The games of life

Transcript

00:00:02Today I'm going to give a talk on, I would say, sort of touching the same elephant, but from a slightly different angle.

00:00:10And 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.

00:00:23What do we, we're here on Earth, what are we supposed to do?

00:00:29Now I think I'm going to be a little bit narrow, more narrow focus, talking about enlightenment.

00:00:38So, just going to start.

00:00:41A little bit, a few words about who I am.

00:00:45I'm a neuroscientist and philosopher.

00:00:48I wrote a book on technical consciousness research, called Principia Qualia.

00:00:53And co-founded a research institute.

00:00:57A few years ago, and found me another one.

00:01:01Some of my major works, the symmetry theory of valence, neural annealing, and most recently, vasocomputation.

00:01:11And we'll be talking about that.

00:01:14My blog is OpenTheory.net, if you want to read my stuff.

00:01:19Is the audio stringing a little bit?

00:01:22But, uh...

00:01:26And testing, testing, testing.

00:01:28I think that's great, thank you.

00:01:31Okay, okay, that's fair.

00:01:36So, I would say that the frame that I want to bring here is that life is a set of games.

00:01:46And games have some players, some rules, some goals.

00:01:54And we don't always know what games we're playing.

00:01:58We're sort of plopped into this world in the middle of everything.

00:02:02And there is a beautiful quote by Kwe Mpaya.

00:02:08It's, in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game.

00:02:15The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.

00:02:19And I think this is very, very important.

00:02:23And I guess I would encapsulate part of Buddhism as the sort of phenomenological game of how to make your experience more pleasant.

00:02:36It isn't obvious.

00:02:39It sort of goes, like, playing the game really well goes against our nature in some way.

00:02:44So, I want to talk about the neuroscience of that.

00:02:50And just in general, I think...

00:02:53If we're to sort of try to describe what games we humans play,

00:02:59I would say that there's sort of the most obvious game, humans as social animals.

00:03:06How do we flourish as social animals?

00:03:10And I think that Edge City is one example of sort of innovation in this space

00:03:16and in this sort of discovery and rediscovery of sort of social technologies

00:03:23to flourish as that.

00:03:26And then the second game that I will be talking about mostly is humans as experienced streams.

00:03:34How do we make this more pleasant?

00:03:36How do we optimize our experience?

00:03:38How do we be good experienced streams?

00:03:42So, I think this is very important.

00:03:44And then the third topic, which, if we have time, we can get into,

00:03:50what are we here to do?

00:03:52If we sort of project into the future, you know, a thousand years, a million years, a billion years,

00:03:58what is the purpose?

00:04:00Like, what's the goal?

00:04:03And, you know, we could say...

00:04:05We could frame it, if humans are servants of God,

00:04:09or if humans are agents of Telos,

00:04:11or if agents are the main characters in the universe,

00:04:16what should we try to accomplish?

00:04:18So, I think that's very important.

00:04:21And then the last thing, we'll see what we can fit in.

00:04:24So, okay.

00:04:27So, we heard from Ruben about enlightenment

00:04:32and this idea that it's core to human alignment

00:04:38and thus it's probably core to AI alignment also.

00:04:42And I agree with that.

00:04:44I think it's very well said.

00:04:47But what is enlightenment?

00:04:51Well, there's also the enlightenment house therapy guys.

00:04:56I don't know, are you guys here?

00:05:00Anyway, 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?

00:05:20So in terms of enlightenment, what can we say about how good it is? Why you should want it? What does it feel like?

00:05:31And 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,

00:05:48and that kind of makes moment by moment somewhere between 10 to 20 to even more times more pleasant.

00:05:57That Shinzen Young has said, you know, life is at least 20 times more pleasant, counterfactually, as if he hadn't started meditating.

00:06:07So 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.

00:06:20And so I want to look at these questions, but I also want to sort of allow us to understand ourselves a little bit better.

00:06:29That it's always nice to sort of have an intuitive model for what's going on.

00:06:34And I want to sort of offer an intuitive model for how the nervous system works.

00:06:40And I hope that we can all walk out of here a little bit more with a little bit more self-knowledge.

00:06:48Okay.

00:06:51So in sort of the grandest big picture sense, the goal today is a new plain language synthesis of what the Buddha was pointing at,

00:07:04grounded in concrete physiological mechanism at a level of description that we can build technology for.

