WEBVTT

NOTE Machine-generated transcript; not human-reviewed.
NOTE Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/the-games-of-life/

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Today I'm going to give a talk on, I would say, sort of touching the same elephant, but from a slightly different angle.

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And I think, so this talk has evolved a few times. I was sort of intending it as sort of an instruction manual for life, we can say.

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What do we, we're here on Earth, what are we supposed to do?

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Now I think I'm going to be a little bit narrow, more narrow focus, talking about enlightenment.

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So, just going to start.

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A little bit, a few words about who I am.

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I'm a neuroscientist and philosopher.

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I wrote a book on technical consciousness research, called Principia Qualia.

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And co-founded a research institute.

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A few years ago, and found me another one.

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Some of my major works, the symmetry theory of valence, neural annealing, and most recently, vasocomputation.

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And we'll be talking about that.

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My blog is OpenTheory.net, if you want to read my stuff.

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Is the audio stringing a little bit?

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But, uh...

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And testing, testing, testing.

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I think that's great, thank you.

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Okay, okay, that's fair.

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So, I would say that the frame that I want to bring here is that life is a set of games.

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And games have some players, some rules, some goals.

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And we don't always know what games we're playing.

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We're sort of plopped into this world in the middle of everything.

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And there is a beautiful quote by Kwe Mpaya.

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It's, in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game.

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The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.

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And I think this is very, very important.

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And I guess I would encapsulate part of Buddhism as the sort of phenomenological game of how to make your experience more pleasant.

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It isn't obvious.

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It sort of goes, like, playing the game really well goes against our nature in some way.

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So, I want to talk about the neuroscience of that.

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And just in general, I think...

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If we're to sort of try to describe what games we humans play,

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I would say that there's sort of the most obvious game, humans as social animals.

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How do we flourish as social animals?

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And I think that Edge City is one example of sort of innovation in this space

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and in this sort of discovery and rediscovery of sort of social technologies

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to flourish as that.

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And then the second game that I will be talking about mostly is humans as experienced streams.

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How do we make this more pleasant?

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How do we optimize our experience?

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How do we be good experienced streams?

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So, I think this is very important.

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And then the third topic, which, if we have time, we can get into,

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what are we here to do?

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If we sort of project into the future, you know, a thousand years, a million years, a billion years,

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what is the purpose?

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Like, what's the goal?

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And, you know, we could say...

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We could frame it, if humans are servants of God,

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or if humans are agents of Telos,

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or if agents are the main characters in the universe,

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what should we try to accomplish?

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So, I think that's very important.

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And then the last thing, we'll see what we can fit in.

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So, okay.

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So, we heard from Ruben about enlightenment

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and this idea that it's core to human alignment

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and thus it's probably core to AI alignment also.

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And I agree with that.

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I think it's very well said.

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But what is enlightenment?

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Well, there's also the enlightenment house therapy guys.

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I don't know, are you guys here?

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Anyway, that's a very fun angle too. They talk about sort of non-dual philosophy. But what is non-dual experience? If we talk about, okay, some people have this magical thing called non-dual experience, and some people don't, most people don't, then what's the difference?

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So in terms of enlightenment, what can we say about how good it is? Why you should want it? What does it feel like?

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And the thing that I puzzled over for a ridiculously long time is how can there be a discrete event and an awakening, a realization, something that you see and cannot unsee,

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and that kind of makes moment by moment somewhere between 10 to 20 to even more times more pleasant.

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That Shinzen Young has said, you know, life is at least 20 times more pleasant, counterfactually, as if he hadn't started meditating.

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So that's like a big deal. It's not a 10% jump. It's not a 20% jump. It's maybe a 20x jump. So maybe there's something interesting here.

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And so I want to look at these questions, but I also want to sort of allow us to understand ourselves a little bit better.

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That it's always nice to sort of have an intuitive model for what's going on.

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And I want to sort of offer an intuitive model for how the nervous system works.

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And I hope that we can all walk out of here a little bit more with a little bit more self-knowledge.

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Okay.

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So in sort of the grandest big picture sense, the goal today is a new plain language synthesis of what the Buddha was pointing at,

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grounded in concrete physiological mechanism at a level of description that we can build technology for.

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So that's a big, big check. We'll see if we can catch it.

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Okay.

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So last year I posted a piece called Principles of Vasocomputation.

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Can I get a show of hands who's read this?

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Yes.

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Okay.

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Great.

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So I'm going to give you just an overview here and also say a few new things.

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So in school, we were taught that the vascular system is essentially,

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a set of plumbing for blood.

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That it just kind of transports blood, transports the plasma, transports the nutrients, transports the waste back.

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Very, very simple.

