multi-voxel pattern analysis

A commonly-held idea is that Multi-Voxel Pattern Analysis has something to do with patterns over voxels.

This flames of this misconception are probably fanned by images like this:

[http://www.cogsci.mq.edu.au/research/projects/thebrainthatadapts/]

Because we never saw this kind of image in review papers about single-voxel fMRI analysis, we tend to think MVPA is special in being able to detect patterns like the one colorfully shown.

What do we mean by a "pattern", exactly? In particular, people often get the idea that MVPA is special because it's sensitive to cases where nearby voxels might encode the stimulus in opposite directions. This intuitively fits with the image above.

But the truth is, analyses that treat each voxel independently are perfectly happy to tell you about nearby voxels encoding a stimulus in opposite directions. Suppose you have two stimulus conditions, like face vs. house. At each voxel independently, you can perform an ANOVA against these category labels. If two adjacent voxels encode the categories in opposite directions, the F-statistics at these voxels will both be large.

You can spatially smooth these F-statistics and align them between subjects, and get a statistical map of where in the brain encodes information about faces and houses.

So, even considering one voxel at a time, you can still pick up the pattern of positive and negative encoding shown in the colorful image above.

One thing MVPA does do is sacrifice spatial resolution to gain sensitivity. By including multiple voxels, more information about the variable of interest (e.g., faces vs. houses) is pooled together. The tradeoff is that we don't know which voxels in that pool contain information about faces and houses.

Consider multiple regression, a typical MVPA approach. Our prediction of the response y (e.g., faceness vs. houseness) is related to:

beta_1 * voxel_1 + beta_2 * voxel_2 + ... + beta_n * voxel_n

In other words, our prediction is roughly the average of the predictions that the individual voxels make. (Although we can find better beta coefficients with multiple regression than with n single regressions.)

A weighted average can be much better than a prediction from a single voxel - but there's no magical "pattern" information.

Conversely, you can use many of the methods typically applied to MVPA to analyze single voxels, including representational similarity analysis. For example, here's a representational dissimilarity matrix constructed from real data from a single MEG sensor:




MVPA does bring some extra benefits if we allow for nonlinearities. Multi-voxel analysis can detect encodings that are invisible to single voxel analysis, like this one:

Neither voxel by itself carries information about red versus blue, but a 2D Gaussian kernel can separate them.

(2D linear classification, unlike 2D linear regression, could perform above chance on these example data, by drawing a boundary that puts all the blue points on one side, and half of the red points on the other side.)

in relation to the previous post, maybe every thought/belief/perception/narrative inherently has some *value*. it constitutes a motivational gradient.

this would explain why every time a thought comes up, it in some way implies an action.

action vs inhibition

this started from thinking about zen. if you're in sitting meditation, you sometimes catch yourself starting to "do" something. it could be either external (like i need to scratch an itch, i need to adjust my position because my leg hurts, etc), or internal (which is often more subtle, like i'm exciting myself by thinking about some interesting thought).

but the premise of zen is that you don't do that stuff, you just sit. normally, outside of zen, a feeling of "need for action" usually gets discharged immediately as an action (internal or external), which puts us in unconscious loops. not taking the actions breaks the loops, and i think this is part of the value of zen.

but then, i was thinking that sometimes the thing i do habitually is *inaction*. like, i'm afraid to show myself too much, i'm afraid to scream around other people, to look like a baby, or to look stupid by doing something. in that case, would the zen philosophy say that i should try actually *doing* those things?

challenging yourself vs accepting yourself

something i've been interested in recently is the balance between accepting yourself and challenging yourself. maybe we could think of it like a spectrum.

on one extreme, you have accepting yourself in a kind of opium-like way. telling yourself it's ok, focusing on the positive.

closer to the middle, there's a "self-acceptance" that observes that your wants and fears are just carrots and sticks on the treadmill. if you're "motivated" by something, to ask what's the nature of the thing that's driving me.. what's my subjective experience like right now, and what will it be like if i change things to make them be like i want? this kind of approach doesn't necessarily prescribe actions per se. i think this is the concept people often associate with zen (but not necessarily what zen teachers teach).

crossing the mid-point of this spectrum, a bit on the other side there's the challenging-yourself approach that says you can always do better. you should specifically identify what you're afraid of happening, and identify what sort of actions you're perpetually doing to keep it from happening. then try not doing those actions (which is very scary), staying conscious through it...

far on the "challenging yourself" end of the spectrum, there's picking a goal (based on what you want at some level), and working toward it concretely, like fixing a cabinet. going for what you want. there's obviously a lot of value in this.

i guess it's often easier, and tempting, to go for the endpoints of this spectrum rather than the middle. maybe the middle is like "passionate equanimity".

but, it's interesting that using the endpoint strategies can paradoxically lead us toward the middle strategies. for example, if we've picked a goal, but now we see the thing that's blocking us from getting their is our own attachments and anxiety.

UPDATE (2020 May 14): wiki says this about gandhi and WWII. a nice example of challenging vs accepting.

Gandhi's views came under heavy criticism in Britain when it was under attack from Nazi Germany, and later when the Holocaust was revealed. He told the British people in 1940, "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." George Orwell remarked that Gandhi's methods confronted 'an old-fashioned and rather shaky despotism which treated him in a fairly chivalrous way', not a totalitarian Power, 'where political opponents simply disappear.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

UPDATE (2021 Jan 17): a more concrete personal example of this duality. say i've done something selfish. on one hand, i might rightly regret it and treat myself like a child who needs some loving discipline, forcing myself to move over an energy barrier in order to see some uncomfortable things about myself and how i'm affecting others. on the other hand, i might accept that i was doing the best i could at the time, like maybe i was feeling really anxious and backed into a corner, or i just didn't have the presence of mind to act better at the time.

how do you know when to do each one? should they come in cycles, like heating and cooling? or are they two different ways of looking at the same thing?

maybe to think of the "self" as the process of metabolism. neither food nor poop are the self. this is the motivational gradient.

"You'll know when it's time to go on" -Jónsi

beliefs and goals

either a belief or a goal is an assertion of the self on reality.

a goal (or motivational gradient) is a subjective axiom about how things "must be" - they can't not be that way.

this is the same as a belief, saying they "are" that way.

both of these are relaxed by awareness.

dACC

"great faith, great doubt, and great determination"

during zazen, you have plenty of reasons to stop. your knees hurt, sitting might even be damaging them. sitting is making your anxiety worse. you could be using the time for something productive. you're doing the wrong thing with your mind and it's creating bad habits. you realized that the philosophy and practice were designed for japanese people and don't make sense for you. you had an important insight about yourself that's going to really help in your life, and you need to think about it, write it down, not forget about it.

this is like the demon mara trying to distract the buddha with his sexy daughters. mara says, "What can you do by struggling now? The path of struggling is too rough and difficult and hard to bear."

parts of your mind say you should quit, because you don't have a path to your goal. this is frustration. when it's really strong, hopelessness or despair.

but with a broader goal, you stay determined and keep sitting. two ideas:

1) this sounds like a function of the dorsal ACC. (it must also be related to, in a xiao-jing wang-esque sense, how neuronal ensembles with long time scales are important for higher and more human cognitive function. and maybe to decoupling gilbert's "nexting" from "imagination".)

the system including dACC feels like it's still making progress toward goal, because it has this meta-stable long-term goal/belief representation.

2) so far, this could apply to anything you stay determined to because you have a broader goal. maybe you persevere with studying because you want a degree, or persevere with running because you want to be fit.

but something about zazen could be that any of these goals themselves ultimately end in frustration when they're faced with their own partiality. if you keep sitting through everything, it can't be put down to a particular broader goal. it could be continually relaxing into broader and broader goals, like poetry. in the brain, maybe this is training dACC in a context-free way - just training the essence of perseverance itself, free from any particular content.

i guess this is like passionate equanimity again. the "passionate" is being absolutely determined, and the "equanimity" is the willingness to allow any formal content to be part of the process.

hierarchy

kinda related to the last one, this is probably a well-worn point by now, but just to remember that "hierarchy" is not that great of a metaphor, it's probably more like heterarchical "message passing" (john holland), where a given structure can be re-used for processing data at different "levels of abstraction". complementing the idea of scale-invariance; like you maybe could use the same circuitry to find "edges" in retinal pixels or in abstract concepts.

stuckness

i said before that we can get stuck in a situation where we aren't making progress. i was saying that awareness of this situation allows the energy basins to get washed out by other dynamics. 

taking my limited understanding of predictive coding ideas, maybe another part of this could be relaxing precision on "top-down" beliefs. 

gilbert says experience is like a vast necker cube with almost unlimited different interpretations - a nasty inverse problem with maybe no real ground truth in some ways. 

does having a stronger "top-down" influence -- i.e., asserting an interpretation for this necker cube -- make it easier to get stuck? does it create less-escapable energy basins in the overall space?

with zen, the idea of being "present" or "in the moment" could conceivably be linked to relaxing the precision on these "top-down" beliefs. i suppose this would raise the effective dimensionality of the overall problem, right? without the shrinkage priors, there are a lot more effective degrees of freedom in the overall system. this makes the problem much much harder to "solve" (if that's meaningful), but maybe it also creates more saddle-points in the energy landscape - and makes it easier to re-organize interpretations.