00:07:12So that's a big, big check. We'll see if we can catch it.

00:07:17Okay.

00:07:18So last year I posted a piece called Principles of Vasocomputation.

00:07:26Can I get a show of hands who's read this?

00:07:29Yes.

00:07:31Okay.

00:07:31Great.

00:07:34So I'm going to give you just an overview here and also say a few new things.

00:07:41So in school, we were taught that the vascular system is essentially,

00:07:48a set of plumbing for blood.

00:07:51That it just kind of transports blood, transports the plasma, transports the nutrients, transports the waste back.

00:08:00Very, very simple.

00:08:03But the neuroscience literature is littered with just hints that this vascular system is doing a lot more than that.

00:08:13And that it's actually adaptive.

00:08:15That it has some inbuilt intelligence.

00:08:18That is doing something very clever.

00:08:22And the literature calls this neurovascular coupling.

00:08:29And it's very interesting.

00:08:31Studies show that, okay, there's some statistically improbable connection between what's happening in the nervous system

00:08:41and what's happening in the vascular system.

00:08:44And I want to say that's,

00:08:47you know, like,

00:08:48the,

00:08:48this is the,

00:08:49it's very, very important.

00:08:52There's a beautiful set of paper kicked off by Moore and Cowell,

00:08:58Christopher Moore and Rosa Cowell in 2008,

00:09:02called the Hemoneural Hypothesis.

00:09:05That suggested blood flow was linked to how sensitive local neurons are.

00:09:14And basically,

00:09:15if the body

00:09:17puts more blood in the vascular system,

00:09:18and more blood in an area,

00:09:19local neurons can listen better.

00:09:22They can update more.

00:09:23They can be more sensitive.

00:09:25It's like adjusting the gain of the neural networks.

00:09:29And there were two crucial findings out of this research.

00:09:32One is that blood flow in perfectly healthy tissue can vary by a factor of 20.

00:09:40Not, like, a little bit, not 10%, not 20%, but 20x.

00:09:44Absolutely huge.

00:09:46And then the second finding was that, you know,

00:09:48changes in blood flow actually precede changes in neural activity.

00:09:55It's not that neurons process a lot of stuff and then,

00:10:00like 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.

00:10:29So 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.

00:10:51And so this is known to help manage blood pressure.

00:10:55But I also believe that clenching stabilizes blood pressure.

00:11:00on both short-term and long-term time frames and if we think so um there's a

00:11:07beautiful frame me and um I believe it's Zen Buddhism talking about the hand of

00:11:13the mind and how sort of part of the the practice is learning how to open the

00:11:21hand of the mind and I think that it this is literally the hand of the mind

00:11:30that we we have this huge network of muscle everywhere everywhere in our body

00:11:35that can kind of clench to stabilize and release to allow to update and so mental

00:11:44like if you're thinking if you're doing mental moves it's adjustment in smooth

00:11:50muscle tension

00:11:52and when you grab an idea it's actually literally a physical clench you are

00:11:58actually literally grabbing an idea with your smooth muscle vascular smooth

00:12:02muscle and when you release it's a physical release

00:12:07willpower as a muscle isn't metaphor it's literal and basically we hold it's

00:12:14a kind of a special kind of memory and we call hold context with vascular

00:12:18tension

00:12:20so

00:12:21the papers there uh moore and cow the hemoneural hypothesis and uh jacob at all cognition is

00:12:28entangled with metabolism uh so uh talk to me later about that so the the the story that i

00:12:37think is is worth pointing out here is that first of all the uh the anatomy is very very simple

00:12:46uh you know we can we can sort of hope that you know someday you know enlightenment is today too

00:12:54hard to even speak about you know maybe maybe we can sort of have a far mode you know it would be

00:12:59nice to figure this out eventually and in a thousand years and five thousand years uh but

00:13:04i actually think that the the fundamental mechanics are very simple you have vascular muscle

00:13:10and you have nearby neurons clenching the muscle prevents the neurons from updating

00:13:16and there's also a way to lock the clench and make it semi-permanent i'll get into that too and

00:13:23there's a short-term effect from from sort of pressure and a long-term effect from uh cutting

