https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x4bO-3SJp1s
Welcome back everyone to another voices with Reveke. I’m so excited. We have the amazing Mark Miller on here again we got so much positive feedback, amazing feedback, and not unexpectedly so and he was last on. Some of you know Mark is a former student of mine he’s a current co author with me, we are we’re, and this was. We’ve got a paper and submission with Brett Anderson and there’s tons of work we’re, we’re planning on doing together. The convergence between what Mark is doing what I’m doing. Like, it’s almost supernatural and so it’s just been amazing. And, and what I want to do is just let Mark introduce himself a little bit more and then we’ll talk about what we’re going to be talking about. So welcome Mark it’s really super to have you here again. Thank you so much for the nicest introductions my goodness. Thank you so much. I mean this is the place I most like to be. It was great talking with you last time and the responses were super good so I’m, I’m really happy to be back. Yeah, so my name is Mark Miller. I’m an assistant professor right now at Hokkaido University in a new department there called the Center for human nature artificial intelligence and neuroscience which is a fantastic center. It focuses on bringing together just as a little side note it focuses on bringing together philosophers and neuroscientists and machine learning researchers to tackle big sort of multi disciplinary interdisciplinary projects. And, and I’m a new external affiliate at Monash University’s new, extremely exciting lab called the Center for consciousness and contemplative studies so this is being led by Jacob Hui. It is just what it sounds like it is it’s a brand new department that’s focusing on trying to figure out what is consciousness and thinking about the science of contemplation the science of meditation, and then, and then bringing those things together so I am, I’m, I’m very fortunate with the people I’m working with today. So cool. Yeah. So what we thought we’d focus on, and I’ll let Mark set it up, I won’t presume on the topic of well being some of you know on my other sub channel I don’t know what to call it the cognitive science show. So, I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. I’m very fortunate to be here. We split up and well being we split up to remind people that well being has a normative term in it. Well, and to try and criticize sort of the fact that these two notions although deeply related are not well explicated, and they need to be. And Mark has recently with, I believe two other people Mark or yeah with Julie, Julian Kiverstein and Eric right felt right at University of Amsterdam. By the way, and I hope this is taken the right way. I think those two are on the right side of the tracks. They talk about a lot of the same stuff that I talked about in ways that is deeply convergent. I love their work. It’s continues to have a significant influence on me. And so, the paper that Mark wrote with the two of them is a paper on well being from a predictive processing framework. And I’m just going to throw one thing in. I found it. It’s juicy and it’s filled with. Sorry, I’ll be a little bit self promoting. It was filled with lots of her bakey juices. There’s ideas in there that just drip with recursive relevance realization. And that that doesn’t surprise me as some, as I mentioned, Mark and Brett and I are trying to integrate these And we’re trying to work on that so that’s a broad general introduction. Mark, can you go into the specifics both like do I know people have probably because we talked about it last time but just a little bit, you know, brief on the framework you’re bringing in, and then what you’re proposing And then, like I said, I do want to talk to you about some of the, the juicy. Yeah, love that. Thanks for that. And you’re right. There’s like such a great coherence between your work and the work that we’re on now so you know it was kind of destined that you and I were going to start working together again soon because our ideas collided in this sort of really important way. Right, so just to set a little bit of context so the paper is called the predictive dynamics of happiness and well being. It was just released not too long ago in a motion review. And it’s a paper that I’m really proud of. It’s, it’s a good journal and, and it’s the end result of a number of years of work that we’ve done and it’s been a really good journal. And it’s a paper that I’m really proud of. It’s, it’s a good journal and and it’s the end result of a number of years of working with some fantastic people Julian kibbutz and Eric right felt, by the way, are just incredible researchers. So anybody who’s listening if you’re not onto their research yet and you’re interested in any of this stuff. I mean you really got to, you really got to get interested because they work a lot and their work is always top notch, and, and again it suits very much with your ideas to john so I mean there again as a natural confluence, be great to get them to come on sometime, Eric or Julian and I and have a chat so let’s we can afford to doing that. I’d like to do that. Yes. So, we, we. What I was missing today in the predictive processing world active inference world is people aren’t yet really talking about well being very much. We’re starting to see it sort of creep in at the edges, a little bit, seeing some work being done on meditation. You know people like Antoine Lutz and Haleem selector. Yeah, exactly. And me. Yeah, that’s right. Thinking about how we can use this framework to think about contemplative training programs and what are, I mean why do they create the states and traits and experiences that they do. And I think the framework is a, it’s a really fruitful way for thinking about some of those things so that’s one part and we’re seeing it happen. We’re seeing it turn up a lot in recent work on hallucinogens and their impact, and often it’s for the benefit of the mind although not sort of exclusively. So we’re starting to see it come in at the edge but nobody’s really taking it as a framework for thinking about. Yeah, what is well being or what does it mean to be well still being sort of left out of the discussions about normativity about how we should live, it’s giving us a kind of really cool architecture cognitive architecture, but nobody’s really taking about to start thinking about well then, what would it mean to be a good predictor and that’s something we’re extremely interested in doing. I think this is actually the first paper where we’re making that sort of for and asking those sorts of questions. It really came out of a bunch of work on pathology I don’t know if I’ve told you that before but we’re working on addiction and depression and OCD. Well you want to talk about addiction with you because I want to compare your work to, I think, what is the other really best big picture theory emerging, which is the reciprocal narrowing theory of Mark Lewis with Mark Lewis exactly Mark loose his work fits like I’m not going to go back with our is actually recite Mark a lot in. I expected so I expected so and then I want to talk to you about the, like I said to you before about the opposite, like, the possible of the possibility of reciprocal opening and framework. Exactly right so then, so this is how the paper came to be we started noticing that there was a shared characteristic across a number of pathologies which was part of the system