WEBVTT

NOTE Machine-generated transcript; not human-reviewed.
NOTE Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/jhanas-awakening-vasocomputation/

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Why is Wittgenstein your favorite philosopher?

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So, I think that Wittgenstein, I mean, he's sort of famous for saying that almost

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all philosophy is bullshit. And that resonates with me. And I think that just the way he

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thinks about language as constructed, that there are these games we play. And in a simple

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sense, it's like we pointed some sticks and we figured out, okay, you know, maybe this

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stick means that and that stick means that. Just kind of we constructed very simple games.

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And then things have meaning within each game. And then language is kind of the set of all

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verbal games that we can play. And I thought this was just mind-blowingly cool when I came

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across it in college. And it does dissolve a lot of forms of confusion. And I really

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respect Wittgenstein for just going for it. Like, okay, let's try to explain everything

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in these terms.

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And then I think that there's sort of a...

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There's sort of the positive framing of what I appreciate so much about Wittgenstein. And

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there's also sort of the negative after image of what's left in philosophy to sort out,

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to figure out. After you say, okay, language is just this set of games and meaning is defined

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within each game, then some sorts of questions in philosophy just dissolve, but some become

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meaningless.

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For example, well, what kinds of games can we play with language? What kind of game is science?

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What kind of game is physics versus mathematics versus sociology? So I think it's a very rich

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jumping off point.

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I remember you had this tweet where you're saying his philosophy ultimately has...

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It has like a moral point of view as well. Like when you take it in totality and then in a tongue

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of a tongue, you said it was about protecting normies from word cells.

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Right.

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Maybe you can explain what you mean by that.

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Right. Yeah. So I had a lot of fun with that tweet. And basically, I think Wittgenstein's

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observation, and I think it's just true, is that language gets used not necessarily in ways that

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illuminate reality, but that...

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Yeah.

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Control people. And this isn't necessarily good or bad. It just is. And sort of the limits of

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your language or limits of your world, to paraphrase, I guess, many people now. And I think

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that when you can confuse someone, then you can have control over them. And so I do think that

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it's very difficult to do this with tech. And I see this, like I see Wittgenstein's ideas as tech

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to sort of dissolve certain forms of confusion. I think it's very free. So that's what I'm really

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excited about in Wittgenstein. It's technology for cognitive freedom, I would say.

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And so the word cells are more...

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Yeah.

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equipped at like using this tech and then they can use it for nefarious purposes against

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the normies like what's your uh in that thread what's your definition for

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normies and word cells yeah yeah so i mean uh a normie in in the sense it's just somebody

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trying to live their life um and then uh a word cell i i call i called word cells dark magicians

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uh in in this uh kind of a you know a fun way to to say it but i do think that um basically

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so i think it was mark andreason uh had the distinction of well in in sort of on twitter

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or in in the professional world there are word cells uh and shape rotators and word cells sort

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of deal with language and sort of like the way that they're used to do things and and

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and um it's sort of if they can tell the story that the world works in a certain way uh they

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feel that they make the world work in that way and this is actually sometimes just true

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because to some degree, reality is socially constructed.

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But then the shape rotators in Mark's terms, I think it's Mark, they sort of are a little bit

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more grounded in reality, we can say. And people who have maybe autism tendencies is the meme,

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I guess. It's like, yeah, if you're building a plane, you need to sort of be able to rotate

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shapes in your mind and see how everything fits. And this is a different world. Building a plane

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is different than writing a news story. If the plane doesn't conform with reality, it doesn't fly.

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So, I see some tension between these two ways of thinking. So, the shape rotators are sometimes

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they tend to take things fairly literally. And they feel like, okay, if you use a word,

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you must be sort of truth-seeking with it. And the word cells are more sort of, well, let's tell

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a story about this and maybe it'll become true. And I feel like there is this sort of eternal

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type of war between these two ways of thinking. And it's generally I think in terms of the

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pendulum can swing one way and swing back the other way. Right now I think we generally takeScripts

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andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts

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as, or reality as more socially constructed than it actually is. And we're sort of, um,

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subject to, to many layers of SIOP we can say, uh, in terms of, uh, stories about, um,

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how things work, who we are, what we value, et cetera. Um, and so, um, yeah, I, I think,

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uh, the, the counter to that is just linguistics.

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I wonder if you can provide like an example of how someone can get, uh, cast under the

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spell of like a dark magician word cell and then how, uh, having some like literacy of

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the metagame of, you know, the Wittgenstein approach can help inoculate that person against

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that attack.

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Yeah, that's a great question.

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Uh, so at, at the risk of, uh, I, I guess the, it's like the, the challenge is that

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any example, uh, that I would give, um, it's like, we're in the, we're in the SIOP already.

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Uh, so it's, yeah, but I do think, I mean, something like democracy, um, is, is like

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one example and that is like, okay, well, democracy is good.

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We live in democracy.

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And then there's kind of a switch.

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There's a switch where, um, we can call this side voting that, okay, let's, let's define

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democracy as, uh, something a little bit different.

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And then, uh, then we can say, well, that, that accords with democracy or that doesn't

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accord with democracy.

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And pretty soon the word democracy doesn't actually have any grounding to where it came

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from.

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It's sort of the play things of, um, word cells we can say.

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Uh, and so in that sense, like just going back to the grounding of the word or the construction

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of the word, um, well, where did this word come from?

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What does it mean?

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How was it used?

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And if we're using it in a new way, maybe we're just using it wrong.

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Um, or, or maybe we can use it in a new way, but we have to be upfront about that.

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Um, we can't just sort of smuggle in a new definition.

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Then and use that.

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Yeah.

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This, uh, this reminds me of, um, a phrase that a mutual friend of ours, rival voices

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likes to say a lot rectification of names where basically if I understand it correctly,

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he's saying that words, um, they're pointers and they often lose their reference.

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So like the thing that the word democracy refers to maybe once was like X and then it

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drifted through.

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of, I don't know, nefarious forces, whatever, incidental things.

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And then people still think it means X, but now it means Y.

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And we must like rectify the reference or at least be conscious of the fact that, um,

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Or at just because someone's using the same word or it's the same symbol or the same sound that you're used to, it doesn't actually point to the underlying thing you think it's pointing to.

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Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, if you can sort of get access to what people's pointers are, I mean, you can control them pretty effectively.

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Yeah. Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit. I know you've talked about how neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. And I kind of feel like a lot of your writing on neuroscience is almost, it feels very frontier. It's almost like you're searching for a new paradigm.

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So maybe you can explain what do you mean when you say,

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it's pre-paradigmatic, or what is a paradigm and how would a paradigm be helpful when it comes to neuroscience?

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Right. Yeah, that's a good question. So alchemy didn't have a paradigm. It didn't have a sort of clean ontology or kind of framework about what its sort of elements were, what the ontology of the world is, what the world is made up of, we can say.

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Yeah.

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But the domain of magic spells said, okay, I can turn this metal into gold or whatnot. But there were definitely cool things going on with alchemy, but it didn't have a system. Whereas chemistry is a system. And we can definitely say that chemistry is paradigmatic. And so there's this question of where is neuroscience in this process?

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Yeah.

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is it more like alchemy or is it more like chemistry?

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And I would have to say it's much, much more like alchemy.

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That there's clearly something interesting here going on

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and many interesting things to find.

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And we don't have a shortage of models.

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We actually have a lot of models.

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It's just that they often conflict or they often not even conflict.

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It's just kind of different, touching different parts of the elephant

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in ways that don't really add up to an elephant at this point.

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So, yeah, I think that it's actually very exciting

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that neuroscience and neurotech are pretty pragmatic

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because there's something to find and a lot to explore.

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Yeah, and I really love this quote that you said

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where pre-paradigmatic models are dominated by bullshit

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and the only antidote is good taste.

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What do you mean by good taste?

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Yeah, so it's sort of, you know, when you see it,

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and because there isn't a paradigm,

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you can't sort of necessarily systematically break down,

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you know, for every claim, you can't sort of break down,

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okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that,

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okay, where did this come from and what does this depend on and so on.

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And partly that's due to how early neuroscience theories are

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and partly due to how complex the situation is.

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But I think good taste is sort of a very complex, intuitive,

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embodied judgment of something's beauty.

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And beauty can be, you know, that's a great marker

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for sort of how well put together something is,

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how likely something is to be true in some senses.

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And yeah, I think it's necessary for navigating life,

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but especially neuroscience.

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And you said basically like whenever someone is,

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I think you were talking about neurotech,

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but maybe this also applies to neuroscience in general.

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Whenever someone's trying to do something in this field without a paradigm,

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they are presupposing, whether consciously or not,

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some model of what it means to be a human.

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And doing that in a way that is thoughtful and grounded in,

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you know, good values is obviously important.

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But yeah, first of all, did I get that right?

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And what exactly do you mean by this?

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Just like what it means to be a human being a question underneath it all?

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Yeah.

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No, that's

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well said. And I would phrase it that, I mean, so TDCS was all the rage some years ago. And you had these sort of battered powered things that you held up to your head or like strapped on a headband at various angles. And it sort of sent electricity into the brain and basically kind of a gentle zap.

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People were reporting, oh yeah, you know, I feel so much better and like more focused and my concentration comes easily and whatnot. But what kind of a thing would the brain have to be for that to work?

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What kind of a thing does the nervous system have to be for that to work? And the answers you get when you pull that thread are fairly nonsensical.

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You know, is focus just a lack of electricity? I don't think so.

