Episode 310: Bayes, Brains, and Buddhists

Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. I'm a victim of 400 years of conditioning. Shut up. The man has programmed my condition. Mm-hmm. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.

Very Bad Wizards. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, the NBA Finals kick off tomorrow, and it's the Indiana Pacers versus the Oklahoma City Thunder. Not exactly the biggest TV markets out there. This might be the most Gen X question I've ever asked you. Do you think David Stern would ever have allowed this to happen? You have layers of explanation there for anybody that's under age 50.

No, no. I mean, of course not. He would have done something to ensure. The officials, the referees, they would have been briefed on what needed to happen. So who would it have been if it were David? Stern. It would have been the Lakers, I think. Probably Lakers and Boston.

Yeah. I mean, I think in this case, it would have been Oklahoma City just because they were so dominant. He would have allowed that to happen, you know, graciously. But then it would have to be like the Knicks or the Celtics facing them.

be indiana but i actually think if the celtics hadn't you know had to lose and they did i like the pacers they were like i i don't think they have much of a chance at all but i'm i'll be rooting for them just because i really like them they're they have a lot of heart a lot of spirit

And they're fun. Maybe the current commissioner on purpose said like, look, your Celtics are just lobbing up threes. Nobody wants to watch that. Let's get a new team in here. Let's tear Jason Tatum's Achilles and have you guys blow.

two 25 point leads in it back to back at home yeah no gone are those days now it's just obviously all determined by the sport big sports betting house yeah exactly i assume yeah You wonder to what extent all of that happens, you know, especially given like how... the game is officiated now yeah you know it's funny i was listening to so it was like about soccer um and it was a bunch of old guys again talking about how oh today's modern players wouldn't survive in in like the 90s or whatever

And you hear this across the board and there must be some truth to it that officiating has gotten tighter because, you know, we don't want head injuries and shit like that. But I got to say, man, I like a little bit of blood in my games. Like, I like when they let them play. You want some headbutts. Go back to the age of headbutts. I'm glad we've pivoted into full sports podcast. Yeah. I was getting tired of the movies. Yeah. We're trying to court the liberal Joe Rogan, $20 million job.

that's being offered right now. So that's what the Libs like. They like basketball. They like soccer, Premier League. And psychology. And psychology. They do. They love.

And we have two articles that are psychology, neuroscience, that we're going to talk about today. We're going old school. Old school. In the second segment, we're going to talk about a paper by... Ruben Lackanen and Helen Slagter. They are Dutch from the University of Amsterdam. It's called From Many to None, Meditation and the Plasticity of the Predictive Mind.

But first, we're going to tackle a paper that kind of denies you the right to exist. I've been erased. You're being erased right now. It's called, Are There... Really people with no inner voice. Commentary on Niedergaard and Lupien by Andres Lind from Lund University. Is that also in Holland or is that Germany? I don't know. I did not look it up yet.

Well, too many Dutch people that we're going to be talking about today. But anyway, you are someone who says you have no inner voice. So you say. But by the end of this paper, this is the final paragraph. To conclude... There is no convincing evidence. in Sedergaard and Lupien or elsewhere to support the assertion that there are individuals who do not have any clinical speech conditions, but who nevertheless lack inner voice completely. So...

How do you defend yourself against the accusation that you were making it all up just to get attention? He doesn't know me. You don't know me. Okay. So like you said, it's a commentary on a previously published paper in sex science that claimed to have evidence. And the evidence that they had was from across four studies. I didn't read them all, but they use a scale that.

just asks people a bunch of questions, both about visualization and about inner speech. And what Lind argues here is that, look, Like there might be people who report lower amounts of inner speech, but there's no evidence even within their samples, like over a thousand people taking these questionnaires, that anybody reports no inner speech.

So like stop with the excessive claims. Everybody has at least some. So but here's my thing. Can we just before we go into the details of the study, can you explain what it means to not have inner speech? Right. So like at a very basic level, because it will matter how we define it, but at a very basic level, the idea is, do you have a little voice inside of you that's sort of narrating your life, your world?

I don't know, it might manifest itself in whether you talk to yourself or not, but do you have this objective experience of this little voice in your head? The monkey mind that's constantly chatting. It's not necessarily chatting about what's happening to you, but in fact, often... It's, as we'll talk about in the second segment, chatting about stuff that might happen, stuff that has happened, movie lines in your head. Right.

So your position, your subjective report is that you lack what I think most people have. I know I certainly have it. It is how I plan for things, how I try to... decide what to do in a given situation do i want to do this you know like it's hard for me to imagine how I would get through the day without having this voice to some extent. Like it sounds awesome. Like I'd be in some kind of optimal flow state where I just did the things I needed to do without thinking about them.

you explain like what it means for you to not have this thing

Yeah, I'm fascinated by even the way that you talk about it when you say, I don't know how I could do things without thinking about them, because that's very much not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I'm not verbalizing anything in my head. So there's no words going by when I'm thinking, at least I don't think, right? To the extent that I can suss out whatever it is that's happening, when I'm thinking about my dog, I'm not thinking Aussie. Or when I'm thinking about...

A car. I'm not thinking the word a car. I'm not thinking I need to go out to my car. I'm just thinking about the thing that is going out to my car. Like you visualize yourself going out to the car? Yeah, or I'm just thinking the concepts without the words. So it seems like it would be an extra step for me to put that into some sort of verbal form where I would say, I need to go out to my car because I left my keys in there or whatever. Whatever it is I'm thinking.

Maybe it's some form of imagery that I'm having, but the concept keys and the concept car, it's sort of agnostic as to what the label is. And how to put it all together. Should I get in the car, go to the supermarket, or should I stay home and jerk off? Or just do it. You just do. Always just stay home and jerk off. Do both. I have a sign. Jerk off at the store. Always stay home.

So concepts are just kind of like transcendentally working themselves out in your mind, or is it just not transparent to you how it happens? Like, you know why it is you're doing the things that you do. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have full like it's not if you needed me to turn them into words like it wouldn't be a problem.

