.

As I said in the blog post, this question of the about'ness of thoughts is the most difficult part of the book, which I've been re-re-reading parts of. Rosenberg tries different approaches to convince the reader that he's correct, several of which I described in the earlier blog post.

One approach I didn't describe, but noted in my recent re-re-reading (third time, I'm pretty sure), concerns an admittedly difficult to understand conception of the regress necessary if neurons in the brain were to be about something. 

I won't try to summarize this concept, as Rosenberg does a good job himself in these paragraphs.

Now the problem is clear. We see why the Paris neurons can't be about Paris the way that red octagons are about stopping. It's because that way lies a regress that will prevent us from ever understanding what we wanted to figure out in the first place: how one chunk of stuff -- the Paris neurons -- can be about another chunk of stuff -- Paris.

We started out trying to figure out how the Paris neurons could be about Paris, and our tentative answer is that they are about Paris because some other part of the brain -- the neural interpreter -- is both about the Paris neurons and about Paris. We set out to explain how one set of neurons is about something out there in the world.

We find ourselves adopting the theory that it's because another set of neurons is about the first batch of neurons and about the thing in the world, too. This won't do.

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted -- by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain) -- as being about the stuff outside the brain. 

What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for "being about") another clump of matter outside the brain. 

But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe -- including, of course, all the neurons in your brain -- that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter.

So when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong. The brain nonconsciously stores information in thoughts. But the thoughts are not about stuff. Therefore, consciousness cannot retrieve thoughts about stuff. There are none to retrieve. So it can't have thoughts about stuff either. 

Now, I view this excerpt, and Rosenberg's entire book, as evidence that philosophy is a good marriage partner with neuroscience. What Rosenberg has done is apply a form of philosophical analysis to neuroscientific knowledge about how the brain works.

Which demolishes many common sense notions, including that we can think about things in the world, and that there is an independent self having such thoughts.

However, I can understand why others might view what Rosenberg says as gibberish. My response to that is this: if you look upon his book that way, do your best to grasp why he dismisses the idea that thoughts are about stuff in the world. Only then can you make an informed judgement about what he says. 

Paradox: loss of self becomes deeply meaningful to our self

Recently I picked up Kevin Nelson's book, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience, after reading it quite a few years ago. I first heard of Nelson, a leading researcher in near-death experiences, via a New Scientist article that I blogged about in 2010.

Not surprisingly, in his book Nelson concludes that spiritual experiences are decidedly physical. In his Epilogue, he writes:

We have placed fragmented consciousness at the heart of many of our spiritual experiences and stripped away the illusion of the seamlessly integrated self. Odd as it may seem, we have shown that primal brainstem reactions seem to be at the root of the experiences that we think of as spiritual and that make us most human.

This concept of "knee-jerk spirituality" deals a strong blow to the idea that free will is necessary to connect with whatever we feel is sacred.

At the neurologist's command, a flicker of electrical current to the brain makes it seem that our consciousness has been lifted from our body and is floating freely in space. The brain pathways used during "natural" spiritual experiences are the same pathways used by spiritual drugs, indistinguishable from otherwise genuine religious conversions, transforming lives long after the drug is flushed clear from the body.

Clinical neurology tells us that these are the same pathways distorted by some diseases of the brain that produce disorders fitting criteria for religious experience. Are spontaneous and authentic spiritual experiences nothing more that "experiments of nature" telling us how the brain works?

We have strong indications that much of our spirituality arises from arousal, limbic, and reward systems that evolved long before structures made the brain capable of language and reasoning. Neurologically, mystical feelings may not be so much beyond language as before language.

...We are all of this world, and my experience optimistically compels me to believe that understanding the brain as a spiritual organ strengthens our quest for meaning and complements a mature spirituality. My deepest hope is that this quest will ultimately bring us to a new birth of wisdom.

In his chapter, "The Fragmented Self," Nelson makes an interesting point. An obvious one, really, but something that gets ignored by those who claim that they went beyond their self into a sense of spiritual or mystical oneness.