00:13:29off blood flow but everything follows from this very simple pattern um so i want to sort of uh

00:13:37explain how i think the body uses this uh it's it's a very simple mechanism but i think evolution

00:13:43has been incredibly clever with the evolution of the body and the evolution of the brain

00:13:45with how it's it's been using this so uh first of all i think there is

00:13:52very interesting variation in where people can flex their smooth muscle

00:14:00so just because you have the the hardware so to speak you know you you have this uh the system that

00:14:07literally literally goes everywhere in the body um and we can sort of learn to flex it in uh in this

00:14:13place or or that place and then we can sort of learn how to flex it in uh in this place or that place

00:14:16probably there are a lot of blind spots there are places many places that i can't flex my muscle

00:14:21but but you can and there are many places that i can and you can't and so i think this is a truly

00:14:28interesting driver of human variation and i think actually um aphantasia arises from from this um

00:14:37just a few words as to uh how how precise the body can be with this with

00:14:45where to flex where to release where to allow blood flow where to prevent blood flow um

00:14:52so the the precision that the body can selectively direct blood flow is somewhere between

00:14:57like studies show uh between

00:15:00100 to 400 micrometers.

00:15:02And if you think of this in terms of voxels, does everyone know what a voxel is?

00:15:07It's like a 3D pixel?

00:15:09Okay.

00:15:11So basically, if you were to say, okay, we have voxels that are the size 100 micrometers

00:15:17or 400 micrometers, then how many of these fit in the brain?

00:15:22And you get something like 21 million to 1.3 billion.

00:15:27So it's not just we can clench in a thumb-sized area.

00:15:31It's we can clench in a truly fine-grained sense.

00:15:37And I think that much of what we call education, much of what we call mental development is

00:15:45learning how to clench in very precise ways.

00:15:48How to stabilize in this micro region or that micro region.

00:15:55And of course, if your brain is sore after reading something or thinking about something

00:16:01difficult, I think it makes sense.

00:16:03It's literally a muscle that can get sore.

00:16:08And so, you know, I always get incredibly excited about explaining human variation

00:16:15in terms of kind of concept.

00:16:21Okay, well, I'm bad at directions.

00:16:24Well, we could diagnose that you don't have clean vasomuscular access to your parietal

00:16:29lobe.

00:16:30But if you work at it, if you do exercises that sort of try to squeeze that muscle over

00:16:38and over and over, you will get better at it.

00:16:43So that's the story that I would tell about the hand of the mind.

00:16:49There's also this other feature.

00:16:51of smooth muscle. So skeletal muscle, pretty simple stuff. It can contract, it can relax. Smooth muscle has a third setting, we can say. And

00:17:02It's called the lach bridge mechanism.

00:17:07And basically, when a lach forms, the smooth muscle locks itself shut.

00:17:15And this is well studied in the abdomen and in the bladder and in sort of blood pressure

00:17:23modulation.

00:17:25But if we think back to sort of the very, very, very fine resolution, 21 million to

00:17:301.3 billion, sort of, I'm calling this vascular addressable units, then that's huge.

00:17:39We can sort of start to program ourselves with selective tension.

00:17:45Where there is tension, there's reduced dynamic range.

00:17:48Where there's no tension, there's full dynamic range.

00:17:51Okay.

00:17:53Okay.

00:17:55So literally, the body is programming language.

00:18:00So yeah, deprived of blood flow, neurons basically drop into safe mode and basically freezing

00:18:08their patterns and leading to a semi-permanent reduction in sort of local possibility.

00:18:16And if we think about, okay, trauma, holding tension that you can't seem to release, or

00:18:25in the Bayesian frame, a strongly held prior that you can't sort of release, I think it's

00:18:31exactly a latch in vascular, in your vasculature.

00:18:37And I think, and here I want to sort of engage with what you said and just offer a frame.

00:18:49This is very mappable.

00:18:52Like, I'm not necessarily talking about like...

00:18:54Okay.

00:18:55I'm not necessarily talking about things at the computational level, like the nervous

00:18:58system makes predictions or it's like something a little bit more abstract.

00:19:03But no, I think that these latches are very discrete physical things.

00:19:08And in fact, so you could make a map of where you can clench by just sort of giving, running

00:19:19a person through a set of tests, like try and think of this, try and think of that,

00:19:25can you do this physics problem?