I just, like, I really don't know. I'm confused as to whether I'm just missing something that people are doing. But here's one clear thing that I think would be psychologically interesting.

even if it's not evidence that there's a complete lack of inner speech. Because one of the things that Lynn is saying, look, like when people read, they report that they have the voice in their head when they're reading or when they think about things they're going to say. And you do that, right? Of course. So you might worry about, oh, what did I say to Nick?

yesterday did i say something then and then you start thinking about the thing yeah and i don't know how you could read without having an inner like voice tracking the words that you're reading. Even if it's not imagining a voice, you certainly have to read the words and process the words. But what about that first part where you're like, oh, like, you know, Nikki just looked at me like, what did I say to her last night? You don't think those words. No, I don't think so. And so what, like...

I never talk to myself. I mean, rarely. So like I have talked to myself before and it's hilarious when I've caught myself, like literally on like one hand, I can count how many times I've been, I've said like, oh, come on. Like to myself out loud where I'm like, oh, that was weird. Right. But like I talked to my daughter.

And she says that she's constantly has her inner voice and that she talked when nobody's home. I know Nikki and Bella both are talking to themselves. Yeah. Like, cause sometimes if they don't know I'm there, I'd be like, what? And they'll be like, oh no, no, I was just talking to myself. So do you not get lost in thought? Because of this? I do, but this is what's so frustrating to me. I'm thinking. I don't know what you think is going on. You're like some continental philosopher.

If you know two languages, you know that any concept can be represented in two different ways. And I don't feel like you have to decide which one you're going to think it in. Like you have to if you're going to say it, but you don't. If I think cat, like I can think the word cat or I can think the word gato, but like I'm not thinking either. But when you're thinking cat and you're not picturing a cat and you're not and the word cat doesn't pop in your brain. I'm probably picturing a cat.

So is it all picturing? I don't think it's all picturing because I think you can, like, I don't think you can get much with like, you know, my mind isn't like Egyptian hieroglyphs. But when you get lost in thought, like on a memory or something like that. Sometimes if like I'm thinking specific. specifically about how i would say something then like i could totally like i'll be thinking in words or if i'm like obviously singing a song in my head like it's words right

So you have the ability to do it. You just don't naturally do it. And that's what Linda is saying. There's no evidence of people who just never do it, which I think is reasonable. Can I ask one last question? Yeah, of course. I hope it's not too personal. But I think you even said on the podcast that you suffer sometimes from anxiety. Yeah. Right. So when you're feeling anxiety. when i feel anxiety and i'm not a particularly anxious person but when i do it's i am

imagining, oh, but what if this happens? What if that happens? I already know what you're going to say. You might think, what if this happens or what if that happens without saying those words, right?

Yeah, that's what I feel. But I feel like this might just be some sort of weird way in which we're both representing the same exact phenomenological state. That's what I'm not sure. But when I see items like... I rarely vocalize thoughts in my mind. I often talk to myself internally while watching TV. Those seem like obvious. And no, like I do rarely vocalize and I don't talk to myself internally. Or even when I read, when you read, do you hear your voice? Like, do you have like...

No, which actually might make me, if I really thought about it, might make me understand your view better because I am taking in the words without vocalizing them. Right. And in fact, if you had to say them, it might take you longer. But I can see them, you know. But if you had to say them, it might take you longer, right? Yeah. What about this one? I hear a running summary of everything I am doing in my head. No. That seems. Crazy. That seems like legit. It's like you have like Vin Scully like.

Vin Scully. That would be amazing. Picking up his glass of water. But, you know, sometimes I'll do it. Like, why am I, do I really need another drink of water? I will vocalize that, you know? And I actually also talk. Like, I talk to the dog. I talk to myself. Not like...

Weirdly often but like sometimes like what do you I'll say like what are you doing? You know something like that and if not I will think that or I'll think of a movie where there's a character that does something like that and says something right But it is funny because it is in this state of, you know, some sort of like Zen state where because my thoughts are often like completely racing. Yeah. Like I feel like they're like constantly.

interrupting me. That's so interesting. But they're just not words. I don't think they are. If they are, they certainly don't. They're not strong enough for me to think those are the words that are going through my mind. They're just like...

amorphous clouds that signal things that words also signal. So, yeah, I just pulled up a memory in my head of when we were in Montana and we were shooting guns. You know the story. Oh, yeah. That was just like, I was just looking at a scene. Like it was like an overhead.

view of us doing that thing. That's how I see that. It might be that we're not that different except maybe the difference is that if you talk to yourself a little bit more sometimes then you start to have that voice sometimes going on in your head and then the yeah then the difference is phenomenologically or and even from the point of view of like suffering which we'll talk about in the second segment are you free from some element of it just because you don't have

words going on in your head because we're you know like or is it the same but just two different ways our brain is representing the same thing to us yeah if i had to put money on it i think that we are more alike than not and the difference is in the extent to which we talk out loud to ourselves

might be like the real difference. But that any given moment, I could catch you having nonverbal thoughts and you could catch me having verbal thoughts. And we just think about what we're doing when we think differently. Yeah, maybe. You remember Yoel? When he reported his... I was going to say, yes, I do remember Yoel. But not the word Yoel. No, just the Jew. Yeah. I just see a Jew. Like a little hat. Like a caricature. The nose. So...

He said he couldn't picture things. Yeah, right. Now that seems like a clearer like demarcation of like two different types of subjective experience maybe than what you're talking about. Yeah. I think that one seems interesting because if.

You really look at those, you know, that like little diagram of an apple at various stages of representation. Yeah. If somebody is really looking at one and saying, like, I don't I never see like a full on red juicy apple in my head, then that really does feel like, OK, that's different. Yeah, that does feel different.

Okay, how about this one? When I hear someone talking, I see words written down in my mind. No, yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, I think we, I'm getting a deja vu right now. I mean, we talked about this, but I don't remember if we did these items or not. Maybe we did. I just, with that item. had a feeling of me saying, that's crazy. That person should be locked away. Like closed captions. What if Gen Z, since they all watch closed captions,

What if they just see that now? That's right. Are you old enough to remember that people used to say you don't dream in color? Yeah, which is not true, right? It's not true. But apparently in the days of black and white TV, it was just more common that you might dream of black and white. And so maybe now that everything's closed caption. They'd literally see those like annoying white on black. Yeah, white on black. Boxes of... Floating underneath us. Like, in brackets, coughs.

