Greedy compression, type safety, and suffering

The brain applies a very simple and very “greedy” compression algorithm to sensations; this algorithm is a big part of why the brain is so efficient but the results are often also a little insane. The source of both the brain’s efficiency and insanity can be described as “lack of ‘type safety’” and can show up in various ways: intuition, superstition, schizophrenia, tanha.

The basic pattern I want to point at is that the brain is very aggressive in compressing/controlling sensations, to the point where if we were to really dissect every attempted operation, we’d find many ‘aren’t even wrong’, similar to multiplying two strings or applying MP3 compression to pictures.

The Buddha observed that our mind’s default compression algorithm produces many type errors (trying to control sensations in ways that they cannot be controlled) and these errors are the source of a surprisingly huge amount of suffering; furthermore, you can refactor the algorithm to avoid these errors and the suffering evaporates. The theory of vipassana is that if you create the conditions to observe the possibility of a mind without these type errors, you naturally begin to stop doing them.

Examples are a little hard because we’re fish in water; we apply this (overly) greedy compression algorithm to everything many times per second. But things like: when we eat tasty food we predict the taste in our mouth will last forever, or if we get into a car crash we’ll try to reject that it happened. Both are examples of tanha, counterproductive ‘clinging’.

Another way to say the same thing: we routinely hold predictions in order to navigate and act in the world, but we tend to be unskillful in what predictions we make and how long we hold them. Developing “type safety” around these predictions can substantially improve our daily experience.

Principles of Vasocomputation explicitly brings in active inference & (speculatively) grounds the mechanism in the vasomuscular system