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But the neuroscience literature is littered with just hints that this vascular system is doing a lot more than that.

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And that it's actually adaptive.

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That it has some inbuilt intelligence.

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That is doing something very clever.

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And the literature calls this neurovascular coupling.

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And it's very interesting.

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Studies show that, okay, there's some statistically improbable connection between what's happening in the nervous system

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and what's happening in the vascular system.

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And I want to say that's,

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you know, like,

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the,

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this is the,

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it's very, very important.

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There's a beautiful set of paper kicked off by Moore and Cowell,

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Christopher Moore and Rosa Cowell in 2008,

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called the Hemoneural Hypothesis.

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That suggested blood flow was linked to how sensitive local neurons are.

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And basically,

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if the body

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puts more blood in the vascular system,

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and more blood in an area,

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local neurons can listen better.

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They can update more.

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They can be more sensitive.

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It's like adjusting the gain of the neural networks.

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And there were two crucial findings out of this research.

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One is that blood flow in perfectly healthy tissue can vary by a factor of 20.

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Not, like, a little bit, not 10%, not 20%, but 20x.

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Absolutely huge.

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And then the second finding was that, you know,

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changes in blood flow actually precede changes in neural activity.

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It's not that neurons process a lot of stuff and then,

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like get hungry and the blood comes to sort of pay off the metabolic debt. It's that the blood shows up first, then the neurons change. And very, very interesting stuff. So last year, I wrote a piece called Principles of Vasocomputation, combining these and a few other observations. And I think it says something fresh about enlightenment. So here's what I think it says.

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So just a little bit of a primer on the vascular system. There's a layer of smooth muscle around all your blood vessels. No matter how small, there's a muscle there. And so anywhere you have circulation, you can clench. You can hold tension.

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And so this is known to help manage blood pressure.

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But I also believe that clenching stabilizes blood pressure.

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on both short-term and long-term time frames and if we think so um there's a

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beautiful frame me and um I believe it's Zen Buddhism talking about the hand of

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the mind and how sort of part of the the practice is learning how to open the

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hand of the mind and I think that it this is literally the hand of the mind

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that we we have this huge network of muscle everywhere everywhere in our body

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that can kind of clench to stabilize and release to allow to update and so mental

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like if you're thinking if you're doing mental moves it's adjustment in smooth

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muscle tension

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and when you grab an idea it's actually literally a physical clench you are

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actually literally grabbing an idea with your smooth muscle vascular smooth

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muscle and when you release it's a physical release

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willpower as a muscle isn't metaphor it's literal and basically we hold it's

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a kind of a special kind of memory and we call hold context with vascular

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tension

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so

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the papers there uh moore and cow the hemoneural hypothesis and uh jacob at all cognition is

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entangled with metabolism uh so uh talk to me later about that so the the the story that i

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think is is worth pointing out here is that first of all the uh the anatomy is very very simple

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uh you know we can we can sort of hope that you know someday you know enlightenment is today too

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hard to even speak about you know maybe maybe we can sort of have a far mode you know it would be

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nice to figure this out eventually and in a thousand years and five thousand years uh but

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i actually think that the the fundamental mechanics are very simple you have vascular muscle

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and you have nearby neurons clenching the muscle prevents the neurons from updating

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and there's also a way to lock the clench and make it semi-permanent i'll get into that too and

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there's a short-term effect from from sort of pressure and a long-term effect from uh cutting

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off blood flow but everything follows from this very simple pattern um so i want to sort of uh

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explain how i think the body uses this uh it's it's a very simple mechanism but i think evolution

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has been incredibly clever with the evolution of the body and the evolution of the brain

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with how it's it's been using this so uh first of all i think there is

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very interesting variation in where people can flex their smooth muscle

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so just because you have the the hardware so to speak you know you you have this uh the system that

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literally literally goes everywhere in the body um and we can sort of learn to flex it in uh in this

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place or or that place and then we can sort of learn how to flex it in uh in this place or that place

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probably there are a lot of blind spots there are places many places that i can't flex my muscle

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but but you can and there are many places that i can and you can't and so i think this is a truly

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interesting driver of human variation and i think actually um aphantasia arises from from this um

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just a few words as to uh how how precise the body can be with this with

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where to flex where to release where to allow blood flow where to prevent blood flow um

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so the the precision that the body can selectively direct blood flow is somewhere between

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like studies show uh between

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100 to 400 micrometers.

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And if you think of this in terms of voxels, does everyone know what a voxel is?

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It's like a 3D pixel?

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Okay.

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So basically, if you were to say, okay, we have voxels that are the size 100 micrometers

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or 400 micrometers, then how many of these fit in the brain?

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And you get something like 21 million to 1.3 billion.

