Okay, so I'm going to give like a little menu of some of the novel paradigm shifting ideas that I associate with you. And some of these will be familiar to the listeners because I think they've become common terms in certain spaces. But neural annealing, autism as a disorder of dimensionality, the neuroscience of meditation, and also qualia formalism and the symmetry theory of valence.
And I'd like to start with that last one because that's what's been blowing my mind in the last two weeks. So like, what would be the one sentence summary of that thesis about qualia formalism?
Qualia formalism is this idea that math is the right approach to understanding consciousness, and that you can have an exact representation of an experience. And like, yeah, once again, this is a big deal if true, it wouldn't be a big deal if false. And then the symmetry theory of valence sort of takes this idea and then says, Okay, so where do we even start to reverse engineering experience?
What is the simplest quality? And, and I chose pain and pleasure to try to reverse engineer. And the symmetry theory of valence, the hypothesis is sort of in the name, by design. And it's that given a mathematical object that represents an experience, for example, what it feels like to be you, what it feels like to me, what, excuse me, what, what it feels like to be some dog, what it feels like to be a dog.
Or for some bird, then if we, if we evaluate this mathematical object for symmetry, that's how pleasant the experience is. And so we can get into what, what symmetry is, or whatever. But I think that like, one, one way I like to describe this is, this is a formal mathematical way to say,
pleasure is good, good valence is harmony in the mind.
And so if I'm feeling happy, then that's going to be associated with more harmony in the mind or symmetry in, in what, in like neuroscientific readouts in some sort of mathematical set of objects that we haven't fully articulated in all of the above. Where is the symmetry?
Right. So the symmetry theory of valence suggests that the symmetry that matters is the symmetry of this mathematical representation of, of what it feels like to be of your experience. And then the question is, well, can we, can we proxy that with various neuroimaging techniques? Can we measure this with EEG? Can we measure this with fMRI? And so on.
And so I've sort of dug into that as, as time goes on.
And I know this because I, I saw some presentations and read the paper, but it does seem like those proxies all correspond. So there's like the proxy for your physiology. So things like heart rate variability and your breathing patterns, and then they kind of get into like a harmonious structure.
And that's associated with positive valence.
But then there's also harmony with like neuroimaging or EEGs. Can you maybe give us some more examples of that?
Sure. So yeah, there, there are many ways to, to measure what's happening in the body and like the, the ways that we would be most interested in are sort of the, the most closely linked to the mind.
Yeah.
So like heart rate variability would be cool to, to measure. But like EEG or fMRI might be a better, better proxy for what's going on in, in phenomenology.
So then like one, one way to, to frame symmetry is symmetry is order. Symmetry is sort of lack.
of noise, lack of complexity. Frank Wilczek defined symmetry as change without change.
And so the more ways that you can sort of shift an object and get the same result, the more symmetries it has.
And this is, this can be framed
in a very formal way. So, production issues here.
His air pod just fell out.
Yeah. Nice. And we're back. So one, it's this big question, this grand question of
how do we connect what's happening in our neuroimaging that we can apply EEG, we can
apply fMRI, we can apply MEG. We have many, many different tools, but how in the world do we
connect that to experience? And this is a pretty central question for neuroscience. And my answer
is it might actually not be that hard. There might actually be some sort of clever things we can do.
For example, if we're trying to approximate the harmony in the mind or the symmetry of this
mathematical representation that right now we can't measure directly, but if we want to say, okay,
what neuroimaging techniques could give us an estimation of how much symmetry there is in the mind,
this is the way that we can do it, then one thing that I'm looking at is compressibility.
That you can apply this to any sort of neuroimaging data, to EEG, to fMRI or whatnot.
And it's just more pleasant states should be more compressible in kind of a very basic information
theoretic sense. And can you define that? What would you mean by compressibility?
Yeah. So if we have a file size that's a gigabyte, how low can we get it if we apply
compression? So if we can compress it 20% versus if we can compress it 40%, maybe the 40%
is a more pleasant state. We can infer that it has more symmetry.