(PS - the therapeutic effects of hallucinogens, ECT, and maybe even standard antidepressants, could be linked to similar effects maybe. it also sounds parallel to norepinephrine (high phasic NE, or low tonic NE) signalling uncertainty and maybe encouraging a re-organization of "higher level" beliefs -- switching models or tasks, or maybe allowing a new level to emerge in the hierarchy by signalling that the extra model complexity is justified.)

so in zen if you keep bringing attention back to sensory inputs, you facilitate this re-organization... but, i feel like there's still a crucial piece missing here. in what i've said so far, reducing the top-down influence could be sort of like raising the temperature of the system - escaping from local minima, but with no particular reason to believe you'd find better solutions. if you subtract what you "know" at the higher levels, you're back to the very hard original inverse problem of your massive-dimensional sensory input. this is why i feel like this view is incomplete and needs something like clark's model. because when you relax your self, there's something like an external gradient that shapes the system toward real improvement. what is that neuroscientifically? i feel like this needs a pretty serious re-organization of my own thinking to get a grip on. but maybe it has something to do with erasing the barrier between form and content. letting the structure of the system be the computation itself. *possibly* this might reveal a flaw in the idea of recreating life in a computer. 

determination

life is the ultimate precommitment.

i was thinking of the movie "what dreams may come". robin williams loves his wife so much that when she spirals into a bottomless psychosis and kills herself, he's willing to give up heaven and be trapped hell in hell forever, for a chance to see her, even if he can't save her. even if she doesn't recognize him, if everything that seemed to be *her* is gone and what's left is just a shell, he believes in her so much, that he never gives up.

in that movie it's two people, robin williams and his wife. but what if you think of them both as being yourself? let's say you really fuck things up in your life, and you get to a state where you don't know who or what you are, and you have no path whatsoever back to something good. or maybe this never actually happens, but it exists as a potential that in some sense you're always working implicitly to avoid - it's inside you somewhere.

what can you do? you could kill yourself, but that doesn't solve anything.

you can only keep believing in yourself no matter what, and go all the way to hell to find yourself. by being yourself, from the very beginning you've been committed to this, even if you don't know it.

from the Shinjin Gakudō

The thought of enlightenment sometimes arises in a life-and-death situation, sometimes in the serenity of nirvana, and sometimes under other conditions. It does not depend on any place, and it is not obstructed by any place where it arises. The thought of enlightenment does not arise from any particular set of conditions and it does not arise from the intellect. It arises from the thought of enlightenment. 

The intention that gives rise to seeking enlightenment is beyond existing or not existing, beyond the judgmental realm of ‘good or evil’, and beyond moral indifference. It is not something that arises as an effect from some previous life, nor is it something that beings in lofty worlds can always realize. It is simply the arising of the intention to realize enlightenment at that moment in time. Because it is not concerned with external circumstances, at the very moment when thought of enlightenment arises, the whole universe, through and through, also gives rise to the thought of enlightenment. Though it is said that this arising seems to turn external circumstances around, the thought of enlightenment is something that these circumstances do not recognize. The arising of this intention is like both self and other stretching out their hands to each other. And we ourselves stretch out our hands going forth amidst beings who are alien to us. Thus the thought of enlightenment is aroused even within the realms of hell, hungry ghosts, animals, and the asuras.

Understanding doesn't get in the way of not understanding

In each moment of experience, I think the fundamental suffering is there with us; we're more or less aware of it.

Activity engages other goals and takes attention away from it.

one theory is that the self likes things it can catalyze. if something is completely foreign to us, we don't especially like it because there's nothing we can do with it. like random noise. but if something is overly familiar/repetitive, we don't like it either - again because there's nothing more we can do with it, we're already predicting it fully.

what we like is the in-between part where we can grapple with the thing and assimilate it. this is the most fundamental way of looking at "making progress toward one's goals". before we start assimilating something, the parts that we don't understand represent "not-self", but after we've finished assimilating it, it's "self". moving along this gradient is what life constantly tries to do. suffering/frustration/confusion is what we feel like when we're not moving along this gradient.

as long as we feel like we're moving along this gradient, we're not too motivated to make big changes, because things are basically working out. if things are not working out, one response is to change "who we are" - i.e., find a different approach that might be able to make progress.

but one interesting thing that buddhism says is that we can get *stuck* in a situation where we're continually *not* feeling like we're making progress, and yet we *keep* persisting with the approach (i.e. goals, beliefs, self-concept) that isn't working. [attachment, perseveration, addiction, being stuck in a too-deep basin with not enough metastability, etc]

the solution that buddhism suggests is then to just *look* at the approach itself (i.e., look at the self), because looking at it inherently makes it less deep/stuck, because "looking" literally means to allow dynamical contact or information exchange between that approach and something outside it. the more information exchange there is, the less that approach can be stuck in its own dynamics -- they're partly washed out by the other dynamics.

rumi

once you think of me
dead and gone
you will make up with me
you may even adore me

why be a worshiper of the dead
think of me as a goner
come and make up now

congruency

congruency effects are all over the place. like the simon effect where it's easier/faster to respond in the same place as you just saw a stimulus. or "pavlovian" effects where action is congruent with valence.

i wonder if using natural objects as cues in a task, as opposed to fractals, is another form of the same principle of "congruency". they look like our predictions, so it's easier to deal with them.

i know how to deal with this, it's a self-contained object, it's not going to start animating or bleeding off the edges or whatever. all those things are forms of congruency (since it actually does behave like that). we don't have those priors about the fractals.

UPDATE: is this just a simple rule -- "make the world look like what you want"? this might correspond to hierarchical action-unfolding. like if PFC representations are abstract goals/beliefs, and they're unfolded down the motor hierarchy by a constraint satisfaction settling process that checks forward models against how we want the senses to look.

incest and zazen

(i keep saying the same thing in different ways)

zazen is like the incest taboo. the default is path of least action: re-merging with the parents, or taking whatever local action seems to make progress toward the online goals (equivalently, i think, away from the fears). this discharges the potentiality of that goal or separation. (a really simple one of these could be particle/antiparticle annihiliations.)

but zazen, like the incest taboo, blocks this route back to zero. this actually spawns new things, because that energy is now in the universe and has to interact with other things, getting integrated into all those patterns.

interestingly this also breaks habits. whenever energy has a route to discharge, it probably starts to form some kind of habitual pathway, without "awareness" (which is maybe just the same as slowing down the route to discharge). but somehow - i don't get this yet - holding it in awareness really eases that... hmm... seems like this might actually be key to understanding "habits", but i don't get it yet.

anyway, in this sense "incest" is being used probably more broadly than just physical sex with the family, but that is a big thing given how we're built as humans.

No source of suffering, no relief from suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment and no non-attainment. Without attainment, bodhisattvas take refuge in the Unknown and live without walls of the mind. Without walls of the mind and thus without fears, they see through delusions and nirvana.

old ideas, restated

an argument. intelligence is a vast collection of well-interfunctioning solutions accumulated over biological history. if you want to recreate something like intelligence, you have to figure out many of these kinds of solutions and put them together in a meaningful way.

for example, the mechanical shapes of axon guidance proteins for visual cortex are probably tuned in some way to natural visual statistics, or to meta-aspects of the visual problem. even the shape of the body itself (like having legs and stuff) is a kind of intelligence. there's an incredible array of clever engineering tricks throughout all levels.

a counterargument. maybe there are simpler principles underlying how these solutions get found and put together. so if you had a grasp of these principles, you wouldn't have to spend decades researching solutions, but instead you could turn your principles loose on tons of real data and they would gradually figure out all these solutions similar to how real life did it.

that's why i was excited about "plasticity in overlapping representations". if there are simpler principles, i think they'd have to erase the boundary between form and content in a learning system.

hmm... also on the topic of goal-states... i guess if the representation of the outcome is a strong driver, it makes sense that you would get "pavlovian" behaviors that are uncoupled from instrumental contingencies. the dominant representation isn't "i'm here, what should i do?" (which you could imagine would favor instrumental behavior), but it's "here's what i want". this could favor actions that are associated with that outcome (like salivating for food).

maybe you could also view lots of the little internal actions that we do during goal-states as pavlovian. orienting/preparatory actions that are consistent with consuming (or avoiding) the outcome. i wonder if we're doing lots of these online during listening to music.