Yeah. Keys jingling in distance. There's a great one in Twin Peaks where it just, the caption is ominous whoosh. John Thorne, the great Twin Peaks writer, did a whole book with that title. All right, so...

I think probably in terms of the paper itself, like there's no beef, like that he's just saying that the extreme version of this, which you don't claim to be, there's no evidence that people who don't have speech. defects of some kind or who aren't deaf are not able to ever see words or hear words in their mind yeah which would be crazy because how do you read well again like i don't feel like i do that for reading no but you're like

There is at least a words going through, you know, you're representing things with words. Like I, that's what I was. wasn't clear what the extreme claim could possibly be. If it is that you don't represent thoughts with words, that seems like absurd. I thought it's just that they can never hear a voice in their head. Like they never do that. Even when you're planning what you're going to say.

you say you then can run through what you're going to say in your mind, right? Yeah. Okay. This is interesting though, because I've heard people with social anxiety, which is certainly I do not have, like I should have more social anxiety, that...

They're constantly running through the things that they might say and they're making judgments about how stupid they'll sound. And maybe that's one reason I just never kind of anxiety that I have. Like unless I'm writing, I'm never thinking about the words about like what I'm about to say. i'm just like yeah

Yeah, I think social anxiety is governed by that, but also maybe even more so running back in your head what you said and how stupid that must have sounded to those people. And like, or did you insult that person? you you know yeah but like if you were planning to give a speech

For sure, yeah. I go through specifically those words, yeah. And I think these people couldn't do that, even if they can read and do other things. They give it a name here, anendophagia, which is not catchy at all. Anendophagia. Would you have more...

Trouble learning the lines to a play. You know, that's one of the findings in the original paper is that they had lower performance. People with lower inner speech on the scale had lower performance on a verbal working memory task. and more difficulty performing rhyme judgments. So maybe, I've never tested myself having to memorize large chunks, but it does seem kind of impossible. I don't know how people do that.

So you've never had to memorize something and give it? You've never been in a play, even in school? I've never been in a play. I've never had to do anything like that on purpose. So I've never even rehearsed a talk verbatim. Right. And it's just usually just going through the steps in my head of like the next idea and the next idea. But when I look, when I think about, I've often thought, could I

Am I capable of that? I think I would be really hard-pressed to memorize an entire play. That makes sense, right? It's just not a muscle that's exercised for you. All right.

when we come back we will continue talking about the brain although we'll get more into it unusually for us from a neuroscientific perspective yeah we'll be right back I should bring him back. With so much drama in the NYC, it's kind of hard being always definitely. Somehow, someway, you keep coming up a funky ass shit like every single day. May I spit a lyric for my ghetto people. Show me enough respect when I breathe. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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All right. Let's get to our main segment. This is a paper in neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews. Is that a good journal? You know, I have no idea. But the impact factor is whatever, decent. So it's definitely a real journal. Yeah, good. So this is called From Many to None, the N being in parentheses, so it could be none or one.

Meditation and the Plasticity of the Predictive Mind by Ruben Lachanen and Helen Slagter. So I want to shout out Ocean Jero and the Musing the Mind podcast because... A few years ago, he did a podcast with Ruben Lachanen, and I listened to it and thought it was great. And then went back to it when I thought of maybe doing this paper. And it is just like a really good interview. Got into both.

the predictive processing view, and especially the meditation stuff in ways that I found enriching. So thanks for that. We are going to just talk about the paper, though. And the paper... tries to bring predictive

processing the predictive coding theory of the mind together with three different categories of meditative practices. And then assuming the truth of the predictive processing theory of the mind, it describes how... meditation practices within these categories might alter or improve the way our brain makes its predictive models correspond to reality.

That's probably not going to mean much to anybody without knowing about these views. So we should probably take it step by step. Should we start talking about the predictive processing view of the mind first? See if we can wrap our heads around that, which is challenging enough. And then we can move to the free energy principle, meditation, all of that. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Let's do that. I mean, this paper was a good reason. We've talked about this predictive processing stuff for a while, and we've both expressed that we've had trouble understanding what exactly that view is. And so this was a good excuse to dive into that a little bit.

And as far as I understand it, which may again, not be great. It's broadly, in the most broad terms, it's the view that what the brain's primary, in some cases the views, like its only real function, is to minimize errors in prediction. So that's what the brain is when you ask what it does. It's a device that's fundamentally built for minimizing the prediction errors.

And this, I guess, stands in contrast to views that the brain needs to, in real time, be constantly processing all of the input that it's getting. rather views the brain as formulating sort of just a set of predictions, like a model or a set of models that compares itself to is constantly making a prediction. And when the prediction that the brain makes conflicts with the input.

Then and only then does something happen. And what that thing that happens, like I'm not exactly sure, but there's a couple of models get updated. Like this is part of, from what I understand, a larger category of Bayesian brain theories. The idea being that you start with a bunch.

of priors, just assumptions like base predictions. And those models that are the basis of those predictions will be continually updated as you get more sensory information, but they'll only be updated when they're are errors not when they're accurate and so that's a way of saving brain

resources. And it makes sense in that sense. And what's interesting about The View, the thing that just intrigued me about it when I first read about it and I got the Andy Clark book about it, and Andy Clark is a great writer, and it's still really hard for me to wrap my... minds about it but the basic idea is that like i'm seeing you right now the thing that i'm seeing like i have a model of what it is to see you on zoom and

That's what I'm seeing, not like taking in the sensory information. And that is building the representation in my mind. I mean, it's very hard to talk about this stuff because it already kind of assumes a kind of dualism that like I'm seeing you. So there's a separate eye and then there's the thing that I'm seeing. But apparently, like, even that, that dualism is a model.

according to this view. And so one of the interesting aspects of it is that it sees our... brain, if I understand it right, as ordered hierarchically, right? So at the lowest levels, it's just pure sensation, you know, like when I feel the table.

that's actually the feeling is what i predict it'll feel like and and then i'm getting information that confirm that so like everything's good right that's the look that's one of the lower levels of the hierarchy and then at the higher levels is more abstract

thinking and what he calls counterfactualizing or creating counterfactuals, imagining scenarios. And from what I understand, the way that this all operates is every level from the abstraction down to the most immediate present experience, they always are making predictions about the level just below that level. Right. And so this creates cascading predictions throughout the brain. The predictions are all top down so that when you get to those lower.