Okay. My mind's going in all sorts of places now, but I guess I want to tie this in with,
an experience I had recently with meditation where I realized that a big part of meditation
for me was about unpacking abstractions in my field of experience. Something
that previously felt like pain. When I really look closely to it, it's actually something a
lot more nuanced and complex. I had a compression on that side of the map that said, this is pain,
avoid it. But really it's a compScriptive compScriptive compScriptive compScriptive
is like textured with all sorts of other stuff and i i like unpack it and then the pain turns
into something else and so this made me have almost like um like a like self-consciousness or
um an unstable relationship with like compression algorithms you know where so much of life is about
creating like adequate compression algorithms to um offload a lot of like cognitive processes
so you can navigate things a little more like uh skill um and i was like well maybe maybe that's
the problem you know maybe that's creating all sorts of unnecessary suffering and so i need to
unpack those compressions or maybe i need to i did them the wrong way or something like that so
um it feels like that's related to what you're saying i'm just curious to hear you riff on that
yes yeah uh so i that definitely matches my experience um i think that like i i tend to
metaphor for the brain that we can talk about unpacking an experience or or like a feeling um
we can also talk about sort of unfolding it and then metabolizing it
we're sort of made to digest these things and uh when they just kind of sit um when when a bunch of
complexity sits there um we can't really digest it until we we can look at it right
right and so
just to draw a thread with a few things um symmetry is like change without change
which i can get how that relates to compression because it you know you compress a one gigabyte
file to like half its size you've changed it it's taking up less space but for it to be a
successful compression something essential about it is still true you know like the image still
looks good it looks like the image um and then this metaphor of
digestion it's like breaking something down to its constituent parts and then
reorganizing them in like a
more harmonious or more useful or more something more beautiful
structure. Am I getting that right? Yeah, yeah, I would say so. And I mean, I would say that that's
kind of the, and my friend Johan, John, and some others have a good paper on this metaphor of
sort of cognition as digestion. And it's the sense that, like, as a system, we try to stay
clean and simple. And so if there's food, we eat the food, we digest it, we extract nutrients,
we get rid of the waste, and leaving room for the next thing that we eat. And I think that
often sensations, feelings, thoughts are the same way, that we have some sort of nugget of complexity,
and we need to sort of internalize it, digest it, extract the good stuff, and then
jettison the stuff that we don't need. And if we do it right, then the outcome, the result,
is simplicity. It's harmony. It's symmetry.
Right. Can you give like a very basic example of, you know, like two people having an interaction,
and then some sort of complexity arises? What would it look like if you went through the whole,
you know, digestive tract for that complexity?
Sure, sure. So if I, if I like, if we're having a conversation, and, and we talk about
like, I don't know, like the molecular structure of water or something, and like,
we talk about chemical bond, and you're like, what exactly is a chemical bond? And like, there's,
there are some words that, okay, I said chemical bond, and now they're, they're sort of,
they're in your head, you're wondering, okay, what, what exactly is this thing?
And you're kind of looking at it from different angles. And maybe it's hard to digest.
Hard to sort of metabolize, hard to sort of get the nutrients out and move on to the next thing.
And so that, that complexity is sort of sitting in your mind, and breaking symmetries, we can say.
And then, you know, as we say, okay, well, they're like these valence shells, and
the electrons fit in them in such a way, then it gives you sort of the reagent,
or the frame to digest this concept. And you're like, oh, yeah, like, that makes total sense.
And we can, we can move on.
It's funny, because this actually, it's very self referencing,
but this matches my experience with encountering your work, and also, you know, QRI stuff, where
I think in part, because it's so ambitious, in the beginning, it felt like I was discovering these,
like, isolated, self contained, you know, theories that I couldn't really incorporate or connect with
other aspects of the world.
My, you know, experience, until I, you know, read a bunch, and then I was able to,
like, hold all of it in the context window or something, and then find a way to, to put it
together. And I think what helped me, and it might help the listeners, is that, and, you know,
correct me if I'm wrong, and this is just my understanding, but there's this,
words like symmetry and harmony, they bring all the metaphors of music to mind for me.
And just, and music and math also have a really beautiful relationship, you know, music theory,
and even if you get down to the physics, like, why are certain intervals, like, pleasant sounding,
and why are some of them not? And it almost seems like the thread that connects a lot of your work
is, is something like the music of consciousness. And I know that's, like, very vague, but that
helped as, like, an anchor for me to make sense of some of the stuff you were saying.
Totally. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that, like, oftentimes, progress is
sort of connecting different domains. And, you know, if we can connect, you know, the domain of
consciousness or phenomenology of, you know, this blooming buzzing confusion, in James's terms,
with, with math, and especially with music, which is in, in some sense, normative mathematics,
I want to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
then that gives us a lot more tools to approach things.
Right.
So coming back to the symmetry theory of valence,
is it, am I right in saying that the thesis or like,
or
an implication of it is that like all things being equal symmetry like as a as in the broadest terms is just good like everything we like as human beings is fundamentally associated with symmetry.
Um directly or indirectly uh so I think that uh like I I would um you know put forth the the pretty strong assertion that all positive valence all a good feeling um comes from symmetry in the mind.
Hmm.
And this is not necessarily the same as symmetry in these stimulus.
So now we we don't have a whole lot of symmetry in the mind.
We don't you know uh hear one one major chord and then just pass out from pleasure.
Um you know and and some of us like uh you know noise music or you know rock music or or whatever that uh that does have some distance.
But I guess like I tend to describe this in terms of a lock and key system.
Hmm.
That uh the brain is is this very complicated lock.
Um and then we were always looking around for keys uh that will sort of combine with this lock to create harmony.
And so if if I'm thirsty then uh a drink of water will combine with the the state of my brain uh to create more harmony.
Um if I'm not thirsty then it probably won't.
Um but the like the symmetry theory of valence uh argues that.
Hmm.
The the goal condition is always the same.
It's always symmetry uh in the brain symmetry in the mind.
Um and technically symmetry in this mathematical representation of experience.