locks down part of the belief network gets locked down and then it gets insulated from updating. And we see that again and again the sort of sticky negative belief set that insulates itself from being updated ends up being what looks like it might underwrite all sorts of pathologies. So I think just right away that’s a kind of interesting thing to say out loud, I mean we could even maybe talk about that a little that if you freeze your belief set. Yeah, don’t let people update it, your bottle will eventually go sort of oblong. I don’t remember I might be miss my memory. Did you talk about like some of the work of Kapoor and us on schizophrenia because they talk about. They talk about salience dysregulation. So they, you know, you’ve got some sort of dopamine thing going wrong, and you get a weird salience landscape. And then schizophrenia comes, usually with the onsite of what’s called the schizophrenic insight, which is they get they form a bizarre alternative ontology to the schizophrenic’s belief system in order to make sense of the aberrant salience network. Now here’s the here’s what plugs into exactly what you’re saying. And what what what Kapoor and awesome other people talk about is you can give people you know all of the things to And you can you can SSRIs and whatever. And what happens is the, you know, this, the salience landscape dampens the affect dampens, but that doesn’t actually address the fact that the schizophrenic tends to hold on to the belief system of the worldview and you need to, you need a completely separate kind of treatment to address that sticky belief system, even beyond the chemical reduction of the aberrant salience network. One of the things that becomes so obvious by thinking about this cognitive architecture are these strange loops, and everything is a kind of strange loop. It’s always a self fueling self fulfilling prophecy. So once you have a belief structure in play, because you’ve had aberrant salience maps, then of course it becomes vicious because that belief set is now what sets up the conditions for how the system goes out and figures out what’s going on. Which then just fuels the belief set which changes the way it looks. And so even if you change the pathological salience in the body or, you know, wherever it persists, then the belief if the belief set is still in play, then it’s still going to tend to try to confirm itself in the world, which will probably just turn back on the salience map. What a nasty what a nasty feedback loop. Yes, yes, yes. We haven’t thought much about schizophrenia but that’s definitely the case for depression and addiction. Depression is a nasty one. You know you start to believe that there’s too much volatility to manage in the world. So then the system starts turning the volume up on all of the, all of the ways you can’t maintain a good predictive grip on the scene, and turns the volume down on all the ways that you’re doing well. And so you get the self fueling self fulfilling. Yeah, experience. I think that’s right, by the way, and I’ve argued something similar, even in an episode of awakening from the meeting crisis, and the work that Leo and I published on parasitic processing. Very much like that. One thing I wanted to ask you about it, because you’re right in the midst of this. What, what do you. I’m expecting you’ve got a very good answer but I want to hear it from you. I think that’s totally right about depression, and it is that kind of reciprocal narrowing, and that, but there’s a lot. I bump into this right what people call depressive realism. The fact that you get these empirical measures of people who are depressed, actually more accurately sort of describing their environment. Part of my criticism of that response is that’s only at one scale of analysis. It doesn’t hold true for. But I wonder what you like, surely you bumped into that, that those sets of empirical results, what do you think about the claims around depressive realism, and how do you make them consistent with this model that you’re presenting here. Yeah, I agree first with what you just said I mean it’s just going to be at one scale that you’re looking at that evidence, but I think maybe an interesting thing to add is, I’ve started sort of, I haven’t written this anywhere yet but it’s sort of a, it’s sort of emerging in my, in my thinking that some of these changes aren’t necessarily pathological in particular niches, right, in particular kind of organism environment niches. Let me start again. Yeah. According to this framework, we are optimizing machines that’s what it is to be alive is life is about optimization and making predictions and reducing prediction error is one of the ways that bio system like us and our kind of bio system like us and our kind of biotech environment can optimize our adaptivity moment to moment to moment by updating by making predictions and then adjusting relative to how it actually turns out, turns out to be a really good way to optimize. We’re optimizing in lots of kinds of niches and so we’re optimizing in lots of different kinds of ways. And so then the question is well how does an optimizing organism become suboptimal. That seems almost not paradoxical but there has been some like critical pushback against active inference and processing, looking at things like addiction where you say well look if you’re an optimizing agent how are you getting stuck in the suboptimal And again, we think it has to do with this insulation of beliefs. But, um, so what I was going to say that’s coming up in my thinking is, it might not be the change itself that’s pathological in a particular niche. So, one of the ones that I’ve been thinking about recently is PTSD. So, in a war zone, having a super powerful amygdala that’s taking everything to be challenged, everything to be volatility is a really adaptive, that’s a really adaptive feature to have, it’s what’s going to keep an optimizing agent like us alive in an extremely volatile situation. It seems like the pathology might not rear its head. It might not even really be a pathology until you remove the system from the niche in which it grew its optimal grip. Right. And then you put it into a peacetime or you put it back at home. And now, the problem isn’t the structure, it’s its inability to update relative to its new environment. And I think there’s a lot of reasons why something could get frozen. And I think that’s what we’re really interested in. So I wonder if the same thing couldn’t be the, couldn’t be true for depression. Depression is an optimizing grip in a particular niche. But the problem is, is that what if you remove that out of a helplessness situation, you put it somewhere where you’re rich with rewards, but the system still doesn’t update relative to those rewards. Now, I think we’re talking about something that’s pathological. So it actually ends up being the stickiness that’s most important there, not the style of updating or not the style of engagement. I think that’s excellent. And this is part of what we’ve been talking about in the other series, which is right, even looking at the personality traits as you have to look them up, like the personality traits are world enacting. They’re not sort of in you, they’re between you and the world in particular ways. And we’ll come back to that. I wanted to pick up on, I want to say two things. That proposal, I think, has significant provenance. There’s quite a bit of theory around the idea that ADHD is actually would be a really great