levels where you're actually in immediate sensory experience, then you can compare it against all of those predictions. And it's only when there are errors that goes back up the hierarchy so that maybe you start to update even more. abstract if all of a sudden the water that was in my bottle started tasting like metallic when i don't expect it to now i'm updating a more abstract model of

there's something wrong with my water bottle. Maybe it got poisoned. I'm thinking, and all that stuff has nothing to do with the present experience. It has to do with like, this water bottle and what I should do with it in the future. And that's my way of trying to minimize prediction error of what happens when I actually drink. Yeah. And there's one thing that I think to add to what you were saying about what the brain is doing when it gets.

this information that's inconsistent with the prediction. One thing that it can do is change the model. The other thing that it can do is the organism can change the world to fit with the model. So that's like what he calls active inference. Or acting, acting period. Yeah.

And so in this way, the organism is viewed less as a passive recipient of outside sensory information and more as like an active creator of the environment around it. Can we linger on that for a second? Because what would be an example of... uh so i have a model and The sensory information is inconsistent with it. So rather than update the model, I act in a way as to make it consistent. Like, what would that be? Well, I think that's a really good question because it gets to the heart.

Part of what I'm like, not sure about what's going on because what is predictive processing a description of? And on the one hand, it seems as if like there is a view of the brain. that says like at this level of networks or neurons or whatever's going on in the brain, that the information that it's not fitting with the model is causing something to happen. And one of those things is like that you take the action to.

dump out your water and like go get water that tastes right yeah okay but like at that point it feels a little metaphorical Like that's like less at the neuronal level and like about the organization of, and the action of specific neural networks that are responding to the immediate actions of the neurons around them. And more of a like. Yeah, okay. I don't just sit there and say, that sucks that my water tastes bad. I go and do something about it. Yeah.

I think we should say, as we were talking offline, there is a particular view of predictive processing, like this specific instantiation that is this free energy principle that this paper draws on a lot. So when they talk about predictive processing, they're talking about... this Friston, like a particular theory. And honestly, I was not well read in this theory. But one of the things that they say, at least their description of this account, is that if you think of the organism...

as this thing that's making predictions and it's updating its priors, they say, well, this is fundamentally what learning is. And so when you have to update a prior, what are you doing? Well, you're changing a model that you had as a result of experience. Yeah. something that happened to you before. But then they broaden it and say, and when we say learning, we mean, and this is their words, like ontogenetically and phylogenetically.

And so they say, not just like your individual history in this world, like what you expect, but also just like what it means to be an organism, in this case, one that needs water. And so... prediction is that you need to drink water or that when you drink water you'll stay alive like it gets it turns out to be like a big theory of everything yeah the so this is the free energy principle and it's like i think the way he describes it although it's not how i've seen

it described elsewhere trying to maintain a boundary between ourselves and the world in a way that combats entropy of some kind so yeah and it is supposed to be a theory of everything it's not clear to me exactly why the predictive processing model needs the free energy principle to be true or explanatory. Maybe it's because it entails a kind of efficiency.

that the brain should operate with and that the brain should always be trying to operate with. And the predictive coding model is more efficient than other models of the mind. I don't know. What's your sense of that? My gut is that the free energy principle is to predictive processing accounts.

what evolutionary psychology is to like cognitive or social psych, which is you can have a cognitive and social psychology that doesn't require you to talk about natural selection and whatever the environment of evolutionary happiness, but...

And it makes sense that if you want to understand why something is the way that it is, that you would turn to what you understand is fundamentally the thing that was driving, like how the mind came to be what it is. So maybe you're right, you can take it or leave it. But I think that what the free energy principle seems to bring is this broader connection with physics and thermodynamics that honestly, I don't think...

Like, I don't know. I don't buy it. But again, I'm a newbie to this all. But the idea of entropy that's, you know, this is the free energy stuff is borrowed directly from our understanding of thermodynamics. And like you were saying, the view is, what is a life form?

Well, a life form is something that derives energy from its surroundings to self-organize in this like coherent way, right? There's boundaries. Now we have bodies and brains and we have to act in the world. And once this thing has organized itself. It is in the business of keeping itself together.

Until it can't, right? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Right. It does that. That's its motivation. It has to take energy from the environment to maintain its boundaries. At least that's the way that these authors are presenting it. which you know okay that means it makes sense it just doesn't seem to entail any particular model of the mind it just like it seems very in line more with like evolutionary theory you know yeah Even denial of death stuff. Yeah, denial of death stuff.

I don't know how it will affect the predictive processing model and to what extent we think it is a promising way of understanding the brain. But I would like to go into a couple other elements of it. So I already talked about how... human beings and Our hierarchy is much greater. And so when we think counterfactually, we are using our imagination to just run our models through hypotheses and test them just through the mind.

We generate our own sensory experience through these imagined scenarios, like stuff we were talking about earlier, like, oh, I'm nervous about what to say, or maybe I should take a drink or something like that. Or if I said this.

What would happen if I said that? Yeah, exactly. Like maybe if I drink, I'll be less nervous when I talk to this person. And, you know, you can think of that while you're in the bathroom taking a piss. You're not getting any information. You're just it's all coming from your head. And so this is really important for us. And maybe this is one way the free energy principle is that it allows us to minimize the surprises that come from the world.

because we have this whole new laboratory to test out our models abstractly. And that's something most other animals don't have. And, you know, we can read about stuff in books and we can do all that stuff, right? And so if the goal is to not be surprised as much, to not have your predictions be erroneous, that would presumably be helpful.