If someone truly has no self, they have no way of remembering that they had an experience where they lacked a self. In other words, it takes a self to know that you don't have a self. Nelson writes:

The self, like consciousness, can fragment. And when we look closely, it may be that a little piece of the self remains even in the most powerful experiences of self-transcendence. After we delve into the way the brain constructs the self, we see that the complete loss of self, even in the most powerful of mystical experiences, is a dubious proposition.

...It is strange, even paradoxical, that the loss of self becomes one of the most powerful experiences that we can own, usually becoming deeply embedded in our lifelong self-identity.

There is no doubt afterward that the "me" of the experience owns the feelings, sensations, knowledge, and aftermath of the types of spiritual experience that involve loss of self! So powerful is this ownership that it often becomes integrated into our enduring religious beliefs and deepest aspirations.

Often we know, but don't understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion. 

I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life.

This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before. 

Its subtitle is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." This too is a notion that mystically inclined people like to claim as their own. Actually, it is an integral part of human nature. Of course, early on in his book Gladwell points out several caveats.

Yes, "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. But, "it's not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the 'truth' of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled."

What's surprising, though, is how often our intuition understands what's going on in the blink of an eye, no time-consuming thinking or reasoning required. 

This morning I finished the book's second chapter, "The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions." It starts off with the story of how Vic Braden, a top tennis coach (and former star player) found that he could tell whether an expert tennis player was doing to double-fault. 

Meaning, fail to get a serve in twice in a row, which gives a point to the opponent. Tennis pros might serve hundreds of times in a match and double-fault only three or four times. Yet in one tournament Braden correctly predicted sixteen out of seventeen double faults in the matches he watched.

But here's the catch: much to Braden's frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

Gladwell goes on to say this.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. 

...Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door. Vic Braden tried to look inside that room. He stayed up at night, trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment. But he couldn't.

...If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that -- sometimes -- we're better off that way.

...In high stakes, fast-moving situations, we don't want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients. We don't want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us.

...Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

...After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute confidence, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision," psychologist Joshua Aronson says. "But how on earth could she know that? What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often."

Of course, there is a second, equally valuable, lesson in the Maier experiment. His subjects were stumped. They were frustrated. They were sitting there for ten minutes, and no doubt many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they had been exposed as stupid. But they weren't stupid. Why not?

Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every possible clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them -- silently and surely -- to the solution. 

Beautiful. Religious believers like to ask God to give them a sign as to what to do. Or they pray for guidance. 

There's no need for any of that. Each of us has an astounding piece of intelligence within us: the human brain's unconscious workings. Sure, often we need to use our conscious intelligence to wend our way through life's many problems and opportunities. 

But we also need to trust the much vaster part of our cognition, the unconscious that has ways of knowing beyond our ability to know what those ways are. All we can do is be grateful for that often right-on intuitive capability.

We need to try not to overdraw our body budget

Recently I've been writing about a book that I'm enjoying a lot more than I thought I would, Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

It's dawned on me that in the course of sharing ideas from various chapters I found compelling, I've largely neglected to make clear the importance of a key concept in the book: that of our body budget.

This was a new notion to me, and I don't claim to fully understand it even after reading Barrett's description of it. But here's some quotes from her book that give a good overview of what the body budget is all about.

Your body-budgeting regions play a vital role in keeping you alive. Each time your brain moves any part of your body, inside or out, it spends some of its energy resources: the stuff it uses to run your organs, your metabolism, and your immune system.

You replenish your body's spending by eating, drinking, and sleeping, and you reduce your body's spending by relaxing with loved ones, even having sex. To manage all of this spending and replenishing, your brain must constantly predict your body's energy needs, like a budget for your body.

...Your body-budgeting regions make predictions to estimate the resources to keep you alive and flourishing, using past experience as a guide.

...Whenever your brain predicts a movement, whether it's getting out of bed in the morning or taking a sip of coffee, your body-budgeting regions adjust your budget. When your brain predicts that your body will need a quick burst of energy, these regions instruct the adrenal gland in your kidneys to release the hormone cortisol.

