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Jhanas, awakening and vasocomputation

The Metagame

Episode 26 · August 5, 2024 · 1 hr 33 min

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Why is Wittgenstein your favorite philosopher?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in these terms.

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

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

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

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

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

meaningless.

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

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

jumping off point.

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

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

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

Right.

Maybe you can explain what you mean by that.

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

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

illuminate reality, but that...

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so the word cells are more...

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

because to some degree, reality is socially constructed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that attack.

Yeah, that's a great question.

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

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

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

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

We live in democracy.

And then there's kind of a switch.

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

democracy as, uh, something a little bit different.

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

accord with democracy.

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

from.

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

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

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

What does it mean?

How was it used?

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

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

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

Then and use that.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

drifted through.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Yeah.

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?

Yeah.

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

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

That there's clearly something interesting here going on

and many interesting things to find.

And we don't have a shortage of models.

We actually have a lot of models.

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

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

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

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

that neuroscience and neurotech are pretty pragmatic

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

Yeah, and I really love this quote that you said

where pre-paradigmatic models are dominated by bullshit

and the only antidote is good taste.

What do you mean by good taste?

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

and because there isn't a paradigm,

you can't sort of necessarily systematically break down,

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

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

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

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

and partly due to how complex the situation is.

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

embodied judgment of something's beauty.

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

for sort of how well put together something is,

how likely something is to be true in some senses.

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

but especially neuroscience.

And you said basically like whenever someone is,

I think you were talking about neurotech,

but maybe this also applies to neuroscience in general.

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

they are presupposing, whether consciously or not,

some model of what it means to be a human.

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

you know, good values is obviously important.

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

And what exactly do you mean by this?

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

Yeah.

No, that's

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

But you know, I'm a big believer inScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScript

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

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

the more skeptics skepticism is warranted, I think.

So, uh, go ahead.

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

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

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

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

um,

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

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

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

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

our brains with, with electricity randomly.

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sort of gathering information.

It's trying to understand what's happening.

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

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

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

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

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

send out an error code

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

whatever ground.

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

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

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

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

by that.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

for watching.

You're

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

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

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

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

Damn. Yeah. It's staggeringly terrible.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connection.

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

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

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

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,

effective.

What is something that an individual can do?

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

to which they've become disembodied.

Yeah.

Um,

I mean,

I would,

I would have to say that,

uh,

first of all,

just noticing what is actively grounding you right now.

Uh,

and like often that's your phone,

uh,

that's thrilling Twitter.

Uh,

and,

and sort of,

I mean,

these are,

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

you know,

if,

if you are ungrounded,

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

um,

and use them as your,

um,

as your brain scorecard.

Um,

so I think that,

I mean,

step one is to get a little distance from devices.

Touch grass.

Yeah.

Literally touch grass,

go outside,

feed the sun,

see nature.

Um,

and like,

you know,

avoid like cut out the super stimuli for,

you know,

at least a little while,

and then do things that will stimulate your natural basics,

your natural grounding,

uh,

patterns.

And like pretty soon you'll,

you'll know what to do.

Yeah.

It's funny.

Um,

how simple it is.

Um,

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

I remember about a year and a half ago,

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

um,

which is something I had no experience with.

And so the experiment was,

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

and then get comfortable,

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

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

Um,

a few of the videos had popped off and,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nice and

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

It's easy to say and hard to do.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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?

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

So if you remember it, maybe you can share it.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

It's an extreme quote.

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

Like life is 10 times better or 20 times better.

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

Like it's just that much, that much better.

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

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.

Yeah, maybe.

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

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.

Yeah, I think that also scares people.

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.

And then we can get into it more.

Specific definition as you kind of unfold your paradigm.

Sure.

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

So Theravada Buddhism, they have a four path model of enlightenment.

So like stream entry is sort of the first path, second path, third path.

And then once you complete fourth path.

Then like that's a big milestone.

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.

And with each completion of each path.

A large part of suffering drops away.

So I've heard various percentages bandied around.

But like.

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

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

So I can say a little bit about Vesic amputation.

And go from there.

So.

Last year, I posted a piece called principles of Vesic amputation part one.

And I sort of would describe it now as a three by three hypothesis.

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

And there's this term in Buddhism, Tanha.

In Buddhism, it's variously translated as grasping or thirst, clenching desire.

If you

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

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

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

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

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

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

way is seen as the root of suffering. And the second domain, active inference,

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

predicting what it will be, and we sort of ignore what we can successfully predict.

But we often

navigate the world by making predictions and then acting to make them true.

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

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

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

Yeah.

And basically the connection, this is a little tangential, but basically this

, this grabbing, this grasping, this initial sort of instinctive impulse that we

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

it's literally a muscle reflex. It's literally a clenching of this immune muscle around our

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

varies by a factor of 20, not 10%, not 20%, but literally 20%.

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

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

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

comes.

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

first and then the neurons change. And so this is a fascinating thing that

has a lot of implications.

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,

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,

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

And I think that this presents a very interesting picture of

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

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

I'll pause the video.

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

vasocomputation is like a three by three. And then you mentioned TANA, active inference.

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

something else?

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

phonology.