But it's also that kind of counterfactual thinking that leads to a lot of suffering and anxiety. You're constantly ruminating about what might happen given that you did this. And should you have made a different choice? And then what is that going to be? to mean for the future and then what a lot you know like you just these mushrooming multiverse of possibilities that are is stressful right so meditation will be one way of pruning the counterfactual tree as he says in his

nice image there. Okay. So that's like a big part of it. There is this weird section, but when they talk about attention, they describe it as precision waiting. So like, what is attention? Attention is, according to this view, how much weight we give to a potential error. that will come up through our sensory experience. So if I'm focused on like having a glass of wine, say, then I'll have more trust in my sensory information so that if...

it tells me that the wine is corked or something like that when I thought it was. And if I had a tension on it, then I will trust that more than if I didn't have attention, if I was just drinking mindlessly, right? Because sometimes when you get sensory information that's inconsistent with your model, you just go with the model because you don't trust your sensory experience. So he talks about like a dark...

room. Even if your senses tell you there's a monster in front of you, you'll still walk through it because you just don't trust it. You're going to keep your old model that there are no monsters in your room. So what attention is, is just like, how much going to trust any error or inconsistency that might come the idea is that attention is just expected precision

So yeah, so their definition of attention really is dependent on this predictive processing role. Like it's not the way that I think many psychologists who study attention would describe attention. And actually, I do think that this paper specifically is relying heavily on this free energy model of Friston, because it sounds like they're borrowing a lot of these concepts from the Friston. And so in describing attention as precision weighting, it's really...

using this Bayesian view of what's going on in the mind. And they say to risk overstretching the function of attention slightly, the more attention that an event receives, the more real it is. If a change in belief occurs, it is because new information is believed to be veridical and can be trusted. And yeah, like, I guess, I guess. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, if you're actually focusing on something, then you're going to trust it.

For the most part, if I'm focusing on this bottle of water and I'm going to trust there really is a bottle of water in front of me. And if I put my hand through it, I'll think, holy shit, something's fucked. Yeah, that sounds fine when you say it, but we attend to lots of stuff precisely because we don't trust what we're seeing. So we focus on it more. You're like, wait, what the fuck? And you attend to it more. Right, to try to determine its reality, right? I guess.

This is I mean, this is my big problem. And like I'll get we you know, we don't have to keep talking about this, the predictive process and the free energy stuff. But it is maybe I'll change my mind about this when I learn more. But everything I read, like I couldn't help but feel like it is a specific vocabulary.

for just describing a bunch of stuff in its own language, in its own vocabulary, that really doesn't make that much of a difference. So I guess you can say that it makes something more real. So like when compared to what? when compared to like what alternate model of the brain? Well, I'm not sure what it even means to say that attention makes something real.

Like, I don't think anybody who studies the brain would make it like normally would say that that's what attention does. Like attention is just the selective deploying of your resources to focus on one thing in the environment. Like, I mean, maybe. In some metaphorical sense, that makes it more real. Well, I think when they say more real, I don't think it's a metaphysical claim. I think they're saying it's more real in your models.

which is all we have, right? We only have the models. Like we're just brains and bodies interacting with the environment. And so all we have is whatever, however, this consciousness. representation works. I guess. They repeatedly say, oh, we don't have access to reality, so we need these models. But we do have access to reality because that's what's updating the models. It seems like a weird way of describing it.

when what you're saying is, look, because our brains, and they use this language, our brains don't have access to reality, we make these predictions. And then they say, and then when the prediction is wrong, then we update our models.

Well, presumably we have information about the prediction being wrong because we're accessing reality in some important way. And that's why we're updating our models. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, we're getting sensory information. Yes. But I guess maybe the difference is, you know.

It's much more constructivist maybe than some. So there is a difference between getting all the sensory information and then constructing a model versus you go in with your model and the sensory information is just there to correct it.

and let you know whether there's something that's messed up with your model. Here's the thing, like you can describe these things in these different ways. And that's why what I'm not sure. And it turns out that this is a big debate in the literature. Like, is this adding anything? So you could say, for instance.

It's a model that I have built on my previous experience that there's going to be a house there. And that's the expectation. And you could say that for like all kinds of visual stuff, but. There's like real low level visual stuff where you say, OK, I expect that shadows will have this effect on color.

And that's not really a function of my experience. That's a function of just the way my brain brings into the world, like these perceptual mechanisms that are just part of the way our brain is organized. And they say, well, that's experience, but like phylogenetically.

And then I'm just like, okay, well, I guess there's no way that I could describe the way that the brain is working without you being able to say, no, see, it's a model. Then it just becomes unfunded. Then it's just like kind of, yeah. And I read...

I don't remember the name of the author. I read a nice critique of this stuff. And he said, look, that is certainly something you can say about this stuff. You could say, well, it's overly broad. That doesn't mean that it's not true or the right way to talk about it. It may be a valid way to talk about it. That's right.

Well, let me take us through just the last couple of things that they say to describe the view before going to the meditation part. They say... that this model helps us better understand how a self is constructed. First, like all other aspects of the mind, the self must also be a construction built out of hierarchical models driven by past experience.

predict the sensory outcomes of future actions without representing oneself in those actions as the hidden cause of changes in sensory input. For example, picking up a glass of water requires that we have a model of our body as an agent who can pick up a glass of water and indeed we must have a model for the fact that we are an agent that needs such a thing as water and so

Ultimately, this leads us to have a narrative self to create a model of a self that is continuous and has been unfolding in this long story that started when they became conscious age. I guess and which leads to a distinction that they make between this narrative self

That is this self as we understand the self, like the thing that I think of when I think what makes me different than you. And that connects me with my previous memories. And then there's the experiencing self, which is just whatever is.

sensations are occurring in the moment. And that experiencing self is much lower in the predictive hierarchy, obviously, than... what a narrative self requires because the narrative self requires what they call temporal depth that you're thinking of a model that stretches over time and you're locating you as the kind of constant over those periods yeah and then

like one of the things i thought was interesting although i could see you having the same complaint is this idea of fact-free learning and insight And this is like just, you know, you're taking a walk and all of a sudden, oh, I know how to finish that paper. You know, all of a sudden, like no information, it seems like to you, relevant has come in and then bang, I just happened to figure out this problem.

So he says, they say, central to the idea of fact-free learning is that insights arise because the brain continues to refine and compress models through Bayesian model reduction, which entails finding simpler and more parsimonial.

models using only prior beliefs not sensory outcomes as they undergo refinement and selection thus making them more parsimonious explanations of sensory experience they can also engender new discoveries such as the discovery of a new perspective generative model that permits a novel insight does that make sense now that i'm reading it yeah i do have problems like when you get to this point where this is where it's

Like I was really solidifying this feeling that, well, you can describe anything. Like there's a kind of theorizing where you think, oh, this is a super elegant way of describing an organism where you have this environmental feedback. So like our sensory systems are predicting.