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So I was pretty skeptical of that trend. And I think time has shown the skepticism to be warranted. And I mean, we do this a lot. We just kind of find crazy things to try and we try them and sometimes it works.

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But you know, I'm a big believer inScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScript

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it should always lead to kind of, um, an elegant story about what's happening, how it works,

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why it works. Um, and the, the longer the, the causal chain, uh, is to that, uh, elegant story,

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the more skeptics skepticism is warranted, I think.

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So, uh, go ahead.

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Yeah. Uh, and just like, um, you know, there's, there's sort of this

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emerging story we can say about what kind of thing a human is. Um, and a lot of great work by,

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by people like Mike 11, that the, uh, human is sort of, um, an emergent coalition of cells that

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coordinate using bioelectricity and so on. Um, and there's, you know, uh, work by,

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um,

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for example, Solonet, Soy, the, the body is kind of this, um, uh, Solonet, Soy, Stephen,

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the body is this harmonic computer. Um, that's also a beautiful, uh, beautiful view. Uh, but

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yeah, like I, I think the, the most profound useful neurotech will come out of some kind of

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beautiful story about what kind of thing the human is not just, uh, you know, uh,

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our brains with, with electricity randomly.

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So what's your, um, current like take of what kind of thing a human is?

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Yeah. Good question. Um, so I would tell him the story about embodiment in, in this way.

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Um, I think of the brain as a, a big L large language model.

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Mm-hmm.

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And brain likes to hallucinate. Uh, and it'll, it'll sort of hallucinate about anything. It's

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kind of a general purpose hallucinating. Um, and then, uh, so it sort of auto-completes

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parents. And then the body, uh, has different nerve clusters, uh, sort of, we can call them,

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uh, ganglia. Uh, we can also call them chakras. Uh, it's pretty much the same thing.

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It's just that if you, if you map out the, the nervous system, yeah. Like there are like

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big nerve clusters, uh, around where people think chocolate's are. Um, but so it's, it's

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kind of a, a short hang there. Um, but then each each nerve cluster outside the brain

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sort of deals with the local logic of some system, usually an organ. And, and so it's

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sort of gathering information.

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It's trying to understand what's happening.

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happening. And then each nerve cluster or each organ or each chakra, depending on how

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you want to frame things, it has a certain number of error codes. And I think of these

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more as ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits, things that only do a few things,

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but they do them very well. And basically, they're just ASICs that check for what error

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code they should be sending. And so, if the stomach notices that it needs food, it'll

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send out an error code

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that says hungry. And then that resonance will kind of make the brain

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hallucinate about, oh, I'm hungry. Oh, what would solve this error code? Oh, this error code,

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I've learned that this error code goes away when I have food. So let me hallucinate about

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where I could find food. And then let me just go and do it. And the error code goes away.

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So the system has more space for the next error code and the next error code. So I see our organs

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as sort of effective, specialized coprocessors that give us certain drives. And then the brain

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is plenty smart, but it's not grounded. And our body grounds the

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de-hallucinations of the brain. So, okay. The brain being an LLM that hallucinates.

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And then it takes inputs from these nerve clusters, chakras, ganglia

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that generate very specialized error codes. What comes to mind there is the, I guess it's related

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to the thing we even opened up with, which is if the relationship between the brain and the body or

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whatever ground.

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The brain is disrupted, then you become quite vulnerable to all sorts of hallucinations that

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don't even have predictive power or aren't yeah. Aren't, aren't like adaptive. And then I remember

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you saying once that that's like kind of what modernity does, like modernity basically separates

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the brain from the body. So I wonder if you could tell the listeners a little bit more what you mean

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by that.

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Yeah.

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Yeah. I do believe that. So basically if we're sort of grounded by our organs and they're sort

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of the place where we get our information about what we should be thinking about, which we be

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feeling, what we should be doing, what's important. I would say that, I mean, especially

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we can say the modern schooling system where you sit in your desk,

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for watching.

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You're

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you're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

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You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

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You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

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You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

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Damn. Yeah. It's staggeringly terrible.

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Uh, and basically I think what, what's happening is that this is somehow like no one planned it out here, but emergently, this is a very useful thing to happen for kind of the, the system, uh, because it makes people a lot more controllable because they can't listen to themselves.

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Uh, there's, there's sort of, you know, after, after those 13 years, um, you sort of lose touch with, uh, checking in with your body about what's important.

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Uh, but the brain is still going to hallucinate about something.

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And so we've gotten very good at sort of breaking this connection and then, uh, sort of giving the brain like,

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grounding the brain in social signals and like, oh, um, how much money am I making?

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Or, uh, you know, do I have my, my peers approval?

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Uh, am I, um, am I useful to society basically?

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And so this is a very, it's a very effective thing for society to be doing.

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You, you sort of unground people by breaking their mind, body.

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Connection.

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And then you reground them, uh, based on what's important for society.

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Uh, but it's not particularly good for the individual.

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And in practice, society built on this, um, just isn't a particularly good place to live.

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So if you're like, let's assume that we're all kind of in the psyop, as you said, or, you know, to some degree,

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effective.

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What is something that an individual can do?

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Like someone listening to this to reground or to gauge the extent

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to which they've become disembodied.

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Yeah.

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Um,

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I mean,

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I would,

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I would have to say that,

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uh,

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first of all,

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just noticing what is actively grounding you right now.

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Uh,

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and like often that's your phone,

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uh,

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that's thrilling Twitter.

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Uh,

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and,

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and sort of,

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I mean,

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these are,

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these are very loud signals and it's easy to,

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you know,

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if,

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if you are ungrounded,

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then it's easy to sort of latch onto these and,

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um,

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and use them as your,

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um,

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as your brain scorecard.

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Um,

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so I think that,

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I mean,

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step one is to get a little distance from devices.

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Touch grass.

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Yeah.

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Literally touch grass,

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go outside,

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feed the sun,

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see nature.

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Um,

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and like,

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you know,

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avoid like cut out the super stimuli for,

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you know,

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at least a little while,

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and then do things that will stimulate your natural basics,

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your natural grounding,

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uh,

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patterns.

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And like pretty soon you'll,

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you'll know what to do.

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Yeah.

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It's funny.

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Um,

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how simple it is.

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Um,

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I'll just share like a personal example to make it maybe more vivid to people.

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I remember about a year and a half ago,

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I did this experiment where someone challenged me to post on Tik TOK,

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um,

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which is something I had no experience with.

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And so the experiment was,

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I was going to post a video a day for four weeks just to see what would happen

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and then get comfortable,

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like making short form content or talking to a camera and stuff.

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And I remember about like a week and a half into it.

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Um,

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a few of the videos had popped off and,

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of views and so i started to have like this new motivational schema that was totally unfamiliar

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to me just start to set in and i remember one day i woke up and i caught myself in this feeling and

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i remember i just tell my friend about it where somehow it felt like the point of my day like

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quite literally like the background feeling of like the whole point of the day was to get another

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viral video on tiktok and it was like all the other stuff i did was like foregrounded by this

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background feeling and it was it was really cool to catch myself in that state because i had just

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started this experiment as like this little isolated thing so i could remember a time

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totally like before i even knew this feeling but very quickly it just came in and supplanted my

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my motivational schemas and i guess i guess that's just kind of how the

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the the brain works you know if and a lot of these tools are perfectly designed to

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kind of interface with that nice yeah that's that's a pretty wild story and like

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your brain is evolved or your your heart is evolved to probably have your best uh in like

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your well-being in mind your kidneys are involved to send signals that you know will

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put you through the process of getting rid of all the bad things and all the bad things and

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in a better place if you listen to them uh your tiktok chakra uh probably does not

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that was that's good intention so yeah it makes sense yeah um just add another bit to this i think

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part of it was especially in the beginning i couldn't really tell the difference between

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like millions of people on the internet and like thousands of comments versus like real people in

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real life it was like it was as if on some level my system was interpreting them at the same

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at the same plane so if there was like positive comments or hateful comments or something like

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that i was just still parsing them as if like real people were saying these things to me

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and that was just in the beginning eventually you know i adjusted to it and set boundaries but

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it was it was surprising how sensitive i was and i wouldn't expect to be just based on my

328
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it was just easy to kind of like plug into this thing um and yeah just a very practical i guess

329
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antidote just to highlight the thing you said is uh just removing super super normal stimuli

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for a period of time to kind of recalibrate and for me that means you know all social media

331
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and means uh youtube i remember i had this thing where i was just finishing projects and being

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super disciplined and i was like so productive for a period of time and i was like what the

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hell is this and i was like what the hell is this and i was like what the hell is this

334
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going on like what's different and then i realized i had not been on youtube for like three months

335
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nice and

336
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I think it sounds very simple and everyone kind of knows this stuff is valuable, but I can't like stress it enough.

337
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It's easy to say and hard to do.

338
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Yeah. I want to introduce something you said. You talked about treasure maps as like an analogy for making sense of pre-paradigmatic fields.

339
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So, like when we don't really have a paradigm for neuroscience, we can rely on treasure maps to help us like do good alchemy, I guess.

340
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And you said that one example could be Theravada Buddhism. So, why is Buddhism a good treasure map and what exactly do you mean by that analogy?

341
00:30:44.040 --> 00:30:54.200
Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So, I would say that, I mean, first of all, just sort of knowing the lay of the land, what's out there.

342
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Is always valuable and especially when the maps are bad, then you can kind of go to traditional maps of, okay, like a lot of people have meditated over the years.

343
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Buddha was a pretty smart guy and so were the scholars who came after him as well.

344
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And so, like what did they say about what the landscape looks like?

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Yeah.