style of cognition to have in a hunter gatherer society. So if you have ADHD, you’re not going to be disordered, you’re going to be a high status individual, because it sets you up. And this is part of the argument about why does it persist, like, like, because it’s an odd thing. Right. But the argument is, well, it’s only odd in our really, really odd environment. Right. First of all, your proposal has good provenance. And then I want to do I want to do I want to, I want to bring up the, the, the, you know, the PTSD, the soldier in the war zone. Right. This is adaptive, and then they come back here and it’s not. I want to say something that’s analogous but it and that way we’ll can also introduce the addiction thing. So you have the disease model of addiction, which is an internal like it’s disease you’ve got something like an infectant. Right. And then you’re locked in and no matter where you are you have the disease. Right. And amongst many of the problematic kinds of evidence around that are things like you had soldiers in the Vietnam War, using opiates. And then they come back to the United States and they like overwhelming majority there’s some that don’t, but overwhelming majority they just quit cold turkey. And these are the opiates that are supposed to be, oh just inherently viciously addictive. And it’s exactly the same argument but symmetrical Do you see what I’m saying, like, they’re doing that there, and then they come back here, and the agent are really well, they’re no longer soldiers, they’re no longer in a war zone. And, right, and this is the kind of stuff that Marcus, trying to explain so, first of all, like this this this model you’re proposing, and what you just said how it’s, it’s like it’s niche construction in a real, that’s what you’re invoking right and the way we’re shaping the environment and the environment is shaping us. Now, that brings up this really interesting issue, because we’re talking about well being which is a very longitudinal comprehensive concept. And, and you know, you know where we’re going to go with this so the brain face is a really, really interesting trade off problem, which is right. How much do I niche construct here versus how much do I try and get processing that will get carry me across many different niches right. And that’s exactly our point so yes yes now moving into the actual happiness and well being part of the paper. Right. We, we started by thinking well, we’ve got a kind of sexy way of thinking about subjective hedonic experiences of happiness, I don’t think we should probably be using the term happiness although that’s what shows up in psychology is, it’s not does not map on to know. Right, so you get you. Right, so you get positive hedonic affect and people call it happiness objective happiness. It’s kind of weird because I think we mean more than that when we say happiness but anyway let’s start there. We get a kind of we get a kind of cool story out of the active inference framework predict processing framework for just that kind of happiness, which is this doing better than expected in things that you care about. And that suits a lot of different literatures all the reward prediction error literature, you know supports that and we know that the reward circuitry in the brain is turning on and making us feel good when we do better than expected it’s something we care about. So you care about it and you’re trying to do it and you do better than expected and then, and then you feel good about it. So I just want to slow down and blow it up a bit. I want to make sure that our listeners are following along, like the brain isn’t just tracking reward and prediction, like, so people talk about dopamine like joy juice and stuff like that. The brain is tracking reward it’s also tracking especially rate of reward, like, and so, right, and so it’s a very, and this is, you emphasize this in paper, there’s a very dynamical measurement that’s going on it’s not an absolute measure. You know it’s always relative to expectation so in case anybody here is interested in this it’s kind of it’s kind of cool. So, in predictive processing reactive inference the idea of reward sort of gets flipped on its head. So, you start by thinking of rewards as highly expected states, rather than as things you get so you know you highly expect to be in certain states. And then the reward circuitry is part of the machinery that helps tune you to opportunities to get to where you want to be. Okay, so you have a high expected state for instance to be well fed to be social to be comfortable to be dry to be clean, and all of your All of your moves towards those highly expected homeostatic states, and of course they blow up our cultural expectations and our personal expectation or relationship expectations. So they set the mark, and then the reward circuitry according to this framework is what helps tune the whole embodied adaptive re self organization in ways that get you there. So we’ve been over a number of papers proposing that that gets supercharged when you do better, you do better than expected at the rate at which you’re doing it so not only is the system tracking what it wants and how it’s getting there it’s also tracking how well or poorly it’s doing at getting there, and it’s tuning itself relative to those expectations. Right, right. That’s one of the nasty things about addiction and drugs of addiction is they pump the same circuitry that is tuning you to these better than expected rates over things you care about. So another way of saying that is something like an opioid is communicating directly to the brain is why it’s so vicious. It’s communicating to the brain. Whatever you just did. You did way better than we would have ever hoped, and getting to everything you want. Everything you want all the things that you need to be in. You just made a huge light year jump to it. So like whatever you did do that again that’s that’s like a deep, you actually just be defaulted. You always choose, because it was so much better than expected at getting you to where you want to be. Of course the problem there is, is that a synthetic improvement in the rate of error reduction because no error was actually reduced. You didn’t get closer to building good family dynamics to improving on your job to, you know, all the other things that we think you did better than expected. And, and even worse still, if you keep doing that, you have this continual narrowing of the field of affordances that becomes more and more important. Other things become less and less important because they’re not as good a bet to get you there. They’re not as probable to get you there. At least the brain doesn’t think so. And so you start letting them lay fallow. So now your relationships are going to start breaking down. Work might start breaking down. Health is definitely going to start breaking down on long term addiction. So you have this increasing rise in error all around you. So of course that rise in error tells the system, well, you better do something quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reduce that gap. And the thing that we know best that does that is the drug seeking and taking behavior. So you do it again. And meanwhile, error goes on the rise of the peripheries. Locally it feels like you’ve got a good grip. But in fact, it’s a fake grip. And the global error is still on the rise. You get this really, I mean, that everybody knows. It’s really nasty feedback loop in addiction. Yeah, and I could