And as I'm physically walking through the world, like I have these models and when something is inconsistent that hits my senses, then I change my behavior or whatever it is or update. And then I update my model about the world around me. And then you're like, oh, and also.

Sometimes you're not having any sensory input and that's also Bayesian model updating. And it's like, well, okay, now the theory itself is like everything from neurons to like the aha moments of insight. And just because you're using the same sort of language of this. Bayesian predictive processing. I'm not sure you're actually explaining anything. Right. I think you're right about that, actually.

All right, should we talk about the meditation connections? I had this thought, by the way, and I almost texted it to you, but I wanted to save it for air, that there is a way that, as I was reading this paper, I thought, Bayesian... bros and like meditation freaks like got together and they put the most like

both of those together into this paper. But I think that's uncharitable. I didn't get that sense of arrogance at all from these authors. But in the abstract, you could imagine that people talking about priors and people talking about meditation coming together might be the most annoying. That Aspen ideas meeting, like the tech bro section.

As someone said, we discovered how to make machines, and then all of a sudden the brain was a machine. We discovered computers, and all of a sudden the brain was a computer. And here it might be, oh, we got really excited about Bayesian. analysis of probability and so now the brain is bayesian i think that might be a hundred percent right but but so that said you could do worse like i think what they're doing with this paper is adopting that language in that framework in a way

that you can easily package the ideas about what meditation is doing. In that sense, like I was saying, it doesn't mean that predictive processing isn't like... pointing to something true about what's going on. I think that it's a useful framework, even if it's not like a hardcore scientific prediction engine, it's still a useful framework to talk about some of these things.

that they're going to talk about, which is like what's happening during these kinds of meditation. And that's actually like, I think the value of something like this, where it's like, I actually don't think, and I wanted to ask you, maybe we could save this to the end, whether there was anything in these ideas that you didn't already. sort of think was going on.

And I only know this because most of what I know about this stuff is from you. Like, for instance, not relying on higher level concepts and just letting experience happen to you. And like that seemed like stuff I already knew from the way you describe it. I didn't need this.

It's funny, right before you asked that question, I asked myself that question. I was like, I'm going to go through this and I'm going to see to what extent this adds to my understanding. Now, to be fair, this paper isn't about... the value of meditation it is about um how it might be described yeah like what it's doing to the brain processes or the mental processes yeah like how how does it fit within this predictive processing view yeah so

Let's go through it. And I'm going to have to answer that question in real time because I honestly don't know. So they talk about three different kinds of meditation practices. The first is focused attention. And this is like normal. mindfulness meditation this is the one they do on most apps i think this is the one that usually silicon valley dudes like don't really get beyond uh because they're really doing it for stress it's a good

for things like stress management and, you know, making yourself more productive and things like that. And what this is, is you... pick a particular object of focus, often the breath, but it can also be sounds. It can also be how your butt feels when it's on the chair. You know, you can just think of all the different sensations and you really try to narrow your focus and your...

attention just to, you know, focus on the moment to moment sensations that are in this object of very narrow focus. Right. Right. And that's sort of like giving you a discipline. Like the way I understood what they're saying is like, you kind of need to be able to, you're doing something that's going to be useful.

for if you want to get to these other things. Yeah. Although I don't know if they think it's necessary. There's a big debate in the non-dual, which is the final category, whether the earlier categories are necessary. So this is what they say. They say it increases Yeah, I actually did even note here.

there are so many why are we multiplying concepts here like yeah it's like another word you attend you focus on one thing yeah But when you are not focusing on the higher levels of abstraction, those models in their terms, you're paying less attention to the narrative self.

And and I think this is interesting, like when you get a thought because you're so focused, say, on the feeling like my butt's feeling right now and the sensations. If I get a thought like, oh, shit, I got to prep for the podcast or like, am I getting sick or something?

like that because you have so much precision waiting on your butt sensations that thought is going to seem less real right that's what they say that uh the realness of distractive thoughts will be down weighted in their terminology but i think that is actually pretty interesting and accurate in that thoughts start to feel more just like thoughts and not something that you necessarily really have to worry about. They're just little wisps that come and then they go.

something you have to pay a lot of mind to one uh thing to note and this is why it's important not to have your practice just be this is that it maintains this duality right between the subject there's me and i am focusing on how my butt feels like even within the practice it's there's an implicit dualism which is

in any Buddhist Hindu kind of tradition, ultimately unsustainable. And part of awakening is getting past that. But this practice... presumes it so that's one practice and then open monitoring which is when you release the object of attention and just stay focused on your present experience in its totality so that includes

all your sensations it includes thoughts it includes memories the thing is is that you are just this kind of mindful witness of them and you don't grasp at them you don't linger on them you watch as they Come and go. It says, crucially, the goal of OM is not to stop experiences from arising. Instead, one reduces grasping by quickly letting arising experiences go without confirmation. Experiences, predictions. Yeah. Go without confirmation.

by maintaining a restful but alert state of nonjudgmental observation. Open monitoring reduces the precision and temporal span of predictions arising in experience. So again, now it's not just like a distracting thought, but even these sensations. because your attention is not on any of them they have different reality to you and you know i think what they think is you see them more as they are just fleeting

ephemeral sensations that pop up in experience and then they drift away. Mental events that pass through there, he says, lose their representational integrity. And I don't know how to interpret that except maybe to say that like if you have a memory or a quick emotion of like shame or something like that, because you're not focused on it.

And you're just experiencing it as a sensation that just... pops in and then pops out you're not giving it the same kind of reality that you might otherwise you think of it oh like oh that's shame requires like a model and like a model of the self a model of Like it's bad to feel shame and all that. But now you just experience it as like twinge in the stomach.

And, you know, whatever the physiological sensations associated with some kind of anxiety or whatever, and then you watch it go away, as they always do eventually. But not if you linger on them or grasp at them.