Um and then of course naturally uh you know we don't stay happy.
We we um we get bored of what we're doing.
We're looking for something new and the lock shifts.
And it takes a different sort of key to to fit.
Right.
I'm I'm reminded here of actually the stuff Jordan Peterson old school Jordan Peterson would say about chaos and order.
Yeah.
And like cleaning your room and um that it's almost like everyone's in a game that's like perfectly matched for their particular subjectivity of finding like that boundary between chaos and order.
And then when you when you do that when you're have one foot in chaos and one foot in order your your meaning instincts and all this other stuff just kind of uh support you and you feel good you get into flow.
Um does that connect with the symmetry theory of valence at all?
Have you thought of that framing?
I I think yeah I'm I'm a big fan of of the chaos and order frame of Peterson as well.
And I think that um like we we sort of it's about the the nature of keys that we seek out and like how challenging like how challenging we we seek out uh like we don't want something too challenging and we don't want something too easy.
Um so I do think that like the the part where I would sort of uh
depart from this chaos versus order frame is that
the sort of the success state in the brain and in the mind is always the same.
And like this this gets into uh sort of effective neuroscience study this in terms of um uh brain regions and um and whatnot.
But the the findings they have is like.
Um.
Regardless of whether you get there by eating a candy bar or listening to this beautiful profound symphony.
Uh the same regions light up.
Um and I think in in an even more general sense like it's all symmetry.
It's all it's all harmony.
What what do you mean by that by it's all symmetry it's all harmony.
Oh yeah um anything that feels good is creating symmetry in the mind.
Um anything that feels bad is creating uh broken symmetries in the mind.
And is that um is that like just certain brain regions are are pulsing in some sort of like periodic
does that look like? And I know these are proxies, but what does that actually look like in a neuroscientific sense?
Yeah, that's a really great question. And just kind of to give a little background, neuroscience has approached this question of what makes some things feel better than others in several ways.
And one way that it's sort of put forward is that maybe they're pleasure neurochemicals. There's dopamine and there's opioids. And these things create pleasure in some way.
And so part of my argument is that this isn't grounded. This is a good explanation on one level, but not all levels.
And another theory that neuroscience has put forth is that pleasure is very localized to certain brain regions.
That the nucleus accumbens is kind of the pleasure center of the brain. And there are several others. And that they sort of intrinsically create pleasure.
And again, my claim is that pleasure is a very local thing.
These sorts of explanations that neuroscience has put forth that pleasure is this, or these things create pleasure, they kind of fall apart when you poke at them.
And I guess I would say a slightly different story in Principia Qualia, where I introduced the symmetry theory of balance.
I suggest that we can think of brain regions or pleasure centers of the brain as a central part of the brain.
As tuning knobs of the brain.
So these, you know, quote unquote pleasure centers, they're not intrinsically creating pleasure.
They're retuning the brain towards harmony.
And a similar argument with sort of opioids. They're sort of adjusting the neuroacoustics of the brain, you could say.
So what would that, how would that map onto like maybe stimuli?
Or like someone's first person experience?
Sure.
So if you eat something that you really like, then maybe there's some activation of nucleus accumbens as a pleasure center.
And maybe it sort of pulses out harmony.
It sort of synchronizes other regions to it.
And like there's a lot of different ways of doing that.
There's sort of the, then the reflections and there's constructive interference and sort of your brain starts to hum when you eat something nice.
Or we can say your nervous system starts to hum.
And so it may look like the pleasure center is causing that, but it's actually the whole brain that's involved.
Okay. Now what if I eat something that tastes really good, but there's this other part of me that knows it's not in line with my taste.
Sure. So then you're going to have some cognitive dissonance and literal dissonance. There may be sort of two, I would call them frequency regimes that are sort of fighting.
And one, like they're each maybe harmonious to themselves, but together they produce dissonance.
So they're like, there's localized pockets of harmony, but they're like totally different genres of music or something, or they're in different keys. And then when they encounter each other, there's disharmony at like a higher level.
Totally.
So this is kind of exciting to me.
Because I've had like a personal philosophy, like a minimum viable philosophy that just works really well for me, which is like I playfully call it integrity maxing, which is just start with the values that I believe I have.
And then try to structure my life, my day, my actions, my practices, so that I'm in integrity with those values.
And that requires like having some self-awareness about what those values are.
And then having the appropriate amount of self-discipline and also compassion to like understand how to do things and skill to have integrity with those values.
And my life is just better when I am in integrity.
And then my life just feels worse when I'm not.
And I try to
almost like make this as legible to myself as possible by like articulating, you know, what it is that I value.
And it just, just taking the thing you just presented, it makes me think that it's, that's just a practice of resolving cognitive dissonance across time.
Right? Because that subjective feeling of integrity is when I guess different regions of my brain like find a way to strike a deal with each other or something and then harmonize.
Am I, am I getting it? Does that make sense? Yeah.
Totally. And I mean, I think in a, in sort of a deep philosophical, psychological way, I think we can construct ourselves in many different ways.
