Jhanas, awakening and vasocomputation

Transcript

00:00:02Why is Wittgenstein your favorite philosopher?

00:00:05So, I think that Wittgenstein, I mean, he's sort of famous for saying that almost

00:00:14all philosophy is bullshit. And that resonates with me. And I think that just the way he

00:00:23thinks about language as constructed, that there are these games we play. And in a simple

00:00:30sense, it's like we pointed some sticks and we figured out, okay, you know, maybe this

00:00:34stick means that and that stick means that. Just kind of we constructed very simple games.

00:00:41And then things have meaning within each game. And then language is kind of the set of all

00:00:49verbal games that we can play. And I thought this was just mind-blowingly cool when I came

00:00:58across it in college. And it does dissolve a lot of forms of confusion. And I really

00:01:06respect Wittgenstein for just going for it. Like, okay, let's try to explain everything

00:01:12in these terms.

00:01:14And then I think that there's sort of a...

00:01:19There's sort of the positive framing of what I appreciate so much about Wittgenstein. And

00:01:25there's also sort of the negative after image of what's left in philosophy to sort out,

00:01:34to figure out. After you say, okay, language is just this set of games and meaning is defined

00:01:41within each game, then some sorts of questions in philosophy just dissolve, but some become

00:01:48meaningless.

00:01:50For example, well, what kinds of games can we play with language? What kind of game is science?

00:01:57What kind of game is physics versus mathematics versus sociology? So I think it's a very rich

00:02:04jumping off point.

00:02:07I remember you had this tweet where you're saying his philosophy ultimately has...

00:02:13It has like a moral point of view as well. Like when you take it in totality and then in a tongue

00:02:20of a tongue, you said it was about protecting normies from word cells.

00:02:23Right.

00:02:24Maybe you can explain what you mean by that.

00:02:26Right. Yeah. So I had a lot of fun with that tweet. And basically, I think Wittgenstein's

00:02:37observation, and I think it's just true, is that language gets used not necessarily in ways that

00:02:45illuminate reality, but that...

00:02:48Yeah.

00:02:50Control people. And this isn't necessarily good or bad. It just is. And sort of the limits of

00:02:58your language or limits of your world, to paraphrase, I guess, many people now. And I think

00:03:06that when you can confuse someone, then you can have control over them. And so I do think that

00:03:17it's very difficult to do this with tech. And I see this, like I see Wittgenstein's ideas as tech

00:03:26to sort of dissolve certain forms of confusion. I think it's very free. So that's what I'm really

00:03:35excited about in Wittgenstein. It's technology for cognitive freedom, I would say.

00:03:43And so the word cells are more...

00:03:47Yeah.

00:03:47equipped at like using this tech and then they can use it for nefarious purposes against

00:03:54the normies like what's your uh in that thread what's your definition for

00:03:58normies and word cells yeah yeah so i mean uh a normie in in the sense it's just somebody

00:04:04trying to live their life um and then uh a word cell i i call i called word cells dark magicians

00:04:11uh in in this uh kind of a you know a fun way to to say it but i do think that um basically

00:04:20so i think it was mark andreason uh had the distinction of well in in sort of on twitter

00:04:29or in in the professional world there are word cells uh and shape rotators and word cells sort

00:04:39of deal with language and sort of like the way that they're used to do things and and

00:04:41and um it's sort of if they can tell the story that the world works in a certain way uh they

00:04:51feel that they make the world work in that way and this is actually sometimes just true

00:05:00because to some degree, reality is socially constructed.

00:05:05But then the shape rotators in Mark's terms, I think it's Mark, they sort of are a little bit

00:05:15more grounded in reality, we can say. And people who have maybe autism tendencies is the meme,

00:05:24I guess. It's like, yeah, if you're building a plane, you need to sort of be able to rotate

00:05:31shapes in your mind and see how everything fits. And this is a different world. Building a plane

00:05:40is different than writing a news story. If the plane doesn't conform with reality, it doesn't fly.

00:05:51So, I see some tension between these two ways of thinking. So, the shape rotators are sometimes

00:06:01they tend to take things fairly literally. And they feel like, okay, if you use a word,

00:06:08you must be sort of truth-seeking with it. And the word cells are more sort of, well, let's tell

00:06:18a story about this and maybe it'll become true. And I feel like there is this sort of eternal

00:06:29type of war between these two ways of thinking. And it's generally I think in terms of the

00:06:40pendulum can swing one way and swing back the other way. Right now I think we generally takeScripts

00:06:48andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts andScripts

00:06:48as, or reality as more socially constructed than it actually is. And we're sort of, um,

00:06:56subject to, to many layers of SIOP we can say, uh, in terms of, uh, stories about, um,

00:07:05how things work, who we are, what we value, et cetera. Um, and so, um, yeah, I, I think,

00:07:15uh, the, the counter to that is just linguistics.

00:07:19I wonder if you can provide like an example of how someone can get, uh, cast under the

00:07:31spell of like a dark magician word cell and then how, uh, having some like literacy of

00:07:36the metagame of, you know, the Wittgenstein approach can help inoculate that person against

00:07:42that attack.

00:07:43Yeah, that's a great question.

00:07:45Uh, so at, at the risk of, uh, I, I guess the, it's like the, the challenge is that

00:07:53any example, uh, that I would give, um, it's like, we're in the, we're in the SIOP already.

00:07:59Uh, so it's, yeah, but I do think, I mean, something like democracy, um, is, is like

00:08:07one example and that is like, okay, well, democracy is good.

00:08:11We live in democracy.

00:08:12And then there's kind of a switch.

00:08:15There's a switch where, um, we can call this side voting that, okay, let's, let's define

00:08:22democracy as, uh, something a little bit different.

00:08:26And then, uh, then we can say, well, that, that accords with democracy or that doesn't

00:08:32accord with democracy.

00:08:33And pretty soon the word democracy doesn't actually have any grounding to where it came

00:08:40from.

00:08:40It's sort of the play things of, um, word cells we can say.

00:08:46Uh, and so in that sense, like just going back to the grounding of the word or the construction

00:08:52of the word, um, well, where did this word come from?

00:08:57What does it mean?

00:08:58How was it used?

00:09:00And if we're using it in a new way, maybe we're just using it wrong.

00:09:06Um, or, or maybe we can use it in a new way, but we have to be upfront about that.

00:09:12Um, we can't just sort of smuggle in a new definition.

00:09:15Then and use that.

00:09:18Yeah.

00:09:18This, uh, this reminds me of, um, a phrase that a mutual friend of ours, rival voices

00:09:24likes to say a lot rectification of names where basically if I understand it correctly,

00:09:29he's saying that words, um, they're pointers and they often lose their reference.