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/09/20/cercor.bhu210.long

"being high", goal pursuit, dopamine, internal conflict

there's something about being "high" that's really hard to let go of. let's say you're feeling euphoric from mdma or meth or opiates. when the first waves of "not-high" state start to hit you, it can be pretty awful. deep sadness in the pit of your stomach, isolation, hopelessness. it would be understandable to want to take more drugs at this point to avoid those feelings.

parts of our deep suffering are often probably coming from very old things, fragile childlike stuff. this is kind of a discordance, often pretty unconscious but still there. for example if some childlike part was hurt before it knew how to deal with it, it still has this wretched image of itself, which is constantly grating against our adult self-image. dunno, that's pretty freudian and rough, but something like that. and so, if drugs let us kind of muzzle the discordance to just believe completely in some positive perspective, then when the drugs wear off and the muzzle disappears, those things ache particularly. partly because you've kind of betrayed yourself in a way.

(incidentally, this might explain why mdma with psychotherapy could be positive without a hangover.)

i think on a smaller scale this is what's happening without drugs, with every little perspective we take. we don't like to let go of our current movement/direction/goal. and the more that connects to any really long-term deep things we haven't been connected to, the harder it is probably. it hurts when you believe in something and that rug is swept out.

i wonder if dopamine contributes to energizing these goal-states - maybe partly related to the idea that dopamine can stabilize representations. some drugs really blast the dopamine. and you can feel great, fully believing in what you're doing or whatever perspective you have at that point. you feel like you're making progress toward this overall goal that you believe in.

this seems like randy o'reilly's "tantrums" that come from frustrated goal-pursuit. it's the worst feeling. it might even be the same thing as hopelessness, because if you have some idea and motivation for how to turn things around and start feeling better, then your goals really haven't been completely frustrated; you still have a goal-state at that higher level that you feel like you can make progress toward.

with or without drugs, this also brings up something similar to the last post i made here about what's special about human suffering. one thing humans can do is entertain perspectives that frustrate the goals of our other perspectives. like when you're an adult, it's hard to get too excited about christmas, because you've had better things than presents, and you know santa claus isn't real.... thus your mental hipster is constantly short-circuiting lots of potentially engrossing goal states. (this reminds me of "zen mind beginner's mind".)

you could think of two dynamical systems with metastable attractor configurations. they've each been selected because they can perpetuate some aspects of their organization through time despite the impinging of outside things that don't match this organization. this means they tend to have mechanisms that respond to offsets with some counter-reaction (wilber called this "exclusivity structures"). for example, a bacterium might secrete a hard shell when the environment goes dry.

possibly the same type of thing happens in social interactions, where someone denying some facet of your beliefs triggers a reaction that strengthens the basin of attraction you're in - a feedback loop that makes it harder to reach synthesis. subjectively, i think this is the opposite of feeling safe, which promotes synthesis. from any individual system's point of view, it can only be selfish, thermodynamically speaking.

i wondered if this is related to what's special (if anything) about human suffering. in buddhist terms, why humans might create karma in ways that other animals don't. we get stuck by criticizing ourselves; thinking that the problem is something we're doing. for example, i've noticed when i'm going to sleep that there are little bits of mental action that i subconsciously think are keeping me from getting to sleep, and i try to turn them off or avoid them. but that actually keeps me awake.

this kind of thing sounds like two functional systems within the individual are falling into this same feedback loop problem, and thereby hardening their own exclusivity structures. i wonder if this property of splitting into two functional systems (very roughly speaking) at this level is something only humans have, since it might be a little bit related to perspective-taking. it could create a qualitatively new way of getting stuck: creating conflict within one individual that hardens both parts.

i think it would be reasonable to say that any form is a perspective. (by a form, i mean anything in the universe -- cheese, zen, you, your wire whisk, the laws of physics, the tendency for white men to be republican, etc.) so that's basically the same as saying that "subjective" and "objective" are just different ways of looking at the same thing. given any particular thing, a form is what it looks like when you're looking at it, and a perspective is what it looks like when you *are* it.

and i think that any perspective could be seen as a world-view. any particular vantage point that looks out at the world i think inherently carries its own overall "purpose" or "meaning", which is defined by the organization of that system.

sparsity/regularization, holographic representation, bigger/smaller loops (e.g. thalamocortical or neuromodulator systems), and "scalar fields"

if you force the dynamics to breathe through cycles of compression and expansion (in terms of information capacity of the channel), is that a possible way to get an efficient coding? and maybe this is separate, but could this be related to holographic? like with plasticity in overlapping representations, everything is morphed into a dual form where every part of the original has a partial representation in every part of the dual...

- Are exclusivity structures always trying to avoid exposure to unpredictable inputs?

- Self consciousness is the beginning of self awareness? The recognition that there's a simplification gradient?

- Is commitment to a particular idea a form of self-study?

so in RLS... D2 agonists might isolate you from the arcing that gets released at this low motor level

least action

there was an amazing passage in stein's book. he has kind of an interesting argument for why the incest taboo is psychically "necessary" - if i'm understanding, it's roughly that the default or symmetric case would be full realization of intimacy with parents and siblings, including sexually. (this is like what clark calls a psychic energy sink.)

he argues that imaginal forms are created when an instinctual drive can't be immediately realized. if there's a potentiality (a divergence between generalized expectation and observation), it essentially follows the path of least action to return to satisfaction/zero. this is kind of like general relativity. because of the "warping" or shape of functional topology of Kosmos/holarchical space (which is simply the truth of all other potentiality), the path of least action can actually involve the apparent creation of new forms.

in his view, imaginal forms are created to find other ways to discharge this potentiality. (and he says this is part of what sets humans apart from other animals; we can rest with some unresolved potentiality over much deeper and more elaborated scales/structures.) so in this case, the incest taboo is strangely like meditation: it induces the path of least action to follow a deepening and spiritualization of male-female polarity. (there are obvious teleological problems with this argument as it's presented here, but let's forget about that for the moment.)

the nice thing is, this fits perfectly with marc's dopamine story. roughly at the human decision making level, dopamine energizes *action* (and i think especially relevantly and perniciously, internal or mental action) to resolve some potentiality. the immediate resolution is benoit's arcing (aka clark's psychic energy sink). at a very motoric level this can be like restless legs syndrome, or slightly more abstract into tourette's or drug addiction.

there feel like vague parallels to hierarchical bayesian stuff - when is there enough evidence to justify another level or meta-parameter. failures of a given model to capture the structure of the world keep increasing the effective temperature until the model complexity of a new level is justified. haven't thought that through yet... but the gist of it is involution -- the impinging of everything is all potentiality.