00:19:26Can you draw this painting, et cetera.

00:19:30And if you give enough tests, then you can figure out where they have access to stabilize

00:19:37patterns in their brain, if you can sort of watch the muscles work and where they don't.

00:19:44So I would expect that if you have aphantasia, you don't have muscle muscular access to like

00:19:50the low tier physical or like visual parts of your body.

00:19:57And then secondly, the,

00:20:00idea of latches that you can measure blood flow in the body.

00:20:06And if there's a black hole, if there's a dark spot that only a trickle of circulation

00:20:13gets to, well, and especially if you compare it to the average, and for other people they

00:20:21have more circulation there, probably a latch.

00:20:25But likewise, you could use, so you can do that with Doppler ultrasound, you can do that

00:20:29with fMRI with contrast.

00:20:32You can also look at differential density, that clenched muscle will have a different

00:20:39density than relaxed muscle.

00:20:41Likewise, you can look at metabolism, that like a PET scan or whatever, you can just

00:20:46see, okay, these neurons are just not using a lot of ATP or something like that.

00:20:53So I'm incredibly enthusiastic about this, although I see it as a fairly simple neuroimaging

00:21:04problem, but somebody does have to do it.

00:21:08So yeah.

00:21:10So let's take this thing that we've just described and apply it to awakening or in

00:21:21enlightenment.

00:21:23And I guess this part of my talk is enlightenment is muscular.

00:21:29So when

00:21:31When we're born, we're born into incredible sensory chaos that William James calls this

00:21:40blooming, buzzing confusion.

00:21:42And things are just happening.

00:21:45It's like a huge dose of LSD all the time.

00:21:48And it's hard to navigate.

00:21:51And one of the crucial tools we have available to us is clenching our smooth muscles to stabilize

00:22:00patterns.

00:22:01And we sort of build out our map where we can clench.

00:22:05And of course, our bodies also sometimes decide to hold these clenches and basically glue

00:22:11them shut to create latches in certain networks.

00:22:15And maybe it decides it found a really good solution.

00:22:19And it's just worth locking that in.

00:22:23Or maybe something really bad happened.

00:22:25And the body just decides, I'm never going to let that happen again.

00:22:29And it latches the network.

00:22:32And sort of restricts certain parts of the dynamic range as unsafe, something you can't

00:22:39be trusted with.

00:22:40And I think that latches and fear are very, like, they go together.

00:22:47So, as we grow, and we can say, as we develop a sense of self, we accumulate these latches.

00:22:59And I suspect that it's a mix of reinforcement learning, and we can say reinforcement learning

00:23:05from human feedback, to adapt.

00:23:09So Foucault talked about how humans sort of enforce norms on each other.

00:23:15And I think that's important.

00:23:16Sort of a distributed thing.

00:23:19I would say that humans also enforce culture on each other by installing latches to block

00:23:24off behaviors that are unwanted by the culture.

00:23:28And maybe this standard set of latches can actually define a culture.

00:23:34And this obviously can be incredibly useful and gives rise to the coordination we see today.

00:23:42And coordination is always the scarce resource.

00:23:46But it's also, each latch that you pick up reduces your felt sense of freedom.

00:23:54And in a very literal sense, drains the feeling of magic from reality.

00:24:03And things get more mundane and predictable.

00:24:07So later, when we are big, when we are socialized, when we can manage our social life, when we

00:24:16can manage our uncertainty with better tools, and high level capacities, we could, technically

00:24:23speaking, we could often afford to release these latches, to release this tension.

00:24:30And latches can last from between minutes to decades, or a whole lifetime.

00:24:38So, but the question is, well, how do you release your latches?

00:24:44And there are a lot of ways to do that.

00:24:47Unfortunately, the body doesn't like the body has memory and it created this memory for a reason

00:24:53And it doesn't necessarily want to let go

00:24:56So I think that a that meditation

00:25:00is 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.

00:25:14So 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

00:25:28is essentially equivalent to the amount of frozen sensation in your system.

00:25:33That something that is kind of a pattern that are stuck, that won't update.

00:25:38And that we could say this also corresponds to the distance you are from a full non-dual existence.

00:25:49And the great thing here is this is very quantifiable.