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So it's not just we can clench in a thumb-sized area.

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It's we can clench in a truly fine-grained sense.

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And I think that much of what we call education, much of what we call mental development is

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learning how to clench in very precise ways.

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How to stabilize in this micro region or that micro region.

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And of course, if your brain is sore after reading something or thinking about something

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difficult, I think it makes sense.

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It's literally a muscle that can get sore.

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And so, you know, I always get incredibly excited about explaining human variation

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in terms of kind of concept.

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Okay, well, I'm bad at directions.

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Well, we could diagnose that you don't have clean vasomuscular access to your parietal

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lobe.

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But if you work at it, if you do exercises that sort of try to squeeze that muscle over

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and over and over, you will get better at it.

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So that's the story that I would tell about the hand of the mind.

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There's also this other feature.

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of smooth muscle. So skeletal muscle, pretty simple stuff. It can contract, it can relax. Smooth muscle has a third setting, we can say. And

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It's called the lach bridge mechanism.

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And basically, when a lach forms, the smooth muscle locks itself shut.

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And this is well studied in the abdomen and in the bladder and in sort of blood pressure

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modulation.

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But if we think back to sort of the very, very, very fine resolution, 21 million to

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1.3 billion, sort of, I'm calling this vascular addressable units, then that's huge.

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We can sort of start to program ourselves with selective tension.

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Where there is tension, there's reduced dynamic range.

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Where there's no tension, there's full dynamic range.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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So literally, the body is programming language.

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So yeah, deprived of blood flow, neurons basically drop into safe mode and basically freezing

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their patterns and leading to a semi-permanent reduction in sort of local possibility.

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And if we think about, okay, trauma, holding tension that you can't seem to release, or

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in the Bayesian frame, a strongly held prior that you can't sort of release, I think it's

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exactly a latch in vascular, in your vasculature.

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And I think, and here I want to sort of engage with what you said and just offer a frame.

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This is very mappable.

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Like, I'm not necessarily talking about like...

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Okay.

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I'm not necessarily talking about things at the computational level, like the nervous

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system makes predictions or it's like something a little bit more abstract.

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But no, I think that these latches are very discrete physical things.

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And in fact, so you could make a map of where you can clench by just sort of giving, running

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a person through a set of tests, like try and think of this, try and think of that,

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can you do this physics problem?

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Can you draw this painting, et cetera.

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And if you give enough tests, then you can figure out where they have access to stabilize

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patterns in their brain, if you can sort of watch the muscles work and where they don't.

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So I would expect that if you have aphantasia, you don't have muscle muscular access to like

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the low tier physical or like visual parts of your body.

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And then secondly, the,

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idea of latches that you can measure blood flow in the body.

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And if there's a black hole, if there's a dark spot that only a trickle of circulation

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gets to, well, and especially if you compare it to the average, and for other people they

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have more circulation there, probably a latch.

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But likewise, you could use, so you can do that with Doppler ultrasound, you can do that

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with fMRI with contrast.

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You can also look at differential density, that clenched muscle will have a different

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density than relaxed muscle.

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Likewise, you can look at metabolism, that like a PET scan or whatever, you can just

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see, okay, these neurons are just not using a lot of ATP or something like that.

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So I'm incredibly enthusiastic about this, although I see it as a fairly simple neuroimaging

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problem, but somebody does have to do it.

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So yeah.

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So let's take this thing that we've just described and apply it to awakening or in

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enlightenment.

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And I guess this part of my talk is enlightenment is muscular.

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So when

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When we're born, we're born into incredible sensory chaos that William James calls this

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blooming, buzzing confusion.

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And things are just happening.

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It's like a huge dose of LSD all the time.

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And it's hard to navigate.

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And one of the crucial tools we have available to us is clenching our smooth muscles to stabilize

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patterns.

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And we sort of build out our map where we can clench.

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And of course, our bodies also sometimes decide to hold these clenches and basically glue

249
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them shut to create latches in certain networks.

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And maybe it decides it found a really good solution.

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And it's just worth locking that in.

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Or maybe something really bad happened.

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And the body just decides, I'm never going to let that happen again.

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And it latches the network.

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And sort of restricts certain parts of the dynamic range as unsafe, something you can't

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be trusted with.

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And I think that latches and fear are very, like, they go together.

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So, as we grow, and we can say, as we develop a sense of self, we accumulate these latches.

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And I suspect that it's a mix of reinforcement learning, and we can say reinforcement learning

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from human feedback, to adapt.

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So Foucault talked about how humans sort of enforce norms on each other.

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And I think that's important.

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Sort of a distributed thing.

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I would say that humans also enforce culture on each other by installing latches to block

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off behaviors that are unwanted by the culture.