00:09:36So like the thing that the word democracy refers to maybe once was like X and then it

00:09:44drifted through.

00:09:47of, I don't know, nefarious forces, whatever, incidental things.

00:09:51And then people still think it means X, but now it means Y.

00:09:55And we must like rectify the reference or at least be conscious of the fact that, um,

00:10:00Or 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.

00:10:11Yeah. 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.

00:10:26Yeah. 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.

00:10:50So maybe you can explain what do you mean when you say,

00:10:54it's pre-paradigmatic, or what is a paradigm and how would a paradigm be helpful when it comes to neuroscience?

00:11:00Right. 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.

00:11:22Yeah.

00:11:25But 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?

00:11:54Yeah.

00:11:55is it more like alchemy or is it more like chemistry?

00:11:59And I would have to say it's much, much more like alchemy.

00:12:06That there's clearly something interesting here going on

00:12:11and many interesting things to find.

00:12:13And we don't have a shortage of models.

00:12:16We actually have a lot of models.

00:12:18It's just that they often conflict or they often not even conflict.

00:12:24It's just kind of different, touching different parts of the elephant

00:12:29in ways that don't really add up to an elephant at this point.

00:12:36So, yeah, I think that it's actually very exciting

00:12:42that neuroscience and neurotech are pretty pragmatic

00:12:46because there's something to find and a lot to explore.

00:12:53Yeah, and I really love this quote that you said

00:12:56where pre-paradigmatic models are dominated by bullshit

00:13:00and the only antidote is good taste.

00:13:03What do you mean by good taste?

00:13:07Yeah, so it's sort of, you know, when you see it,

00:13:13and because there isn't a paradigm,

00:13:16you can't sort of necessarily systematically break down,

00:13:20you know, for every claim, you can't sort of break down,

00:13:23okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that,

00:13:23okay, where did this come from and what does this depend on and so on.

00:13:28And partly that's due to how early neuroscience theories are

00:13:33and partly due to how complex the situation is.

00:13:37But I think good taste is sort of a very complex, intuitive,

00:13:47embodied judgment of something's beauty.

00:13:50And beauty can be, you know, that's a great marker

00:13:56for sort of how well put together something is,

00:13:59how likely something is to be true in some senses.

00:14:04And yeah, I think it's necessary for navigating life,

00:14:10but especially neuroscience.

00:14:13And you said basically like whenever someone is,

00:14:18I think you were talking about neurotech,

00:14:20but maybe this also applies to neuroscience in general.

00:14:22Whenever someone's trying to do something in this field without a paradigm,

00:14:27they are presupposing, whether consciously or not,

00:14:31some model of what it means to be a human.

00:14:37And doing that in a way that is thoughtful and grounded in,

00:14:43you know, good values is obviously important.

00:14:47But yeah, first of all, did I get that right?

00:14:51And what exactly do you mean by this?

00:14:54Just like what it means to be a human being a question underneath it all?

00:14:58Yeah.

00:14:59No, that's

00:15:00well 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.

00:15:28People 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?

00:15:45What 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.

00:15:56You know, is focus just a lack of electricity? I don't think so.

00:16:04So 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.

00:16:24But you know, I'm a big believer inScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScript

00:16:25it should always lead to kind of, um, an elegant story about what's happening, how it works,

00:16:31why it works. Um, and the, the longer the, the causal chain, uh, is to that, uh, elegant story,

00:16:40the more skeptics skepticism is warranted, I think.

00:16:46So, uh, go ahead.

00:16:49Yeah. Uh, and just like, um, you know, there's, there's sort of this

00:16:55emerging story we can say about what kind of thing a human is. Um, and a lot of great work by,

00:17:04by people like Mike 11, that the, uh, human is sort of, um, an emergent coalition of cells that

00:17:11coordinate using bioelectricity and so on. Um, and there's, you know, uh, work by,

00:17:18um,

00:17:18for example, Solonet, Soy, the, the body is kind of this, um, uh, Solonet, Soy, Stephen,

00:17:25the body is this harmonic computer. Um, that's also a beautiful, uh, beautiful view. Uh, but

00:17:33yeah, like I, I think the, the most profound useful neurotech will come out of some kind of

00:17:41beautiful story about what kind of thing the human is not just, uh, you know, uh,

00:17:48our brains with, with electricity randomly.

00:17:51So what's your, um, current like take of what kind of thing a human is?

00:18:00Yeah. Good question. Um, so I would tell him the story about embodiment in, in this way.

00:18:11Um, I think of the brain as a, a big L large language model.

00:18:18Mm-hmm.

00:18:19And brain likes to hallucinate. Uh, and it'll, it'll sort of hallucinate about anything. It's

00:18:25kind of a general purpose hallucinating. Um, and then, uh, so it sort of auto-completes

00:18:32parents. And then the body, uh, has different nerve clusters, uh, sort of, we can call them,

00:18:42uh, ganglia. Uh, we can also call them chakras. Uh, it's pretty much the same thing.

00:18:48It's just that if you, if you map out the, the nervous system, yeah. Like there are like

00:18:53big nerve clusters, uh, around where people think chocolate's are. Um, but so it's, it's

00:19:00kind of a, a short hang there. Um, but then each each nerve cluster outside the brain

00:19:07sort of deals with the local logic of some system, usually an organ. And, and so it's

00:19:15sort of gathering information.

00:19:17It's trying to understand what's happening.

00:19:18happening. And then each nerve cluster or each organ or each chakra, depending on how

00:19:27you want to frame things, it has a certain number of error codes. And I think of these

00:19:36more as ASICs, application-specific integrated circuits, things that only do a few things,

00:19:43but they do them very well. And basically, they're just ASICs that check for what error

00:19:51code they should be sending. And so, if the stomach notices that it needs food, it'll

00:19:58send out an error code

00:20:00that says hungry. And then that resonance will kind of make the brain

00:20:06hallucinate about, oh, I'm hungry. Oh, what would solve this error code? Oh, this error code,

00:20:15I've learned that this error code goes away when I have food. So let me hallucinate about

00:20:21where I could find food. And then let me just go and do it. And the error code goes away.

00:20:28So the system has more space for the next error code and the next error code. So I see our organs

00:20:35as sort of effective, specialized coprocessors that give us certain drives. And then the brain

00:20:51is plenty smart, but it's not grounded. And our body grounds the

00:20:58de-hallucinations of the brain. So, okay. The brain being an LLM that hallucinates.

00:21:05And then it takes inputs from these nerve clusters, chakras, ganglia

00:21:11that generate very specialized error codes. What comes to mind there is the, I guess it's related

00:21:19to the thing we even opened up with, which is if the relationship between the brain and the body or

00:21:27whatever ground.