just see the reciprocal narrowing in there just happening the way you were describing it. Right. Right. That’s amazing. So I just I don’t want to throw you off where you are. We were beginning to discuss happiness versus well-being. Right. Right. Okay. So happiness is this doing better than expected? Yes. But that can’t be identical to with well-being. So that’s one of the things we tackle in the paper because exactly for this reason, you can have lots of local happiness experiences if what we mean by happiness is positive affective positive hedonic bumps. Yeah. Yeah. Like addiction is an example where you have, you know, you have pretty good control over your local positivity dynamic. But globally, it’s falling apart. Yes. And it’s not only happening in addiction. I mean, not I mean, substance addictions. It happens everywhere. I mean, you could imagine a video game. That’s one of the examples we use. I use this example. I talk about the video game. I talk about the video game. I talk about people who get do getting the flow state while they’re in the video game. Right. Right. But there, but their, but their, but their relationship to the real world is degrading. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. This question. What’s the difference between the video game that reciprocally like that, which you open up within the game, but you reciprocally narrow in the world. And when you’re doing something like Tai Chi Chuan that actually transfers out to the real world. So exactly. It’s very good. That’s exactly our point. That’s Brickerback. We do. We say exactly the same thing. We say, look, a video game is a good example where a designer could create error reducing slope opportunities in an increasingly challenging and interesting way so that you’re hitting little micro flow states. Yeah. Yeah. And yet maybe you’re losing contact with your relationships and your work and the other things that make up a rich, meaningful life. So you can have local happiness success, but global well being is starting to erode or degrade. So then the question is, how do you, what’s the relationship between those? That’s the question we wanted to find out was what’s the relationship between succeeding locally and succeeding globally where it is the case that you can succeed at one while fail at the other. Yeah, exactly. That’s really cool. And I mean, and there’s also there’s all kinds of add ons because you’re spending so much time in the virtual world, the brain’s getting a lot of the evidence it uses to say, but I must be doing well on the big picture because look at all the time I’m spending in this world. And there’s all these things like, yeah, this is so exciting. So, so what like, obviously you’ve you’ve now you’ve you’ve introduced the distinction. And so we’ve got two things at play right now, just to keep you going. We’ve got the distinction between something like hedonic goodness or something right. I don’t like to call it happiness for all the reasons you say, but I’ll call it happiness because you called it that the paper and well being which is something like the pneumonia, it was supposed to point to. And then there’s the issue about the relationship between the local and the global, because we know we can get stuck, we can reciprocally narrow into the local. And what what makes that happen and then what’s affords the opposite, so that the local reciprocally opens into the well being. So there. Right. Is that a good setup to keep going. Right. It’s perfect. Exactly right. So then, what we started so now we just made a sort of opening step into well being. Yeah, because I think it’s a complicated topic and we don’t want to think that we’re sort of exhausting the idea computation. So what we’re going to do is pick out a couple of the traits that look like they’re probably online for people in systems that have a high probability of being well over a long period of time. So the system is able to behave in ways or be sensitive in ways where it’s not going to get locked into these little pockets. Rather, a system that’s going to be well over a long period of time is going to be one which is monitoring how well it’s doing both locally, but it’s in touch with its various cares and concerns across the board. Now the kind of interesting thing about that proposal. And this is just, this is just the baby steps into it is that people like Lars and that Smith, really fantastic young new researcher in active inference. He’s putting out a paper about meta cognition, and he uses this deep parametric model to express what’s happening in an active inference style. Right. And, and if you look at it, it’s, you can see where aerodynamics so for those of you who are not familiar this doing better than expected, and the positive effect that you get in return, and the way that that affect tunes the system to do better. That’s what we’re calling aerodynamics. Sure, sure, sure. It shows up in the model, although nobody’s really expressed it yet this is what we did that was novel in the paper is that we show that that aerodynamics both locally, and that there’s a potential for it to be happening globally as well, which means the system isn’t only watching. If it’s doing better or worse than in some particular niche, but a well functioning system is also sensitive to whether or not it’s improving error over its various cares and concerns. Now a system that has that meta cognition level that, and he actually even says in that paper that that’s what awareness is, rather than just attentional dynamics. This is awareness helping attention do what it does optimally. This is why meditating in ways where you start to have control over how attention is being deployed is partially a strengthening of your awareness of your own attentional capabilities. Right. So not only are you getting better locally, but a system that has a more robust awareness or a meta cognitive layer that strengthened will also be monitoring how it’s deploying its precision across various tasks. So, for example, someone who has that working correctly will be the kind of system that when they’re playing the video game, even though they’re locally succeeding, they will have a background tension growing when they hit our one, our two, our three, and it will be informing them, hey, these other cares and concerns are starting to fill up with entry. If you’re going to fill up with entropy, you had better drop the local success, you had better be willing to break this local vector state soon, because you have other vectors that need to be visited. If you’re going to keep the overall error minimization routines, working the way they’re supposed to work and what matters isn’t the local success. It’s the global success that matters. This is the more important one. So it’s fine that you’re doing well here, but you better not spend too much time there, because there’s lots of other things. If you’re going to take this as a, if you take that as an amalgam of error reducing capability, then actually you do much better by keeping all the plates spinning, rather than focusing on one to a super high degree. So if that’s the okay, well, I want you to respond first, but I just want to like, I just want to say something. I’m holding back. No, I just let me add one thing for the future conversation. Then the question is, is how do those come apart? And how do they get reintegrated? And how do we build this, if this turns out to be the thing that we need for long term well being? Okay, so, oh my