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

======

on one level it's a pretty generic trope. he's chickening out of suicide because he starts overthinking it and getting scared of what it will be like.

but this brings up the good and bad of "thinking". "the currents of enterprises of great pitch and moment turn awry" is zen-like. with more patience and contemplation, there's space to take proper care of any particular conviction, relax it into a bigger love.

so is the "native hue of resolution" our spontaneous self, getting troubled by thoughts and fear; or is it our momentary passion, getting ripened and softened by reflection?

paradox: the chaotic thinking that's troubling us may be the movement that ultimately generates space.

vice and virtue...

why is it so hard to do the right thing. coming back to the old dual-systems view: plato's charioteer and horses, kahnemann's thinking fast and slow, model-based and model-free, hot and cold systems, etc.

also, what is "impulsivity" and addiction.

i'm wondering if the most salient dichotomy is vice and virtue. the other definitions get caught up on weird issues, like the fact that drug addicts can spend weeks planning sophisticated schemes to get drugs, or that scientists compulsively stay at work even when it's hurting their overall productivity.

maybe these things boil down to some kind of dynamic attractor state in the brain (or in lots of cases probably implemented on a substrate that includes both the brain and other components, parts of your body, other people, etc) that keeps pulling things back toward a certain configuration. this comprises all the partially erroneous beliefs that make up that attractor. "vice" is the continuation of that attractor configuration; "virtue" is when it partially dissolves to inclusion with other dynamics. (incidentally, this is exactly the continental divide between free will and determinism.) so virtue is highly context dependent and can't really be pinned down by any particular understanding.

vice often manifests as short time horizons, self-centric behavior, less deliberative, etc -- but it doesn't necessarily have to. it's possible for other kinds of dynamics to get stuck, even very apparently generous behavior for example, which could still be stuck somewhere as a self-assertion (although this language can be confusing because it's not the standard notion of self).

a rock just exists as a rock -- no problem. like the garden of eden in the bible. there's no suffering when there's no self-awareness.

the birth of suffering is the awareness that things *could be* different than they are. then there's constant dissatisfaction/confusion in the divergence between how things are and your ideal image of how things should be (this ideal image is your "self").

but, the clash will *never* end. you wouldn't want it to, because this trajectory is exactly what creates the world: form is created by the divergence. what looks like suffering from one perspective is also impossible beauty. to take care of the world is that.

ensemble methods, sexual reproduction, regularization, order and chaos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78

one idea is, the balance between order and chaos in giving rise to life.

another idea is ensemble methods performing really well - like the netflix competition winner. (is this related to monte carlo methods too? lots of weak solutions thrown together?)

in this talk hinton talks about why it might be good to have sexual reproduction in evolution. sex keeps reassorting chunks of the genome, so you never have a "single learner" in that evolutionary sense, but rather an ever-shifting ensemble of individually maybe not all that amazing learners, but always thrown back together into the same system.

he shows an example of how you can do the same thing within a deep neural network. you basically constantly turn on and off bits of the network as it's learning, so subsets of it are trying to learn some of the structure in the data, but the whole thing is never getting too committed, it's finding bits of *relatively* shallow solutions. and all these bits are learning in the context of each other (so they regularize each other, in that larger generalized space).

for one thing, it would be cool if the brain works this way, essentially living on the edge of chaos so the dynamics are always getting thrown around of which subcircuit is online during some experience (even at a microscale of time, like individual theta cycles for example). so the brain is keeping online a sort of chaotically scattered but somewhat balanced subset of stuff, always flitting between different hypothesis spaces and driving updates in those, within the global weight-space of all the learning it's done so far.

this might partly explain why individual trials of brain activity look so random, and doug garrett's data where dynamical *variability* in brain signals is related to behavioral performance.

and fundamental balance between chaos and order- the emergence of beauty and life is this being tilted with your weight ahead of your feet, the unresolving energy of the sampling dynamics kind of bootstrapping itself.

No guests remain within the dragon gate

regularization

"generalizing from finite samples in extremely high dimensions" is an amazing problem. think of life expectancy. let's say men born today expect to live 82 years and women expect to live 84 years (don't know the actual numbers). that's based on a lot of samples of men and women (plus some projections, but let's say for now it was just based on raw statistics of past events). OK. so if you're a man, your best guess for how long you'll live is 82 years, and if a woman, your best guess is 84 years. in other words, if you were doing optimal decision-making or whatever, this is the number you should factor in (well actually the variance could be asymmetric so you ought to integrate over the whole distribution but let's ignore that for now too). OK, *but*, let's suppose the expectancy for white-men is 85 years and for non-white-men is 77 years. maybe for some reason it's reversed for women; white-women 82 years and non-white-women 86 years. NOW, if you know you're a white man, you should use 85 years as your best guess. OK, but what if you factor in height? smoking? educational history? city of birth? environmental toxin exposure? genetics? .... pretty soon, there won't even be a *single sample* of experience to draw on, to make an estimate of the life expectancy in your particular category.

one way around this problem is to assume that each factor operates linearly and independently. then, you solve a big linear regression problem, and linearly interpolate/extrapolate to points in the space where you don't have any samples. note that even under these simplifying assumptions, there are serious problems. for example, when you have many many dimensions, some will by chance have extreme slopes -- which will push your extrapolated prediction into crazy values. but even ignoring those problems, there's the bigger problem that the factors aren't actually linear or independent. they interact very strongly in fact: sometimes one factor might even reverse its direction of effect depending on another factor. so the linear regression is not a good solution.

what can you do? you have to regularize the problem. this is, you have to use some prior knowledge to drastically pare back the number of effective dimensions. for example, you might know some variables are strongly correlated, so you can treat them as one. or you might know that some variables are dominated by others, so you omit the weak variables. or you might know that the underlying function ought to be at least locally smooth, so you impose a smoothness constraint.

but what is the right regularization? brains are somehow really good at this (algorithms are getting better quickly though..)

i was just thinking that the regularizing prior knowledge could be a good place to fit in scale-invariance and holo-stuff. i haven't read enough, but i haven't seen yet much in machine learning on using a single learning framework to accommodate all different kinds/levels of data. i imagine that's what the brain is doing (maybe it's related to the relatively "unitary" consciousness that we seem have subjectively) -- because we're essentially shifting around the focus of more or less the same global model to apply to massively disparate "kinds of things". so we have more samples to draw on for any given problem. we can even turn this global model partially on itself, which perpetually gives us even more samples and might also produce other weird features.

somehow, the circuitry of the cortex must be cleverly set up to do this kind of learning over space and time. (like hawkins' and others' "hierarchical temporal memories" type ideas).

in a friston-type framework, i'm picturing that the structure of the organism at all levels already encodes a deep regularization (for example RNA only interacts with some molecules). since there's no separation between what is "inference" and what is just dynamical structure of the "inferring entity" itself. if every dynamical system can be thought of as doing prediction (which means vastly generalizing from finite samples), then its whole structure from the ground-up is scale-invariantly encoding regularization for all the external states it's exposed to.

new ideas

Part 1

Some models suggest that the basal ganglia are used to select between actions. Some candidate actions are generated, and the circuitry of the basal ganglia allows one to win and be executed (like Jeff Wickens). I wondered if the basal ganglia are also used to select between "internal actions", like what to think about, what to attend to, etc. This could be connected to habits of mind. 

Part 2

I was thinking about Karl Friston's view of sleep. If I understood correctly, sleep is a time of lower top-down precision, when the experience collected during wakefulness can be used to drive big changes to the world-model. It makes sense to isolate your brain from your muscles when you're doing this deep restructuring: when you're awake you need high top-down precision to make your best active predictions.

[As a side note, I wonder how this fits with the data about interstitial volume increasing during sleep to allow "clean up" of metabolic products. Maybe a sleep-state is simply a useful time to do multiple unrelated things. Or maybe the physiological implementation of precision actually has to do with neuron-glia interactions and interstitial space (e.g. glutamate reuptake).]

The most obvious thing that happens during sleep, physiologically, is change in oscillatory activity. High-frequency activity mostly drops away, and low-frequency oscillations become prominent.

Does low-frequency activity correspond to the "subtle" state described by Eastern mystics?

In terms of oscillatory activity, a child's brain looks like a sleeping adult's brain. Roughly, a deeper stage of adult sleep corresponds to an earlier stage of child development. In childhood we also have high plasticity. This is when things seem really meaningful, like they can in dreams.

The adult mind can be pretty locked in place. Old feelings, even from early childhood, are still there somewhere, but maybe don't find much expression. Really deep *meaning* seems to be locked in there somewhere, too. Things can seem a bit abstract until it's in your gut. Truly believing in love isn't something the rigid adult mind is very good at.

What about meditation and the subtle stage of development?

Maybe meditation peels the layers off. Perhaps during development, something happened to hurt that level of the self: suffering (free energy) caused by direct contact with not-self. That then becomes a scar or a rigidity: some loss of dynamic flexibility like Eve Marder's ion channels. Specifically it's a hyper-assertion of the self-pattern at that level.

Meditation brings awareness to the thing that's creating the rigidity. Bringing awareness is the same as nesting the thing in a larger context, allowing it to healthily integrate and discharge some of its exclusivity. In meditation we also see slow oscillatory states.

This suggests that top-down precision is something we should look at in multiple layers. There might be a different kind of precision every time we peel off a layer.