There's a section here that was a little too much for me where they say, if all generated predictions, thoughts, feelings, sensations are continually seen as appearing and disappearing, it would be logical to conclude... have the insight that they are impermanent and then they have like whatever buddhist word anika yeah that's that's the impermanence of all objects right that's a central insight in buddhism but i'm just like

now you're just like selling me your religion under the words of predictive processing where i'm just like all right like i don't think it's logical to conclude like you might have that experience but it's not like this follows okay fair enough right let me continue this quote because i

So it's exactly what I was going to go to. So that's one central insight, just the impermanence of everything, of all phenomena. And then he says, moreover, if one sees that all predictions are quickly interpreted by the system as pleasant or unpleasant, leading to craving or aversion, respectively. than one would see the suffering, dukkha, inherent in much of experience.

which is another insight that this grasping and craving is what leads to suffering. The fact that you mentally represent something and then you think, oh, I want that or I don't want that. And it's not the thing itself. the cause of suffering. It's the wishing the world were different than it is in some way that leads to suffering. And so because all these things have lost their reality to some degree, the suffering... reduced as well.

And then says, finally, if arising predictions are not under control, if these sensations and images are arising spontaneously, then it's also recognizable that they, including all embodied sensations and narrative self... centered thinking that are usually ascribed selfhood are not self-induced. They don't have any consistent, unchanging self-like character.

So that's the no-self insight. So yeah, it's that thing of fact-free learning now leads to these central insights of Buddhism through open monitoring via God. You're really making me... lose my enthusiasm from the paper because it's true that

This is all stuff that you could say without... That people say all the time, and it makes a lot more sense often. And it was just particularly glaring where I was like, I just read a passage that's sort of imploring me about... like the metaphysical realizations that come from meditation.

Buddhist insights may therefore be seen as new priors engendered by OM practice, possibly as a result of Bayesian model reduction or factory learning. It's like, oh, man, I didn't mean to be reductive or like that. That sounds horrible.

I had a visceral aversion that caused suffering when you read that. But just to... carry this out because i still think it's kind of interesting uh to get to the non-dual part so even though open monitoring is not this like uh subject object subject focusing on an object there is still some dual built in in the fact that there is a mindful witness and then so there's the mindful witness and then there's the experience and there's some kind of division so a different set of practices in buddhism

Zen has a lot of this and also Dzogchen, the one Sam Harris and his app champions or in Hindu philosophy, Advaita Vedanta. And it's weird because it really is different. Like you're given something to do. in the other practices whether it's focus on an object focus on your breath or just focus on experience moment to moment whereas like the non-dual teachings are much more getting you to stop doing just kind of relax.

in such a way that you discover what's already been here the whole time, which is awake awareness. So what he says in the paper, this results in a state of awareness in which there is no background. or foreground of experiencing that is hence devoid of concepts self objects intentionality or the experience of time and space a state in which even the most basic constructs of cognition allegedly

no longer persist. It is against this awareness that all cognition is said to arise. It is somewhat paradoxical then to talk about non-dual practice, since the term practice itself implies a duality, someone who is practicing something. Thus, one way to understand the nature of non-dual practices as follows creating the conditions that reduce ordinary cognition that normally hides non-dual awareness

And so you're not getting yourself into any state. What you're doing is removing all the things that veil the non-dual awareness. Like this relates to some of the Campbell stuff that we're talking about. This is the thing that the universe actually is. But crucially, it's always here. It's not like you can get it or lose it. It's just that it can be hidden from you. And then some of these practices are ways of revealing it.

My question is, so they're representing these three forms of meditation as a continuum. Is that new to them or is that something that people talk about? Like, do they talk about these as just sort of different stages of the same? I mean, they're different. It's different schools doing all sorts of different stuff. Some of the non-dual people think you can just start. It's like people call it like.

direct path, getting there without, you know, building up your concentration through focused awareness practices or, you know, mindfulness practices. And that's built into the fact that it's because it's already here. It's already true. And so... You can spontaneously experience it. Some people think we spontaneously experience it not that infrequently.

So here's where I thought it's actually kind of interesting. And I don't know if there's a tension or I'm just making it up. But the way that they're using the predictive processing and the free energy stuff to talk about this, what reminded me is that...

That's sort of like the kind of dissolution of the boundaries of the ego or of the self that you get from open monitoring. Like the free energy stuff is explicitly says like that's the fundamental motivation of the organism is to maintain those boundaries. And so in some ways, this is contrary to the goals of the organism. I mean, which I guess this is.

It's just a different way of saying that like we're constantly stuck in our in our ego boundaries. It's not like the free energy stuff or the predictive processing stuff is making a normative claim. But it is interesting that if that's like the goal, like the entropy.

uh fighting the like reduction of surprise like the maintaining of the coherence of the boundaries of the organism if that's like our fundamental motivation it seems funny that like we would fight so hard to get rid of it i had this question too because if the the fundamental goal of non-dual practice you can see it in the name is to get rid of any boundary between you and everything it is weird but maybe that's where

the boundary metaphor is less useful when describing the free energy principle. Because one thing they say, and maybe this makes sense within the model, is that when you do this kind of practice, what you're doing is... conserving so much brain resource energy that is normally just firing constantly creating all these different scenarios fighting for your attention and all that stuff becomes so chaotic and often really either dysfunctional or certainly not effective for maybe making better

predictions and having less surprising outcomes. So it could be that even though we are breaking down this metaphorical boundary between the organism and the world in terms of how they experience, you are still reducing predictions.

surprises that this physical organism has as they... navigate through the world because most people aren't like and i don't think anybody thinks that that's a goal necessarily is to get to the point where you stop feeding yourself like the goal of this is that you're you're much more in a kind of flow state and there a kind of inherent wisdom in your non-dual self

that will get the organism to do things like feed themselves. Just in case you want to include, I'm going to read the footnote. In the famous case of Ramana Maharshi, it is said that he was so absorbed in ND awareness that, quote, he was completely oblivious of his body and the world.

Insects chewed away portions of his legs. His body wasted away because he was rarely conscious enough to eat and his hair and fingernails grew to unmanageable length. A return to normal physical condition was not completed for several years. When he was discovered, food had to be placed in his mouth to prevent him from starving.