And some lead to,
internal conflict, internal dissonance, et cetera, much more so than others.
And maybe a very simple model is like, you know, you have your values and then you have your, your behavior.
And so to the degree that your behavior corresponds with your values, you are in integrity.
But then your values might not actually correspond to reality. Like you might have the wrong values.
And then you're going to get,
you might have to have a different.
Feedback from reality that you know you're, you're doing things wrong or something's off.
And so there's that kind of, there's different places where you can have dissonance, I guess.
One, one interesting angle in this.
I'm a big fan of this idea that emotions are embodied and there's so much intelligence, not only in the brain, but also in the body.
And, and there's different, different.
frames about parts work and like internal family systems and whatnot and curating therapy and i
think that uh like oftentimes literally different parts of your nervous system can be in conflict
and um and like that conflict sort of leads to you know literal dissonance in your nervous system
and literal broken symmetries in your experience uh and it's sort of a tug of war and like
different organs fight differently and they have different carrots and sticks
and so i don't know we know a lot of people on twitter talk uh talk about ai alignment um and
i think that's that's a fascinating topic and i think that like somatic alignment is also just
super interesting what are some um interesting implications of the symmetry theory of valence
when it comes to therapeutic practice
for somatic alignment or even just you know personal practices in order to achieve more
symmetry yeah yeah so i would say that um there's this idea that um there can be competing and i'm
going to use this term again um uh harmonic regimes um and that can like they sort of have
coherence and harmony
harmony when taken solo but then when combined they can create distance and i think that a lot of
like
a lot of improving that and like this this is kind of a human condition to be you know this sort of
uh somatic parliament that it doesn't always fully get along um and then i think that uh
um like there's
there's there's like stuff that i can say about sort of symmetry and and harmony and mathematics
and there's also this stuff that i can say about just like when you have several
periodic systems that each have harmonic structure like how do you make them play well together um
how do you sort of harmonize that harmonic structure and like i um in my expectation and in
my experience um it's it's about listening
it's about like uh getting the getting the integration getting the information to flow um and then like over time these systems will will figure it they'll figure it out um it might be a somewhat painful process uh during you know during that time but um yeah i think like
in terms of like having harmony in your body
just kind of
make sure it's it's talking listening
and practically is that
just, you know, having equanimity and bringing attention to all these different parts?
Yeah, so, I mean, this kind of gets into semantic practices and whatnot.
I think, like, the most important thing is just to set aside time to give yourself attention.
To give different parts of you attention.
And, like, the parts that need the most attention feel the worst to give attention.
Because it's like, oh, you know, I have a pain in my stomach and I don't want to put my attention there because it hurts.
But, like, it'll only hurt when you resist giving it attention.
And then once you kind of apply attention, you let, again, touching back on your previous example,
you kind of let that part of you expand and unfold.
And then you can sort of metabolize whatever's there.
And does that just look like sitting?
Yeah, I mean, it can be in meditation.
But I get the feeling that a lot of people are sometimes a little…
They find meditation a little intimidating.
Like, this practice can just literally be just lie down in bed, shut your eyes, and, like, give yourself attention.
And it seems like there's a general direction, I guess, for most people.
Depends on your starting point.
But for that attention to be in the body and not in terms of, you know, your thoughts about the body.
And so, you know, I guess that's the whole thing.
Right.
And I think that's the whole point of somatic work.
It's about feeling what wants to be felt and not, you know, telling a story about it or describing it and then paying attention to the description.
But actually paying attention to the raw sensory experience of it.
Right.
Yeah.
So, my apostolic teacher suggests this, I don't know if I want to call it a mantra or just kind of framework.
Present, internal, centered.
So much of our experience, we're thinking about the future, we're thinking about the past.
And to sort of be present, we have to be in the present.
And then internal, like, we can kind of put our attention outside, you know, thinking about other things.
But we should be putting our attention, like, if we're trying to sort of give ourselves attention, we should put it inside.
And centered, he means it in terms of not trying to chase after or judge anything.
It's just taking things neutrally as they are.
Right.
And that gives you the space to actually listen to it.
Yeah.
What comes to mind here is, you know, as by hydrating all these harmonic regimes with attention and, you know,
and listening to them, we can create the opportunity for them to reorganize with, like, more harmony.
And I think that's true internally, but it's also true externally with people.
Like, there's a way in which you can show up with someone that you have dissonance with that creates the opportunity for harmony across, you know, that relationship.
Do you think about the way human beings coordinate?
Are they all in the same terms?
Are there notable differences in the way this shows up externally as opposed to internally?
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's all the same stuff.
And there's this one of my favorite sayings is, as you do anything, so you do everything.
Yeah.