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nationally, where are the good parts? It's like in sort of old school maps. So my first blog before

347
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Open Theory, I called it Modern Dragons. And there was kind of this, at least an anecdote, if not

348
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reality, old school map makers used to write, hic sunt dracones, here be dragons in Latin.

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And where they didn't know exactly what was there, but just dragon, maybe dangerous, don't go there.

350
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And I always liked that. And I think that just kind of knowing, having a rough map of the

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landscape and knowing where the good parts are, it's like, oh, I'm going to do this.

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And where the dangerous parts are, it's super, super valuable. And it's always a big question

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about how to understand what a mind is and how to navigate the human. And I mean, I actually think

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that throughout the last century, psychology has actually gotten actively worse at doing this.

355
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We've gotten from Carl Jung, which he was a smart guy. I like his work.

356
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To more, I don't know, more lowbrow psychology, I would say. Kind of trying to science things up,

357
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but not doing it in a very holistic way. Now, I would say that in terms of Buddhism,

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I find it extremely interesting. Not just because, okay, this is a good sort of system of phenomenology,

359
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but also there's, you know, in kind of the center of the map with, you know, glowing arrows and

360
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flapping lives. Like, there is like, there's paradise here. Like, awakening, enlightenment,

361
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liberation. Like, this is the point. And for that to have been written,

362
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and passed down for, you know, 2500 years, and okay, like, maybe it's, it's worth taking

363
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seriously. Maybe there is a big treasure to find. And Nick Camerata has a lot of beautiful

364
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threads on this topic. And he, he recently had a thread of how, like, he's actually kind of upset

365
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how downplayed the idea of enlightenment, awakening, liberation, sort of, you know,

366
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prior some path, how significant people phrase stats. They kind of lowball it. They say, oh,

367
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yeah, you know, once, once you get here, you'll understand or whatever. But he's like, no,

368
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like, they should be saying, okay, you know, it's at least a 10x, maybe it's 100x. And you should,

369
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like, it's definitely worth going for. Like, this is a big, a big treasure to sort of

370
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discover in life. And yeah, it's worth the effort. So, yeah, I had to laugh at that. And

371
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I probably agree with that. And like, I guess, in

372
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my research right now, and we've talked about vasocomputation in part one, I'm really pretty focused on understanding, okay, what's happening, not only during meditation, where presumably you sort of get incrementally closer to something in maybe a continuous way, but also what is awakening?

373
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Are there, in fact, discrete irreversible jumps where there's a clear before and there's a clear after and there's no going back and things are a lot better on the other side?

374
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And if so, what in the world is happening in the brain?

375
00:35:51.920 --> 00:36:05.380
So maybe to sell the listeners a little bit more on this and not downplay it, do you remember that quote by Shinzen where like somebody asked him like how he would describe the experience after awakening?

376
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I don't remember the details, but I thought that was the most compelling summary.

377
00:36:08.520 --> 00:36:09.880
So if you remember it, maybe you can share it.

378
00:36:10.780 --> 00:36:11.760
Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

379
00:36:12.560 --> 00:36:14.260
It's an extreme quote.

380
00:36:14.960 --> 00:36:21.080
You know, he's when he's tried to put numbers on it, you know, he said, you know, very conservatively.

381
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Like life is 10 times better or 20 times better.

382
00:36:25.820 --> 00:36:37.760
But this quote is something like, you know, he would prefer maybe like one afternoon of being awakened to the rest of his life.

383
00:36:38.880 --> 00:36:41.600
Like it's just that much, that much better.

384
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And I think he even said he was comparing like a normal afternoon being awakened versus a life where everything would be maxed out.

385
00:36:51.760 --> 00:37:07.900
On all the kind of like worldly metrics that people would care about, like wealth and, you know, supermodels and yachts and what I can't remember the details, but it was just like the strongest, I guess, like, yeah, pronouncement or selling point.

386
00:37:09.680 --> 00:37:10.720
Yeah, maybe.

387
00:37:11.400 --> 00:37:21.320
I have a good friend who has told me that, yeah, like eating good food and sex actually feel.

388
00:37:21.760 --> 00:37:34.300
Worse than just hanging out and vibing like in this sort of state that anything that takes you away from the present moment once you once you just stay doesn't feel as good.

389
00:37:35.060 --> 00:37:36.820
Yeah, I think that also scares people.

390
00:37:38.180 --> 00:37:50.740
But so maybe like as we go into this, you can give like a working definition of awakening or enlightenment for maybe people who are like less familiar with this stuff.

391
00:37:50.840 --> 00:37:51.700
And then we can get into it more.

392
00:37:51.760 --> 00:37:55.260
Specific definition as you kind of unfold your paradigm.

393
00:37:56.020 --> 00:37:56.640
Sure.

394
00:37:57.660 --> 00:38:04.740
Yeah, just to say a few things in general, and this isn't particularly particular to my work.

395
00:38:05.560 --> 00:38:11.840
So Theravada Buddhism, they have a four path model of enlightenment.

396
00:38:12.280 --> 00:38:19.600
So like stream entry is sort of the first path, second path, third path.

397
00:38:19.780 --> 00:38:21.380
And then once you complete fourth path.

398
00:38:21.760 --> 00:38:24.700
Then like that's a big milestone.

399
00:38:24.900 --> 00:38:37.340
You've got it in some sense, not to put a materialistic perspective on it, but like some irreversible shift has happened and it's very good.

400
00:38:37.520 --> 00:38:41.020
And with each completion of each path.

401
00:38:42.020 --> 00:38:45.140
A large part of suffering drops away.

402
00:38:45.580 --> 00:38:50.180
So I've heard various percentages bandied around.

403
00:38:50.360 --> 00:38:51.280
But like.

404
00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:57.420
It's there are these sort of discrete milestones where things feel a lot better.

405
00:38:59.520 --> 00:39:08.600
And there are also, you know, there are trials and tribulations, sort of unpleasant parts to path to the 39th stuff.

406
00:39:10.780 --> 00:39:15.800
So I can say a little bit about Vesic amputation.

407
00:39:16.540 --> 00:39:18.060
And go from there.

408
00:39:20.240 --> 00:39:20.840
So.

409
00:39:21.760 --> 00:39:27.720
Last year, I posted a piece called principles of Vesic amputation part one.

410
00:39:28.280 --> 00:39:34.320
And I sort of would describe it now as a three by three hypothesis.

411
00:39:35.620 --> 00:39:44.880
First of all, sort of lining up three domains that Buddhist phenomenology being the one like first domain.

412
00:39:46.100 --> 00:39:50.720
And there's this term in Buddhism, Tanha.

413
00:39:51.760 --> 00:39:58.140
In Buddhism, it's variously translated as grasping or thirst, clenching desire.

414
00:39:58.700 --> 00:39:59.900
If you

415
00:40:00.120 --> 00:40:20.520
desire as the root of all suffering, well, desire in this sense is a very technical term used in Buddhism. And it's sort of when a sensation comes into the mind, we naturally grab at it and try to make it controllable, in the words of Grand

416
00:40:20.520 --> 00:40:32.500
Bernard Stevens. Controllable, satisfying, and permanent. So if we have a nice taste of some

417
00:40:32.500 --> 00:40:39.720
chocolate cake, we try to grab that sensation and keep it forever. It's just instinctive. And this

418
00:40:40.240 --> 00:40:43.960
is the root of a lot of suffering because sensations don't work like that.

419
00:40:45.700 --> 00:40:49.860
And if it's a bad sensation, we try to push it away and not feel it.

420
00:40:50.520 --> 00:40:58.360
And of course, that is the root of suffering as well. So trying to control our sensations in this

421
00:40:58.360 --> 00:41:05.880
way is seen as the root of suffering. And the second domain, active inference,

422
00:41:07.840 --> 00:41:13.300
basically not only is the brain a prediction machine, we're sort of hallucinating our reality,

423
00:41:13.420 --> 00:41:17.940
predicting what it will be, and we sort of ignore what we can successfully predict.

424
00:41:19.000 --> 00:41:20.380
But we often

425
00:41:20.520 --> 00:41:26.500
navigate the world by making predictions and then acting to make them true.

426
00:41:28.200 --> 00:41:35.680
So if I predict that we'll go for coffee tomorrow, I'll make that. Or if I agree, okay,

427
00:41:35.780 --> 00:41:44.320
damn, let's go to coffee tomorrow, then I'll hold that prediction and kind of my mind sort

428
00:41:44.320 --> 00:41:49.500
of self-organizes around making that true. We go to coffee, then I can release the prediction.

429
00:41:49.820 --> 00:41:49.880
Yeah.

430
00:41:53.200 --> 00:42:02.320
And basically the connection, this is a little tangential, but basically this

431
00:42:02.320 --> 00:42:09.740
, this grabbing, this grasping, this initial sort of instinctive impulse that we

432
00:42:09.740 --> 00:42:17.600
have to control sensations, it's the same thing as making a prediction about our senses.

433
00:42:18.240 --> 00:42:18.660
Yeah.

434
00:42:20.520 --> 00:42:29.020
And then there's this big question about how all this is implemented. And this is kind of where

435
00:42:32.420 --> 00:42:40.920
I'm most excited to dig into. And this is, I think, the vasomuscular system,

436
00:42:41.560 --> 00:42:49.800
literally the muscles that are wrapped around all of our blood vessels are able to sort of grab at

437
00:42:49.800 --> 00:42:50.500
patterns. And then there's this big question about how all this is implemented. And this is kind of

438
00:42:50.520 --> 00:42:56.440
And I think that when we have some sort of a psychological reaction to something,

439
00:42:57.150 --> 00:43:03.980
it's literally a muscle reflex. It's literally a clenching of this immune muscle around our

440
00:43:04.790 --> 00:43:17.260
blood vessels. And so I think that helps us try to control our sensations. But also I guess

441
00:43:17.260 --> 00:43:17.540
Yeah.