00:25:54If you sort of can create this map,

00:25:58you can see the things that are sort of blocking you from entering sort of a more flow non-dual state.

00:26:06And, you know, for example, a deer, I think, would be very close to perfect non-dual experience.

00:26:13It doesn't have many sort of frozen patterns, frozen sensations.

00:26:17And a modern human, fairly far.

00:26:21And this also sort of paints the story about, you know, we talk about emotional growth,

00:26:28and becoming non-reactive, and sort of building this sense of equanimity.

00:26:37And I think it's literally muscle deconditioning.

00:26:39That in a very, very literal sense, retraining the urge to sort of reflexively stabilize or reify sensations with vascular pressure.

00:26:49And the Buddhists call this tantra.

00:26:52And I think it's literally a muscle reflex.

00:26:55And it corresponds to the strength of this muscle reflex.

00:26:59And also the skill by which it happens as well.

00:27:02But anyway, also a very quantifiable thing.

00:27:07So the story that I want to tell about what is the game of optimizing experience.

00:27:15You know, we have this system, we have this nervous system.

00:27:20And sort of how do we...

00:27:23What's like winning the game, we can say.

00:27:25And probably that's like a bad frame, but it's at least narrowly accurate.

00:27:34And 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.

00:27:48As you sort of build your predictive models, as you latched certain patterns in your nervous system.

00:27:55And of course, first sort of building enough, I'm calling it nervous system virtue, to sort of handle that freedom.

00:28:04This is not necessarily a thing that happens by default.

00:28:09And then sort of tuning down this sort of tantra muscle reflex.

00:28:14And then also I would say a counterpart to this is systematically training the capacity to flex more of your smooth muscle.

00:28:26To stabilize more complex and more subtle things.

00:28:30That, you know, we're born, we don't know how to stabilize anything.

00:28:35We reach three.

00:28:37Okay, we're like getting better at like, I know this concept and I know that concept.

00:28:43And then, okay, you know, you're going to get better.

00:28:44You finish your PhD and you can like very, very precisely stabilize a lot of technical terms.

00:28:50And like feel them.

00:28:53So 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.

00:29:07Then by training, you can increase the number of fingers on the hand of the mind.

00:29:15where it can flex and maybe we can buy you know build a new science of

00:29:24psychometrics around this and then uh finally so I thought the the final

00:29:34question or maybe final about sort of becoming a good person like you don't

00:29:39have to be enlightened to be a good person and not all enlightened people

00:29:45are like that but there is like they're not completely orthogonal either and

00:29:49like a lot of being a jerk is just suffering and so if you remove that and

00:29:54sort of remove the the frozen

00:30:00shards 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.

00:30:30So 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.

00:30:56I 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.

00:31:17This could have strange effects if you can just pop latches.

00:31:20So there is this question of if you have the right amount of blood, you can pop latches.

00:31:25map of someone's latches are

00:31:28Are 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.

00:31:46And finally, the body uses neurotech or uses this tension system to program itself.

00:31:53And 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.

00:32:00I might try to interface with this system.

00:32:06But I'd be very mindful that tension has a cost, and it's better to remove tension than add tension.

00:32:15So that's the core hypothesis that I wanted to share today.

00:32:22And I think it says a lot about sort of how do we design a good tribe, a good culture.

00:32:30A good life.

00:32:32How do we raise young people in sort of a very humane way?

00:32:39Like minimize their latches in very simple terms.

00:32:45And 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?

00:33:00Or how easy would it be to design a human such that they were born enlightened and wouldn't lose it?

00:33:05And I think these are very interesting questions.

00:33:08But I also think that this might be a good place to open for questions.

00:33:21Yeah.

00:33:30Thank you.

00:33:33Mike, before the question, very cool.

00:33:36The somatization, the principle, very cool.

00:33:39Thank you.

00:33:40Are you aware of Nordenstrom's work with closed biological circuits?

00:33:47Yeah, the principle that there is a regulatory bioenergetic system that runs in the vascular wall.

00:33:57And you're shaking your head yes.

00:34:00And it's highly complementary.

00:34:02It may be just two views of the same system.

00:34:05So thank you.

00:34:06Thanks for getting us out of our head and into our body, which is our whole mind.

00:34:10Thank you very much.

00:34:12Nordenstrom.