And then the second domain is active inference predictions. And like grasping intention in

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

sort of physical touching in smooth muscle.

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

Right. So, passive inference, so if you want to reduce your prediction error,

you have two basic options. The first is to make better predictions.

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

Okay.

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

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

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

that's unwise.

Yeah.

precipitates suffering because we try to do it when it comes to sensations positive or negative

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

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

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

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

kind of the um especially the the muscle wrapped around our vasculature

so i don't know if i mentioned this last time we spoke but

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

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

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

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

I get over that hump, then I can actually

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.

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.

So before we get into the deconditioning can you maybe explain

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

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

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

be able to find simple predictions. And sometimes we find some simple predictions and then we can

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

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

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

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

So and I think yeah there's also like the body often hates change and

there's something sort of very disjoint or unpredictable.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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?

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.

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

And it also reduces the fidelity of your experience.

Yes. So I would say that it's trying to negate the cold.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And

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.

And what are what are latches?

Right. Right. So I think this is going to be the most important thing.

Yeah.

I guess I would

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

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

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

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

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

So with skeletal muscle, contract, relax. With smooth muscle, it can contract, it can relax,

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

And so generally speaking, the body uses this extensively in the

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

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

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

requirements go down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

And so this gets really interesting when we combine this sort of model of

smooth muscle latches with the vasculature, because there is smooth muscle wrapped around

all of our blood vessels, every single one. And so anywhere blood flows,

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

latches in vascular latches, we can say, control

the freedom of local neurons. And

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

range. They can listen, they can change.

Yeah.

But then when a latch occurs, then they get frozen.

And then they can't change.

And I think that in cases of, for example, trauma,

I would absolutely predict that these will be implemented

through vascular smooth muscle latches.

That if your body sort of clamps down on a pattern and says,

like this, or like, I'll never let that happen again,

or like, I'll never forget this.

Then sort of there's a vascular clamp.

And some vascular channel has closed.

And the neurons associated with that have been frozen.

And it's hard to open them back up.

So let me just see if I can draw a thread

between this.

And some of the other things you said.

So first, the thing about the blood flow

varying by a factor of 20 in the brain.

And that blood flow is the thing that regulates

the full dynamic range of a cluster of neurons.

If you have a traumatic experience that latches

the smooth muscle around the vascular system

associated with the vascular system,

then it limits the dynamic range.

And then this fits with what you said earlier,

where

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

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

i would strongly suspect that yeah yeah and yeah something very very physical and anatomical

one quick question how is the smooth muscle latch different from

uh the tension that i experience in my rhomboid that's like just a pattern that

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

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

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

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

Michael Levin talks about

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

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

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

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

smooth muscle

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

respects and your body kind of pays attention attention and maybe especially like restricts

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

smooth muscle uh or like vascular smooth muscle because it has these latches which are very

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

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

the vascular system has the potential to regulate on a micro level

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

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

all these sorts of like tension in in any of these contraction tissues helps regulate uh the body

it's only in vascular smooth muscle

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

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

so important for neuroscience right um most of your suffering is probably due to your latches

and uh most of your the limits to your cognitive emotional uh behavioral freedom

are also due to these smooth muscle latches

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

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

and I think it is real it's a literal

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

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

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

it feels amazing uh it's just like restoring circulation it's very healthy it feels very good

you probably lack a lot of sort of microbe circulation due

to these smooth muscle lunges uh it's possible to get that back

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

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

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

it's sort of the body has reasons to close these vascular channels the body has reasons to freeze

these patterns and maybe they're good reasons maybe they're uh maybe you've outlived those

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

and um

um

yeah i guess i'm also thinking about sort of

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

um what are jhanas uh from the perspective of vasocomputation and what what is enlightenment

right uh so um i would uh i would say first of all these are these are big questions

and um i have some theories

and um i have some theories uh

uh

uh these these theories are um

these these theories are um

these these theories are um are speculative so i don't want to step on

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

the toes of you know very accomplished

the toes of you know very accomplished meditators and buddhists but

meditators and buddhists but

meditators and buddhists but i do think that we can tell an

i do think that we can tell an extraordinarily interesting story with

extraordinarily interesting story with

extraordinarily interesting story with vessel computation about both jhanas

vessel computation about both jhanas

vessel computation about both jhanas and enlightened

and enlightened

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

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

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

meditation so you sort of um you uh you focus on some sort of uh sensation of pleasure and try to

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

body and uh and that's that's basically um a very pleasant sort of um somatic meditation

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

that's doing um uh sort of genre truths so fantastic team fantastic idea um

so the question is okay like if if you're sort of doing this

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

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

and I would so in my I have a treat thread on this I propose that basically

we have this perturbational system all over our body the the muscles around our blood vessels

and uh it's basically jhana is using this system as a wave machine

um trying to sort of uh I mean usually it's trying to sort of micromanage neurons and and

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

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

hmm

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

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

interference, what frequencies lead to sort of local harmony in each part of the body

and kind of, uh, oscillate or churn in that pattern.

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

um, measure muscle activity and

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

it should just jump out of the data.

Should be very clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

flexing or linting feels like. Whoa.