Something like the aPFC or hippocampus might correspond to top-levels of the adult hierarchy. Interestingly, you also grow to a bigger model as you relax levels, because that slice of the self gets integrated with a bigger context. This might be like how unexpected uncertainty could convert to expected uncertainty as the model grows.

A tricky issue is how to reconcile this with the psychedelic state. Psychedelic states have been likened to dream states, and sometimes include a feeling of vast lovingness and meaningfulness. Is this playing the same role as sleep? If so, do psychedelic states show the same oscillatory signature?

Some studies have described increases in low-frequency oscillatory power with psychedelics, but more recent work (Carhart-Harris et al, 2013) showed decreases in oscillatory power across the spectrum (in default mode). Carhart-Harris suggests this corresponds to "destabilization" of brain activity, possibly allowing it to leave attractor states that it's been stuck in.

Part 3

Oscillations, again. Subjectively, people sometimes describe "the present moment". To some extent, every moment seems to be the "same moment". It's always the present moment. Of course in some ways this is vacuously true; it follows from the definition of "now". But I think it might also be describing some aspects of how the brain works.

Clark and I talked about "ontologeny" (he calls it "microgeny"), which is the "waking up" of the universe in each moment. It's possible that it sort of ultra-quickly recapitulates all of the development of the universe, up until now.

Clark wants to extend this to fundamental physics, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but being more conservative for a minute, let's say this is just an attribute of the brain. Within a brain rhythm, you keep doing the same thing over and over again. If this brain rhythm is one signature of the dynamic quasi-stable attractor state you're in, then it's probably repeating the same pattern over and over again. That's "you" -- the stability of that attractor is what makes up the coherence and consistency of your experience. But it's constantly "refreshing", going through all the phase-angles of that space. So in every moment it would feel like you're constantly waking up to that moment as you go through that same cycle. The attractor can gradually (or sometimes quickly) change, both through its own unstable dynamics and through sensory inputs, and there's also long-term plasticity. A wakeful attractor state would have some signature in alpha frequencies in the brain, for example.

This could explain why sometimes it seems like mental events are perpetually happening "before" the present moment of awareness. A simplistic explanation would be that there is some particular phase-angle that actually corresponds to the "waking up" or the present moment (and I suspect that's true in some partial ways), but a more complete explanation probably involves interactions at all the phase-angles. In either explanation, bringing those things into awareness (into the present moment) might involve an attentionally-driven shift in the relative phases of firing of different neural populations.

For me, subjectively, this corresponds to things that I feel were always "there" inside me somewhere. With some attention they can be brought up to "near" awareness, but it sometimes feels like they're still lurking before the edge of the present moment. Sustained attention brings them into the present.

I think this is also a key to the "hierarchical temporal memory" idea from Jeff Hawkins. Microcircuits in the brain must be set up to dynamically mirror aspects of the sensory inputs / the world. But as you go up the hierarchy of the brain, they extract structure. A lot of work has focused on the "spatial" structure they extract (like going from spots to oriented lines to edges to objects to recognizing people, etc), but they are implemented as oscillatory dynamical systems, so it makes sense that the real mirroring and abstraction is deeply spatiotemporal.

[Also, I think it's worth mentioning that we often use the visual system as an example for this type of thing, but a huge area of the brain is devoted to somatosensory, visceral, vestibular, etc processing. Further, I only talked about the sensory side of the hierarchy but the brain can at least as well be thought of as organized hierarchically around action, on the motor side. There are always rhythms in motion, too. Together I think this fits embodied cognition and the body-mind naturally into the framework.]

"Commit not a single unwholesome action,
Cultivate a wealth of virtue,
To tame this mind of ours,
This is the teaching of all the buddhas."
-- attributed to Shakyamuni Buddha

somehow this meant to me that we create the world (in its partial, divided, samsaric sense) through karma. or, duality *is* precisely our own karmic burden. which is why buddha said "i and all beings are enlightened".

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.

This discovery will be the one that tells me what invented me

Like any dealer, he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another

identification

one issue that's been bugging me is what "identification" means. i was watching another one of diane hamilton's videos, and she's talking about how identification with the small self is just one of many perspectives.

it seems to be true that "i" suffer when i identify with a particular small-self to the exclusion of other phenomena. when "i" release into a more inclusive perspective, the suffering-as-partiality of the smaller-self is revealed to just be a transient object, whereas before it felt like an existential/unsolvable problem.

but, what does it *mean* to expand identification like that? three broad categories of possibility:

1) both the smaller system and the larger system already existed before you released your perspective, and your change in perspective didn't really change either system. instead, it has something to do with how the dynamics of these systems are coupled to the aspects of manifestation that we agree to associate with the individual (e.g. control of your speech muscles to say "i am experiencing xyz").

2) the smaller system is being changed. dissolving exclusivity structures, so that it can arise and release and transform more spontaneously in the context it's in.

3) the larger system is actually being created in the process. when the smaller system is allowed to enter into increased dynamic coupling with other phenomena, then the system that calls itself "zeb" now consists of fundamentally new dynamics that only exist in the interplay between the previous small-self and the other phenomena. *however*, i'm not sure how this fits in the case of releasing to "identification" with all phenomena / formless awareness.

i feel like all of these are true, but i'm still missing something.

making pot illegal

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/opinion/brooks-weed-been-there-done-that.html?src=me&ref=general

i love brooks, and this is a fucking awesome article in a lot of ways.

i can't even say i categorically disagree with "seatbelt laws". we want to make policy that does the most overall good, and the disutility of restricting personal choice is just one component of that.

i think he misses two things-

1) some of personal growth comes from making stupid choices- how do you do that if all the stupid choices are illegalized?

2) it's true that you can find some good in illegalizing pot (and he does a brilliant job of outlining the shape of that good), but how can you have a complete argument without comparing the magnitude of that good with the magnitude of the concomitant harms?

when it comes to illegalizing pot, the magnitude of the good is really pretty meager. like one comment points out, the usage doesn't skyrocket when pot is legalized in places like holland. yeah, if you make it illegal people might do it a bit less. that is a good, but is a big one? i believe illegalizing heroin reduces the number of addicts. that's probably a bigger good. (still, how big?)

and he doesn't talk about the harm. making drugs illegal obviously creates shit-tons of practical problems. then there's the difficult-to-estimate disutility of inhibiting personal freedom. and another nebulous factor is slippery-slope into 1984. i'd have to think very carefully about how to put this harm in a common currency to compare directly to the good. yet my intuition is that the harm outweighs the good by several orders of magnitude here.

i want to be SURE

free energy hierarchies and pedagogy

last night somebody was spraying the sidewalk with water to clean it. but he was doing it at 6:30pm, the busiest time. he turned off the hose whenever someone was walking past (to avoid spraying them), and this meant he had the hose off 90% of the time. he was just spraying in little bursts when there was a gap in people.

i thought, shouldn't they do this at a different time of day? it's probably just poor management. if i were in charge, i would set it up differently.

then i thought, it's possible that they know something i don't know, and the best solution is actually to do it at 6:30pm for whatever reasons.

but this made me think about free energy and pedagogy.

in order to learn, i have to take action based on my current model and see the consequences. there may be a prediction error that drives an update of my model; then i involute this structure and the model gains richness.

people who take control of all aspects of their life in this way, fully inhabiting their current model to produce action and then incorporate the updates, probably involute the most of the world.

and "teaching" should based on this. getting students to take action based on their current model, in situations where they can incorporate the prediction error.

dopamine, progress, and tantrums

the real "dual-system" issue is probably the one that plato and buddha and whoever else understood from the beginning.

virtue or responsibility, that's the hard thing that's right to do.

the unvirtuous thing is perseverating the goals of some smaller system.

the relatively virtuous thing is what o'reilly said -- you're unhappy when you're frustrated in making progress toward your goal, so the way to be happier is to let go of that goal. in a little sense that means the smaller system you're currently identifying with has to "die" or "dissipate".

the subjective experience of this is "awareness of" that smaller system. identification with a perspective which is not limited to being *inside* the smaller system. because the goals are determined by the priors of the system, and now the dynamical system in question has another hierarchical level, so it behaves as if it's trying to minimize surprise at *that* level. (still unvirtuous from a broader context, but moving in the right direction!)

that's why i was excited by o'reilly's talk about tantrums. along with karl's model it feels like a step toward a scientific view of wtf is going on...

how stuff works

As these peaks in the holomapping and their concentric boundaries coalesce, stable conscious binding flourish-develops as manifold harmonic attunement thru complexificationary unitive intraperfusilusion in dynamical introjective identity with the All as it can be 'known' as consciousness.