00:21:28The brain is disrupted, then you become quite vulnerable to all sorts of hallucinations that

00:21:35don't even have predictive power or aren't yeah. Aren't, aren't like adaptive. And then I remember

00:21:43you saying once that that's like kind of what modernity does, like modernity basically separates

00:21:50the brain from the body. So I wonder if you could tell the listeners a little bit more what you mean

00:21:55by that.

00:21:56Yeah.

00:21:58Yeah. I do believe that. So basically if we're sort of grounded by our organs and they're sort

00:22:07of the place where we get our information about what we should be thinking about, which we be

00:22:14feeling, what we should be doing, what's important. I would say that, I mean, especially

00:22:23we can say the modern schooling system where you sit in your desk,

00:22:28for watching.

00:22:31You're

00:22:33you're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

00:22:43You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

00:22:47You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

00:22:49You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body. You're listening to your body.

00:22:51Damn. Yeah. It's staggeringly terrible.

00:22:58Uh, 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.

00:23:20Uh, 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.

00:23:35Uh, but the brain is still going to hallucinate about something.

00:23:39And so we've gotten very good at sort of breaking this connection and then, uh, sort of giving the brain like,

00:23:50grounding the brain in social signals and like, oh, um, how much money am I making?

00:23:58Or, uh, you know, do I have my, my peers approval?

00:24:03Uh, am I, um, am I useful to society basically?

00:24:09And so this is a very, it's a very effective thing for society to be doing.

00:24:16You, you sort of unground people by breaking their mind, body.

00:24:20Connection.

00:24:21And then you reground them, uh, based on what's important for society.

00:24:28Uh, but it's not particularly good for the individual.

00:24:32And in practice, society built on this, um, just isn't a particularly good place to live.

00:24:42So 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,

00:24:50effective.

00:24:50What is something that an individual can do?

00:24:54Like someone listening to this to reground or to gauge the extent

00:25:00to which they've become disembodied.

00:25:03Yeah.

00:25:05Um,

00:25:07I mean,

00:25:08I would,

00:25:08I would have to say that,

00:25:09uh,

00:25:12first of all,

00:25:13just noticing what is actively grounding you right now.

00:25:18Uh,

00:25:20and like often that's your phone,

00:25:24uh,

00:25:25that's thrilling Twitter.

00:25:26Uh,

00:25:27and,

00:25:31and sort of,

00:25:33I mean,

00:25:33these are,

00:25:34these are very loud signals and it's easy to,

00:25:37you know,

00:25:38if,

00:25:38if you are ungrounded,

00:25:39then it's easy to sort of latch onto these and,

00:25:41um,

00:25:42and use them as your,

00:25:44um,

00:25:45as your brain scorecard.

00:25:48Um,

00:25:48so I think that,

00:25:49I mean,

00:25:50step one is to get a little distance from devices.

00:25:54Touch grass.

00:25:56Yeah.

00:25:57Literally touch grass,

00:25:58go outside,

00:25:59feed the sun,

00:26:00see nature.

00:26:00Um,

00:26:01and like,

00:26:02you know,

00:26:03avoid like cut out the super stimuli for,

00:26:07you know,

00:26:08at least a little while,

00:26:09and then do things that will stimulate your natural basics,

00:26:14your natural grounding,

00:26:15uh,

00:26:16patterns.

00:26:17And like pretty soon you'll,

00:26:18you'll know what to do.

00:26:22Yeah.

00:26:22It's funny.

00:26:23Um,

00:26:23how simple it is.

00:26:25Um,

00:26:26I'll just share like a personal example to make it maybe more vivid to people.

00:26:30I remember about a year and a half ago,

00:26:34I did this experiment where someone challenged me to post on Tik TOK,

00:26:38um,

00:26:39which is something I had no experience with.

00:26:41And so the experiment was,

00:26:43I was going to post a video a day for four weeks just to see what would happen

00:26:46and then get comfortable,

00:26:47like making short form content or talking to a camera and stuff.

00:26:51And I remember about like a week and a half into it.

00:26:56Um,

00:26:57a few of the videos had popped off and,

00:27:01of views and so i started to have like this new motivational schema that was totally unfamiliar

00:27:07to me just start to set in and i remember one day i woke up and i caught myself in this feeling and

00:27:15i remember i just tell my friend about it where somehow it felt like the point of my day like

00:27:21quite literally like the background feeling of like the whole point of the day was to get another

00:27:26viral video on tiktok and it was like all the other stuff i did was like foregrounded by this

00:27:34background feeling and it was it was really cool to catch myself in that state because i had just

00:27:40started this experiment as like this little isolated thing so i could remember a time

00:27:45totally like before i even knew this feeling but very quickly it just came in and supplanted my

00:27:53my motivational schemas and i guess i guess that's just kind of how the

00:27:57the the brain works you know if and a lot of these tools are perfectly designed to

00:28:03kind of interface with that nice yeah that's that's a pretty wild story and like

00:28:14your brain is evolved or your your heart is evolved to probably have your best uh in like

00:28:21your well-being in mind your kidneys are involved to send signals that you know will

00:28:26put you through the process of getting rid of all the bad things and all the bad things and

00:28:26in a better place if you listen to them uh your tiktok chakra uh probably does not

00:28:33that was that's good intention so yeah it makes sense yeah um just add another bit to this i think

00:28:40part of it was especially in the beginning i couldn't really tell the difference between

00:28:46like millions of people on the internet and like thousands of comments versus like real people in

00:28:53real life it was like it was as if on some level my system was interpreting them at the same

00:29:00at the same plane so if there was like positive comments or hateful comments or something like

00:29:05that i was just still parsing them as if like real people were saying these things to me

00:29:10and that was just in the beginning eventually you know i adjusted to it and set boundaries but

00:29:16it was it was surprising how sensitive i was and i wouldn't expect to be just based on my

00:29:23it was just easy to kind of like plug into this thing um and yeah just a very practical i guess

00:29:30antidote just to highlight the thing you said is uh just removing super super normal stimuli

00:29:36for a period of time to kind of recalibrate and for me that means you know all social media

00:29:43and means uh youtube i remember i had this thing where i was just finishing projects and being

00:29:49super disciplined and i was like so productive for a period of time and i was like what the

00:29:53hell is this and i was like what the hell is this and i was like what the hell is this

00:29:53going on like what's different and then i realized i had not been on youtube for like three months

00:29:59nice and

00:30:00I think it sounds very simple and everyone kind of knows this stuff is valuable, but I can't like stress it enough.

00:30:08It's easy to say and hard to do.

00:30:12Yeah. I want to introduce something you said. You talked about treasure maps as like an analogy for making sense of pre-paradigmatic fields.

