Thursday, February 06, 2014

zen & inference


i think i've said the same thing before, but this felt more clear as i was writing it.

one suggestion is that zen is about building a better model. that the vast majority of your model of the world is the sort of moment-to-moment dynamics of sensory prediction (including interoceptive, meta-cognitive activity, etc) ; and the model basically sucks because it ignores the vast majority of the actual structure of the world (you see what you expect to see). so zen practice is about relaxing the top-down priors to allow the model to incorporate more of the dynamics.

that doesn't feel like the whole story, but it's an idea to start from.

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