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And maybe this standard set of latches can actually define a culture.

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And this obviously can be incredibly useful and gives rise to the coordination we see today.

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And coordination is always the scarce resource.

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But it's also, each latch that you pick up reduces your felt sense of freedom.

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And in a very literal sense, drains the feeling of magic from reality.

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And things get more mundane and predictable.

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So later, when we are big, when we are socialized, when we can manage our social life, when we

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can manage our uncertainty with better tools, and high level capacities, we could, technically

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speaking, we could often afford to release these latches, to release this tension.

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And latches can last from between minutes to decades, or a whole lifetime.

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So, but the question is, well, how do you release your latches?

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And there are a lot of ways to do that.

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Unfortunately, the body doesn't like the body has memory and it created this memory for a reason

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And it doesn't necessarily want to let go

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So I think that a that meditation

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is a recipe for, first of all, how to build nervous system capacity such that you could be trusted without these latches and then to sort of tease them open.

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So I think that just to bring this back to sort of non-dual experience, I would say that the amount of latches in your system

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is essentially equivalent to the amount of frozen sensation in your system.

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That something that is kind of a pattern that are stuck, that won't update.

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And that we could say this also corresponds to the distance you are from a full non-dual existence.

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And the great thing here is this is very quantifiable.

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If you sort of can create this map,

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you can see the things that are sort of blocking you from entering sort of a more flow non-dual state.

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And, you know, for example, a deer, I think, would be very close to perfect non-dual experience.

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It doesn't have many sort of frozen patterns, frozen sensations.

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And a modern human, fairly far.

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And this also sort of paints the story about, you know, we talk about emotional growth,

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and becoming non-reactive, and sort of building this sense of equanimity.

294
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And I think it's literally muscle deconditioning.

295
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That in a very, very literal sense, retraining the urge to sort of reflexively stabilize or reify sensations with vascular pressure.

296
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And the Buddhists call this tantra.

297
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And I think it's literally a muscle reflex.

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And it corresponds to the strength of this muscle reflex.

299
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And also the skill by which it happens as well.

300
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But anyway, also a very quantifiable thing.

301
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So the story that I want to tell about what is the game of optimizing experience.

302
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You know, we have this system, we have this nervous system.

303
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And sort of how do we...

304
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What's like winning the game, we can say.

305
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And probably that's like a bad frame, but it's at least narrowly accurate.

306
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And I would say that I would offer that one of the core goals here is to regain the phenomenological freedom and sense of magic that you lost as a child.

307
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As you sort of build your predictive models, as you latched certain patterns in your nervous system.

308
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And of course, first sort of building enough, I'm calling it nervous system virtue, to sort of handle that freedom.

309
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This is not necessarily a thing that happens by default.

310
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And then sort of tuning down this sort of tantra muscle reflex.

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And then also I would say a counterpart to this is systematically training the capacity to flex more of your smooth muscle.

312
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To stabilize more complex and more subtle things.

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That, you know, we're born, we don't know how to stabilize anything.

314
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We reach three.

315
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Okay, we're like getting better at like, I know this concept and I know that concept.

316
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And then, okay, you know, you're going to get better.

317
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You finish your PhD and you can like very, very precisely stabilize a lot of technical terms.

318
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And like feel them.

319
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So it's just kind of, we could frame this as if you, if there's the hand of the mind that corresponds to this spider web of blood vessels throughout your whole body.

320
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Then by training, you can increase the number of fingers on the hand of the mind.

321
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where it can flex and maybe we can buy you know build a new science of

322
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psychometrics around this and then uh finally so I thought the the final

323
00:29:34.080 --> 00:29:39.680
question or maybe final about sort of becoming a good person like you don't

324
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have to be enlightened to be a good person and not all enlightened people

325
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are like that but there is like they're not completely orthogonal either and

326
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like a lot of being a jerk is just suffering and so if you remove that and

327
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sort of remove the the frozen

328
00:30:00.600 --> 00:30:26.600
shards of sensation in your nervous system, you open yourself up to showing up for what is actually real. So I do think that the fewer of these latches that you have, the more options you have for not being bad, at least. Or like the fewer incentives you have for being bad.

329
00:30:30.960 --> 00:30:55.340
So what does this mean for neurotech, we can say? And I think that if someone figures out how exactly to pop smooth muscle latches with transcranial apocosal ultrasound, it would change the world. It would be a very, very big deal.

330
00:30:56.400 --> 00:31:15.520
I don't actually expect it to be that technically hard. But just like psychedelics, which I think also can randomly open latches, and I think that can also sort of push more blood into latch areas temporarily, and sort of wake them up also temporarily.