-- Clark Potter

intelligence

intelligence is the ability to make accurate predictions about the

world. you can think of the mind as a *model* of the outside world. but of

course it's never a perfect model. the self is the model, and the not-self

is the aspects of the world not captured by the model. we're perpetually

afraid to relax the self, to allow the model to capture more aspects of the

world. there's a moment of "little dying" when we do this. the self never

wants to let go of the idea that *it is the whole world*, or in other words,

it is already a perfect description of the world. fundamentally, it has to

be this way, because the self is a homeostatic system that maintains its

integrity because it constantly enforces its own pattern against the chaos

of the outside world. but fortunately, the world forces little bits of the

self to relax, so the self can grow and become a more honest and faithful

model of the world (it might be fair to call this the universal principle of

"love").

that's why taking care of yourself emotionally makes you smarter. 

I have a sheep doing roofing over at my house.

Come and drop in. We'll put on Zeppelin and eat cheddar cheese.

free energy and suffering

the free energy framework provides a really natural explanation for what suffering is. "good" vs "bad" feels like such a basic quality of subjective experience, but neuroscience says the material correlate is dopamine or opioidergic neuron firing or whatever. that doesn't make sense, it's way too arbitrary. in the active inference framework, suffering is exactly free energy. it's the same principle for any system. to the extent that the system is trying to assert that "it is the universe", and the rest of the universe is shooting that theory down, that's the subjective quality of suffering.

of course, the concept of a "system" is just something we lay down post hoc to try to understand. you can draw a boundary anywhere you want and call the inside a "system" (although this might get increasingly pointless for weird boundaries). and then our concept of "suffering" would match up with the free energy of that "system".

this is a nice explanation for what happens in addiction, i think. when you look at the system-boundary around your relatively shallow ego, free energy actually decreases when you take drugs (or do whatever addictive behavior), because the drugs help this shallow system to live in a more isolated dream, where it's not exposed to the truth of the rest of the world which it's denying. but simultaneously, if you look at the system-boundary around some deeper identity of the individual, the drugs are making things worse -- creating more suffering. so at the same moment, there's either more or less suffering depending on what system-boundary you're considering.

inconsistencies

whether particular beliefs are inconsistent depends on your model of the world. fundamentally all beliefs must be inconsistent in some way because they're just partial truths. evolution in general, i think, is the process of steadily burning away these inconsistencies when they're forced to interact with each other. or in another sense, the inconsistencies remain (since, after all, they are what manifestation is), but their reconciliation also exists (which itself is another kind of inconsistency). so depending on how you look at it, more-and-more "stuff"/form is being created, or more-and-more "stuff"/form is being burned away to leave what it originally was, truth.

the transition from not-life to life

Q: do you think the "no-life" to "life" transition... that first step to the first living cell.... was a bigger and more complex step than all of the evolution of lifeforms that has happened since?

A: the free energy way of looking at life suggests that, 1) there isn't any kind of border between life and not-life. homeostatic dynamics arise within all systems, and just progressively increase in richness when possible. there were probably lots of intermediate steps between autocatalytic RNA sets and modern "cells". and 2) each additional step is only meaningful in the context that it arose in. the organizational level of, e.g. what we call "life" is just the tip of an iceberg of systems dynamics. the right way to think of the non-living world isn't as a static or dead -- it has its own rich dynamics, upon which the steps toward life are just little nudgings that reorganize those dynamics.

extending science to mind, heart, and spirit

this kind of science is fundamentally a bit different from classic science, for at least three reasons:
1) observations may be internal rather than external. in science, i do an experiment and i see that the litmus paper turns blue. then you do the same experiment and you see that the paper turns blue. we talk to each other, and we agree that we observed the same thing. but what if the experiment is to meditate for one year, and the observation is whether i feel calm? it's harder to agree on what we mean, because these internal observations are nuanced and deeply coupled to the act of perception itself that looks at them.
2) observations require more practice to see. we can never see the real world, only the inside of our own brains. if we "see" a particular phenomenon, like "a chair" or "an act of bravery", this means we have a predictive model that hasn't yet been shot down by the sensory evidence. but we can only see things that we have predictive models for. if caveman witnesses a traffic jam, he won't see "a traffic jam". at best he might be able to recognize that each "car" is an autonomous unit. likewise, autistic people probably can't see "extracting oneself from an awkward social situation", yet for other people this is as clear as "a chair". in a science of spirituality, observations of things like "mindfulness" would require the observer to actually have the predictive models for the things being observed, which requires a lot of experience and practice.
3) finally, these experiments might require people with strongly developed compassion and mindfulness to perform the manipulations, for example to provide therapy to psychopaths. such people are rare, and it's difficult to identify them.

when i got back from the airport last night, everything was closed (the 26th, "boxing day", is a holiday in britain), so i ate at subway. in the middle of my sandwich, a young employee came up to my table and said, "you have to move in 30 seconds". i was like, "what?". he said, "you can't sit here now, the chairs have to be moved". my first reaction was, ok, i see what you mean, but you're being really rude about it. i was preparing to be a dick back to him, but then i looked at him and it struck me that he seemed like he might have asperger's. for him, it's just a mechanical job: move the customers so he can move the chairs. he knows when he needs to move the chairs (i.e., 30 seconds from now), and i'm in his way. so i collected my luggage and as i was leaving, i looked in his eyes, gave him a smile and said "have a good evening" as warmly as i could. this is on the theory that no matter how weirdly the brain is wired, there's something human inside most of us, which you can find if you look hard enough. and it felt like there was something in him that responded to being treated nicely. probably he normally gets very bad reactions from people, and this just reinforces his isolation. in this sense, mental illness is a deeply social phenomenon, involving interpersonal feedback loops.

but what i think is even more interesting about this is why i decided not to be a dick to him. it was because i thought "he has asperger's, so he needs some special help". but the really important thing is this: *anybody* who's being a dick to you, needs special help.

100 years ago, we didn't know about autism or schizophrenia. naturally, people with these mental illnesses would do things that hurt us (i.e., rudeness, socially inappropriate behavior, violence, etc). and our reaction was to label them as fools, people of low moral character, imbeciles, etc. we would lock them up or even execute them for their crimes.

now, we recognize that it's an illness and they need help. but the point is that there's nothing magical about our current diagnostic categories. in another 100 years, we'll have probably identified the neural underpinnings of psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and even the things that make people commit mass killings. then, rather than saying, "you're fundamentally a bad person and you don't deserve another chance", we'll say, "at the core you're a human being, you're struggling with extraordinary suffering, and we'll do everything we can to help".

but even right now, if we want to, we can act based on this general understanding. when someone does something bad, they are the ones who are hurt the most. the suffering that a victim feels is nothing compared to the suffering that the criminal feels. i know this from my own experience-- doing something bad arises from a deep suffering. it's the exact opposite of being kind to yourself. and having done the bad thing, it becomes even harder to admit this weakness to yourself, because you have to take responsibility for what you've done. in the people who commit mass killings, i think this guilt is locked away so deeply that they literally feel like they would die if they let themselves feel it.

"Let me be thankful, first, because he never robbed me before; second, because although he took my purse, he did not take my life; third, because although he took what I possessed, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed." -- Matthew Henry

bootstrapping and pirsig's quality

so, i don't really believe in good and bad (although of course they are real in some senses); phenomena just happen. but my closest thing to having an orienting principle is something like pirsig's "quality". the closest thing to "should" is that we should follow our consciences, act truly, and this is quality. (as a side note, most of these things, like "should", just depend a lot on the context and have a lot of different aspects to their meaning. it's perfectly reasonable to say you should work hard, shouldn't hurt people, etc.)

but my question is, how does bootstrapping fit in? what if you're shy, and if you act as your true self, you don't get many people interacting with you. but having more social interactions facilitates your own growth. so you temporarily stray from your conscience. and then you come back and find that you have a deeper understanding of yourself.

i guess my best answer right now is that you should take a more direct approach of being your true self throughout, not using bootstrapping.

maybe the deeper problem comes because it's not so easy to act truly all the time. the brain is just molecules, and like any other robot, we're following the determinism of the universe, according to how we're set up.

any notions of "deciding" what to do are pretty fuzzy and look different from different perspectives. so there may be times when you use bootstrapping because you do, or something else that looks sort of like boostrapping, or maybe it's not clear in some senses, or from some "perspectives" (which themselves are just molecules going through some movements), what acting truly is. bootstrapping happens, and buddha breathes. there's a real breakdown between form and content.

it's at the heart of your life

What do you say we make apple juice and fax it to each other.

necrophilia is anesthesia

Success Reported Using Fetal Tissue to Repair a Brain - NYTimes, 1992

white shores, and beyond- a far green country under a swift sunrise

the body

addiction

How can we reconcile the psychiatric and neurophysiological concepts of addiction with the more general Buddhist idea of addiction (attachment to things that temporarily let you avoid seeing your true nature)?

