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Vasocomputation suggests that imagination is essentially tension-based: squeezing vascular muscle in just the right place in your predictive hierarchy to stabilize the feeling of an apple, a princess, a dragon.

It takes hard work to learn how to precisely move muscles, because muscle control signals are tricky — babies & spinal injury patients take long months and constant effort to (re)gain function

We all have huge deficits in where in our nervous systems we can clench — “aphantasia” is just the tip of the iceberg. As a philosopher with aphantasia, I’d counter that most people have aphilosophia — inability to stabilize patterns at the very top of the predictive hierarchy. But it’s trainable

Without the invitation and the need, people just don’t develop fine capacities — much easier to solve problems with your known mental motions than develop new ones. It can be really painful talking with someone who habitually uses classes of stabilized patterns you personally don’t know how to stabilize — “thinking hurts” when you try to move muscles in areas you don’t have clean access to. But then once you can do it it can be lots of fun

I think within a few years we could ask a good multi-modal LLM to test for capacity to stabilize patterns at different levels of various predictive hierarchies, and exercises to train stabilization at the levels you’re bad at

Such a map of places in your nervous system where you can clench (and thus can control), and where you can’t clench (and thus are simply subject to whatever patterns are flowing through), would be a map of phenomenal agency. Very similar to Kegan levels, but perhaps something it would be easier to test for and improve

Obviously this has a lot of implications for iPad/covid kids