331
00:31:17.100 --> 00:31:20.080
This could have strange effects if you can just pop latches.

332
00:31:20.160 --> 00:31:25.320
So there is this question of if you have the right amount of blood, you can pop latches.

333
00:31:25.340 --> 00:31:28.580
map of someone's latches are

334
00:31:28.580 --> 00:31:43.340
Are 50% of them just safe to open? And 50% could cause trouble? Or is it more 99% are safe to open if they're an adult, and like 1% might cause some trouble? So a lot would depend on this.

335
00:31:46.920 --> 00:31:52.740
And finally, the body uses neurotech or uses this tension system to program itself.

336
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And if I were to consider how to most naturally use it, I would say that the body is more likely to be able to do it.

337
00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:04.080
I might try to interface with this system.

338
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But I'd be very mindful that tension has a cost, and it's better to remove tension than add tension.

339
00:32:15.460 --> 00:32:20.860
So that's the core hypothesis that I wanted to share today.

340
00:32:22.180 --> 00:32:30.120
And I think it says a lot about sort of how do we design a good tribe, a good culture.

341
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A good life.

342
00:32:32.080 --> 00:32:37.200
How do we raise young people in sort of a very humane way?

343
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Like minimize their latches in very simple terms.

344
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And then I think that I can also say things about kind of the biggest picture of, well, in a million years, or how easy would it be to get everyone enlightened?

345
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Or how easy would it be to design a human such that they were born enlightened and wouldn't lose it?

346
00:33:05.740 --> 00:33:07.900
And I think these are very interesting questions.

347
00:33:08.100 --> 00:33:13.980
But I also think that this might be a good place to open for questions.

348
00:33:21.460 --> 00:33:21.940
Yeah.

349
00:33:30.580 --> 00:33:30.740
Thank you.

350
00:33:33.300 --> 00:33:35.980
Mike, before the question, very cool.

351
00:33:36.100 --> 00:33:39.760
The somatization, the principle, very cool.

352
00:33:39.880 --> 00:33:40.280
Thank you.

353
00:33:40.860 --> 00:33:46.780
Are you aware of Nordenstrom's work with closed biological circuits?

354
00:33:47.720 --> 00:33:57.140
Yeah, the principle that there is a regulatory bioenergetic system that runs in the vascular wall.

355
00:33:57.440 --> 00:33:59.400
And you're shaking your head yes.

356
00:34:00.800 --> 00:34:01.960
And it's highly complementary.

357
00:34:02.220 --> 00:34:04.460
It may be just two views of the same system.

358
00:34:05.720 --> 00:34:06.540
So thank you.

359
00:34:06.600 --> 00:34:10.540
Thanks for getting us out of our head and into our body, which is our whole mind.

360
00:34:10.720 --> 00:34:11.640
Thank you very much.

361
00:34:12.080 --> 00:34:12.400
Nordenstrom.

362
00:34:12.700 --> 00:34:13.020
OK.

363
00:34:13.580 --> 00:34:13.760
Great.

364
00:34:13.980 --> 00:34:16.280
Let me just make a note of that.

365
00:34:16.420 --> 00:34:17.860
I want to make sure to follow up.

366
00:34:18.200 --> 00:34:19.120
What was the name?

367
00:34:22.580 --> 00:34:23.880
I've got a big fat book.

368
00:34:24.040 --> 00:34:25.200
I'd be happy to gift it to you.

369
00:34:25.360 --> 00:34:26.020
Oh, wonderful.

370
00:34:26.320 --> 00:34:26.580
Great.

371
00:34:26.640 --> 00:34:26.900
OK.

372
00:34:29.140 --> 00:34:30.400
It's also, I would say that.

373
00:34:30.420 --> 00:34:30.560
Yeah.

374
00:34:30.580 --> 00:34:35.680
So, William Reich, with his sort of Oregon energy and armoring, sort of is touching the

375
00:34:35.680 --> 00:34:36.440
same elephant, I think.

376
00:34:40.640 --> 00:34:44.360
Fantastic talk, Mike, and I look forward to many conversations drilling extra deep.

377
00:34:44.440 --> 00:34:48.380
But for here, just a comment and a question.

378
00:34:48.500 --> 00:34:52.980
First of all, comment, you know, it feels like right now, and sort of when it comes

379
00:34:52.980 --> 00:34:57.700
to skill formation, memory formation, prior to this theory and the one that was also mentioned,

380
00:34:57.800 --> 00:35:00.000
maybe other theories, there was sort of like, we have

381
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:08.120
a lot of data at the top level and some sort of higher level theories, sort of like at the level of what Darwin came up with when he came up with his level theory of evolution at the time.