00:30:24So, 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.

00:30:33And 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?

00:30:44Yeah. 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.

00:30:54Is 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.

00:31:09Buddha was a pretty smart guy and so were the scholars who came after him as well.

00:31:18And so, like what did they say about what the landscape looks like?

00:31:23Yeah.

00:31:25nationally, where are the good parts? It's like in sort of old school maps. So my first blog before

00:31:36Open Theory, I called it Modern Dragons. And there was kind of this, at least an anecdote, if not

00:31:48reality, old school map makers used to write, hic sunt dracones, here be dragons in Latin.

00:31:58And where they didn't know exactly what was there, but just dragon, maybe dangerous, don't go there.

00:32:06And I always liked that. And I think that just kind of knowing, having a rough map of the

00:32:16landscape and knowing where the good parts are, it's like, oh, I'm going to do this.

00:32:18And where the dangerous parts are, it's super, super valuable. And it's always a big question

00:32:25about how to understand what a mind is and how to navigate the human. And I mean, I actually think

00:32:35that throughout the last century, psychology has actually gotten actively worse at doing this.

00:32:41We've gotten from Carl Jung, which he was a smart guy. I like his work.

00:32:48To more, I don't know, more lowbrow psychology, I would say. Kind of trying to science things up,

00:32:58but not doing it in a very holistic way. Now, I would say that in terms of Buddhism,

00:33:08I find it extremely interesting. Not just because, okay, this is a good sort of system of phenomenology,

00:33:18but also there's, you know, in kind of the center of the map with, you know, glowing arrows and

00:33:28flapping lives. Like, there is like, there's paradise here. Like, awakening, enlightenment,

00:33:37liberation. Like, this is the point. And for that to have been written,

00:33:48and passed down for, you know, 2500 years, and okay, like, maybe it's, it's worth taking

00:33:55seriously. Maybe there is a big treasure to find. And Nick Camerata has a lot of beautiful

00:34:03threads on this topic. And he, he recently had a thread of how, like, he's actually kind of upset

00:34:09how downplayed the idea of enlightenment, awakening, liberation, sort of, you know,

00:34:18prior some path, how significant people phrase stats. They kind of lowball it. They say, oh,

00:34:26yeah, you know, once, once you get here, you'll understand or whatever. But he's like, no,

00:34:31like, they should be saying, okay, you know, it's at least a 10x, maybe it's 100x. And you should,

00:34:37like, it's definitely worth going for. Like, this is a big, a big treasure to sort of

00:34:48discover in life. And yeah, it's worth the effort. So, yeah, I had to laugh at that. And

00:34:55I probably agree with that. And like, I guess, in

00:35:00my 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?

00:35:24Are 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?

00:35:43And if so, what in the world is happening in the brain?

00:35:51So 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?

00:36:05I don't remember the details, but I thought that was the most compelling summary.

00:36:08So if you remember it, maybe you can share it.

00:36:10Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

00:36:12It's an extreme quote.

00:36:14You know, he's when he's tried to put numbers on it, you know, he said, you know, very conservatively.

00:36:22Like life is 10 times better or 20 times better.

00:36:25But this quote is something like, you know, he would prefer maybe like one afternoon of being awakened to the rest of his life.

00:36:38Like it's just that much, that much better.

00:36:42And I think he even said he was comparing like a normal afternoon being awakened versus a life where everything would be maxed out.

00:36:51On 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.

00:37:09Yeah, maybe.

00:37:11I have a good friend who has told me that, yeah, like eating good food and sex actually feel.

00:37:21Worse 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.

00:37:35Yeah, I think that also scares people.

00:37:38But 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.

00:37:50And then we can get into it more.

00:37:51Specific definition as you kind of unfold your paradigm.

00:37:56Sure.

00:37:57Yeah, just to say a few things in general, and this isn't particularly particular to my work.

00:38:05So Theravada Buddhism, they have a four path model of enlightenment.

00:38:12So like stream entry is sort of the first path, second path, third path.

00:38:19And then once you complete fourth path.

00:38:21Then like that's a big milestone.

00:38:24You'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.

00:38:37And with each completion of each path.

00:38:42A large part of suffering drops away.

00:38:45So I've heard various percentages bandied around.

00:38:50But like.

00:38:52It's there are these sort of discrete milestones where things feel a lot better.

00:38:59And there are also, you know, there are trials and tribulations, sort of unpleasant parts to path to the 39th stuff.

00:39:10So I can say a little bit about Vesic amputation.

00:39:16And go from there.

00:39:20So.

00:39:21Last year, I posted a piece called principles of Vesic amputation part one.

00:39:28And I sort of would describe it now as a three by three hypothesis.

00:39:35First of all, sort of lining up three domains that Buddhist phenomenology being the one like first domain.

00:39:46And there's this term in Buddhism, Tanha.

00:39:51In Buddhism, it's variously translated as grasping or thirst, clenching desire.

00:39:58If you

00:40:00desire 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

00:40:20Bernard Stevens. Controllable, satisfying, and permanent. So if we have a nice taste of some

00:40:32chocolate cake, we try to grab that sensation and keep it forever. It's just instinctive. And this

00:40:40is the root of a lot of suffering because sensations don't work like that.

00:40:45And if it's a bad sensation, we try to push it away and not feel it.

00:40:50And of course, that is the root of suffering as well. So trying to control our sensations in this

00:40:58way is seen as the root of suffering. And the second domain, active inference,

00:41:07basically not only is the brain a prediction machine, we're sort of hallucinating our reality,

00:41:13predicting what it will be, and we sort of ignore what we can successfully predict.

00:41:19But we often

00:41:20navigate the world by making predictions and then acting to make them true.

00:41:28So if I predict that we'll go for coffee tomorrow, I'll make that. Or if I agree, okay,

00:41:35damn, let's go to coffee tomorrow, then I'll hold that prediction and kind of my mind sort

00:41:44of self-organizes around making that true. We go to coffee, then I can release the prediction.

00:41:49Yeah.

00:41:53And basically the connection, this is a little tangential, but basically this

00:42:02, this grabbing, this grasping, this initial sort of instinctive impulse that we

00:42:09have to control sensations, it's the same thing as making a prediction about our senses.

00:42:18Yeah.

00:42:20And then there's this big question about how all this is implemented. And this is kind of where

00:42:32I'm most excited to dig into. And this is, I think, the vasomuscular system,

00:42:41literally the muscles that are wrapped around all of our blood vessels are able to sort of grab at

00:42:49patterns. And then there's this big question about how all this is implemented. And this is kind of

00:42:50And I think that when we have some sort of a psychological reaction to something,

00:42:57it's literally a muscle reflex. It's literally a clenching of this immune muscle around our

00:43:04blood vessels. And so I think that helps us try to control our sensations. But also I guess

00:43:17Yeah.