Yeah, that's like Piro, the skeptic who had to be walked around like deep holes because he would just walk into it because he didn't think he could trust his senses at all. It is funny because one of the... one of the sort of like common criticisms of this free energy thing or predictive processing or whatever is what they call the dark room problem, which is, well, if the goal is to minimize surprise, then put yourself in the ultimately like...

least surprising situation and just lock yourself into a dark room there's no chance that you're going to get surprised And it's usually it's like viewed as like an objection to understanding the living organism this way. But this is kind of like, yeah, you know what? I'm just going to sit here and I won't even have any models to be surprised by. Right. It doesn't matter if bugs crawl.

or if I'm thirsty. Right, right. So maybe that is ultimately success. I mean, it kind of ties into, remember when we, I think we discussed in Freud, Like after a while of his talking about libido and sexual energy and the drive to sort of like whatever this drive was, he was just like, maybe there is this other drive of homeostasis, which is just like, let me just die. Maybe we have a death drive because.

all of this like work to like stay alive it's exhausting to fulfill my desires is exhausting so maybe there is just this like let me just yeah but I do think like that is not an ideal that is uh in any of the traditions that I'm familiar with is to just let yourself waste away. In some ways, it's a counterproductive example here to include. But I guess the point is, you know, how deep these states are can be that you've completely detached from like...

Because you're going underneath your sensations. Sensations are kind of the lowest level. Raw sensual experience. What do you call that? Raw sensory experience. Or sensual. Or sensual experience. And non-dual awareness is just one level below this. That's why I think the hierarchical self is being connected here. It's like you are going even beneath an already bottom-out level.

of the hierarchy into the thing that's underneath all of it and a precondition for it. It's like the substratum. It's the ground. You know, they describe it in all these different ways. I don't know. Now I feel like I'm just talking about meditation, but the way they describe it in the non-dual practices, when you get these nice glimpses, it is a complete relaxation of these levels of mind that are the...

things that keep you separate from the moment, separate from right now, and the thing that separates you from everything else. Okay, so... Back to this point, though, about like, so they have a section where they're like, OK, like, is there any brain stuff that's consistent with this, which.

You know, I didn't go look at the actual studies, but I don't think it's all that important. But then they talk about like, look, we're not saying that like you couldn't have bad downstream effects from meditation. And this is what I thought, like.

got kind of interesting um which is like yeah i get this sort of is like the earlier point they were saying but like the whole thing about the bayesian model is that this is like the best way of learning yeah about your environment and then sort of like

Optimizing. More resource efficient, right? Yeah. And so it seems as if using this model to describe what's happening in meditation is almost like saying you're purposefully like turning off the only way you have of learning. And I don't think that's right. I don't think that's how anybody would describe it. You're turning it off for the periods of meditation, but still, you're right.

supposedly these things are what helped us be successful as a species. But, you know, like as individuals, we may not want to be optimal in that way. That's why we do drugs. Yeah, exactly. Like we don't have the same. goals as evolution or our Bayesian brain right like fuck the Bayesian brain Yeah. But yeah, it does seem like you are trying to go against the very thing that makes human beings distinctive. Yeah. So what else? So they say here that, I mean, one of their predictions.

is temporal thickness of mental activity reduces from focused awareness to open monitoring, to all the different kinds of meditation. That's the neuroscience study, if there really is. correlated with brain activity that they can measure, which is skeptical, but... I mean, they raise a lot of...

points about the methodology of this contemplative science or whatever they're calling this field of studying meditation, which is it's inherently like so many of the things that you would want to study are impossible to study.

just because like what does it mean to ask somebody a question when they're in an experience of not not having a self right you can't so you could try your best to like put them in an fMRI and people do do that but like I'm not sure and I've always been allergic which is weird

to combining meditation with any kind of scientific research into it. So I don't know why this one all of a sudden popped out as we should do it. But I was left wondering whether or not I learned anything. It seemed as if... And again, this is mostly from talking to you, that erasing our reliance on concepts, losing the boundary between self and world and like having pure experience.

All of that stuff seemed like we've already talked about that. That's very clear. It was very clear to me before this that this was what was happening during meditation and especially the advanced forms. And so I wasn't sure whether this...

Aside from situating it in a framework that many people find convincing, like I wasn't sure. Yeah, I think maybe it's just that. There was another novel prediction that we meditators would become better at certain kinds of abstract thinking and counterfactualizing or whatever. like they would produce more accurate models, I guess, because they have relaxed.

to the point where maybe insights can happen or maybe just you save a lot of energy. Like we do a lot of that modeling when it's not effective, not just for happiness, but probably for accuracy, you know, wound up. In your mind, creating scenarios that are just like perseverate or something that are just have nothing to do with reality. So it could be that like just taking times during the day, whether through sitting practice or not.

where that's not happening, just minimizing that or making it only fire when you have some kind of intention forming to do it rather than just as the default mode, that would actually help you. be a better bayesian in terms of even those higher level models right so yeah at the end when they're talking about this sort of like there might be the sort of ironic effects it says

Intriguingly, since many decisions and tasks require abstract self-time and space-related processing, it is also possible that performance on some tasks would be impaired due to meditation. And I thought, like... That seems like actually it would be cool to see whether or not somebody who's so good at letting their meditative state work its way into the real world, are they slower to categorize something as a dog when they see it?

Yeah, maybe. You know, you become like Fooness, you know, where like you just see everything as just... this river flowing river. So like, you know, wait, you're calling that dog from this angle, the same as the dog from that angle. That's annoying. Right. Yeah. Well, I have determined one thing. Combining our previous episode on Joseph Campbell and this, is that meditation seems like a really hard way to get to the dissolution of self. Yeah. I'll just do that when I'm dead.

And that's a sure way of doing it too. That's a sure way. But maybe you'll be better prepared for death if it becomes a more flowing gradual process than an abrupt. I do sometimes feel like I'm gradually dying. We're all facing, like entropy gets us all in the end. All right. Well.

Hopefully that was helpful. I don't know. Maybe it was just me babbling about meditation. I'd say, to be fair, it was half of you babbling about meditation and half of me complaining about Asian frameworks, about predictive processing. Everybody gets something. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. It's just a very bad