gosh. First of all, the original paper and relevance realization talked about one of the dynamics was not was a trade off between, like, what we called hedging your bets where you’re trying to address many different sources of potential sources of reward with the one big bet on one narrow channel, and you’re right and you’re constantly toggling between them because sometimes you do do that like that’s my child. Forget everything else. You do do that sometimes you do. I don’t care about the long term goal, I might die, but that’s my kid. Sometimes you do that. So that’s why that’s in this. That’s what I propose. There are times when you say one big bet, you know what my marriage, if everything else goes to hell, I’m going to save my marriage, we do that sometimes. And that’s actually adaptive. Yeah, although, but other times we have to say no no no no, I want to be a general problem solver I want to be able to, like, just like you said the big picture. Right. And so we talked about a trade off relationship between exactly those kinds of things out there right there. The problem isn’t either end. It’s getting stuck. Yes, yes, yes, that’s the problem we feature so fluidity is what you expect. You want this going out, going out to many projects and then collapsing and then opening and collapsing, because it’s the opening that keeps them in play. It’s the collapsing that lets you specialize, which actually allows you to open and sort of new and interesting ways, which allows you to collapse. And that ends up being the whole thing. So we quote the Dowdy Ching as the first line of the paper. Right. I mean, we just told the editor like we just we need to have that in so just make it happen, you know, because it’s important that the things that flow are the ones that are healthy and that’s the whole take home message is that even there, the problem isn’t the movement from small to big and small to big. It’s getting stuck in one regime, or being the kind of thing that can flow and be fluid. And that ends up being what we think is the primary characteristic of a non well system and a well system or at least one of the central characteristics. If you’re looking at it over the long term. Excellent. So now I want to throw in two other points. Yeah. Yeah. The meta level. So consensus paper that we just published in 2019, you go Grossman lead author, one of the defining features of, you know, basically all wisdom accounts is a meta perspectival ability. Right. Right, as opposed to being able to move between perspectives is exactly I think which, especially if you think what a perspective is, it’s like a niche, it’s like a niche construction of your attention, and you’re, you’re in action. Right. And so this meta perspectival ability, which means there’s going to be an inherent wisdom aspect to well being. And think about the classic distinction between from neesis and Sophia pro neesis is your ability within the context to fit yourself and do what is appropriate in this situation. So fear is your understanding of the big picture that puts you on the track towards well being. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is Let me just, this is really good there about this meta for perspectival position is exactly is exactly the way I’m thinking about it as well. And what allows that in part is the insight that any particular perspective is temporary. Yes. Right. And I think that’s really important. So we’re doing some work with Antoine Lutz and again lens, Larsen, but Smith, and we’re thinking about what it is to de ray fi concepts. What is, what is it for us to like take a concept that ordinarily when it turns on, we take it as subjectively real we can get really locked into it. I mean, that’s one of the things that keeps us stuck is that we take it very seriously we think well that’s real, and I can’t get out of it until it’s done. Part of what’s going to allow you I suspect and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this part of what would allow you to have this meta perspectival. Or maybe it works dynamically like we’re getting that helps you do this but wouldn’t part of that be that you have an insight that any particular perspective isn’t essential, it’s not enduring, it comes and it goes, which means you don’t get locked because they’re not lockable type things they’re, it’s like genuine pretending, it’s just like serious play, you’re playing at this thing. But part of the meta system knows, this is just a temporary vector state. So you’re just in here temporarily, and then you’re going to bump out and be something else that you can task switch more easily, because you’re not taking any one of these things too seriously. Right. Okay, so, just so much. It’s always like, like, like, like, like Alice D or something when I’m talking to you just like me. Okay, so I think the two ideas come together you can actually see it, and some of the work that I’m doing Dan Chappie and with John Johannes Niederhauser and Daniels Ruba, and actually trying to do it as practice not just as theory is how you can bring the meta perspectival and the derayification together. It’s based on Husserl’s notion of idetic reduction but it’s taken up something I call idetic deduction, which is what I think I think Marla Ponte is doing and how Marla Ponte is going beyond Husserl. So think about how how multi perspectival is sort of the agent side of describing something. And I wanted you now to think about that you can, and lots of people talking about this way this new way of seeing, which is actually an old way of seeing how every object is actually multi aspectual. And you never can see even visually, the whole object. This is Marla Ponte’s point. And once you start adding in not just, you know, you know, course physical features but all the imaginal possibilities. So seeing is multi aspectual in an opening, uncompletable way. And then, so there’s it. So what you do is you can take them, you can take the meta perspectival ability and say no no no, that’s not just us moving around static objects that’s actually disclosing the reality objects when you’re doing the complementary idetic deduction. And here’s the interesting thing to think about Mark sort of ontologically and think about how this might weirdly type Platonism and Buddhism together or something like that, or Taoism. There’s a through line. John Wilson talks about this is like music it’s like a melody. There’s a through line to all the aspects they don’t strike you as just coordinate. They all mutually are all mutually intelligible, but the through line is itself not any aspect. It’s a non aspect that ties all the aspects together. There’s a no thingness running through the unpacking of any particular object so you can you can you like here’s the arena side. Right multi aspectuality. Here’s the agent side multi perspectival and then what you get is you get the no thingness that is the through line running through objects but also therefore also through you as you’re doing all the multiple perspectives. How do you see. So to have that perspective requires that you. I mean what does that require relative to the end. There’s a lot of practice. Right. So, and there was a there was even a line of like out of ID and others you might have come across ID experimental phenomenology, where he was trying to basically do this with us basically teaching people how to do this, you can see it also in good to his work when he’s talking about this way of seeing, and he was trying to get at