00:43:18Yeah.

00:43:21Um, like blood flow, um, blood flow, uh, is not exactly how we are. Well, okay. There

00:43:42was an amazing paper, uh, just about 20 years ago. Um, it was called the hemo neural hypothesis

00:43:48hypothesis, and it made, uh, two really interesting observations. Um, the first observation was

00:43:57that, uh, blood flow, uh, well, it's this one and then there's some followup work as

00:44:02well. Uh, so the basic conclusions, one is that, um, blood flow in the, in the brain

00:44:11varies by a factor of 20, not 10%, not 20%, but literally 20%.

00:44:18Oh, huge. And, uh, the second observation, uh, was that, um, blood changes in blood flow

00:44:33actually proceed changes in neural activity. It's not that you use a bunch of oxygen and

00:44:41then the blood comes to sort of, uh, pay for that in your planar cells. It's that the blood

00:44:48comes.

00:44:48Um, and then the blood comes to sort of, uh, pay for that in your planar cells. Um, it's

00:44:48first and then the neurons change. And so this is a fascinating thing that

00:45:00has a lot of implications.

00:45:03The 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,

00:45:29like 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,

00:45:59then it no longer updates, it no longer changes. That basically, whatever patterns are sort of bouncing around in the network, those patterns freeze.

00:46:14And I think that this presents a very interesting picture of

00:46:25our somatic programming environment. Once you can sort of adjust what's dynamic and what's static,

00:46:38then you can sort of build complicated patterns by grabbing certain patterns and combining them and so on.

00:46:51I'll pause the video.

00:46:54Yeah, well, let me see if I get the basics of the model first, because you said

00:47:01vasocomputation is like a three by three. And then you mentioned TANA, active inference.

00:47:09And what's the third thing? I may have missed that. Is that the vasomuscular system or is there

00:47:14something else?

00:47:16Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, the first domain that I've linked together is Buddhist

00:47:22phonology.

00:47:24And then the second domain is active inference predictions. And like grasping intention in

00:47:33phenomenology, it's the same as making predictions in active inference. And then the third domain is

00:47:41sort of physical touching in smooth muscle.

00:47:47Right. And active inference, how is that different from passive inference?

00:47:56Right. So, passive inference, so if you want to reduce your prediction error,

00:48:04you have two basic options. The first is to make better predictions.

00:48:12And the second is to make predictions and then make them true. And so, that's called active inference.

00:48:23Okay.

00:48:29And so, I'm going to just try to summarize in my own words. But basically, there's evidence that so first we do

00:48:38this thing active inference where we make predictions and then we conduct ourselves in a manner to

00:48:43increase the odds that they occur. The Buddhist phenomenology side of it is that we do this in a manner

00:48:51that's unwise.

00:48:53Yeah.

00:48:54precipitates suffering because we try to do it when it comes to sensations positive or negative

00:49:01that we don't actually have the ability to control and we're going to get into this in more detail

00:49:07now but there's evidence that the mechanism for this is the smooth muscle around our vascular

00:49:14system yeah that's that's the move that i want to make um that uh like this this thing this reflex

00:49:26that the buddhists call tanha is actually a physical reflex uh of of our smooth muscle system

00:49:32kind of the um especially the the muscle wrapped around our vasculature

00:49:40so i don't know if i mentioned this last time we spoke but

00:49:43when i first started talking about this i was like oh my god i'm not sure if i'm

00:49:44the thing that immediately came to mind was the feeling of um trepidation before taking a cold

00:49:52shower so like the cold water's running and i'm about to step into it and i know

00:50:00like 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

00:50:29I get over that hump, then I can actually

00:50:33actually 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.

00:51:00At 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.

00:51:24So before we get into the deconditioning can you maybe explain

00:51:29in a little more detail like how is this muscle reflex helping us with active inference? Like what is the relationship there?

00:51:40Right. 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

00:51:57simple things that we can do to help us. And so I think it's really important to kind of

00:51:58be able to find simple predictions. And sometimes we find some simple predictions and then we can

00:52:04discard sense data. Okay you know that's just the wind or that's just my cat or something. You're

00:52:11not going to ignore that. And then sometimes we find simple predictions of things that will be

00:52:19simple if we make them true. Like okay I'm thirsty. It would be

00:52:28a lot better for everything if I had the taste of water in my mouth. Let me just take a drink of water.

00:52:35So and I think yeah there's also like the body often hates change and

00:52:52there's something sort of very disjoint or unpredictable.

00:52:58about stepping into a cold shower. And even if it's the 2000th time you've done it, it still has that element to it.

00:53:11So 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.

00:53:27Yeah.

00:53:30So 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?

00:53:42So 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.

00:53:59So the cringe stops you or tries to stop you from going back to like, you know, the thing that hurt you.

00:54:06And it also reduces the fidelity of your experience.

00:54:15Yes. So I would say that it's trying to negate the cold.

00:54:22Yeah.

00:54:22It's trying to say, no, like, I'm not going to feel this cold. This is not happening.

00:54:26Yeah.

00:54:28And

00:54:29of 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.

00:54:42And what are what are latches?

00:54:47Right. Right. So I think this is going to be the most important thing.

00:54:58Yeah.

00:54:59I guess I would

00:55:02Yeah. It's sort of the anatomical feature that neuroscience forgot. So first of all,

00:55:18just a few comments on the types of muscle. So usually we talk about muscle, like skeletal

00:55:24muscle. It can contract, it can relax, pretty simple stuff. And then there's also heart muscle,

00:55:35there's fascia, which are kind of similar. It's a contractive tissue. And then there's smooth

00:55:43muscle. And smooth muscle is unique in all of this in that it has a special setting.

00:55:50So with skeletal muscle, contract, relax. With smooth muscle, it can contract, it can relax,

00:56:00and it can also glue itself shut. It can sort of chemically glue itself into a contracted position.

00:56:12And so generally speaking, the body uses this extensively in the

00:56:20digestive system, in the pelvis, in the bladder, et cetera. It's like any time where you need to

00:56:27basically set it and forget it. Where once this latch bridge mechanism is engaged, smooth muscle

00:56:38doesn't have to spend energy to be contracted. You basically, you lock it shut and then energy

00:56:46requirements go down.

00:56:47Yeah.

00:56:49Yeah.

00:56:52These smooth muscle latches, so they can last for anywhere between minutes to hours to days to

00:57:04weeks, months, years, potentially a whole lifetime. It really is a set it and forget it thing.