442
00:43:18.860 --> 00:43:19.440
Yeah.

443
00:43:21.520 --> 00:43:42.620
Um, like blood flow, um, blood flow, uh, is not exactly how we are. Well, okay. There

444
00:43:42.620 --> 00:43:48.780
was an amazing paper, uh, just about 20 years ago. Um, it was called the hemo neural hypothesis

445
00:43:48.780 --> 00:43:57.140
hypothesis, and it made, uh, two really interesting observations. Um, the first observation was

446
00:43:57.140 --> 00:44:02.980
that, uh, blood flow, uh, well, it's this one and then there's some followup work as

447
00:44:02.980 --> 00:44:11.620
well. Uh, so the basic conclusions, one is that, um, blood flow in the, in the brain

448
00:44:11.620 --> 00:44:18.760
varies by a factor of 20, not 10%, not 20%, but literally 20%.

449
00:44:18.780 --> 00:44:33.060
Oh, huge. And, uh, the second observation, uh, was that, um, blood changes in blood flow

450
00:44:33.560 --> 00:44:41.820
actually proceed changes in neural activity. It's not that you use a bunch of oxygen and

451
00:44:41.820 --> 00:44:48.220
then the blood comes to sort of, uh, pay for that in your planar cells. It's that the blood

452
00:44:48.220 --> 00:44:48.640
comes.

453
00:44:48.640 --> 00:44:48.760
Um, and then the blood comes to sort of, uh, pay for that in your planar cells. Um, it's

454
00:44:48.780 --> 00:45:00.000
first and then the neurons change. And so this is a fascinating thing that

455
00:45:00.780 --> 00:45:03.080
has a lot of implications.

456
00:45:03.400 --> 00:45:27.920
The basic story that I would tell, the picture I would paint here is that, and this is related to the 2007 paper, they make this claim. Basically, blood flow adjusts neural dynamism,

457
00:45:29.000 --> 00:45:57.540
like the gain in the network, the sensitivity. And so, if you dial blood flow up to some tissue, then it can sort of use its full dynamic range. It's very sensitive to signals that it's getting. You can rewire a bunch of stuff, it can change, it can update and adapt. Then when you dial blood flow down, so from 20x to 1x, say,

458
00:45:59.000 --> 00:46:11.740
then it no longer updates, it no longer changes. That basically, whatever patterns are sort of bouncing around in the network, those patterns freeze.

459
00:46:14.060 --> 00:46:23.060
And I think that this presents a very interesting picture of

460
00:46:25.560 --> 00:46:37.460
our somatic programming environment. Once you can sort of adjust what's dynamic and what's static,

461
00:46:38.440 --> 00:46:48.800
then you can sort of build complicated patterns by grabbing certain patterns and combining them and so on.

462
00:46:51.540 --> 00:46:53.040
I'll pause the video.

463
00:46:54.380 --> 00:47:00.160
Yeah, well, let me see if I get the basics of the model first, because you said

464
00:47:01.740 --> 00:47:08.340
vasocomputation is like a three by three. And then you mentioned TANA, active inference.

465
00:47:09.580 --> 00:47:14.920
And what's the third thing? I may have missed that. Is that the vasomuscular system or is there

466
00:47:14.920 --> 00:47:15.680
something else?

467
00:47:16.300 --> 00:47:22.820
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, the first domain that I've linked together is Buddhist

468
00:47:22.820 --> 00:47:23.460
phonology.

469
00:47:24.060 --> 00:47:32.620
And then the second domain is active inference predictions. And like grasping intention in

470
00:47:33.300 --> 00:47:39.520
phenomenology, it's the same as making predictions in active inference. And then the third domain is

471
00:47:41.160 --> 00:47:46.280
sort of physical touching in smooth muscle.

472
00:47:47.320 --> 00:47:53.720
Right. And active inference, how is that different from passive inference?

473
00:47:56.640 --> 00:48:03.480
Right. So, passive inference, so if you want to reduce your prediction error,

474
00:48:04.320 --> 00:48:10.940
you have two basic options. The first is to make better predictions.

475
00:48:12.670 --> 00:48:22.700
And the second is to make predictions and then make them true. And so, that's called active inference.

476
00:48:23.300 --> 00:48:23.670
Okay.

477
00:48:29.680 --> 00:48:38.840
And so, I'm going to just try to summarize in my own words. But basically, there's evidence that so first we do

478
00:48:38.840 --> 00:48:43.720
this thing active inference where we make predictions and then we conduct ourselves in a manner to

479
00:48:43.720 --> 00:48:51.900
increase the odds that they occur. The Buddhist phenomenology side of it is that we do this in a manner

480
00:48:51.900 --> 00:48:52.960
that's unwise.

481
00:48:53.680 --> 00:48:54.040
Yeah.

482
00:48:54.060 --> 00:49:01.460
precipitates suffering because we try to do it when it comes to sensations positive or negative

483
00:49:01.460 --> 00:49:07.740
that we don't actually have the ability to control and we're going to get into this in more detail

484
00:49:07.740 --> 00:49:14.560
now but there's evidence that the mechanism for this is the smooth muscle around our vascular

485
00:49:14.560 --> 00:49:26.160
system yeah that's that's the move that i want to make um that uh like this this thing this reflex

486
00:49:26.160 --> 00:49:32.860
that the buddhists call tanha is actually a physical reflex uh of of our smooth muscle system

487
00:49:32.860 --> 00:49:38.080
kind of the um especially the the muscle wrapped around our vasculature

488
00:49:40.460 --> 00:49:43.300
so i don't know if i mentioned this last time we spoke but

489
00:49:43.300 --> 00:49:44.540
when i first started talking about this i was like oh my god i'm not sure if i'm

490
00:49:44.560 --> 00:49:52.980
the thing that immediately came to mind was the feeling of um trepidation before taking a cold

491
00:49:52.980 --> 00:49:59.800
shower so like the cold water's running and i'm about to step into it and i know

492
00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:28.980
like it's not gonna hurt me but there's like something that like I'm resisting and whenever I paid really close attention to that experience there's like a full body like flinch response that I think to some extent I can down regulate and it's entirely a function of how mindful and present I am but it's like the system just kind of like seizes for a second and it's that thing that just feels so aversive but then when I'm

493
00:50:29.060 --> 00:50:32.980
I get over that hump, then I can actually

494
00:50:33.000 --> 00:51:00.960
actually a very present blissful experience in the cold water it's the same with cold plunges. I bring that up because I kind of want to ground it in like a visual or like a concrete experience. Is that related at all? Absolutely. Same thing. Yeah, yeah. And like this is you know you can kind of notice this as a physical muscle reflex and no we can call it flinch. We can call it cringe. It's the same thing. We can call it tanha. It's the same thing.

495
00:51:00.960 --> 00:51:22.400
At least I strongly believe so. And then yeah it's literally a muscle reflex and reducing that muscle reflex or reducing this sort of we can say propensity toward tanha or control of sensations. It's literally muscle deconditioning.

496
00:51:24.480 --> 00:51:28.620
So before we get into the deconditioning can you maybe explain

497
00:51:29.500 --> 00:51:39.800
in a little more detail like how is this muscle reflex helping us with active inference? Like what is the relationship there?

498
00:51:40.240 --> 00:51:57.780
Right. So it's trying to help us and we're sort of greedy compressors we can say. And when we're going through life we're always trying to find

499
00:51:57.780 --> 00:51:58.600
simple things that we can do to help us. And so I think it's really important to kind of

500
00:51:58.620 --> 00:52:04.940
be able to find simple predictions. And sometimes we find some simple predictions and then we can

501
00:52:04.940 --> 00:52:11.520
discard sense data. Okay you know that's just the wind or that's just my cat or something. You're

502
00:52:11.520 --> 00:52:19.540
not going to ignore that. And then sometimes we find simple predictions of things that will be

503
00:52:19.540 --> 00:52:28.160
simple if we make them true. Like okay I'm thirsty. It would be

504
00:52:28.620 --> 00:52:35.060
a lot better for everything if I had the taste of water in my mouth. Let me just take a drink of water.

505
00:52:35.380 --> 00:52:49.540
So and I think yeah there's also like the body often hates change and

506
00:52:52.060 --> 00:52:58.480
there's something sort of very disjoint or unpredictable.

507
00:52:58.620 --> 00:53:11.020
about stepping into a cold shower. And even if it's the 2000th time you've done it, it still has that element to it.

508
00:53:11.660 --> 00:53:27.860
So the body is trying to protect you against a surprise basically. And it's trying to both avoid the surprise and control your sensation of the surprising thing.

509
00:53:27.960 --> 00:53:28.600
Yeah.

510
00:53:30.380 --> 00:53:42.780
So it's like if I have this like flinch or this cringe response, is it making me less likely to do the thing on the other side of it?

511
00:53:42.860 --> 00:53:58.600
So it's like trying to protect me from the negative stimuli. And I think last time we talked about if you have like a traumatic social experience or something in a certain place, and then you go back to that same place, you'll get this like, this same kind of cringe response.

512
00:53:59.620 --> 00:54:05.360
So the cringe stops you or tries to stop you from going back to like, you know, the thing that hurt you.

513
00:54:06.980 --> 00:54:12.460
And it also reduces the fidelity of your experience.