And I mean, this, it's clear that, like, we have the same kind of interactions with others as we do, like, inside our body.
and like uh we're sort of fractal harmonic computers and uh like a lot of
a lot of effective practice is sort of learning how to um how to be a good harmonic computer i
guess i would say um okay this reminds me of a quote of yours that i really liked i'm just going
to read it uh he said people think emotional progress is about releasing tension but in my
opinion it's first about building enough virtue in your nervous system
such that your vasomuscular
system doesn't need to jump in and micromanage and then showing your
body evidence of this virtue and then you get release can you can you explain that nice uh yeah
would be would be happy to um so this gets into my my latest piece um it's called principles of
vasocomputation and um it uh it talks about it sort of it combines three domains one domain is
buddhist phenomenology um another domain it's called um active inference it's part of the
predictive coding pre-energy principle uh cluster and then the third domain is neuroanatomy um
and so uh
the
the rabbit hole goes pretty deep uh i'd recommend people uh people read my thing
uh it's it's the top post right now on opentheory.net um uh but i would say that uh
like the the important thing uh for explaining this quote is that you know we we think of
um computation as happening in the nervous system that okay you have the brain you have some nerves
and they
send electrical pulses around and the magic happens. And principles of vasocomputation
says, yes, and. Like that is absolutely true. But there's also a parallel system that is
very computationally relevant. And that's actually the vasomuscular system. So the vasomuscular
system is it has a ring of muscle around it. All our veins and arteries and whatnot.
It has a ring of smooth muscle. They're called VSMC, vascular smooth muscle cells. And so
they can contract our blood vessels. And I think that the contractions of this system
are.
Are actually really important to understand, like how humans work, how humans think, how
humans feel, how humans move. So.
The vasomuscular system is a helper system. When the neural system is, you know, doing
good things, it just hangs out. But when the neural system gets into trouble, when
you have to figure out how to get them to understand how to understand how to understand
how to understand how to understand how to understand how to understand how to understand
how to understand how to understand how to understand how to understand how to understand how to understand
patterns as unsafe, it sort of blocks those out.
So if we have tension in the body, it's because our body thinks that some parts of our full
dynamic range are unsafe.
And this tension is trying to help us.
And I think of it like, I don't know if you know what a caladny plate is.
It's like a vibrating metal plate and you can sprinkle sand on it and it can make cool
geometric patterns.
Like that's kind of what our nervous system is in terms of it has harmonics or like eigenmodes
and whatnot.
But then like having tension in the body is sort of like putting a clamp on the body,
putting a clamp on the resonances.
Yes.
And it can block off certain patterns.
You just say, okay, we're not going to resonate in that way because it got us in trouble.
And to some degree, like this is, I think, a pretty clean generative definition of trauma.
It's this sort of clamp put on the nervous system that prevents certain classes of resonance.
It prevents certain.
areas of our dynamic range from being used.
um and so uh and i once again i i think that this is a this is a muscular thing it's it's the
the the vasomuscular uh tissue is it's just
of crunched. Um, so if, if no somatic people talk about blocks, uh, this is what I think a block is. And, uh, and these clenches can last for a long time. They can, uh, they can undergo what, or like they can engage what's called the latch bridge mechanism, which basically glues, uh, glues muscle shut. Like it glues it into a contracted state and it can stay that way.
For seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Um, it can be that way for the rest of your life if, if you're unlucky. So, um, so the question is, um, how do you, like, how do you get rid of tension? And there are so many different ways. Uh, you know, there's, you know, nutrition and like, you know, making those things. Magnesium is a, not, not a bad idea.
Um, and you know, you can, you can go to sauna and you can go, you know, uh, do, do yoga. You know, just the menu on this is just, uh, huge and there's no wrong answer. Um, but I would also say that, uh, like back to the, the quote that you, uh, you brought up, our nervous systems were like, uh, I take that back. Our bodies are trying to help us.
Mm-hmm.
Like it's, it's not that your body is trying to be a big jerk. And so it's holding this tension. Um, it actually thinks that there's something unsafe there, that part of the range that is blocking off, it needs to block off. Um, otherwise something bad would happen.
So, um, I think like one of the, one of the frames that, uh, I think we should generally put more attention.
on is like can we make our nervous systems better more virtuous uh better able to handle things by
themselves so that this vasomuscular system doesn't have to get it doesn't have to clench
it doesn't have to hold tension that um you know it's like uh we we talk uh about how how great
flow state is and it's a great thing uh and that's just when the neural system can do its thing
and the vasomuscular system doesn't even have to get involved then then we get flow and it's
beautiful but it's this question of what is the prerequisite there and it's it's having a neural
system with good defaults and you build those defaults through good habits and so i i almost
think that like one
one underappreciated um thing about okay if you want to feel less tension if you want to feel less
stressed etc uh build better habits and then uh your system and like you you might also have to
you know do do something to to unclench that that tissue um sometimes
i'm having trouble with my earbuds here uh sometimes we we hold a clench much longer than
we need to but i think step one is uh make sure that like uh your your nervous system your your
neural system can be trusted to just go into flow and and like uh perform its its defaults
and I think of that as like
tension sort of holds patterns into place
and then over time these patterns grow into being the defaults
and kind of like a wrapped bonsai tree or something
and then over time then we don't need the tension
like the defaults are in a good state
what sort of habits are you talking about when you say build better habits
sure um so
if I always get nervous about something if I'm like
nervous about going into the grocery store and what then
you know something like that uh then like just breaking down okay like why
why am I nervous what bad thing uh do I am I concerned about
you know what I'm doing and then I'm like okay I'm gonna build better habits
and like
is there a habit that I can put into place that would just
block up the possibility of that bad thing happening
And then, you know, you apply that habit and then you don't need to feel nervous.