the flower or the plant, right. And I would argue, if you go back. That’s what Plato is doing, because the word I does originally means the look of something. It’s particular aspect. Right. And so, and what Plato is realizing, I think, is that the, there’s, there’s a look that’s not any particular physical look that’s running through things and we’re somehow, and think about how that think about how that matters for predictive processing, because you’re right, you’re not just predicting an object, you’re predicting right a man unfolding incomplete manifold between all these aspects. Yeah, so that’s very interesting. So, there were two qualities that look like they got foregrounded in our paper that I think are worth tracking down and one of them seems like we share, we share in spades which is metacognition plays a really valuable role, and wisdom is going to play a special role in well being over the long term, because it’s going to be the kind of way the system can be set up, such that it doesn’t get locked in any one of its kind of ways of being. If you think that you are one kind of thing, and you’re willing to jeopardize all of the other possibilities of what you could be and, in fact, are for just that one thing, then the system will go oblong in given enough time that actually a healthy system is one that knows about its own And isn’t getting stuck in any one for too long or for longer than is adaptive. So one thing is metacognition. And the second quality was this tendency to disrupt your own fixed attractor states in order to push the limit. So that’s the other thing we’re interested in is one the metacognition like you were just talking about, but the other one is this, and I think this is something we can be doing practically as good humans if we think this framework is pointing to something real and I think it is pointing to something real. One we can get better on our metacognition, we can start asking, who am I? What am I? And what are my belief sets? And are they true? That’s Socrates. Right, exactly. Are they true? And you should have a healthy amount of intellectual humility where you think actually everything I believe is only relatively true. Right. The other half is then moving beyond your knowledge sets. So going out to your own edge of criticality, as we say, out to the edge of your own between order and chaos, and have some risky play opportunities. And the reason why that keeps you healthy is because if you’re always hanging out at the edge of what you know, and let me say when I say always, it’s important to be in your window of tolerance. So I don’t mean like literally always. But if you are the kind of system. That’s what you mean. Exactly who tends to frequent interesting edges of their own knowledge. This is why I think everybody should take philosophy also because it’s I think at its best it’s a training and bringing you out to the edge of what you know. If you hang out if you hang out at that edge, then you’ll also be the you’ll not only be the kind of system that catches lots of good slopes. So there’s half of the story. Because if catching a good error reducing slope is what makes us feel good. The answer is always going to be at the edge of your capability. Yes, right. Because that’s going to be close enough to you that you have the skills to manage that new volatility, but far enough away that there’s something new to learn. So actually hanging out at your edge is a surefire way to feel good over the long term. So there’s happiness taken care of right now. Well being also gets managed. If you’re a kind of risky play person also to some degree, because that is also asking you to constantly be jeopardizing your own belief sets. That’s what it means to transform at that edge. And if you’re doing that, then you will tend, I think, to be the kind of self organizing system that doesn’t get the best out of you. So medical ignition so that you know where you are, and the kind of courage to go to your edge. And that’s what it means to be a good person. And that’s what it means to be a good person. And that’s what it means to be a good person. And that’s why you get stuck in these nasty little cul-de-sacs, because you will be asked to jeopardize them as part of your transformation into being something new. So medical ignition so that you know where you are, and the kind of courage to go to your edge. And that seems like two broad things that I think are working in systems that are well over the long term. I think those map very well onto Sophia and Phronesis, by the way. So, and the edge. So the edge is what, you know, Socrates starts, but it keeps going until Eckhart and Erigina and Nicholas of Cusa, which is the precipice of learned and learned. You have to do both pronunciations, ignorance. Which, and Eckhart’s got this great quote, you can’t get this kind of ignorance unless you go through all of your knowledge. Like, it’s not the same as privative ignorance. It’s superlative ignorance. It’s the ignorance that you have to go, right, you have to go through to get there. So I think this is, and this is something I’m going to be bringing out, both in the series with Chris on Socrates and Kierkegaard, and comparing the leap of faith and the leap of reason, and also what I’m going to be doing and after Socrates. So there’s that. Then I just wanted to say, you know, that I did work with Leo Ferraro, we published in 2013, arguing that the something like self organizing criticality can do what we want relevance realization to do because when when the neurons are firing in synchrony, it looks plausibly like they’re doing data compression, right, and then when they break up, they’re doing particularization and the criticality helps you to get out of local minima, which is another way of describing being stuck. Right. And Stefan and Dixon did that behavioral work showing that just before insight, you get a huge increase in entropy, the brain is sort of introducing entropy into itself in order to get out and bump itself into space. And interestingly, what you can do is you can actually afford that. So they were giving people insight experiments, problems, they were impassing and then they were introducing a little bit of entropy into the, into the stimulus like they, they would make the picture grainy or would jerk around, and that would trigger the insight, which, and this also converges with that, you know, some of the stuff that’s coming out of the mind, right, the insight literature and the mind wandering literature. So, if you need an insight, you want to moderately distract yourself from your problem. If you go too far, you lose touch. And if you don’t move at all, you don’t break out, you want to moderately and one of the things. And this is something that Zach Irving and other people are like, what are the things mind wandering might do, right, is it might give us moderate distractions. All right, so you’ve got the variation with the mind wandering and then you got the past focus doing the selection, and that can bounce you out of getting too sticky. Well, this is amazing. And I just want to like highlight. If you thought it was going to be a simple fix to be wise or to be well, you were wrong. It is a fluid dynamic contextual ongoing moving target process. It’s not one thing or another. It’s not like, do this be well, do yoga be well, do this kind of meditation be well what we’re talking about there’s way more sophisticated, way more difficult to say because our language is pretty linear, but