...Withdrawals from your body's budget don't require actual physical movement. Suppose you see your boss, teacher, or baseball coach walking toward you. You believe that she judges everything you say and do. Even though no physical movement seems calls for, your brain predicts that your body needs energy and makes a budget withdrawal, releasing cortisol and flooding glucose into your bloodstream.

...Stop and think about this for a moment. Someone merely walks toward you while you are standing still, and your brain predicts that you need fuel! In this manner, any event that significantly impacts your body budget becomes personally meaningful to you. 

...To perturb your budget, you don't even require another person or object to be present. You can just imagine your boss, teacher, coach, or anything else relevant to you. Every simulation, whether it becomes an emotion or not, impacts your body budget.

As it turns out, people spend at least half their waking hours simulating rather than paying attention to the world around them, and this pure simulation strongly drives their feelings.

I'm finding this body-budget concept to be useful in my own life. It fits with the metaphor used for the title of a book, Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which I wrote about in "No lions? Then relax. Especially if you're a zebra."

If a lion starts chasing a herd of zebras, their body budget predicts that they're going to need a release of energy for running away. But if zebras remained in this state of heightened arousal, with such a large withdrawal from their body budget, they'd be in bad shape. 

So zebras quickly go back to grazing on grass after a lion attack, because they need to replenish their body budget. Lucky them. We humans, on the other hand, often fret and worry about a stressful event for a long time after the event has passed.

If this happens repeatedly, we can find ourselves in a chronic state of anxiety or depression, which Barrett says is the result of prediction errors.

When we're anxious, we're predicting that bad things are going to happen even though there is little or no actual evidence of this. Thus we can get into a state akin to zebras imagining lions about to pounce even when no lions are around. This leads to excessive withdrawals from our body budget.

When we're depressed, we try to reduce the need for a deposit into our body budget by remaining still, cutting way down on our activities, staying at home, ignoring friends and family, which leads to a feeling of fatigue.

Everyday language echoes the notion of a body budget. "I feel drained." "I'm overflowing with joy." "I'm running on empty." "Your words filled me with hope." 

This evening I watched results of the runoff election in Georgia between incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger Herschel Walker. 

Being a political junkie, and knowing the importance of this election for confirming judges, conducting investigations, and doing other business in the Senate for the next two years (a Warnock win would give Democrats a 51-49 majority), I found my mood rising and falling as the results were reported by MSNBC over the span of three or four hours.

At first Warnock was way ahead, since Georgia counts early and absentee voting first, methods favored by Democrats. I felt great! Then Walker -- an absolutely horribly unqualified candidate -- moved ahead as conservative counties released their vote tallies. I felt awful!

Finally, the liberal-leaning urban areas around Atlanta finished counting their same day votes and Warnock was declared the victor. I felt really great! So my body budget was rising and falling even though I was doing just about nothing physically. My mind was predicting how I'd feel if I had to watch Walker blunder his way as a Senator for the next six years, versus how wonderful I'd feel if Warnock won.

The human mind is a marvelous result of evolution.

However, that marvel has resulted in mental abilities that can easily go awry. For our modern malady isn't being chased by predators on the African grasslands, but having to cope with psychological stresses caused by our ability to remember problems from the past that we worry will recur, and imagine problems in the future that we worry will occur. 

Which is why I've taken up the habit of saying to myself, "No lions," when I find myself fretting unduly in the absence of clear reasons to do so.

The self, like emotions, is constructed by the brain

I'm continuing to make progress on reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. 

As noted in a previous post about the book, I'm glad that I decided to read it straight through, even though some chapters seemed more appealing than others. Barrett is a good writer. She organized her book well, with interesting topics in every chapter.

Before I get to how she views the self, which is pretty much how I also see it, as something constructed, not a given, I want to briefly mention her wise words about jumping to conclusions about how someone feels.