Like, you might still feel nervous, but it can just kind of fade away.
I'm imagining almost like a skill tree, you know, of like a series of, there's probably
a set of habits or a set of practices that generalize quite well to giving, I guess,
like safety to the system.
So it's like, okay, the bad thing isn't going to happen anymore.
And then that, maybe that's also what you mean by like virtue, building virtue in your
nervous system.
And one of the ones that came up is actually stoicism or CBT or the ability to disambiguate
your interpretations of events and then from the events themselves and realizing that,
you know, like people can't really hurt you with their words.
It's your interpretation of their words and the implications and all the metadata that
comes along with the words that lead to the feelings of hurt and having the skill of disambiguating
that would probably give you a lot more resilience and safety when it comes to potential conflict
or tense situations with people.
So having good habits around that, which, you know, is CBT, stoicism, virtue, and virtue.
I'm curious to hear how you feel about how stoicism and similar practices would give you
safety in these situations.
Is that kind of what you're talking about when you say building virtue in the nervous
system?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, there's also this sort of getting into stoicism and Buddhism and whatnot.
There's this idea that usually the bad thing isn't the thing itself.
It's our reaction to the thing.
The second arrow.
Yeah.
Right, right. And, you know, Buddhism, you know, there are Buddhists who claim that, you know, it's like 95% of suffering is our reaction. And I guess I'd want to sort of touch back on the vasocomputation angle that I actually think that this is a literally a muscle reflex.
And so, I'm kind of playing around with this idea that, and no, I can't fully explain it at this point, but the phrase that comes to mind is enlightenment is muscular.
And that to some degree, there's sort of two tracks on the path.
And one track is, it's literally muscle deconditioning.
It's sort of taking this natural reflex, and you can call it the cringe reflex, and turning it down, making it sort of less of a default, softening it.
And I do think that in very experienced meditators, their cringe reflex is very, very soft.
And it's something that they've successfully deconditioned.
Now, on the other hand, it's about also about sort of building up your nervous system so that you don't need that.
That, I mean, this sort of reflex that, you know, something happens, whether it's, you know, a sensation or a situation or something.
Kind of, you know.
we react to it in in this sort of instinctual uh simple way but it's also about not needing
that reflex that reflex is trying to help us and maybe it creates more trouble than
it solves many times but um if you can absolutely remove the need for that reflex
then it's a lot easier to decondition so this would be like getting triggered by something
somebody says and then through contemplative practice and meditation you can kind of see
that happening in slow motion and then realize you don't need to get triggered and then that
gives you the space to better dance with the situation totally as opposed to like clenching
up again yeah and it seems like
at least practically speaking there's the habits the good habits to give yourself a sense of safety
so that you you don't you don't need to get triggered but then there's also this like
second category of, you know, the somatic work, like doing the sauna and cold plunge, like doing the yoga and stuff like that, where it almost seems like you're bringing yourself to these like places where you would otherwise cringe or where there's like a clamp in the network and then realizing that it's safe and you don't have to do that anymore.
And then kind of giving yourself evidence that, okay, we don't, we don't need to do that anymore.
Is that how you think about it as well?
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
And I also think that like, this is something that can be viewed from many, many different angles.
And like something like sauna, especially where like breathwork or psychedelics, I almost think of like as a garbage collection mechanism.
So we go through our day and, you know, basically, so the principles of vessel computation hypothesis suggests that we hold predictions as tension.
And we sort of commit to holding this tension until these predictions come true.
And this can be done in skillful or unskillful ways.
Yeah.
But it's also the case that sometimes, like, I don't know if people are fully familiar with the garbage collection metaphor, but like in programming, you know, you can allocate a bunch of memory, you can say, okay, I need access to this memory, and then you can use it.
And sometimes you don't give it back.
It just kind of hangs out and becomes kind of this sort of overhead that
you you're not using it, but you haven't given it back to the system.
So it's just three sources that are kind of frozen.
And I think that in day to day experience, this actually happens a lot with tension that, you know, we can think of, okay, you know, I'm going to light the stove and okay, I have the burner on and I'm going to hold like I have a tension in my body, some tension that sort of represents the tension.
And so I have to stove on and I need to remember this.
And then, okay, I turn the stove off, I can release tension.
You know, everything's clean again.
But a lot of you know, modern life is just so complicated.
And it's so fragmented.
And it's so we don't always have the cues that while actually you can release that tension, you don't need to worry any more.
And and so you slide little fragments of of you know, you have to figure out how to get them back.
uncollected garbage, we can say, um, just kind of pile up and, you know, it's not that, uh,
it needs to be there. It's just that your body is facing this incredibly hard computational
problem of keeping track of everything. And, uh, you know, better to, to be a little sticky
with tension than to just, you know, let everything go, uh, at the first hint that you can.