00:34:12OK.

00:34:13Great.

00:34:13Let me just make a note of that.

00:34:16I want to make sure to follow up.

00:34:18What was the name?

00:34:22I've got a big fat book.

00:34:24I'd be happy to gift it to you.

00:34:25Oh, wonderful.

00:34:26Great.

00:34:26OK.

00:34:29It's also, I would say that.

00:34:30Yeah.

00:34:30So, William Reich, with his sort of Oregon energy and armoring, sort of is touching the

00:34:35same elephant, I think.

00:34:40Fantastic talk, Mike, and I look forward to many conversations drilling extra deep.

00:34:44But for here, just a comment and a question.

00:34:48First of all, comment, you know, it feels like right now, and sort of when it comes

00:34:52to skill formation, memory formation, prior to this theory and the one that was also mentioned,

00:34:57maybe other theories, there was sort of like, we have

00:35:00a 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.

00:35:08But he knew that you had there was details that needed to be filled in for the actual physical mechanisms.

00:35:14And then, you know, that finally got filled in with DNA, Watson and Crick, et cetera.

00:35:18And this feels like a great example of filling in the detail.

00:35:21And then it can unlock now that we're at the very physical level, then it can lock a spate of innovations.

00:35:29And my question is, this seems to be a very useful for explaining skills and biases and values and so on.

00:35:38Do 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?

00:35:50You know, because in electrical engineering, you know, you combine a couple latches, you get a bit cell, right?

00:35:54And that's this loop that just remembers a bit.

00:35:57So what like is it possible?

00:35:59Or what level of fidelity of memory might this be?

00:36:02Have the capacity for?

00:36:04Yeah, that's a great question.

00:36:06And I would say that Warren had a good, really good question the other day about sort of do sensory judgments deal with latches?

00:36:16Like, 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?

00:36:29And I think that's yes.

00:36:30So I do think that basically, anywhere you have neurons can get latched, and anything that neurons do can get latched as well.

00:36:42I 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.

00:36:50You can't starve those neurons of blood flow.

00:36:53But yeah, there's a lot of networks that could be.

00:36:58Yeah.

00:37:02Thank you, Mike.

00:37:04So I have a question kind of about almost like an interpretability problem for this.

00:37:09You suggested, you know, open question of like, how, like, what percentage of a person's latches would be safe to pop open?

00:37:16Right?

00:37:17Yeah.

00:37:18But I also wonder, you know, should we necessarily try to understand how each latch relates to the person's web of priors?

00:37:28Yeah.

00:37:29So 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.

00:37:52So, so do you agree with that?

00:37:54And how do you think that kind of mapping and going slowly and like kind of, you know,

00:37:59feeling like, okay, what's changing now?

00:38:00Yeah.

00:38:01Could help that go effectively?

00:38:03Yeah, that's a good question.

00:38:04And I would say that, uh, you, we can kind of split these into like, there are some latches which are convergent.

00:38:12And 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.

00:38:21And they're pretty much the same across everyone.

00:38:24And, you know, if you sort of follow this recipe, you may be able to open that.

00:38:29So I think like, that's like, that's an example of sort of everybody kind of works the same, more or less.

00:38:37But I would also say that, yeah, like, in any adult, there's going to be huge, unique patterns of what gets latched.

00:38:47And then it's a question of, okay, how do you know what it does?

00:38:51And I think that we may have to build up rules of thumb of, okay.

00:38:57It's usually.

00:38:59It's usually safe to open latches in this brain region.

00:39:01And it generally has this hedonic or phenomenological or predictive or whatever effect.

00:39:07But like that brain region, probably don't touch that.

00:39:32Thank you for your sharing, Michael.

00:39:36Actually, I'm from China.

00:39:38So there are some traditional Chinese medicine, especially just now you mentioned the blood and the muscles.

00:39:47So like acupuncture is kind of like something if you feel somewhere very painful, just like take out the blood from that way.

00:40:00And 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.

00:40:14So, I think that it's obvious that traditional Chinese medicine knows a lot about the body

00:40:23and knows things that Western mainstream science does not.

00:40:29It's always a struggle to update the way we talk about the body.

00:40:33And so, if we talk about blood vessels and neurons, it has different trade-offs than

00:40:42talking about energy or chi or humors or whatnot.