514
00:54:15.160 --> 00:54:21.800
Yes. So I would say that it's trying to negate the cold.

515
00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:22.720
Yeah.

516
00:54:22.720 --> 00:54:26.640
It's trying to say, no, like, I'm not going to feel this cold. This is not happening.

517
00:54:26.840 --> 00:54:27.060
Yeah.

518
00:54:28.340 --> 00:54:28.820
And

519
00:54:29.620 --> 00:54:40.920
of course it is actually cold and it is actually happening. So it's kind of a losing battle. But you're you sort of began by trying to push away the sensation until you accept it.

520
00:54:42.600 --> 00:54:45.800
And what are what are latches?

521
00:54:47.220 --> 00:54:58.840
Right. Right. So I think this is going to be the most important thing.

522
00:54:58.960 --> 00:54:59.400
Yeah.

523
00:54:59.520 --> 00:55:02.560
I guess I would

524
00:55:02.660 --> 00:55:18.960
Yeah. It's sort of the anatomical feature that neuroscience forgot. So first of all,

525
00:55:18.980 --> 00:55:24.420
just a few comments on the types of muscle. So usually we talk about muscle, like skeletal

526
00:55:24.420 --> 00:55:33.460
muscle. It can contract, it can relax, pretty simple stuff. And then there's also heart muscle,

527
00:55:35.300 --> 00:55:43.920
there's fascia, which are kind of similar. It's a contractive tissue. And then there's smooth

528
00:55:43.920 --> 00:55:50.980
muscle. And smooth muscle is unique in all of this in that it has a special setting.

529
00:55:50.980 --> 00:55:59.360
So with skeletal muscle, contract, relax. With smooth muscle, it can contract, it can relax,

530
00:56:00.280 --> 00:56:09.800
and it can also glue itself shut. It can sort of chemically glue itself into a contracted position.

531
00:56:12.600 --> 00:56:20.460
And so generally speaking, the body uses this extensively in the

532
00:56:20.980 --> 00:56:27.580
digestive system, in the pelvis, in the bladder, et cetera. It's like any time where you need to

533
00:56:27.580 --> 00:56:38.100
basically set it and forget it. Where once this latch bridge mechanism is engaged, smooth muscle

534
00:56:38.940 --> 00:56:46.680
doesn't have to spend energy to be contracted. You basically, you lock it shut and then energy

535
00:56:46.680 --> 00:56:47.700
requirements go down.

536
00:56:47.840 --> 00:56:48.280
Yeah.

537
00:56:49.820 --> 00:56:50.420
Yeah.

538
00:56:52.420 --> 00:57:04.100
These smooth muscle latches, so they can last for anywhere between minutes to hours to days to

539
00:57:04.100 --> 00:57:10.920
weeks, months, years, potentially a whole lifetime. It really is a set it and forget it thing.

540
00:57:12.680 --> 00:57:20.880
And so this gets really interesting when we combine this sort of model of

541
00:57:20.980 --> 00:57:31.240
smooth muscle latches with the vasculature, because there is smooth muscle wrapped around

542
00:57:31.240 --> 00:57:37.740
all of our blood vessels, every single one. And so anywhere blood flows,

543
00:57:38.000 --> 00:57:49.600
then we have the smooth muscle and it can latch. And the basic story I would paint here is that

544
00:57:53.640 --> 00:58:02.200
latches in vascular latches, we can say, control

545
00:58:04.600 --> 00:58:08.520
the freedom of local neurons. And

546
00:58:08.520 --> 00:58:15.560
if there's no latch and there's lots of blood flowing, then the neurons can explore their whole

547
00:58:16.100 --> 00:58:19.420
range. They can listen, they can change.

548
00:58:19.620 --> 00:58:19.680
Yeah.

549
00:58:21.900 --> 00:58:25.420
But then when a latch occurs, then they get frozen.

550
00:58:28.580 --> 00:58:30.480
And then they can't change.

551
00:58:31.660 --> 00:58:35.760
And I think that in cases of, for example, trauma,

552
00:58:37.320 --> 00:58:42.300
I would absolutely predict that these will be implemented

553
00:58:42.300 --> 00:58:46.180
through vascular smooth muscle latches.

554
00:58:46.960 --> 00:58:51.200
That if your body sort of clamps down on a pattern and says,

555
00:58:51.900 --> 00:58:54.660
like this, or like, I'll never let that happen again,

556
00:58:54.780 --> 00:58:57.880
or like, I'll never forget this.

557
00:58:58.420 --> 00:59:02.580
Then sort of there's a vascular clamp.

558
00:59:03.300 --> 00:59:06.640
And some vascular channel has closed.

559
00:59:07.620 --> 00:59:11.060
And the neurons associated with that have been frozen.

560
00:59:14.240 --> 00:59:16.760
And it's hard to open them back up.

561
00:59:18.640 --> 00:59:20.640
So let me just see if I can draw a thread

562
00:59:20.640 --> 00:59:21.800
between this.

563
00:59:21.900 --> 00:59:22.980
And some of the other things you said.

564
00:59:23.860 --> 00:59:28.820
So first, the thing about the blood flow

565
00:59:28.820 --> 00:59:31.620
varying by a factor of 20 in the brain.

566
00:59:31.720 --> 00:59:36.800
And that blood flow is the thing that regulates

567
00:59:36.800 --> 00:59:40.920
the full dynamic range of a cluster of neurons.

568
00:59:42.880 --> 00:59:45.900
If you have a traumatic experience that latches

569
00:59:45.900 --> 00:59:50.540
the smooth muscle around the vascular system

570
00:59:50.540 --> 00:59:51.880
associated with the vascular system,

571
00:59:51.900 --> 00:59:54.620
then it limits the dynamic range.

572
00:59:56.200 --> 00:59:58.920
And then this fits with what you said earlier,

573
00:59:59.240 --> 00:59:59.580
where

574
01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:27.680
the what kind of thing is a human well if it's if we're LLMs with a bunch of ASICs and then the ASICs are these like ganglia or chakras or clusters of neurons that to varying degrees are limited in their range because of our latch systems then is it fair to say that the thing we were talking about earlier about disembodiment and modernity disembodying us is it's at the at the vaso

575
01:00:28.000 --> 01:00:34.480
muscular level it's like latches being created in perpetuity that like limit our dynamic range

576
01:00:35.620 --> 01:00:44.080
i would strongly suspect that yeah yeah and yeah something very very physical and anatomical

577
01:00:45.500 --> 01:00:51.460
one quick question how is the smooth muscle latch different from

578
01:00:51.460 --> 01:00:57.820
uh the tension that i experience in my rhomboid that's like just a pattern that

579
01:00:58.000 --> 01:01:02.480
i've had and like no matter how many times i get it massaged like that pattern seems to come back

580
01:01:02.480 --> 01:01:07.580
until i you know figure out what's like the underlying cause of it is it is there a continuum

581
01:01:07.580 --> 01:01:16.140
between those two or is this the tension and skeletal muscle different sure uh so they're not

582
01:01:16.140 --> 01:01:24.660
uh of a different kind uh but like there's a little bit of difference in practice uh so

583
01:01:26.160 --> 01:01:27.440
Michael Levin talks about

584
01:01:28.000 --> 01:01:34.040
um the body is sort of having a um like performing this um distributed stress

585
01:01:34.040 --> 01:01:39.420
minimization algorithm and so if there's stress somewhere in the body then it'll kind of get

586
01:01:39.420 --> 01:01:48.500
distributed elsewhere in the body and um I think that uh like tension can can be in

587
01:01:50.360 --> 01:01:57.160
in you know any sort of contracted tissue uh it can be fascia it can be skeletal muscle it can be

588
01:01:57.160 --> 01:01:57.660
smooth muscle

589
01:01:58.000 --> 01:02:09.460
um I'm and I mean likely tension in in any of these will restrict dynamic range in some important

590
01:02:09.460 --> 01:02:16.740
respects and your body kind of pays attention attention and maybe especially like restricts

591
01:02:16.740 --> 01:02:26.240
dynamic range to keep you safe um but I would say that I'm I'm most interested in

592
01:02:28.000 --> 01:02:35.460
smooth muscle uh or like vascular smooth muscle because it has these latches which are very

593
01:02:35.460 --> 01:02:42.240
programmable um it's like okay you know there can be tension in a muscle and maybe that's because

594
01:02:42.240 --> 01:02:50.060
you're pulling in a in a certain angle and whatnot but um that's kind of macro stuff uh

595
01:02:51.190 --> 01:02:57.300
the vascular system has the potential to regulate on a micro level

596
01:02:58.000 --> 01:03:06.940
um kind of very fine grained level um that okay you know this exact neural network uh let's let's

597
01:03:06.940 --> 01:03:14.460
reduce the blood flow to it and then freeze it into this pattern so like well I would say that

598
01:03:14.460 --> 01:03:23.620
all these sorts of like tension in in any of these contraction tissues helps regulate uh the body

599
01:03:24.650 --> 01:03:27.880
it's only in vascular smooth muscle

600
01:03:28.000 --> 01:03:35.940
um that I would give it the label of computation then this is very intimately intertwined with

601
01:03:36.620 --> 01:03:44.760
how the neurons are are doing their thing so in case it's not obvious to the listener why is this

602
01:03:44.760 --> 01:03:57.040
so important for neuroscience right um most of your suffering is probably due to your latches

603
01:03:58.000 --> 01:04:07.800
and uh most of your the limits to your cognitive emotional uh behavioral freedom