382
00:35:08.360 --> 00:35:14.060
But he knew that you had there was details that needed to be filled in for the actual physical mechanisms.

383
00:35:14.580 --> 00:35:18.440
And then, you know, that finally got filled in with DNA, Watson and Crick, et cetera.

384
00:35:18.720 --> 00:35:21.380
And this feels like a great example of filling in the detail.

385
00:35:21.520 --> 00:35:27.600
And then it can unlock now that we're at the very physical level, then it can lock a spate of innovations.

386
00:35:29.600 --> 00:35:37.920
And my question is, this seems to be a very useful for explaining skills and biases and values and so on.

387
00:35:38.240 --> 00:35:50.100
Do you believe that or is it possible that it could also go to one level lower for specific memory, like one bit at a time for like, you know, what's the capital city of Florida, that sort of thing?

388
00:35:50.220 --> 00:35:54.380
You know, because in electrical engineering, you know, you combine a couple latches, you get a bit cell, right?

389
00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:57.020
And that's this loop that just remembers a bit.

390
00:35:57.100 --> 00:35:58.920
So what like is it possible?

391
00:35:59.000 --> 00:36:02.180
Or what level of fidelity of memory might this be?

392
00:36:02.860 --> 00:36:04.060
Have the capacity for?

393
00:36:04.200 --> 00:36:05.940
Yeah, that's a great question.

394
00:36:06.060 --> 00:36:16.700
And I would say that Warren had a good, really good question the other day about sort of do sensory judgments deal with latches?

395
00:36:16.780 --> 00:36:28.460
Like, can you like, can part of your sensory input circuitry get latched such that you sort of preferentially interpret things as X instead of Y?

396
00:36:29.000 --> 00:36:30.260
And I think that's yes.

397
00:36:30.820 --> 00:36:41.360
So I do think that basically, anywhere you have neurons can get latched, and anything that neurons do can get latched as well.

398
00:36:42.480 --> 00:36:50.680
I mean, maybe it's harder to like, latch things that are very, very close to a major artery, because they're just going to be huge amounts of blood flow.

399
00:36:50.760 --> 00:36:53.200
You can't starve those neurons of blood flow.

400
00:36:53.600 --> 00:36:57.620
But yeah, there's a lot of networks that could be.

401
00:36:58.460 --> 00:36:58.980
Yeah.

402
00:37:02.120 --> 00:37:03.400
Thank you, Mike.

403
00:37:04.500 --> 00:37:09.060
So I have a question kind of about almost like an interpretability problem for this.

404
00:37:09.820 --> 00:37:16.680
You suggested, you know, open question of like, how, like, what percentage of a person's latches would be safe to pop open?

405
00:37:16.800 --> 00:37:17.100
Right?

406
00:37:17.220 --> 00:37:17.580
Yeah.

407
00:37:18.120 --> 00:37:28.440
But I also wonder, you know, should we necessarily try to understand how each latch relates to the person's web of priors?

408
00:37:28.440 --> 00:37:28.980
Yeah.

409
00:37:29.000 --> 00:37:51.880
So what are the episodic and semantic memories and, you know, high level, you know, sensory motor predictions that are associated with each latch, so that as you release them, you're not doing it indiscriminately, which could cause potential short term chaos in the person's web of beliefs and expectations of the world.

410
00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:54.260
So, so do you agree with that?

411
00:37:54.380 --> 00:37:58.980
And how do you think that kind of mapping and going slowly and like kind of, you know,

412
00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:00.660
feeling like, okay, what's changing now?

413
00:38:00.760 --> 00:38:01.100
Yeah.

414
00:38:01.200 --> 00:38:02.860
Could help that go effectively?

415
00:38:03.240 --> 00:38:04.560
Yeah, that's a good question.

416
00:38:04.700 --> 00:38:11.400
And I would say that, uh, you, we can kind of split these into like, there are some latches which are convergent.

417
00:38:12.020 --> 00:38:20.580
And I think like the the four path model suggests that, yeah, like there are these like, really important networks that get latched pretty early on.

418
00:38:21.280 --> 00:38:23.920
And they're pretty much the same across everyone.

419
00:38:24.760 --> 00:38:28.980
And, you know, if you sort of follow this recipe, you may be able to open that.

420
00:38:29.700 --> 00:38:37.480
So I think like, that's like, that's an example of sort of everybody kind of works the same, more or less.

421
00:38:37.980 --> 00:38:47.320
But I would also say that, yeah, like, in any adult, there's going to be huge, unique patterns of what gets latched.

422
00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:50.540
And then it's a question of, okay, how do you know what it does?

423
00:38:51.920 --> 00:38:56.280
And I think that we may have to build up rules of thumb of, okay.

424
00:38:57.980 --> 00:38:58.700
It's usually.