Being addicted to something means you're doing it to avoid something else. On some level you know it's wrong (not bringing real peace and happiness), but you do it anyway. Procrastination. Distraction. Is this the same as drugs of abuse? Say I have a compulsion to take drugs. What would happen if I didn't take drugs? I don't know.

Or say I am afraid my body will fail if I stop distracting myself. It won't really. I can understand this if I really think it through. But a lot of the time I don't want to. I'm afraid of it. The defense and safety comes from a self-delusion and I intuitively recognize that once I start to let it go, it will fall apart. I want to have my head in the sand. But at the same time I deeply crave something that I'm not getting.

An article said we get a boost of dopamine when we distract ourselves. So how does dopamine fit into the psychological theory?

I guess we do something about the pain that we know how to fix.

I've used cellular automata as a thinking metaphor for how life could emerge from the Universe. If you had a large enough CA grid, starting random, you'd be guaranteed to get any possible structure. So if there are any structures that can persist and replicate, you should see them appear and start to dominate the grid.

1) This makes me think you would want a CA rule that didn't generally collapse randomness to nothingness or static structures. For example, Conway's rules on a random grid produce mostly empty space along with some bricks, blinkers, and occasional gliders. But in the Universe, even where you don't have life, you have interesting and complex stuff going on, possibly analogous to Wolfram's Rule 30.

2) In the Universe, we don't know how life started, but it seems like there might have been a fairly smooth progression of complexity. Subatomic particles, hydrogen, heavier elements, simple molecules, nucleotides, RNA, etc. This differs from the "rely on extreme luck in the midst of a flat background" vision of CA. Even something like Rule 30 that doesn't flatten everything still doesn't produce stages of increasing depth. Maybe a CA would look like the Universe if you zoomed out (spatially and temporally) 10^10 so the "extremely lucky" structures were common and interacted with each other. If so, is the enormous amount of empty space and time between structures somehow necessary?

half halt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_halt

I was in a waiting room and I saw an article in "Dressage" magazine about this equestrian maneuver. From all the diagrams and explanation, I couldn't tell what a "half halt" is supposed to be. I can't even tell from the wiki video.

Here's the thing. I bet if you ride horses for a little bit, you "find" this maneuver. Even if you don't know what it's called, you recognize that when you "do" a certain thing, the horse responds in a certain way, and this is like a discrete entity. You can tell when it's working or not working. Sometimes you might try to do a half-half; seemingly doing the exact same action that you've always done, but for some reason it doesn't work, you don't get that response.

Like in Go, the ideas of moyo or thickness or sente. Once you've played a bit, you know exactly what they are, but it's pretty damn hard to explain to someone who doesn't play; even if you give a perfectly good explanation, they just don't *see* it, they can't see it on the board. They have to see the thing itself first, without a name; then you can point at that thing and name it.

It's a discrete entity because there's some strength to it as apart from other possible ways the sequence of events could unfold. It's amazing in a way that things like this exist at all.

Another example is the kinds of interactions you can have with people. You can just feel that it's "this" kind of thing, 99% of the time you don't have a word for it, but you recognize it very clearly. And artists communicate this shit in sweet ways.

It blows my mind that we can communicate this stuff. Even giving a name to something like the "half halt". What *IS* it?!?!? The rider does something and the horse responds in some way and this influences the rider... and all of this is fluid and is totally dependent on the surrounding context.

It's easier for me to have this amazed feeling about something that I *don't* understand; it's harder to have it about something that I deal with routinely. That's one reason it's awesome to learn new things. You can have this vague idea of "what if things fit together in this kind of way that I can't wrap my head around", and then someone has a word for it.

sputnik means traveling companion but it stands for the loneliness of outer space

from the beginning, not a thing is

somehow this is an awesome sentence to me

maybe one of the highest things to aspire to is giving hope to other people. i have never thought of myself as influencing people particularly. but i was just thinking about how i am going through some tough shit and trying to stay mindful, always trying to recognize if i'm just anesthetizing myself, and sort of keeping in mind the deepest goal or direction (following my conscience, as i've thought of it). and at the same time having a meta-interest in this process, which may actually be a hindrance sometimes, but it means that i can maybe vaguely try to explain it. so when other people are going through distress, i can maybe be more aware of it, and even though my thoughts sound like total nonsense when i try to explain it, maybe somehow people are benefiting from that.

systems that are rich and ready

Drop a grain of sand into a supersaturated solution and watch complex crystals spontaneously form. Give an engineer two words of inspiration and watch him build an intricate machine. Inject a pathogen into the blood and watch the immune system build new antibodies and make new cells.

Many systems contain a lot of "potential energy" in this sense. What seems like a small input triggers an elaborate set of processes. With your small input, you "caused" the reaction, but a lot of the "cause" is actually the prior state of the system.

There is an important distinction between this and gating. For example, turning on your computer is a simple action that invokes a massively complex process. But there's no informational input. The computer will boot exactly the same way regardless of small variations in how you press the button. The key to what I'm thinking of is that the system receiving the input is not just waiting for some "Go" signal to perform a predetermined function. Instead it's rich and ready for a huge possible variety of inputs, each of which will engage the resources of the system in a different way.

drugs

i was just reading experience reports on erowid about mirtazapine. it reminded me of how TOTALLY AWESOME drugs are. there is so much SPACE to explore in the dimensions of interior consciousness. not diving into this is like being color-blind.

intelligence

when jeff hawkins spoke at sfn, he made the point that humans receive a lot of training before they can do anything intelligent. there's just so much stuff in the world that you have to be exposed to a lot before you can start to sort it out. i looked at the numenta website just now and i saw that they still haven't made any significant progress on AI. their program can recognize a sailboat, as long as the sail is up and it's oriented the right way and so forth. then i thought, to recognize other configurations, the program would have to have some deep knowledge about sailboats and how they work, not just pixels. so it would probably have to be trained on other kinds of data besides pictures of sailboats. then i wondered if this could actually be an advantage in some way, because of the repeating nature and scale-invariance of patterns in the universe. for example, you can attach a mast to a sailboat like you attach a methyl group to a carbon ring.

the more direct the experience, the harder to talk about... why?

i was thinking about "brain freeze", an expression people sometimes use when they can't think of something. i wanted to ask, when people use that expression, what is the actual experience they're describing? is it just applied rhetorically in retrospect if you happen to not be on the ball? or is there some really distinct feeling, like a brain-state movement? i was thinking that it's kind of hard to phrase this question in a way so someone could understand what i'm trying to ask. how do you talk about "brain-state movements"? "now it feels like this...."

and then i was thinking that, paradoxically, the most abstract (distanced from direct experience) things are the easiest to talk about. in the limit, you have formal systems that can be perfectly described with no ambiguity, and no one has ever experienced a formal system. on the other end of the spectrum, looking at a block of wood. it's pretty hard to describe the essence of that experience.

self-image

if you have a fantasy image of yourself being an awesome person, then you have to defend that image if something suggests it might be false. if you have a fantasy image of yourself being worthless, then everything bad confirms this image. what if you have no real image of yourself?

using abstract information to update concretely-learned rules

For more than two years, I regularly drank the tap water in lab. Then I learned from the building management that it is not potable because in some other labs the same water system is hooked up to equipment that can potentially create backflow (although there are guards against this, it's considered a significant risk). So I stopped drinking the water.

I probably drank the water a thousand times, and I never suffered any ill effects. Just going by my experience, I'd have to infer a very small probability that continuing to drink the water would cause harm (leaving aside the possibility of a cumulative health hazard- e.g. increased cancer risk). If I were a cave-man king drinking from a mountain stream, I would have long ago stopped requesting my servant to test the water for me.