604
01:04:08.670 --> 01:04:11.200
are also due to these smooth muscle latches

605
01:04:12.060 --> 01:04:18.200
and you know maybe you've heard of like heart openings or whatever in some history practices

606
01:04:18.200 --> 01:04:24.840
or you know somebody goes to zayahuasca and has an opening well what what does that do uh is that real

607
01:04:24.840 --> 01:04:27.700
and I think it is real it's a literal

608
01:04:28.000 --> 01:04:37.220
release of these smooth muscle latches and I mean in the same way that um getting circulation in

609
01:04:37.720 --> 01:04:42.980
like okay if you've been sleeping under your arm and it's gotten to sleep uh okay like

610
01:04:42.980 --> 01:04:47.320
getting circulation back in that arm maybe it hurts a little bit at the beginning but

611
01:04:47.860 --> 01:04:55.060
it feels amazing uh it's just like restoring circulation it's very healthy it feels very good

612
01:04:56.060 --> 01:05:00.000
you probably lack a lot of sort of microbe circulation due

613
01:05:00.200 --> 01:05:04.060
to these smooth muscle lunges uh it's possible to get that back

614
01:05:06.320 --> 01:05:12.820
why is it not sufficient to just you know have good cardio practices and you know maybe do sauna

615
01:05:12.820 --> 01:05:22.200
and cold plunge a couple times a week sure that'll absolutely help um i wouldn't call it uh sort of

616
01:05:22.200 --> 01:05:27.400
sufficient to get all the all the benefits uh because i have like some of these patterns are

617
01:05:29.000 --> 01:05:38.040
it's sort of the body has reasons to close these vascular channels the body has reasons to freeze

618
01:05:38.040 --> 01:05:44.880
these patterns and maybe they're good reasons maybe they're uh maybe you've outlived those

619
01:05:44.880 --> 01:05:53.100
reasons uh and it would be useful to to open them back up um but these are often very sticky

620
01:05:54.880 --> 01:05:56.180
and um

621
01:05:56.180 --> 01:05:56.800
um

622
01:05:59.000 --> 01:06:01.460
yeah i guess i'm also thinking about sort of

623
01:06:02.520 --> 01:06:09.280
enlightenment frames it but uh does that answer the question yeah well i guess so my next question was

624
01:06:09.280 --> 01:06:17.020
um what are jhanas uh from the perspective of vasocomputation and what what is enlightenment

625
01:06:19.180 --> 01:06:28.040
right uh so um i would uh i would say first of all these are these are big questions

626
01:06:29.000 --> 01:06:31.680
and um i have some theories

627
01:06:32.940 --> 01:06:33.320
and um i have some theories uh

628
01:06:33.320 --> 01:06:33.560
uh

629
01:06:33.560 --> 01:06:37.160
uh these these theories are um

630
01:06:37.160 --> 01:06:37.960
these these theories are um

631
01:06:37.960 --> 01:06:41.020
these these theories are um are speculative so i don't want to step on

632
01:06:41.020 --> 01:06:43.860
are speculative so i don't want to step on the toes of you know very accomplished

633
01:06:43.860 --> 01:06:43.880
the toes of you know very accomplished

634
01:06:43.880 --> 01:06:45.960
the toes of you know very accomplished meditators and buddhists but

635
01:06:45.960 --> 01:06:46.220
meditators and buddhists but

636
01:06:46.220 --> 01:06:49.240
meditators and buddhists but i do think that we can tell an

637
01:06:49.240 --> 01:06:52.480
i do think that we can tell an extraordinarily interesting story with

638
01:06:52.480 --> 01:06:52.780
extraordinarily interesting story with

639
01:06:52.780 --> 01:06:54.860
extraordinarily interesting story with vessel computation about both jhanas

640
01:06:54.860 --> 01:06:54.880
vessel computation about both jhanas

641
01:06:54.880 --> 01:06:55.420
vessel computation about both jhanas and enlightened

642
01:06:55.420 --> 01:06:57.160
and enlightened

643
01:06:59.000 --> 01:07:03.940
story about jhanas that I would tell and I I have a tweet thread on this um it's basically

644
01:07:05.560 --> 01:07:12.340
uh I mean we we have this oh and sorry before you get into it what what is a jhana in case

645
01:07:12.340 --> 01:07:18.140
someone has never heard that word before right right um it's a really pleasant absorptive

646
01:07:18.140 --> 01:07:30.020
meditation so you sort of um you uh you focus on some sort of uh sensation of pleasure and try to

647
01:07:30.020 --> 01:07:39.580
sort of uh instantiate it uh like feel it let it spread and pretty soon it's it's in your whole

648
01:07:39.580 --> 01:07:47.340
body and uh and that's that's basically um a very pleasant sort of um somatic meditation

649
01:07:48.140 --> 01:07:55.500
cool um and like there are these uh startups uh I know of uh of one in particular uh journey uh

650
01:07:55.500 --> 01:08:03.360
that's doing um uh sort of genre truths so fantastic team fantastic idea um

651
01:08:05.080 --> 01:08:09.520
so the question is okay like if if you're sort of doing this

652
01:08:10.380 --> 01:08:16.920
somatic meditation where you kind of try to feel and then spread pleasure through your body

653
01:08:18.140 --> 01:08:23.220
what in the world is happening like how how should we even begin to to think about this

654
01:08:24.940 --> 01:08:30.780
and I would so in my I have a treat thread on this I propose that basically

655
01:08:31.840 --> 01:08:37.760
we have this perturbational system all over our body the the muscles around our blood vessels

656
01:08:39.400 --> 01:08:46.540
and uh it's basically jhana is using this system as a wave machine

657
01:08:48.180 --> 01:08:55.300
um trying to sort of uh I mean usually it's trying to sort of micromanage neurons and and

658
01:08:55.300 --> 01:09:06.120
stabilize patterns and uh reduce prediction here if you make the prediction there is pleasure in my

659
01:09:06.120 --> 01:09:16.940
body then the best way for it to minimize prediction error is to create pleasure in your body

660
01:09:16.940 --> 01:09:17.380
hmm

661
01:09:18.180 --> 01:09:26.120
And the best way for it to create the pleasure, I believe, is to basically be kind of this

662
01:09:26.120 --> 01:09:34.100
gentle wave machine that, uh, it kind of tune in to what frequencies lead to constructive

663
01:09:34.100 --> 01:09:39.300
interference, what frequencies lead to sort of local harmony in each part of the body

664
01:09:40.040 --> 01:09:44.540
and kind of, uh, oscillate or churn in that pattern.

665
01:09:46.120 --> 01:09:54.440
Uh, so this is a, this is a big hypothesis, but we should be able to, I mean, literally,

666
01:09:56.480 --> 01:09:59.840
um, measure muscle activity and

667
01:10:01.180 --> 01:10:09.980
In any real way, if we sort of sort out a way to measure muscle rhythms during trial,

668
01:10:10.120 --> 01:10:12.040
it should just jump out of the data.

669
01:10:12.620 --> 01:10:13.700
Should be very clear.

670
01:10:17.100 --> 01:10:25.200
Why is it that from the inside view, as an individual, getting to these states

671
01:10:25.200 --> 01:10:33.260
it's involves at least to the extent that I've experienced them involves moving your awareness.

672
01:10:34.540 --> 01:10:38.440
Like that's like the one move that you have. It's like your, your awareness is like the thing

673
01:10:39.140 --> 01:10:46.560
that it seems that is modulating all of this as opposed to, I don't know, like actively like

674
01:10:47.240 --> 01:10:51.880
flexing your muscles or like some other thing. It's just, at least that's the way that's my

675
01:10:51.880 --> 01:10:57.620
limited experience of it. Sure. So, um, I'm going to be, uh,

676
01:11:00.980 --> 01:11:06.980
it's, it's interesting that, um, you distinguish moving your awareness from flexing your muscles.

677
01:11:08.260 --> 01:11:14.680
Maybe they're the same thing. Uh, it's just that awareness is what smooth muscle, uh,

678
01:11:15.400 --> 01:11:18.080
flexing or linting feels like. Whoa.

679
01:11:23.760 --> 01:11:29.480
Okay. And what is your speculative definition of enlightenment under this model?

680
01:11:30.880 --> 01:11:38.640
Sure. So yeah, that's, that's a great question. I'm going to tell, I'm going to attempt to tell

681
01:11:39.260 --> 01:11:50.660
a very simple story. Um, when we're born, there's absolute sensory chaos.

682
01:11:51.880 --> 01:11:56.320
Uh, in, in William James terms, there's blooming, buzzing confusion.

683
01:11:57.780 --> 01:12:04.060
And, um, and then especially when we interact with other people, uh, there's also, you know,

684
01:12:04.120 --> 01:12:11.480
we, we don't really have a, a self model and, you know, who is this, what's happening and

685
01:12:11.480 --> 01:12:19.220
how do I interact with, uh, with this other agent basically. And very early in development,

686
01:12:20.420 --> 01:12:21.380
I believe,

687
01:12:24.000 --> 01:12:33.400
we, I can, I could say, um, we can geo a set of vascular latches and desconstScripts to self.

688
01:12:35.640 --> 01:12:39.180
And basically it makes things much more predictable.

689
01:12:39.560 --> 01:12:47.140
Uh, we sort of clamp down on what allows us to, uh, navigate the world, uh, appropriately.

690
01:12:47.140 --> 01:12:54.620
And so kind of the self as a pattern of absolute muscle tension, literally.

691
01:12:55.980 --> 01:13:05.540
But these are sort of implemented as latches, basically semi-permanent constrictions in neurodynamism.