Okay. And what is your speculative definition of enlightenment under this model?

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

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

Uh, in, in William James terms, there's blooming, buzzing confusion.

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

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

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

I believe,

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

And basically it makes things much more predictable.

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

And so kind of the self as a pattern of absolute muscle tension, literally.

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

So we lose certain dimensions of freedom in our processing capacity.

But we gain a lot of stability.

We gain context, predictiveness, etc.

It's the developmental trade-off, basically.

And then, okay, you become an adult.

You still have these smooth muscle latches.

They're as firmly latched as ever.

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

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

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

They've grown, basically.

But they're still there.

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.

I mean, if this...

This tanha is like a twitchiness, propensity to clench reactiveness.

You want to turn that way down as low as possible.

Stop cranking.

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.

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.

And then,

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.

Internal, not the present.

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.

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

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.

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

Yeah.

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.

Um, what I think is happening there.

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

You're, you're less likely to just kind of reflexively.

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

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

It's really weird stuff.

And I would say the combination of these things.

Basically try tries to tease your system into opening back up.

Hmm.

It's saying, okay, nervous system.

Uh, it's, it's very safe.

You don't need to clench.

Uh, you don't need to be afraid.

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

And all this weird stuff is happening.

Like you're getting some really weird signals from your.

And stuff that you absolutely cannot predict.

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

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.

Hmm.

Hmm.

So it's, it's like not necessarily trying to force it.

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.

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

If you.

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

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

That's what I think is happening during enlightenment.

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

open?

Like what is that stepwise change between before and after enlightenment?

So this gets into the details of the four path model.

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

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

open and then it closes.

You tease it open, it closes, and eventually it can stay open.

I'm not sure if anything like it's open to question.

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

or like DTI or Doppler ultrasound basically to measure blood flow.

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

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

anticipate that people who have sort of these serious meditative attainments, they will

have more blood flow in certain areas of the brain than people off the street.

That more blood flow, more neural dynamism.

It might be a little bit more.

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

the blood flow.

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

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

So maybe just two.

The first is just because I love ending on practical things.

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

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

or modifications to their lifestyle?

Yeah.

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

A surprising amount of sort of wellbeing is metabolic health.

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

have big metabolic components and so on.

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

have this very finely regulatory system that sort of has tendrils, neural tendrils in literally

all parts of your body.

Yeah.

And like little clenches, they have functional implications.

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

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

to color your phenomenology in a bad way.

The cleaner you can run, the cleaner your metabolism, the better.

And just things will feel like non-lumpy, cleaner, just much better.

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

latches might be present is metabolic constraints.

Yeah.

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

So it latched it.

And so I think as a prerequisite for well-being actually, and I

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,

I think all those are going to be surprisingly important.

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

Yeah. Mitochondrial function and thyroid function, I would say.

So how consistent is this with like the theories of Ray Peet?

100% consistent. I'm a huge fan.

That's cool. It's like worlds kind of colliding. That's crazy.

It's a pretty provocative idea too that a certain threshold of metabolic health is

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

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

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

I would love to see a lot of meditation centers take metabolic health seriously

and you know, cook with coconut oil, for example.

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

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

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

I mean, understanding the four path model of enlightenment

in under the lens of desScript computation, I would say is,

is pretty much my, my current edge thinking. But as another curve fault,

I'll just, I'll just give like a, I'll just give a quick slide. I'm gonna slide back to slide.

a very short description of what I'm thinking.

So I've been thinking about the simulation hypothesis lately

and this sort of Nick Bostrom hypothesis that, yeah,

like it could very well be that we live in simulation.

And I've been thinking about what kind of thing,

like how can consciousness research contribute to researching that?

I have written some things about this in the past,

but I would say right now my sort of current edge is that

maybe the laws of physics,

or like we have laws of physics and laws of qualia.

And base reality, if we are in a simulation,

then base reality exists.

And they would also have their laws of physics

and their laws of qualia.

I suspect that our laws of qualia and their laws of qualia,

which are really the laws of perception,

which are pretty a priori are the same.

Maybe we have different laws of physics,

but we have the same laws of qualia.

And so if we can kind of distinguish, okay,

in what ways do our laws of qualia and laws of physics differ?

If there's something that we find in our laws of physics

that are not in our laws of qualia,

maybe that's a property of the substrate of the simulation.

So maybe quantum indeterminacy,

it isn't part of the laws of qualia.

It's just the way that the GPU that we're running on

handles sparse state or something.

So that's a rabbit hole.

But,

But you did ask.

So that's my answer.

Yeah.

How the hell would we even know that?

Yeah.

Okay.

I have to ask this one more question

because it's like, I'll regret it if I don't.

I'm curious.

I don't know if you've written about this anywhere,

but I'm curious about,

I guess like your metaphysics,

like I

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?

Yeah. This actually gets to what we were just talking about, the simulation.

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

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

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

physics textbook, find a theorem, apply it to consciousness. No exceptions.

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

One is physics, one is phenomenology.

I think in a practical sense, that's going to be true.

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

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

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

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

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

and thinking about types of language shapes. Amazing. Something to save for part three.

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

It was my pleasure.