425
00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:01.480
It's usually safe to open latches in this brain region.

426
00:39:01.620 --> 00:39:06.960
And it generally has this hedonic or phenomenological or predictive or whatever effect.

427
00:39:07.260 --> 00:39:10.440
But like that brain region, probably don't touch that.

428
00:39:32.840 --> 00:39:34.660
Thank you for your sharing, Michael.

429
00:39:36.920 --> 00:39:38.500
Actually, I'm from China.

430
00:39:38.680 --> 00:39:46.880
So there are some traditional Chinese medicine, especially just now you mentioned the blood and the muscles.

431
00:39:47.000 --> 00:40:00.000
So like acupuncture is kind of like something if you feel somewhere very painful, just like take out the blood from that way.

432
00:40:00.200 --> 00:40:14.400
And if you feel some like you feel a headache, just like press this way. Do you think it can be very scientist? Because in past it always be experience.

433
00:40:14.400 --> 00:40:23.900
So, I think that it's obvious that traditional Chinese medicine knows a lot about the body

434
00:40:23.900 --> 00:40:27.740
and knows things that Western mainstream science does not.

435
00:40:29.460 --> 00:40:33.340
It's always a struggle to update the way we talk about the body.

436
00:40:33.780 --> 00:40:42.300
And so, if we talk about blood vessels and neurons, it has different trade-offs than

437
00:40:42.300 --> 00:40:46.440
talking about energy or chi or humors or whatnot.

438
00:40:46.440 --> 00:40:53.940
And so, I'm always interested in combining, like, I guess I have a friend who talks about

439
00:40:53.940 --> 00:41:05.620
naturalizing Wu, of taking frames like Chinese medicine, like Buddhism, like energy work,

440
00:41:05.820 --> 00:41:12.900
and sort of trying to put it in a Western frame without losing anything.

441
00:41:13.300 --> 00:41:15.840
And that's a very difficult problem.

442
00:41:16.940 --> 00:41:19.960
But I do think there's a lot to be learned.

443
00:41:25.560 --> 00:41:27.020
Two more questions there.

444
00:41:32.240 --> 00:41:33.580
Please also say your name.

445
00:41:33.860 --> 00:41:34.020
Yeah.

446
00:41:34.180 --> 00:41:34.660
Thank you.

447
00:41:35.020 --> 00:41:35.920
My name is Christopher.

448
00:41:36.080 --> 00:41:37.120
Thank you for the talk, Michael.

449
00:41:37.720 --> 00:41:41.720
And my question may or may not be out of scope for what you're looking to discuss here, so

450
00:41:41.720 --> 00:41:43.260
feel free to just pass on it.

451
00:41:43.260 --> 00:41:56.400
But a few times in stuff you said in the talk, I got the impression of sort of at least an implicit deontology of pleasure, like that pleasure was valuable, worth pursuing, maybe good.

452
00:41:56.660 --> 00:42:03.360
And I'm curious for you, is pleasure a sort of terminal value that is phenomenologically self-evident?

453
00:42:03.660 --> 00:42:11.520
Or is it something that you think is good or worthy of pursuit in the context of some other sort of larger scale ethical system?

454
00:42:11.580 --> 00:42:12.640
And if so, what is that?

455
00:42:12.820 --> 00:42:13.120
Yeah.

456
00:42:13.260 --> 00:42:14.160
That's a great question.

457
00:42:14.320 --> 00:42:20.900
And as background, I spent like seven or eight years writing a book on what is pleasure.

458
00:42:22.420 --> 00:42:26.280
So it's a topic that is near and dear to me.

459
00:42:27.980 --> 00:42:37.120
I would say personally, I aim to live my life in sort of a virtue ethics frame that I think that

460
00:42:41.240 --> 00:42:46.220
I do think it matters whether or not it's a terminal value.

461
00:42:46.740 --> 00:42:50.020
I am not quite ready to pass judgment on.

462
00:42:50.380 --> 00:43:05.240
But actions taken solely to maximize pleasure, whether your own or in the world, there tend to be piles of goals by that path.

463
00:43:05.520 --> 00:43:07.100
And I think that's a good point.

464
00:43:07.120 --> 00:43:09.320
I don't necessarily believe in doubling down on that.

465
00:43:11.160 --> 00:43:11.880
Thank you.

466
00:43:14.020 --> 00:43:15.700
Hey, thank you so much for your talk.

467
00:43:15.960 --> 00:43:16.700
My name is YY.

468
00:43:17.960 --> 00:43:23.060
I liked the lady brought up the example of acupuncture.