692
01:13:05.740 --> 01:13:15.120
So we lose certain dimensions of freedom in our processing capacity.

693
01:13:15.120 --> 01:13:18.500
But we gain a lot of stability.

694
01:13:19.300 --> 01:13:24.720
We gain context, predictiveness, etc.

695
01:13:25.240 --> 01:13:30.900
It's the developmental trade-off, basically.

696
01:13:31.940 --> 01:13:36.280
And then, okay, you become an adult.

697
01:13:36.520 --> 01:13:39.560
You still have these smooth muscle latches.

698
01:13:40.020 --> 01:13:43.660
They're as firmly latched as ever.

699
01:13:45.980 --> 01:13:55.720
But it's sort of like you can tie a bonsai tree into a shape, and it'll grow into that shape.

700
01:13:56.720 --> 01:14:01.340
And then you can remove the tie, and it'll still be in that shape.

701
01:14:03.000 --> 01:14:15.000
And so we may not need, like need with capital N, this set of latches to navigate the world after work.

702
01:14:15.120 --> 01:14:15.940
They've grown, basically.

703
01:14:17.400 --> 01:14:19.340
But they're still there.

704
01:14:21.000 --> 01:14:42.040
So I think of sort of the Buddhist protocol or recipe, we can say, as first of all, you really work hard to turn down your reactiveness.

705
01:14:43.380 --> 01:14:45.100
I mean, if this...

706
01:14:45.120 --> 01:14:52.120
This tanha is like a twitchiness, propensity to clench reactiveness.

707
01:14:53.960 --> 01:14:57.880
You want to turn that way down as low as possible.

708
01:14:58.220 --> 01:14:59.040
Stop cranking.

709
01:15:00.000 --> 01:15:22.860
Exactly. Exactly. Stop cringing. Stop flinching. Be okay with ambivalence, uncertainty. Just be able to sort of sit with feelings, with raw sensations. So very important stuff. Become less reactive. And again, there's really a muscle deconditioning process.

710
01:15:25.040 --> 01:15:49.320
Then the second step here is to create a container, like a very safe container for the next step in the process. And like meditation hall, Buddhist tradition, there's a lot of safety in these protocols.

711
01:15:51.600 --> 01:15:52.700
And then,

712
01:15:52.860 --> 01:16:19.360
I think that, like, for example, Vipassana meditation. And in Vipassana meditation, you sort of bring your awareness. I have a teacher who calls it internal or present. Not thinking about the future or the past. So be in the present.

713
01:16:21.160 --> 01:16:22.840
Internal, not the present.

714
01:16:22.860 --> 01:16:39.220
Internal, not the present. Trying to feel what's going on out there or there, but be inside your body. And then centered. Don't try to chase good feeling or run away from bad feeling, but just try to accept whatever comes.

715
01:16:40.780 --> 01:16:52.840
And so that's kind of the basic, or a basic Vipassana frame. There are several possible ways to describe this.

716
01:16:52.860 --> 01:17:10.500
But basically, then you focus on incoming sensations and you try to know them and note them, let them go, move on to the next sensation. Know it, know it, or know, note, let go.

717
01:17:13.880 --> 01:17:20.760
What I think is, and then like, if you keep doing this for a while, it feels really weird.

718
01:17:21.440 --> 01:17:21.960
Yeah.

719
01:17:22.860 --> 01:17:34.120
You know, the, the sort of, the story that we sort of live in, of normality kind of drops away and you get into some pretty, um, intense, crazy sensory experiences.

720
01:17:37.600 --> 01:17:39.700
Um, what I think is happening there.

721
01:17:40.980 --> 01:17:49.200
So to, to synthesize all these, all these threads, you've turned down your muscle, uh, reactivity.

722
01:17:49.780 --> 01:17:52.620
You're, you're less likely to just kind of reflexively.

723
01:17:52.860 --> 01:18:00.840
Uh, with your, your spleen muscle, your vascular system, you're in a very safe container.

724
01:18:03.800 --> 01:18:10.480
And now you're giving your system data that is wildly out of distribution.

725
01:18:13.260 --> 01:18:14.820
It's really weird stuff.

726
01:18:17.360 --> 01:18:20.940
And I would say the combination of these things.

727
01:18:22.860 --> 01:18:28.580
Basically try tries to tease your system into opening back up.

728
01:18:28.880 --> 01:18:29.380
Hmm.

729
01:18:30.060 --> 01:18:32.540
It's saying, okay, nervous system.

730
01:18:33.820 --> 01:18:35.840
Uh, it's, it's very safe.

731
01:18:36.140 --> 01:18:37.720
You don't need to clench.

732
01:18:38.040 --> 01:18:39.880
Uh, you don't need to be afraid.

733
01:18:40.120 --> 01:18:42.940
You don't need to sort of interpret the things in a threatening way.

734
01:18:46.460 --> 01:18:48.760
And all this weird stuff is happening.

735
01:18:49.460 --> 01:18:52.620
Like you're getting some really weird signals from your.

736
01:18:52.860 --> 01:18:56.520
And stuff that you absolutely cannot predict.

737
01:18:57.360 --> 01:19:01.720
This is, this is way out of any distribution that you're familiar with.

738
01:19:03.780 --> 01:19:20.360
If you open some of these smooth muscle latches that you've had closed almost your whole life, maybe you'll be able to better predict this data coming in.

739
01:19:20.460 --> 01:19:20.480
Hmm.

740
01:19:22.260 --> 01:19:22.840
Hmm.

741
01:19:22.860 --> 01:19:27.440
So it's, it's like not necessarily trying to force it.

742
01:19:28.060 --> 01:19:43.260
You can't force things to open, but it's trying to tease it open saying, you know, I know system that you like, you are absolutely a hundred percent focused on minimizing prediction error.

743
01:19:44.280 --> 01:19:51.640
Well, there are some predictions there, prediction errors here, and maybe you would be able to minimize this.

744
01:19:52.140 --> 01:19:52.680
If you.

745
01:19:52.860 --> 01:19:59.800
You open back up, you, you sort of release these latches, you let blood flow into these, uh,

746
01:20:00.300 --> 01:20:11.120
networks that have been constrained for decades. Maybe you need that extra dynamic range to predict these sensations.

747
01:20:14.360 --> 01:20:17.280
That's what I think is happening during enlightenment.

748
01:20:20.820 --> 01:20:29.380
So is it that some threshold of dynamic range is reopened or is it like completely

749
01:20:29.380 --> 01:20:29.800
open?

750
01:20:30.020 --> 01:20:35.220
Like what is that stepwise change between before and after enlightenment?

751
01:20:37.020 --> 01:20:41.100
So this gets into the details of the four path model.

752
01:20:41.100 --> 01:20:51.620
And I think that it could be that certain discrete latches are opened with each path.

753
01:20:52.820 --> 01:21:03.000
Or it could also be that at least for the first three paths, you sort of tease a channel

754
01:21:03.000 --> 01:21:04.300
open and then it closes.

755
01:21:04.480 --> 01:21:09.500
You tease it open, it closes, and eventually it can stay open.

756
01:21:11.460 --> 01:21:15.860
I'm not sure if anything like it's open to question.

757
01:21:17.400 --> 01:21:31.720
But I would say the way I would test this is to use some tech like either MRI with contrast

758
01:21:31.720 --> 01:21:38.900
or like DTI or Doppler ultrasound basically to measure blood flow.

759
01:21:39.720 --> 01:21:41.080
And if you use a blood flow, you're going to be able to measure blood flow.

760
01:21:41.100 --> 01:21:49.460
If you put a bunch of people in brain scanners and just measure their blood flow, I would

761
01:21:49.460 --> 01:21:57.820
anticipate that people who have sort of these serious meditative attainments, they will

762
01:21:57.820 --> 01:22:03.500
have more blood flow in certain areas of the brain than people off the street.

763
01:22:04.160 --> 01:22:08.260
That more blood flow, more neural dynamism.

764
01:22:10.160 --> 01:22:11.080
It might be a little bit more.

765
01:22:11.100 --> 01:22:19.320
It might not be like all the time, but they can sort of increase the blood flow, decrease

766
01:22:19.320 --> 01:22:19.880
the blood flow.

767
01:22:20.000 --> 01:22:23.540
It's not always set at one X out of the 20.

768
01:22:25.940 --> 01:22:30.820
So I have like a million more questions, but I know we're coming up on our time here.

769
01:22:31.060 --> 01:22:33.220
So maybe just two.

770
01:22:35.160 --> 01:22:39.700
The first is just because I love ending on practical things.

771
01:22:42.100 --> 01:22:48.740
What would you say to a listener is like a very concrete takeaway they can get if they're

772
01:22:48.740 --> 01:22:57.180
like vibing with your theory on what to add to their system of practices, for instance,

773
01:22:57.320 --> 01:22:59.220
or modifications to their lifestyle?

774
01:23:00.140 --> 01:23:00.780
Yeah.

775
01:23:01.540 --> 01:23:05.940
So I'm going to throw a bit of a curve ball here.

776
01:23:06.160 --> 01:23:11.200
A surprising amount of sort of wellbeing is metabolic health.

777
01:23:12.120 --> 01:23:20.440
And we see this in sort of the metabolic theory of brain health and how all these disorders

778
01:23:20.440 --> 01:23:23.280
have big metabolic components and so on.

779
01:23:25.160 --> 01:23:32.120
And I also think that just, I mean, in general thinking about the smooth muscle system, you

780
01:23:32.120 --> 01:23:39.240
have this very finely regulatory system that sort of has tendrils, neural tendrils in literally

781
01:23:39.240 --> 01:23:41.220
all parts of your body.

