feeling like things are a little unfair

we don't like being taken advantage of. for example, if you always clean up after your housemate, and they never clean up after you, this doesn't sit well.

to avoid being taken advantage of, we roughly track how much we've done for someone and how much they've done for us. it's annoying if someone does this tracking excessively, but i think everybody does it to some degree.

however, this tracking is not an exact science. there's lots of uncertainty. and most importantly, i think we probably tend (more often than not) to give ourselves the benefit of this doubt.

what this means is that if things are "objectively" fair, each person will feel like they're giving slightly more than the other person, in the long run.

so this is probably the feeling we should be expecting, and accepting.

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.