469
00:43:23.400 --> 00:43:37.100
I just want to like since you mentioned Chi as well, and I think how like these ancient practice not only from China, also from other cultures as well, who through dedicated interception, kind of become more established.

470
00:43:37.120 --> 00:43:48.000
I think it's really interesting to see how the way that the Chinese are attuned with how they naturally feel is actually an inherent knowledge that we all have to learning to identify how each thought is a chi flow in which part of the body.

471
00:43:49.620 --> 00:44:06.260
And I just see it's very interesting to find identify the parallels between how you can see how you can come to realize by introspecting insight and what you can learn by understanding the body or even setting the body as an object almost.

472
00:44:06.380 --> 00:44:07.100
Because you know, when you're learning about the body, you're learning about the body.

473
00:44:07.120 --> 00:44:13.780
And so you're everything's filters through the, you know, like, brings cognition of what we're doing.

474
00:44:14.020 --> 00:44:26.940
So I do think it's it's interesting that like you mentioned the topic of enlightenment because in these ancient texts on Chi practice.

475
00:44:27.820 --> 00:44:35.080
I've also heard like these ancient people from maybe 2000 years ago talking about, oh, even 2000 years earlier than them.

476
00:44:35.420 --> 00:44:37.100
The ancient people were more like, oh, I'm not going to do this.

477
00:44:37.120 --> 00:44:49.800
But they are more attuned and they are able to achieve this level of awareness or easing the tensions in the bodies in a very natural way that they have come to learn through a lot of hard work.

478
00:44:49.980 --> 00:44:54.680
So I've got kind of like wondering what do you mean by enlightenment?

479
00:44:54.960 --> 00:44:56.340
What are you exactly saying?

480
00:44:56.420 --> 00:44:59.700
Because it seems to me I'm a little bit skeptical about.

481
00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:00.720
Sure, sure.

482
00:45:00.880 --> 00:45:11.120
So in, I would say, the latch model of awakening, or the latch model of enlightenment, I would

483
00:45:11.120 --> 00:45:20.300
say that probably there are a few big latches, maybe in the brain stem, maybe in the thalamus,

484
00:45:20.300 --> 00:45:25.460
maybe somewhere pretty fundamental to the nervous system.

485
00:45:25.460 --> 00:45:28.660
And early on, they latch.

486
00:45:30.500 --> 00:45:36.480
And if you sort of follow the recipe of like the four paths model, you can get them open

487
00:45:36.480 --> 00:45:36.700
again.

488
00:45:38.840 --> 00:45:46.280
And so the, this would be kind of a, like, it wouldn't remove all your latches.

489
00:45:47.180 --> 00:45:55.340
But these may be in sort of very crucial networks, where you might get, you know, 80% of the

490
00:45:55.460 --> 00:45:58.820
benefit of all removal of latches from exactly those.

491
00:45:59.620 --> 00:46:03.200
I don't know if that's exactly true or not, but that would be my guess.

492
00:46:08.900 --> 00:46:16.640
People at a particular era share a similar set of latches as a result of the particular

493
00:46:16.640 --> 00:46:20.800
social structure or the culture that we're in, or the technological conditionings that

494
00:46:20.800 --> 00:46:21.820
we have been received.

495
00:46:22.140 --> 00:46:23.260
I would expect that.

496
00:46:23.380 --> 00:46:24.900
And I would actually expect that.

497
00:46:25.460 --> 00:46:31.020
We probably carry a lot more latches than people did 2000 years ago.

498
00:46:32.860 --> 00:46:38.660
And, you know, modern life, you just have to sort of be able to hold stuff in your mind.

499
00:46:38.720 --> 00:46:44.880
And the sort of capacity to free sensations is really just really important.

500
00:46:44.980 --> 00:46:48.160
It's more like relatively more important for living life.

501
00:46:52.020 --> 00:46:55.440
I also suspect that to some degree, latches are just like the most important thing.

502
00:46:55.500 --> 00:47:04.360
may run in families. That if you are, I mean, I like the frame of you are the average of the five people you spend the most

503
00:47:04.360 --> 00:47:09.060
most time around or your nervous system becomes the average of the five nervous

504
00:47:09.060 --> 00:47:20.100
systems you spend the most time around and if if everyone around you sees the

505
00:47:20.100 --> 00:47:26.340
world in a certain way and you don't ever get exposed to different ways of

506
00:47:26.340 --> 00:47:31.160
seeing different ways of being you might just your nervous system might just

507
00:47:31.160 --> 00:47:35.580
decide to watch it like okay that's that's the solution let's let's just go

508
00:47:35.580 --> 00:47:48.680
with that so which can be good can be bad thank you so much thank you okay I

509
00:47:48.680 --> 00:47:53.180
think we're out of time really grateful to Mike and all our others