I think it’s extremely true, which is a meta stable system. Yeah, one that’s willing to both move to its edge and use what it knows it’s willing to blow up and taking consideration the whole, but also collapse down and take care of the part. And the one that’s able to do that sort of well is the one that is well over the long term, but there’s no easy way to you can’t just say, oh, we’ll do this and then you’ll get it. No wonder Aristotle. I think when people ask him, this is, this is me just sort of standing in for Aristotle, but people ask him, how do I be wise and he said, well, how would I know. I mean, you’re asking me a kind of impossible thing to say, and he said, well, go hang out with wise people, and then maybe you’ll get it by osmosis. Yeah, because it’s a hard thing. It’s a hard thing to do well. And what you’re talking about there is that’s a whole amalgam of skills and abilities. That’s a whole path. You’re saying there because to be the kind of thing that’s willing to know about itself and disrupt its own belief sets to find new things, but not too much of the new thing and to be able to use what it knows, but know about its own window of tolerance and be comfortable at coming to the edge. And I think that’s, that’s really complex. But I think that’s, that is what well being looks like. It looks like this very careful fluid engagement with life. Yeah, I’ve been sort of pointing the phrase of being a big unit you want to be precipitous in order to precipitate right. Yeah, I think that’s the kind of wisdom that you need. So, so a couple things on that this is one of the things reasons why I argue for an ecology of practices that is multi layered and has opponent processing with it, because you need this complex dynamic self correcting system in order to try and tackle this kind of dynamics that 100% and you know I’m also a meditation, longtime meditation practitioner and now meditation teacher as well. One of the things that I’m really excited about bringing to the teachings that I give is that if you think any one thing will do it. You’ve missed the point because there again, that’s the kind of thing that might lock you in. Yes, locking in is the issue. I mean, really got to take the Buddha at his word when he says burn the boat when you cross the river I mean, you have to have been able to let go of the one attachment, not get stuck anywhere and that’s even with mindfulness you know like people are taking mindfulness as a wholesale cure all but the fact is if mindfulness is mostly useful if you tend to turn away from your issues then mindfulness of the issue of course can be really super valuable, but if you’re obsessive about the issue, then more mindfulness doesn’t necessarily fix that actually there’s all sorts of distracting and looking at developing other skills and abilities that will deal with that along, like at the periphery. So you need to have teachers that are willing to show up with you over the long term, but good friends I mean, and able to say a little bit right a little bit left as you go because there is no come for a weekend and I’ll tell you how it works and then you can go home and just practice that forever and it will work. Yeah, it’s not like that. There is no panacea path, there is no. Right. And so I think that that’s right really really important and I think it is it becomes increasingly more important. And you know you there’s things you’ve touched on about this too, as the environment that we’re in becomes increasingly dynamically complex. So, I want to say this was always the case. Yeah. But even more so now. Yeah. Right, and it really like the way we can get stuck on things is multiply. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn’t it doesn’t help. And I don’t think I don’t think technology is only bad I think there’s no no no but it doesn’t help that we have vicious AIs whose job it is is to attract is to attract our very innocent attentional systems. That’s it. It’s not only to attract, but to use your adjective sticky. Right. And bullshitty because super salient at the price of being in contact with reality. Now that brings up a question I wanted to ask, because, and I think it follows like really well from your paper as well. So let’s say we have that fatal proposed this an agog a the reciprocal opening, coming out of the cave right, I get more internal flexibility, the world discloses more possibilities. I internalize that and it just reciprocally open right okay that’s play dough, and I’m finding that through line in a way that like right. Okay. One of the things Plato argues is the reason why that works so well is it gets and I want to see this maps, maybe it doesn’t but it feels like it might. It maps between two different meta drives that we have. One is, I want, no matter how I’m satisfying my desires. I want to have inner peace, I don’t want to be rife with internal conflict. And I’m wondering if, right, maybe if that maps on to what happiness is tracking that there’s, there isn’t massive internal conflict, but the other is. And I think this goes towards the thing you’re making about meta stable attunement and also a good model, because that’s part of your thesis to a well being right. It’s better said the other meta drive is we want whatever is satisfying our desires to be real. So, right. So, like, the example I use is, I’ll say to people how many of you are in the classroom I’ll do this. How many of you are like really satisfying romantic relationships and our culture thinks that romantic relationships is God, basically. And so, you know, some people put up their hand, and then I say, how many of you would want to know that your partner was cheating on you. Even if that meant the complete destruction of the relationship, and almost all of the people put their hands back up. They’re willing to destroy the relationship, and I’ll ask them, and here’s all these students who are so cynical and postmodern, and blah, blah, blah, no truth and I’ll say, why do you do that. And they’ll say, because, and they say it innocently, which, you know, you got to love them for it, because it’s not real. That’s how they respond. It’s not real. And I said, but the person’s going to keep acting all the way they’ve been acting, they’re going to still, oh but it doesn’t matter anymore, because it’s not real. So I’m like, it’s, it’s so good job. First of all, I miss having you as a professor. What an amazing, what an amazing professor you are. What a cool question to ask a group of kids. Fantastic. Fantastic. That fits really good with the framework, both of those fit very well. Second one first, second one first. The framework proposes that what we are is trying to get a good model of how things really are in the world. That’s our modus operandi. You are trying to create a good model of the world. It doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily have to be completely accurate has to be useful but part of it being useful is that it’s accurate to some degree. I mean, it doesn’t have to be faithful to how the world is completely you’re not trying to build an internal map of the whole world as it is, but you are trying to build. You are trying to get at how it really is out there, especially the parts that you really care about. And that’s what you are built for. If this is true, then you are built to get a good grip on how it actually is relative to what allows you to stay alive and to be well and to flourish. So that’s what you are. So of course they