We're all guilty of this, me certainly included. It's easy to do, but we shouldn't do it. Feelings, or emotions, are private. And Barrett stresses that there aren't universal outward signs of any emotion. For example, a person can smile when happy, smile when anxious, or smile when angry.

So assuming that they are happy because they're smiling isn't justified. Of course, it's way worse when people on social media claim that they know how someone feels just from words appearing on a computer screen.

Barrett writes:

Perceptions of emotion are guesses, and they're "correct" only when they match the other person's experience: that is, both people agree on which [emotion] concept to apply. Anytime you think you know how someone else feels, your confidence has nothing to do with actual knowledge. You're just having a moment of affective realism [tendency of your feelings to affect what you see].

Now, regarding the self, Barrett views it as constructed in much the same way she views emotions as constructed.

Not by a conscious act of will, but via brain processes. This means that just as there is no hard-wired place in the brain where anger or any other emotion resides (an essentialist view), neither do we possess, or are, an essential self, a perspective shared by Buddhism. She writes:

My scientific definition of the self is inspired by the workings of the brain yet is sympathetic to the Buddhist view. The self is part of social reality. It's not exactly a fiction, but neither is it objectively real in nature like a neutron. It depends on other people.

In scientific terms, your predictions in the moment, and your actions that derive from them, depend to some extent on the way that others treat you. You can't be a self by yourself. We can understand why Tom Hanks's character in the movie Cast Away, who was marooned alone on a desert island for four years, needed to create a companion named Wilson out of a volleyball.

Certain behaviors and preferences are consistent with your self and some are not. There are foods you enjoy and others you'd prefer not to eat. You might call yourself a "dog person" or a "cat person." These behaviors and preferences vary quite a bit: your favorite food might be French fries, but not at every meal.

The most enthusiastic dog lovers know a couple of dogs that they can't stand and are secretly fond of a few cats. Overall, your self is like a collection of dos and don'ts that summarizes your likes, dislikes, and habits in the moment.

We've seen something like this before. These dos and don'ts are like the features of a concept. So in my view, the self is a plain, ordinary concept just like "Tree," "Things That Protect You from Stinging Insects," and "Fear."

I am quite sure you don't go around thinking of yourself as a concept, but just go with me for a bit on this.

If the self is a concept, then you construct instances of your self by simulation. Each instance fits your goals in the moment. Sometimes you categorize yourself by your career. Sometimes you're a parent, or a child, or a lover. Sometimes you're just a body.

Social psychologists say that we have multiple selves, but you can think of this repertoire as instances of a single, goal-based concept called "The Self" in which the goal shifts based on context. 

How does your brain keep track of all the varied instances of your "Self" as an infant, a young child, an adolescent, a middle-aged adult, and an older adult? Because one part has remained constant: you've always had a body. 

Every concept you have ever learned includes the state of your body (as interoceptive predictions) at the time of learning. Some concepts involve a lot of interoception, such as "Sadness," and others have less, such as "Plastic Wrap," but they're always in relation to the same body.

So every category you construct -- about objects in the world, other people, purely mental concepts like "Justice," and so on -- contains a little bit of you. This is the rudimentary mental basis of your sense of self. 

The fiction of the self, paralleling the Buddhist idea, is that you have some enduring essence that makes you who you are. You do not. 

I speculate that your self is constructed anew in every moment by the same predictive, core systems that construct emotions, including our familiar pair of networks (interoceptive and control), among others, as they categorize the continuous stream of sensation from your body and the world.

As a matter of fact, a portion of the interoceptive network, called the default mode network, has been called the "self system." It consistently increases in activity during self-reflection. If you have atrophy in your default mode network, as happens in Alzheimer's disease, you eventually lose your sense of self.

Deconstructing the self offers a new inspiration for how to become the master of your emotions. By tweaking your conceptual system and changing your predictions, you not only change your future experiences; you can actually change your "Self."

...Western culture has some common wisdom associated with these [Buddhist] ideas. Don't be materialistic. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Sticks and stones [may break my bones but words shall never hurt me]. But I am asking you to take this one step further.