Like people vary a lot in this dimension. I know for some people things are very sticky and for
some people they're not, but, um, like this, this sort of garbage can build up and then it can be
very useful to have some sort of, um, some sort of practice that can sort of clean this stuff.
And like sauna would be a great example. Um, you know, uh, psychedelics may also work for this.
Um, and like,
yeah, just any, any high energy state and this gets into the general.
Yeah. Um, just to kind of connect this with some of my own experiences, um, definitely
high energy states, like really intense workouts, really intense sauna sessions, uh, cold plunge.
One thing I noticed, so I do sauna then cold, and then I sit in like a normal room until I shiver.
Um, and then I take the body temperature back up to something stable and then go back to the sauna.
And that shivering period is actually way harder than the cold plunge for me.
Yeah.
And that's often when a bunch of like emotional stuff comes up too. And like the body's shaking
and it kind of feels like some of these patterns are being released. Um, and just to kind of,
I guess, bring in the neural annealing bit. Um, my understanding of that theory is that
the body's like almost, um, or the nervous system gets into like a local maximum. Um,
and, uh, by adding disorder or variance or energy to the system,
things can like have the possibility to reorganize at like a higher level of organization and that's why these uh practices like physical practices that are really intense can be associated with a lot of release. Is that right?
I think it's sort of, I like the metaphor of the brain is like a metal.
And if it's sort of cold worked a lot, so if you cold work metal, it's like you bend it into place without heating it up.
And if you do that a lot to some metal, it'll get hard and brittle.
You know, if you think of like taking a paperclip and you bend it, you bend it back, you bend it, you bend it back, pretty soon like that metal is going to get really, really hard and brittle.
And so the neural annealing model says that, yeah, like, just like you can, you can heal a metal by sort of heating it up past a certain critical threshold, letting the atoms self-organize into a new default microstructure, and then letting it cool down.
You can and should do that to the brain as well.
And not let it cool down.
Yeah, I mean, it's not just literal heat, but just like...
Sometimes.
Emotional.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes, yeah, sometimes it's great.
But like, we need emotional intense experiences.
Yeah.
And if we don't get them, then our psyches get hardened at all.
Yeah, that makes complete sense to me.
It's like once a quarter, you got to do something really intense.
One other thing this reminds me of.
We're coming up on the hour mark.
So I got a couple questions left for you.
But I wanted to share that.
So I do coaching for founders and a lot of stuff that we do is like bread and butter productivity type stuff.
And they're inundated with all sorts of responsibilities and like potentially distracting things.
And they have to really focus on, you know, a couple of really important things and say no.
And that, I guess, creates a lot of tension.
A lot of like garbage gets collected.
And then you have to really see things emerge out of that.
And one framework that works really well is GTD, getting things done.
I don't know how familiar you are with that.
But the first step of that is basically like a major like mind dump where you walk people through listing all the different things in their life that they're avoiding or resisting or responsible for.
And it's very, very basic and mundane.
Like you just get a sheet of paper and you write things down or you do it in a Google Doc.
But...
It's almost as if it makes a lot of that...
Those things like, you know, the stove is on or whatever, like the equivalents for of those of that category of stuff, very legible.
And I call it like collecting open loops.
And then once you see them in front of you, you can actually close them or decide that these ones aren't important or figure out like the 20% that's responsible for 80% of the outcomes.
And I bring that in because that's a lot more mundane and straightforward.
And, you know, day to day than, you know, doing a psychedelic trip or doing sauna and cold plunge.
But it seems like it would help with the clenching, cringing patterns that you're describing.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
And I think that these open loops take a lot more resources than we realize.
And like if we're these sort of harmonic computers and we just have a bunch of clamps on our...
On our...
On our ability to resonate, then that really does reduce our capacity quite a bit.
And so the more free the body and the mind will follow, I guess is the frame there.
And also free the mind and the body will follow.
Right.
I think it's connected.
Yeah.
So two more questions.
The first is, and this is kind of a selfish question.
This is something I was curious about when...
Just for my own life.
Yeah.
Basically, something I've been quite interested in just to understand myself is the problem of salience or like keeping certain things salient across time and why it seems so difficult for many personalities, including my own.
Like I've had to come up with all sorts of practices and systems in order to maintain the salience of things that I know are valuable to me.
You know, something I'm excited about on Monday, I like totally forget about on Thursday, unless I follow some of these practices to basically narrow my focus and, you know, remind myself of things.
And the more I've talked about this openly with people, and especially with clients,
I've realized it's actually a big, big problem that a lot of people face.
And I think some of it has to do with our overwhelming information environment and digital environment.
But I was curious how this fits with your ideas of symmetry.
Because one of the things you alluded to in the beginning is that it's not enough that you just have a singular symmetrical experience.
Like if you play a beautiful major seventh chord on the piano, it might feel good for the moment, but it's going to get boring.
And boredom and salience seem to be related.
So I wonder if you have any thoughts on how you might frame those concepts from the lens of your work.