00:57:12And so this gets really interesting when we combine this sort of model of

00:57:20smooth muscle latches with the vasculature, because there is smooth muscle wrapped around

00:57:31all of our blood vessels, every single one. And so anywhere blood flows,

00:57:38then we have the smooth muscle and it can latch. And the basic story I would paint here is that

00:57:53latches in vascular latches, we can say, control

00:58:04the freedom of local neurons. And

00:58:08if there's no latch and there's lots of blood flowing, then the neurons can explore their whole

00:58:16range. They can listen, they can change.

00:58:19Yeah.

00:58:21But then when a latch occurs, then they get frozen.

00:58:28And then they can't change.

00:58:31And I think that in cases of, for example, trauma,

00:58:37I would absolutely predict that these will be implemented

00:58:42through vascular smooth muscle latches.

00:58:46That if your body sort of clamps down on a pattern and says,

00:58:51like this, or like, I'll never let that happen again,

00:58:54or like, I'll never forget this.

00:58:58Then sort of there's a vascular clamp.

00:59:03And some vascular channel has closed.

00:59:07And the neurons associated with that have been frozen.

00:59:14And it's hard to open them back up.

00:59:18So let me just see if I can draw a thread

00:59:20between this.

00:59:21And some of the other things you said.

00:59:23So first, the thing about the blood flow

00:59:28varying by a factor of 20 in the brain.

00:59:31And that blood flow is the thing that regulates

00:59:36the full dynamic range of a cluster of neurons.

00:59:42If you have a traumatic experience that latches

00:59:45the smooth muscle around the vascular system

00:59:50associated with the vascular system,

00:59:51then it limits the dynamic range.

00:59:56And then this fits with what you said earlier,

00:59:59where

01:00:00the 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

01:00:28muscular level it's like latches being created in perpetuity that like limit our dynamic range

01:00:35i would strongly suspect that yeah yeah and yeah something very very physical and anatomical

01:00:45one quick question how is the smooth muscle latch different from

01:00:51uh the tension that i experience in my rhomboid that's like just a pattern that

01:00:58i've had and like no matter how many times i get it massaged like that pattern seems to come back

01:01:02until i you know figure out what's like the underlying cause of it is it is there a continuum

01:01:07between those two or is this the tension and skeletal muscle different sure uh so they're not

01:01:16uh of a different kind uh but like there's a little bit of difference in practice uh so

01:01:26Michael Levin talks about

01:01:28um the body is sort of having a um like performing this um distributed stress

01:01:34minimization algorithm and so if there's stress somewhere in the body then it'll kind of get

01:01:39distributed elsewhere in the body and um I think that uh like tension can can be in

01:01:50in you know any sort of contracted tissue uh it can be fascia it can be skeletal muscle it can be

01:01:57smooth muscle

01:01:58um I'm and I mean likely tension in in any of these will restrict dynamic range in some important

01:02:09respects and your body kind of pays attention attention and maybe especially like restricts

01:02:16dynamic range to keep you safe um but I would say that I'm I'm most interested in

01:02:28smooth muscle uh or like vascular smooth muscle because it has these latches which are very

01:02:35programmable um it's like okay you know there can be tension in a muscle and maybe that's because

01:02:42you're pulling in a in a certain angle and whatnot but um that's kind of macro stuff uh

01:02:51the vascular system has the potential to regulate on a micro level

01:02:58um kind of very fine grained level um that okay you know this exact neural network uh let's let's

01:03:06reduce the blood flow to it and then freeze it into this pattern so like well I would say that

01:03:14all these sorts of like tension in in any of these contraction tissues helps regulate uh the body

01:03:24it's only in vascular smooth muscle

01:03:28um that I would give it the label of computation then this is very intimately intertwined with

01:03:36how the neurons are are doing their thing so in case it's not obvious to the listener why is this

01:03:44so important for neuroscience right um most of your suffering is probably due to your latches

01:03:58and uh most of your the limits to your cognitive emotional uh behavioral freedom

01:04:08are also due to these smooth muscle latches

01:04:12and you know maybe you've heard of like heart openings or whatever in some history practices

01:04:18or you know somebody goes to zayahuasca and has an opening well what what does that do uh is that real

01:04:24and I think it is real it's a literal

01:04:28release of these smooth muscle latches and I mean in the same way that um getting circulation in

01:04:37like okay if you've been sleeping under your arm and it's gotten to sleep uh okay like

01:04:42getting circulation back in that arm maybe it hurts a little bit at the beginning but

01:04:47it feels amazing uh it's just like restoring circulation it's very healthy it feels very good

01:04:56you probably lack a lot of sort of microbe circulation due

01:05:00to these smooth muscle lunges uh it's possible to get that back

01:05:06why is it not sufficient to just you know have good cardio practices and you know maybe do sauna

01:05:12and cold plunge a couple times a week sure that'll absolutely help um i wouldn't call it uh sort of

01:05:22sufficient to get all the all the benefits uh because i have like some of these patterns are

01:05:29it's sort of the body has reasons to close these vascular channels the body has reasons to freeze

01:05:38these patterns and maybe they're good reasons maybe they're uh maybe you've outlived those

01:05:44reasons uh and it would be useful to to open them back up um but these are often very sticky

01:05:54and um

01:05:56um

01:05:59yeah i guess i'm also thinking about sort of

01:06:02enlightenment frames it but uh does that answer the question yeah well i guess so my next question was

01:06:09um what are jhanas uh from the perspective of vasocomputation and what what is enlightenment

01:06:19right uh so um i would uh i would say first of all these are these are big questions

01:06:29and um i have some theories

01:06:32and um i have some theories uh

01:06:33uh

01:06:33uh these these theories are um

01:06:37these these theories are um

01:06:37these these theories are um are speculative so i don't want to step on

01:06:41are speculative so i don't want to step on the toes of you know very accomplished

01:06:43the toes of you know very accomplished

01:06:43the toes of you know very accomplished meditators and buddhists but

01:06:45meditators and buddhists but

01:06:46meditators and buddhists but i do think that we can tell an

01:06:49i do think that we can tell an extraordinarily interesting story with

01:06:52extraordinarily interesting story with

01:06:52extraordinarily interesting story with vessel computation about both jhanas

01:06:54vessel computation about both jhanas

01:06:54vessel computation about both jhanas and enlightened

01:06:55and enlightened

01:06:59story about jhanas that I would tell and I I have a tweet thread on this um it's basically

01:07:05uh I mean we we have this oh and sorry before you get into it what what is a jhana in case

01:07:12someone has never heard that word before right right um it's a really pleasant absorptive

01:07:18meditation so you sort of um you uh you focus on some sort of uh sensation of pleasure and try to

01:07:30sort of uh instantiate it uh like feel it let it spread and pretty soon it's it's in your whole