When you are suffering from some ill or insult that has befallen you, ask yourself: Are you really in jeopardy here? Or is this so-called injury merely threatening the social reality of your self?

The answer will help you recategorize your pounding heartbeat, the knot in the pit of your stomach, and your sweaty brow as purely physical sensations, leaving your worry, anger, and dejection to dissolve like an antacid tablet in water.

Feelings are an unreliable guide to reality

Thanks to a Church of the Churchless commenter who mentioned Lisa Feldman Barrett's book about how emotions are uniquely fashioned out of our experiences and environment, rather than appearing ready-made the same way in every human brain, I've been reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain with increasing enjoyment now that I'm past the initial introductory chapters.

Barrett, a psychologist and neuroscientist, makes a strong case for her admittedly out-of-the-mainstream view of what emotions are and how they come to be. She cites lots of research, both her own and that of others, as she systematically describes why the prevailing view of emotions is wrong.

So far, I'm finding a lot to like in her book. Her stance fits with other books I've read about how the human brain constructs reality, rather than being a mirror of reality. Of course, because most human brains are similar in many regards, we tend to agree on the more objective aspects of reality, such as whether a stop light we're approaching is green, yellow, or red. 

(That's a good thing for our traffic safety; not so good for auto body repair shops.)

I'm reading the book straight through, though I was tempted to skip to the "Mastering Your Emotions" chapter, since like most people I'd like more happiness/peace of mind and less sadness/anxiety. But when I started that chapter, I realized that it contained key concepts that I hadn't been exposed to yet, like the body budget, which should be in balance for optimum well-being.

So here's some excerpts from "The Origin of Feeling" chapter that I finished this morning. I found these passages to be interesting and accurate. It's easy to believe that how we feel about something is the way that thing truly is -- whereas actually we're simply looking upon it as our affect guides us to.

A definition: interoception "is your brain's representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system."

Affect is the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day. It is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features.

The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. The pleasantness of the sun on your skin, the deliciousness of your favorite food, and the discomfort of a stomachache or a pinch are all examples of affective valence.

The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news, the jittery feeling after drinking too much coffee, the fatigue after a long run, and weariness from lack of sleep are examples of high and low arousal. 

...When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world.

The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades performing clever experiences to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called affective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are created in part by our feelings.

For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.

...Affect leads us to believe that objects and people in the world are inherently negative or positive. Photographs of kittens are deemed pleasant. Photographs of rotting human corpses are deemed unpleasant. The phrase "an unpleasant image" is really shorthand for "an image that impacts my  body budget, producing sensations that I experience as unpleasant."

In these moments of affective realism, we experience affect as a property of an object or event in the outside world, rather than as our own experience. "I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person." 

...You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it's mostly the other way around: that what you feel alters your sight and hearing. Interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is. 

You might believe that you are a rational creature, weighing the pros and cons before deciding how to act, but the structure of your cortex makes this an implausible fiction. Your brain is wired to listen to your body budget. Affect is in the driver's seat and rationality is a passenger.

It doesn't matter whether you're choosing between two snacks, two job offers, two investments, or two heart surgeons -- your everyday decisions are driven by a loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist who views the world through affect-colored glasses. [Meaning, your brain.]

...Affect is your brain's best guess about the state of your body budget. Interoception is also one of the most important ingredients in what you experience as reality. If you didn't have interoception, the physical world would be meaningless noise to you.

Consider this: your interoceptive predictions, which produce your feelings of affect, determine what you care about in the moment -- your affective niche. From the perspective of your brain, anything in your affective niche could potentially influence your body budget, and nothing else in the universe matters. 

That means, in effect, that you construct the environment in which you live. You might think about the environment as existing in the outside world, separate from yourself, but that's a myth.

You (and other creatures) do not simply find yourself in an environment and either adapt or die. You construct your environment -- your reality -- by virtue of what sensory input from the physical environment your brain selects; it admits some as information and ignores some as noise.