782
01:23:41.320 --> 01:23:41.680
Yeah.

783
01:23:42.920 --> 01:23:51.440
And like little clenches, they have functional implications.

784
01:23:53.430 --> 01:24:01.660
And any noise in the system is going to have, it's going to disturb the system.

785
01:24:02.300 --> 01:24:12.020
Basically if you have little spasms, like little muscle spasms in the system, it's going

786
01:24:12.100 --> 01:24:14.560
to color your phenomenology in a bad way.

787
01:24:15.860 --> 01:24:20.860
The cleaner you can run, the cleaner your metabolism, the better.

788
01:24:21.020 --> 01:24:29.060
And just things will feel like non-lumpy, cleaner, just much better.

789
01:24:29.400 --> 01:24:36.880
And so I think, and also like if you want to release muscle latches, one reason why

790
01:24:37.400 --> 01:24:41.520
latches might be present is metabolic constraints.

791
01:24:41.600 --> 01:24:42.080
Yeah.

792
01:24:42.100 --> 01:24:49.480
It's like your body just didn't have enough energy to power those neurons and those muscles.

793
01:24:49.640 --> 01:24:50.700
So it latched it.

794
01:24:51.960 --> 01:24:59.980
And so I think as a prerequisite for well-being actually, and I

795
01:25:00.000 --> 01:25:27.040
suspect to a very surprising degree as a prerequisite for progress on sort of the meditative path, I think metabolic health is huge. It's super. And just like simple things that feel like non-sequiturs to suggest, but like supplement magnesium, get enough calcium, don't eat seed oils,

796
01:25:28.000 --> 01:25:30.540
I think all those are going to be surprisingly important.

797
01:25:33.340 --> 01:25:39.500
So when you say metabolic health, do you mean it in like the sense of mitochondrial function?

798
01:25:40.140 --> 01:25:43.940
Yeah. Mitochondrial function and thyroid function, I would say.

799
01:25:44.340 --> 01:25:48.480
So how consistent is this with like the theories of Ray Peet?

800
01:25:49.720 --> 01:25:52.880
100% consistent. I'm a huge fan.

801
01:25:53.460 --> 01:25:57.460
That's cool. It's like worlds kind of colliding. That's crazy.

802
01:25:59.220 --> 01:26:05.820
It's a pretty provocative idea too that a certain threshold of metabolic health is

803
01:26:07.320 --> 01:26:11.560
instrumental to the path. I don't think I've ever heard that before. Yeah.

804
01:26:12.120 --> 01:26:21.900
Yeah. And I had a friend go on a meditation retreat and they served her food with a lot of seed oils,

805
01:26:22.040 --> 01:26:27.140
and that probably wasn't a good thing. So I think that, you know, I,

806
01:26:28.000 --> 01:26:32.400
I would love to see a lot of meditation centers take metabolic health seriously

807
01:26:34.000 --> 01:26:36.280
and you know, cook with coconut oil, for example.

808
01:26:39.160 --> 01:26:45.320
Yeah. Okay. So this opens up a bunch of other tangents that I'd love to explore in a future

809
01:26:45.320 --> 01:26:54.620
conversation. But I guess I'll just leave it to, is there anything else that you, that's like,

810
01:26:54.680 --> 01:26:57.860
kind of like at the edge of your thinking right now that you just love to share with the listeners?

811
01:27:02.380 --> 01:27:07.840
I mean, understanding the four path model of enlightenment

812
01:27:09.200 --> 01:27:12.880
in under the lens of desScript computation, I would say is,

813
01:27:12.880 --> 01:27:24.760
is pretty much my, my current edge thinking. But as another curve fault,

814
01:27:26.080 --> 01:27:27.980
I'll just, I'll just give like a, I'll just give a quick slide. I'm gonna slide back to slide.

815
01:27:28.000 --> 01:27:31.360
a very short description of what I'm thinking.

816
01:27:31.560 --> 01:27:36.500
So I've been thinking about the simulation hypothesis lately

817
01:27:36.500 --> 01:27:43.040
and this sort of Nick Bostrom hypothesis that, yeah,

818
01:27:43.140 --> 01:27:45.680
like it could very well be that we live in simulation.

819
01:27:46.930 --> 01:27:51.460
And I've been thinking about what kind of thing,

820
01:27:51.930 --> 01:27:56.240
like how can consciousness research contribute to researching that?

821
01:27:58.000 --> 01:28:00.440
I have written some things about this in the past,

822
01:28:00.580 --> 01:28:05.480
but I would say right now my sort of current edge is that

823
01:28:08.580 --> 01:28:11.240
maybe the laws of physics,

824
01:28:11.440 --> 01:28:16.180
or like we have laws of physics and laws of qualia.

825
01:28:17.440 --> 01:28:21.080
And base reality, if we are in a simulation,

826
01:28:21.340 --> 01:28:22.560
then base reality exists.

827
01:28:23.240 --> 01:28:26.100
And they would also have their laws of physics

828
01:28:26.100 --> 01:28:27.860
and their laws of qualia.

829
01:28:29.600 --> 01:28:35.900
I suspect that our laws of qualia and their laws of qualia,

830
01:28:36.000 --> 01:28:37.900
which are really the laws of perception,

831
01:28:38.100 --> 01:28:46.680
which are pretty a priori are the same.

832
01:28:47.960 --> 01:28:49.540
Maybe we have different laws of physics,

833
01:28:50.240 --> 01:28:51.820
but we have the same laws of qualia.

834
01:28:52.800 --> 01:28:55.720
And so if we can kind of distinguish, okay,

835
01:28:58.000 --> 01:29:02.320
in what ways do our laws of qualia and laws of physics differ?

836
01:29:02.800 --> 01:29:05.440
If there's something that we find in our laws of physics

837
01:29:05.440 --> 01:29:06.900
that are not in our laws of qualia,

838
01:29:07.900 --> 01:29:12.240
maybe that's a property of the substrate of the simulation.

839
01:29:15.260 --> 01:29:18.340
So maybe quantum indeterminacy,

840
01:29:19.380 --> 01:29:21.480
it isn't part of the laws of qualia.

841
01:29:22.760 --> 01:29:25.620
It's just the way that the GPU that we're running on

842
01:29:25.620 --> 01:29:27.040
handles sparse state or something.

843
01:29:29.620 --> 01:29:32.060
So that's a rabbit hole.

844
01:29:35.620 --> 01:29:36.100
But,

845
01:29:36.140 --> 01:29:37.480
But you did ask.

846
01:29:37.680 --> 01:29:38.380
So that's my answer.

847
01:29:38.960 --> 01:29:39.380
Yeah.

848
01:29:39.420 --> 01:29:41.380
How the hell would we even know that?

849
01:29:43.900 --> 01:29:44.320
Yeah.

850
01:29:44.440 --> 01:29:44.720
Okay.

851
01:29:46.500 --> 01:29:48.320
I have to ask this one more question

852
01:29:48.320 --> 01:29:50.140
because it's like, I'll regret it if I don't.

853
01:29:50.500 --> 01:29:51.600
I'm curious.

854
01:29:51.800 --> 01:29:53.220
I don't know if you've written about this anywhere,

855
01:29:53.280 --> 01:29:54.760
but I'm curious about,

856
01:29:56.240 --> 01:29:57.860
I guess like your metaphysics,

857
01:29:58.000 --> 01:29:59.720
like I

858
01:30:00.460 --> 01:30:16.480
know if you align with any particular philosophical point of view on this. I've been super into analytical idealism lately because it helps explain Carl Jung and stuff. But yeah, do you have anything you could say about that?

859
01:30:16.480 --> 01:30:22.640
Yeah. This actually gets to what we were just talking about, the simulation.

860
01:30:24.040 --> 01:30:35.780
I'm somewhere between a dual aspect monist, and I distinguish weak monism as like,

861
01:30:35.900 --> 01:30:44.940
oh, this solves some philosophical problems, versus strong monism, which is literally the same math

862
01:30:46.480 --> 01:30:54.080
applies to qualia, consciousness, phenomenology. And literally, we should be able to flip through a

863
01:30:54.080 --> 01:30:59.500
physics textbook, find a theorem, apply it to consciousness. No exceptions.

864
01:31:01.180 --> 01:31:09.280
So that would be strong monism. One thing exists, it casts two shadows or has two projections.

865
01:31:09.760 --> 01:31:12.740
One is physics, one is phenomenology.

866
01:31:14.860 --> 01:31:19.700
I think in a practical sense, that's going to be true.

867
01:31:22.980 --> 01:31:29.980
However, I also take idealism. It's like, okay, now, what do we have access to?

868
01:31:30.420 --> 01:31:42.440
We have access to qualia, to consciousness. What is physics, really? I would say that physics is no

869
01:31:42.740 --> 01:31:52.580
more and no less than hidden state in our phenomenology. So I guess I would say yes,

870
01:31:52.760 --> 01:32:04.640
totally. Idealism, great, I'm on board. But yes and. Let's talk about the nature of what

871
01:32:04.640 --> 01:32:13.760
is physics from within the idealism view. And this perhaps takes us full circle to Wittgenstein

872
01:32:13.760 --> 01:32:21.480
and thinking about types of language shapes. Amazing. Something to save for part three.

873
01:32:21.700 --> 01:32:25.380
Mike Johnson, thank you so much for coming back. This was an amazing conversation.

874
01:32:25.860 --> 01:32:26.820
It was my pleasure.