Sure. That's a great question.
I think that's a...
I mean, I'd first put it in the metaphor that, I mean, if the body is a song,
the song changes over time.
Keeping something in mind, keeping something prominent and salient and constant,
is like when you have...
When you're playing the same note throughout this changing song,
like it's hard.
It's hard to write a beautiful song that always has the same note playing.
So it's somehow understandable that it's...
It's hard.
And I think that when...
Like we can look at what happens when this...
When we can't do this, when we fail at this task.
And like one kind of failure is, you know, things just drop out of our salience list.
And you're like, yeah, it was important yesterday, but it's not important today.
But another failure I would say is ADHD.
It's sort of trying, you know, the...
The ADHD state is trying to hold many different, very disparate things.
And you're like, well, I have to keep hold of this.
And it's in, you know, the context of my work.
And I have to keep hold of this.
And this is in the context of my relationship.
I have to keep hold of this.
This is in the context of like taking care of my dog or something like that.
And it's just too much.
And you get paralyzed because, well,
I know you have to hang on to these things,
but you can't make it into a song.
I have so many follow-ups, but I know we're coming up on time.
Do you have a hard stop in five minutes?
No hard stop.
Okay.
Well, let's ask a couple more questions then.
Any suggestions for how to make music with that kind of stuff?
Like how do you...
How do you make that all into a song?
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's the hardest thing and it's, it's kind of the problem of modernity.
So it's not an easy problem, but I do think that like really, I mean, we hang on to these
things through instinct.
We, because we fear we might lose something important in reality.
If we let it go, it'll probably come back.
Hmm.
And that if, if we're less sticky, it's good on the margin.
I mean, it's, it's not great to, you know, just let go of everything and, you know, you
know, responsibilities and memories and, you know, it'll all work out.
Well, sometimes it doesn't work out.
But on the margin, it's probably great advice to, to let, just be more willing to let go
because if something is important, you don't have to hold it with tension.
Like you could, you know, you could, you know, you could, you know, you could, you could
rely on your, your neural patterns to, to hold it as well.
Um, and like we can really only do one thing at a time.
So if you're holding things in many domains, um, it's just, it's just nice.
Right.
This is why I like, um, learning, you know, systems for processing all the open loops
like GTD, um, and having almost being like a martial artist when it comes to navigating
all that.
You know, life complexity and then focusing on what's immediately before you.
And then the other thing this reminds me of, and this is a huge topic, but it does seem
like the fact that we don't have shared cosmic narratives, you know, like a shared religious
worldview with the same set of values or, um, big, big stories to like hold us together
in modern life is one of the reasons why this is really hard.
Because basically your paradigms can constantly be refactored
and re-evaluated and things are going to fall out and like other things are going to come back. And I just imagine it'd be way easier if, you know, everybody was Christian or something, or, you know, we
So, I think that's part of the diagnosis.
I also think that there are really cool social technologies that we've kind of let fall into
to disrepair.
I mean, for example, if we think about effective garbage collection technologies, and that
has a negative connotation, but it's actually like, no, this is really important.
It's like cleaning yourself of all these shards of context.
Like confession at church.
Holy cow.
How powerful is that as a garbage collection technology?
Like you can just kind of close a lot of different sorts of loops every week.
Right.
Okay, last question.
This is more of a personal one.
When I look at all your work, and as I said, it strikes me as very intellectually ambitious.
And I think part of the reason why it was kind of hard to penetrate from the outside
is that generally, I'm not used to people being that ambitious.
Like for even the idea of qualia formalism, that there is like a mathematical object that
corresponds to every subjective state or state of consciousness.
That's like a very bold, ambitious idea.
And it seems like you're following through and rigorously trying to make sense of it.
And I just think that's very rare.
That's even rare in like intellectuals.
So, yeah.
Why do you think you had the intuition or courage to go down that path while it seems
like most other people don't?
Yeah.
I guess the honest appraisal there is I just get obsessed with curiosity of things.
And it's like you do what you need to do to get clarity.
But I guess I'm...
Yeah.
I'm a big fan as a philosopher about finding binary philosophical questions.
Like either we live in a universe where X is true or we live in a universe where X is false.
And I mean, it's easy to spend a life in philosophy just thinking about things and like wondering
things and being curious.
And that can be beautiful, but it can produce nothing.
And I always want to sort of try to compile things into this binary frame of like, well,
either this is true and that would be super interesting to know.
Like that would be very big news.
Or this is false.
And that would also be very, very big news.
And whenever I find a question like that, I get really excited.
And like this sort of leads into like...
I think it's like the idea of formalism and valence-trualism and valence-formalism and so on.
So it's just I guess I'd credit that instinct or heuristic for a lot of those.
Mike Johnson, it was very nice talking to you.
Where can people find more about you and what's something you'd like to draw their attention to in particular?
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
My work is on OpenTheory.net.
And I'm especially proud of the last three posts.
And yeah, just want to thank you for the invite.
I'll put all those articles in the show notes as well.
Awesome.