01:07:39body and uh and that's that's basically um a very pleasant sort of um somatic meditation

01:07:48cool um and like there are these uh startups uh I know of uh of one in particular uh journey uh

01:07:55that's doing um uh sort of genre truths so fantastic team fantastic idea um

01:08:05so the question is okay like if if you're sort of doing this

01:08:10somatic meditation where you kind of try to feel and then spread pleasure through your body

01:08:18what in the world is happening like how how should we even begin to to think about this

01:08:24and I would so in my I have a treat thread on this I propose that basically

01:08:31we have this perturbational system all over our body the the muscles around our blood vessels

01:08:39and uh it's basically jhana is using this system as a wave machine

01:08:48um trying to sort of uh I mean usually it's trying to sort of micromanage neurons and and

01:08:55stabilize patterns and uh reduce prediction here if you make the prediction there is pleasure in my

01:09:06body then the best way for it to minimize prediction error is to create pleasure in your body

01:09:16hmm

01:09:18And the best way for it to create the pleasure, I believe, is to basically be kind of this

01:09:26gentle wave machine that, uh, it kind of tune in to what frequencies lead to constructive

01:09:34interference, what frequencies lead to sort of local harmony in each part of the body

01:09:40and kind of, uh, oscillate or churn in that pattern.

01:09:46Uh, so this is a, this is a big hypothesis, but we should be able to, I mean, literally,

01:09:56um, measure muscle activity and

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

01:10:10it should just jump out of the data.

01:10:12Should be very clear.

01:10:17Why is it that from the inside view, as an individual, getting to these states

01:10:25it's involves at least to the extent that I've experienced them involves moving your awareness.

01:10:34Like that's like the one move that you have. It's like your, your awareness is like the thing

01:10:39that it seems that is modulating all of this as opposed to, I don't know, like actively like

01:10:47flexing your muscles or like some other thing. It's just, at least that's the way that's my

01:10:51limited experience of it. Sure. So, um, I'm going to be, uh,

01:11:00it's, it's interesting that, um, you distinguish moving your awareness from flexing your muscles.

01:11:08Maybe they're the same thing. Uh, it's just that awareness is what smooth muscle, uh,

01:11:15flexing or linting feels like. Whoa.

01:11:23Okay. And what is your speculative definition of enlightenment under this model?

01:11:30Sure. So yeah, that's, that's a great question. I'm going to tell, I'm going to attempt to tell

01:11:39a very simple story. Um, when we're born, there's absolute sensory chaos.

01:11:51Uh, in, in William James terms, there's blooming, buzzing confusion.

01:11:57And, um, and then especially when we interact with other people, uh, there's also, you know,

01:12:04we, we don't really have a, a self model and, you know, who is this, what's happening and

01:12:11how do I interact with, uh, with this other agent basically. And very early in development,

01:12:20I believe,

01:12:24we, I can, I could say, um, we can geo a set of vascular latches and desconstScripts to self.

01:12:35And basically it makes things much more predictable.

01:12:39Uh, we sort of clamp down on what allows us to, uh, navigate the world, uh, appropriately.

01:12:47And so kind of the self as a pattern of absolute muscle tension, literally.

01:12:55But these are sort of implemented as latches, basically semi-permanent constrictions in neurodynamism.

01:13:05So we lose certain dimensions of freedom in our processing capacity.

01:13:15But we gain a lot of stability.

01:13:19We gain context, predictiveness, etc.

01:13:25It's the developmental trade-off, basically.

01:13:31And then, okay, you become an adult.

01:13:36You still have these smooth muscle latches.

01:13:40They're as firmly latched as ever.

01:13:45But it's sort of like you can tie a bonsai tree into a shape, and it'll grow into that shape.

01:13:56And then you can remove the tie, and it'll still be in that shape.

01:14:03And so we may not need, like need with capital N, this set of latches to navigate the world after work.

01:14:15They've grown, basically.

01:14:17But they're still there.

01:14:21So 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.

01:14:43I mean, if this...

01:14:45This tanha is like a twitchiness, propensity to clench reactiveness.

01:14:53You want to turn that way down as low as possible.

01:14:58Stop cranking.

01:15:00Exactly. 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.

01:15:25Then 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.

01:15:51And then,

01:15:52I 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.

01:16:21Internal, not the present.

01:16:22Internal, 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.

01:16:40And so that's kind of the basic, or a basic Vipassana frame. There are several possible ways to describe this.

01:16:52But 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.

01:17:13What I think is, and then like, if you keep doing this for a while, it feels really weird.

01:17:21Yeah.

01:17:22You 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.

01:17:37Um, what I think is happening there.

01:17:40So to, to synthesize all these, all these threads, you've turned down your muscle, uh, reactivity.

01:17:49You're, you're less likely to just kind of reflexively.

01:17:52Uh, with your, your spleen muscle, your vascular system, you're in a very safe container.

01:18:03And now you're giving your system data that is wildly out of distribution.

01:18:13It's really weird stuff.

01:18:17And I would say the combination of these things.

01:18:22Basically try tries to tease your system into opening back up.

01:18:28Hmm.

01:18:30It's saying, okay, nervous system.

01:18:33Uh, it's, it's very safe.

01:18:36You don't need to clench.

01:18:38Uh, you don't need to be afraid.

01:18:40You don't need to sort of interpret the things in a threatening way.

01:18:46And all this weird stuff is happening.

01:18:49Like you're getting some really weird signals from your.

01:18:52And stuff that you absolutely cannot predict.

01:18:57This is, this is way out of any distribution that you're familiar with.

01:19:03If 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.

01:19:20Hmm.

01:19:22Hmm.

01:19:22So it's, it's like not necessarily trying to force it.

01:19:28You 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.

01:19:44Well, there are some predictions there, prediction errors here, and maybe you would be able to minimize this.

01:19:52If you.

01:19:52You open back up, you, you sort of release these latches, you let blood flow into these, uh,

01:20:00networks that have been constrained for decades. Maybe you need that extra dynamic range to predict these sensations.

01:20:14That's what I think is happening during enlightenment.

01:20:20So is it that some threshold of dynamic range is reopened or is it like completely

01:20:29open?

01:20:30Like what is that stepwise change between before and after enlightenment?

01:20:37So this gets into the details of the four path model.

01:20:41And I think that it could be that certain discrete latches are opened with each path.

01:20:52Or it could also be that at least for the first three paths, you sort of tease a channel

01:21:03open and then it closes.

01:21:04You tease it open, it closes, and eventually it can stay open.

01:21:11I'm not sure if anything like it's open to question.

01:21:17But I would say the way I would test this is to use some tech like either MRI with contrast

01:21:31or like DTI or Doppler ultrasound basically to measure blood flow.