But I incorporated the abstract knowledge of an invisible threat into my behavior. It's as if I were watching someone play Russian roulette. They pull the trigger fifty times and no bang. I shouldn't be too worried about squeezing one on myself. On the other hand, if someone shows me a schematic of the gun, and on the inside there's a digital counter ticking down from fifty-one, I will be more worried.

In particular, the abstract information gave me a new Markov model of the world. Before I heard from building management, my belief was that contaminants in the water would either always or never be present. Therefore, each incident of not being poisoned reinforced my belief that I would never be poisoned. However, the new information revealed that there was always a small but finite chance of toxic backflow.

I wonder how this kind of learning fits into our learning processes in general. It's always seemed mysterious to me how we can extract deep Markov structure from essentially binary environmental feedback.

binding rhythms and the realms of being

1. EEG rhythms change in concentration, wakefulness, REM, and dreamless sleep.
2. The states of consciousness- waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep- correspond to the realms of being- gross, subtle, causal.
3. Representation in the brain may be at least partly implemented by "binding rhythms", where a set of neurons (which may be distributed over a large physical space in the brain) become synchronized and thereby act as a functional unit.

So if delta sort of corresponds to the witness, maybe that's just the pure fact of representation (which is what creates subject/object), a slow rhythm involving many neurons that would in waking be separately representing various forms.

static/dynamic

i wonder if self/other is related to static/dynamic.

drugs and mental rigidity

In 2002, I started having anxiety attacks. Their most potent trigger was drugs. I had my first one after combining Wellbutrin, Ritalin, codeine, Benadryl, and marijuana. My second one was from yohimbine. Then a caffeine pill. I finally figured out that the drugs were triggering these things after the fourth attack (from smoking pot). After that, I would sometimes have spontaneous attacks without any drugs, but drugs were the best trigger.

Why did the drugs start to have this effect on me? Before 2002, I was convinced that I could take any amount of any mind-altering drug, short of a physically toxic dose, without ill effects. I didn't respect people who "freaked out" on hallucinogens. I had taken insane combinations, like 700mg of dextromethorphan, 500mg of diphenhydramine, and as many balloons of nitrous as I could stay conscious for. At worst, I would have some restless energy toward the end of the trip.

I still have no idea what changed biologically. But subjectively, I realized that one cause of my anxiety was an increase in my mental rigidity. As a drug starts to kick in, it puts pressure on your mind-state on many levels. In the old days, before anxiety, coming up was a great feeling, and I would melt into it. In a lot of ways, I wouldn't even be the same person while tripping. The entire framework of my mind could be pulled fluidly by the drug.

When I was 19, my mind started resisting the pull. I don't know why exactly, but it was related to my social development. I feel like I have a lot more to say about this, but it's not coming to me now.

being normal

benoit vs basal ganglia

I just had an idea that is too amazingly simple.

I was reading more in Supreme Doctrine. One of Benoit's metaphors is "training". He imagines the mind as a horse being ridden by a horseman. The horse is sort of like "subconscious", although not exactly. It's more like what you do. The horseman periodically (every other moment, or with long stretches in between) interrupts the horse and evaluates it, good or bad. This training is motivated by the idea that "heaven is just around the corner" -- if I can just get/change/accomplish whatever image, my fundamental distress will be solved. Benoit points out that the training itself isn't bad; for example, training your horse is what lets you develop the understanding that leads to enlightenment. In fact, if you try to eliminate the training, thinking that it is the root of your distress (which is, in a sense, true), then you're just training yourself not to train, which is at least as bad!

Anyway, my thought was, what if that is the basal ganglia loop?!? The brain is training itself through the dopamine signal (and probably lots of other signals). Maybe the horseman is cortical control or something else, but the key is that idea of the online training loop. That would suggest that this system is close to whatever in the brain actually is the root of distress. I know I'm getting way ahead of myself and this isn't well-formed at all. There's got to be something here, though.

don't lay a finger on life

another thing with the cognitive scaffolding

I just thought of another purpose for cognitive scaffolding. Cognitive is periodically going to ask, "what's up?", and if it doesn't get a satisfactory answer, it will get agitated and start messing around. For cognitive to keep quiet, it needs an explanation of the situation in its own terms.

Participled out?

Noun yourself.

cognitive scaffolding for non-cognitive development

Here is another idea.

Not all personal development is cognitive. But maybe cognitive processes can facilitate non-cognitive development in some cases. An example would be where cognitive simply knows that it's not the whole picture. Or cognitive can get feedback and learn which of its patterns are leading into good transcognitive states.

Because cognitive is doing this stuff, it either stops itself from fucking up other processes, or actively helps growth, maybe by remembering to "do" a spiritual practice. (I love how cognitive thinks it is "doing" :-) ... not that it's not :-) ...)

This might be related to good kid's stories, which have deep messages whose motivation can't be understood by the kids; yet the pithy statement of the message sticks with the kid and guides them to absorb experiences that help to flesh out the motivation.

this is normal

i just had a weird thought. i don't know if it will make any sense if i try to explain it. i was staring at my lab computer box and not really thinking anything. i drifted into the mental situation where i "feel my mind" for any drug effects. that part is hard to explain, too, but it's sort of like a particular "location" in my mind that i can probe to check out what my overall state is like. it feels almost tangible. this whole explanation makes the process sound very concrete, but it's really normally pretty subtle, and it's maybe even something i'm doing without thinking about it sometimes. anyway, the weird thought was, "no, i'm not on any drugs; this is normal". this is what normal feels like.

email to abolitionist-society.com

I was reading through the objections to the Hedonistic Imperative (http://hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon4.htm), and I thought of one that isn't listed.

To preface this, I am really excited about your ideas. I'm so glad that there are people thinking like this and working to make substantive changes in the world. I'd just like to hear your take on the following issue.

What is suffering? Drugs like opiates or MDMA can make me feel great, warm, comfortable, loved. But in the back of my mind there can still be some "existential distress", like the "big problem" of my existence is still unanswered. [You might reply that solving this big problem just requires a more thorough re-engineering of my brain, but please keep reading...]

What if what we normally call suffering is actually part of the development/evolution process, and it's not intrinsically bad, but rather one side of a yin/yang-type dualism in the manifest world? A lot of times when I force myself to closely examine subjective experiences that I thought were "bad", I find out that they aren't actually bad; it was mostly my fear or avoidance that was causing me distress.

Sometimes it's when I feel most "existentially distressed" that I make the most internal progress. The distress forces me to address and open myself to parts of myself/reality that I otherwise wouldn't.

States of happiness or well-being are states of the self. Buddhism claims that suffering is caused by attachment, or wanting. When you feel an emptiness and you try to solve it by seeking the thing you think will cure it, you distract your mind. This process is actually what generates the self. But if you feel the emptiness and let it be what it is, then part of the self dissipates, and what's left is more enlightened. If we anesthetize ourselves against what is "bad" on the relative plane, then our selfs are reinforced.

Some people say "Love has no opposite". I think that means that although there are "good" and "bad" in the manifest world, the superior principle through which the universe is unfolding is neither "good" nor "bad" and has no dualism or opposite. If this is true, then in some sense the abolitionist project is already complete!

Now, to be fair, bad experiences clearly exist nowadays, and I think most people would agree that we should work to reduce suffering in the world. But I wonder about the difference between "working to reduce suffering" and "working to reduce the capacity for suffering". If someone has a broken leg, you set the bone, but if someone lost a family member, you support them and show them compassion as they heal. Through the healing process, you and that person both grow, and you grow closer to each other.

One more thought. "Bad" subjective experiences may actually be a constitutive part of development and growth. Just to throw out a crazy idea, suppose a network of neurons has learned a certain set of inputs pretty well. Now the network is exposed to new inputs and wants to change itself so it can generalize to both the old and the new. There may be an unsettled period between stably representing the old and stably representing both. (Something like an increased temperature parameter for the network.) What if that unsettled period *is* the material correlate of the subjective experience of negativity?

out of addiction (a hopeful hypothesis)

say you're addicted to doing X (X could be an external or internal behavior).

stages:
1. you "believe" that X will make you feel better. believe is in quotes because you haven't really looked at it yet; it's more of a reflexive belief.
2. you recognize that X actually doesn't satisfy that deep craving for something that it was supposed to satisfy. in fact, you may recognize that X even makes you feel bad. but you keep doing X because on some level you don't apprehend how it is hurting you.
3. you internalize and integrate the realization that X makes you feel bad and doesn't relieve your emptiness.