00:40:46And so, I'm always interested in combining, like, I guess I have a friend who talks about

00:40:53naturalizing Wu, of taking frames like Chinese medicine, like Buddhism, like energy work,

00:41:05and sort of trying to put it in a Western frame without losing anything.

00:41:13And that's a very difficult problem.

00:41:16But I do think there's a lot to be learned.

00:41:25Two more questions there.

00:41:32Please also say your name.

00:41:33Yeah.

00:41:34Thank you.

00:41:35My name is Christopher.

00:41:36Thank you for the talk, Michael.

00:41:37And my question may or may not be out of scope for what you're looking to discuss here, so

00:41:41feel free to just pass on it.

00:41:43But 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.

00:41:56And I'm curious for you, is pleasure a sort of terminal value that is phenomenologically self-evident?

00:42:03Or is it something that you think is good or worthy of pursuit in the context of some other sort of larger scale ethical system?

00:42:11And if so, what is that?

00:42:12Yeah.

00:42:13That's a great question.

00:42:14And as background, I spent like seven or eight years writing a book on what is pleasure.

00:42:22So it's a topic that is near and dear to me.

00:42:27I would say personally, I aim to live my life in sort of a virtue ethics frame that I think that

00:42:41I do think it matters whether or not it's a terminal value.

00:42:46I am not quite ready to pass judgment on.

00:42:50But actions taken solely to maximize pleasure, whether your own or in the world, there tend to be piles of goals by that path.

00:43:05And I think that's a good point.

00:43:07I don't necessarily believe in doubling down on that.

00:43:11Thank you.

00:43:14Hey, thank you so much for your talk.

00:43:15My name is YY.

00:43:17I liked the lady brought up the example of acupuncture.

00:43:23I 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.

00:43:37I 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.

00:43:49And 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.

00:44:06Because you know, when you're learning about the body, you're learning about the body.

00:44:07And so you're everything's filters through the, you know, like, brings cognition of what we're doing.

00:44:14So I do think it's it's interesting that like you mentioned the topic of enlightenment because in these ancient texts on Chi practice.

00:44:27I've also heard like these ancient people from maybe 2000 years ago talking about, oh, even 2000 years earlier than them.

00:44:35The ancient people were more like, oh, I'm not going to do this.

00:44:37But 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.

00:44:49So I've got kind of like wondering what do you mean by enlightenment?

00:44:54What are you exactly saying?

00:44:56Because it seems to me I'm a little bit skeptical about.

00:45:00Sure, sure.

00:45:00So in, I would say, the latch model of awakening, or the latch model of enlightenment, I would

00:45:11say that probably there are a few big latches, maybe in the brain stem, maybe in the thalamus,

00:45:20maybe somewhere pretty fundamental to the nervous system.

00:45:25And early on, they latch.

00:45:30And if you sort of follow the recipe of like the four paths model, you can get them open

00:45:36again.

00:45:38And so the, this would be kind of a, like, it wouldn't remove all your latches.

00:45:47But these may be in sort of very crucial networks, where you might get, you know, 80% of the

00:45:55benefit of all removal of latches from exactly those.

00:45:59I don't know if that's exactly true or not, but that would be my guess.

00:46:08People at a particular era share a similar set of latches as a result of the particular

00:46:16social structure or the culture that we're in, or the technological conditionings that

00:46:20we have been received.

00:46:22I would expect that.

00:46:23And I would actually expect that.

00:46:25We probably carry a lot more latches than people did 2000 years ago.

00:46:32And, you know, modern life, you just have to sort of be able to hold stuff in your mind.

00:46:38And the sort of capacity to free sensations is really just really important.

00:46:44It's more like relatively more important for living life.

00:46:52I also suspect that to some degree, latches are just like the most important thing.

00:46:55may 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

00:47:04most time around or your nervous system becomes the average of the five nervous

00:47:09systems you spend the most time around and if if everyone around you sees the

00:47:20world in a certain way and you don't ever get exposed to different ways of

00:47:26seeing different ways of being you might just your nervous system might just

00:47:31decide to watch it like okay that's that's the solution let's let's just go

00:47:35with that so which can be good can be bad thank you so much thank you okay I

00:47:48think we're out of time really grateful to Mike and all our others