01:21:39And if you use a blood flow, you're going to be able to measure blood flow.

01:21:41If you put a bunch of people in brain scanners and just measure their blood flow, I would

01:21:49anticipate that people who have sort of these serious meditative attainments, they will

01:21:57have more blood flow in certain areas of the brain than people off the street.

01:22:04That more blood flow, more neural dynamism.

01:22:10It might be a little bit more.

01:22:11It might not be like all the time, but they can sort of increase the blood flow, decrease

01:22:19the blood flow.

01:22:20It's not always set at one X out of the 20.

01:22:25So I have like a million more questions, but I know we're coming up on our time here.

01:22:31So maybe just two.

01:22:35The first is just because I love ending on practical things.

01:22:42What would you say to a listener is like a very concrete takeaway they can get if they're

01:22:48like vibing with your theory on what to add to their system of practices, for instance,

01:22:57or modifications to their lifestyle?

01:23:00Yeah.

01:23:01So I'm going to throw a bit of a curve ball here.

01:23:06A surprising amount of sort of wellbeing is metabolic health.

01:23:12And we see this in sort of the metabolic theory of brain health and how all these disorders

01:23:20have big metabolic components and so on.

01:23:25And I also think that just, I mean, in general thinking about the smooth muscle system, you

01:23:32have this very finely regulatory system that sort of has tendrils, neural tendrils in literally

01:23:39all parts of your body.

01:23:41Yeah.

01:23:42And like little clenches, they have functional implications.

01:23:53And any noise in the system is going to have, it's going to disturb the system.

01:24:02Basically if you have little spasms, like little muscle spasms in the system, it's going

01:24:12to color your phenomenology in a bad way.

01:24:15The cleaner you can run, the cleaner your metabolism, the better.

01:24:21And just things will feel like non-lumpy, cleaner, just much better.

01:24:29And so I think, and also like if you want to release muscle latches, one reason why

01:24:37latches might be present is metabolic constraints.

01:24:41Yeah.

01:24:42It's like your body just didn't have enough energy to power those neurons and those muscles.

01:24:49So it latched it.

01:24:51And so I think as a prerequisite for well-being actually, and I

01:25:00suspect 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,

01:25:28I think all those are going to be surprisingly important.

01:25:33So when you say metabolic health, do you mean it in like the sense of mitochondrial function?

01:25:40Yeah. Mitochondrial function and thyroid function, I would say.

01:25:44So how consistent is this with like the theories of Ray Peet?

01:25:49100% consistent. I'm a huge fan.

01:25:53That's cool. It's like worlds kind of colliding. That's crazy.

01:25:59It's a pretty provocative idea too that a certain threshold of metabolic health is

01:26:07instrumental to the path. I don't think I've ever heard that before. Yeah.

01:26:12Yeah. And I had a friend go on a meditation retreat and they served her food with a lot of seed oils,

01:26:22and that probably wasn't a good thing. So I think that, you know, I,

01:26:28I would love to see a lot of meditation centers take metabolic health seriously

01:26:34and you know, cook with coconut oil, for example.

01:26:39Yeah. Okay. So this opens up a bunch of other tangents that I'd love to explore in a future

01:26:45conversation. But I guess I'll just leave it to, is there anything else that you, that's like,

01:26:54kind of like at the edge of your thinking right now that you just love to share with the listeners?

01:27:02I mean, understanding the four path model of enlightenment

01:27:09in under the lens of desScript computation, I would say is,

01:27:12is pretty much my, my current edge thinking. But as another curve fault,

01:27:26I'll just, I'll just give like a, I'll just give a quick slide. I'm gonna slide back to slide.

01:27:28a very short description of what I'm thinking.

01:27:31So I've been thinking about the simulation hypothesis lately

01:27:36and this sort of Nick Bostrom hypothesis that, yeah,

01:27:43like it could very well be that we live in simulation.

01:27:46And I've been thinking about what kind of thing,

01:27:51like how can consciousness research contribute to researching that?

01:27:58I have written some things about this in the past,

01:28:00but I would say right now my sort of current edge is that

01:28:08maybe the laws of physics,

01:28:11or like we have laws of physics and laws of qualia.

01:28:17And base reality, if we are in a simulation,

01:28:21then base reality exists.

01:28:23And they would also have their laws of physics

01:28:26and their laws of qualia.

01:28:29I suspect that our laws of qualia and their laws of qualia,

01:28:36which are really the laws of perception,

01:28:38which are pretty a priori are the same.

01:28:47Maybe we have different laws of physics,

01:28:50but we have the same laws of qualia.

01:28:52And so if we can kind of distinguish, okay,

01:28:58in what ways do our laws of qualia and laws of physics differ?

01:29:02If there's something that we find in our laws of physics

01:29:05that are not in our laws of qualia,

01:29:07maybe that's a property of the substrate of the simulation.

01:29:15So maybe quantum indeterminacy,

01:29:19it isn't part of the laws of qualia.

01:29:22It's just the way that the GPU that we're running on

01:29:25handles sparse state or something.

01:29:29So that's a rabbit hole.

01:29:35But,

01:29:36But you did ask.

01:29:37So that's my answer.

01:29:38Yeah.

01:29:39How the hell would we even know that?

01:29:43Yeah.

01:29:44Okay.

01:29:46I have to ask this one more question

01:29:48because it's like, I'll regret it if I don't.

01:29:50I'm curious.

01:29:51I don't know if you've written about this anywhere,

01:29:53but I'm curious about,

01:29:56I guess like your metaphysics,

01:29:58like I

01:30:00know 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?

01:30:16Yeah. This actually gets to what we were just talking about, the simulation.

01:30:24I'm somewhere between a dual aspect monist, and I distinguish weak monism as like,

01:30:35oh, this solves some philosophical problems, versus strong monism, which is literally the same math

01:30:46applies to qualia, consciousness, phenomenology. And literally, we should be able to flip through a

01:30:54physics textbook, find a theorem, apply it to consciousness. No exceptions.

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

01:31:09One is physics, one is phenomenology.

01:31:14I think in a practical sense, that's going to be true.

01:31:22However, I also take idealism. It's like, okay, now, what do we have access to?

01:31:30We have access to qualia, to consciousness. What is physics, really? I would say that physics is no

01:31:42more and no less than hidden state in our phenomenology. So I guess I would say yes,

01:31:52totally. Idealism, great, I'm on board. But yes and. Let's talk about the nature of what

01:32:04is physics from within the idealism view. And this perhaps takes us full circle to Wittgenstein

01:32:13and thinking about types of language shapes. Amazing. Something to save for part three.

01:32:21Mike Johnson, thank you so much for coming back. This was an amazing conversation.

01:32:25It was my pleasure.