say, well, that feels intuitive that I need to know how it really is because that’s what you’re built to do. You’re built to know how it is. I want to say two things for that. I actually, I propose using the word faithful for that kind of continuity of contact, rather than complete accuracy. I’m right. I’m faithful to my partner doesn’t mean I have a completed model about her. I do is an absolute disaster for the relationship, but it means I have a sense of no, but my model keeps continuity of contact with her. I, as she changes it evolve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well think if you’re, if you’re choosing your behavior. So given this model, you choose your behaviors, basically you’re running multiple possible realities alongside one another, and you’re choosing the right behavior set relative to how much entropy that behavior will increase relative to things you really care about to get to where you want to go. Right. That to work, you have the better the model you have of how the actual environment is working is how bad good you’ll be at picking the right adaptive action. So you have to know how it is to do the thing that means something to you. So, it’s really rewarding to know, knowing is rewarding like we are epistemic agents in a really deeply like a fundamental way and actually life might just be epistemic machines trying to figure out how it is and I kind of like that poetically. Yeah, life is all about trying to figure out how it is. So, I’ll let you, I’ll let you return back to the first part of it. But before you do, like, so first of all I think, I think what I’m, what I’m arguing I think you’re agreeing it seems like it is Plato’s proposal for the meta drive that meta drive seems like well well placed. Right. Right. And, and then the other thing is, given that the predictive processing model is ultimately dependent on sort of this this this interesting variant, and it shares this with deep learning in some ways this really interesting epistemic move which is the brain, the embodied brain let’s be clear about that doesn’t directly try to predict the world it tries to protect itself, which turns out to be a really good way of trying to predict the world. So, if we get really optimally gripped on the things that we care about that that sort of tracks really well with that epistemic move. Right, there’s a way in which, like, this is another conversation you and I are going to have so we’re not going to have to go into detail here but I want to introduce, like, like, you’re getting, I think you’re getting a kind of input, like, I think what is implied maybe even tail but at least implied by this is a philosophical pragmatism which is, we’re never actually predicting the world, per se, we’re predicting our ability to interact with the world in an optimally gripping fashion. I think that’s right. Right. Right. Okay, now, I just wanted to get back and so for me. That’s really it’s a really it’s a you’re right, that’s a really rich conversation and there’s a lot, there’s a lot going on there too especially around wisdom right because you can have high level beliefs that then track the reality that you are not tracking and that seems like an important thing for this de-reification process as well that your experiences are always a sub slice of reality rather than reality itself. It’s always being seen through the filter of what you are. I mean what a huge insight that is to have to have a high level belief that’s installed that knows that, because that’s going to change you from, like with jealousy right, knowing the difference between the somebody acts in some way and then you think, oh, you’re the problem. Relative to relative to knowing that actually I’m perceiving those cues through a certain lens. I’m predicting my own reaction to those cues and that’s really what I’m reacting to. It’s a big difference, big difference between you’re doing something wrong and I am interpreting the scene as something, you know, and if you have friends who make that difference you know that these are good friends to have because they’re the ones who don’t come up to you being, you’ve done this thing they come up to you and say, look, I perceived a certain thing and I need to check in on the reality of that. Exactly, exactly. They, when we’re when we’re doing the dialectic into D logos, you don’t, you don’t make a third person definition of a particular virtue that’s coming into the practice, you say, I propose that right right it’s coming out of the system. Okay, back to the first. Yeah, yeah. Meta Meta proposal. So, something that we haven’t spoken of that comes up in the paper is the difference between feelings and moods. Again, that’s a really rich literature, so I don’t want to exhaust that literature with a simple computational sort of output, but this is one interesting thing that’s coming out of the framework is that where individual affective changes, positive or negative, are about these changing slopes of error reduction either better than expected or worse than expected so we feel good when it’s going better than expected we feel bad when it’s not going as well as expected. So, moods longer timeline, more context irrelevant you know you can have a mood all day even though you do multiple little local things. The background affective mood might be phenomenologic computationally speaking and it pours into the phenomenology are general expectations about the kinds of slopes we tend to find in a particular season in a particular context. So what it means to have a bad mood is that some part of the system is now running the belief set that says, given the context and given your skill set, we are unlikely to find better than expected slopes in all the little local niches that we’re going to explore today. That’s what it is to kind of feel like I’m not having a very good day. It’s not working out. I don’t expect it to get better. Whereas a good mood. If we do better than expected a couple of times in a row, your overall expectations for the amount of error you should be managing in a particular context might elevate and then suddenly you’re thinking wow, no this is I’ve, I found the right place where the berries are on this fine spring day, and I’m likely to find many other berries and I’m feeling pretty good about that okay. So we’ve got we might have longer term background affective experiences affect like experiences like moods that are telling us how well we are doing as an overall predictive machine in our kind of niche. Now if that’s the case, then the wise person who’s hanging out at their edge, who’s not getting stuck in local dynamics, but is instead keeping all the plates spinning because they are not only sensitive to the local, but they’re, they’re available to the global. That means they’re able to have more plates spinning and more successfully spinning. You’re keeping more things in play because you’re deploying your attention resources across the whole, the output is, even though you might not be doing way better at one particular thing, you’re reducing lots of little errors across the whole, which is going to give you an overall embodied sense of, I’ve got a good control on my life. I’ve got a good grip on how it goes and that feels great. It feels great when you can be the kind of thing that’s set up in a way where you’re not getting burned by local burns and losing it, but instead, and I think there’s a bigger story here about what needs to actually be in play to have that bigger mood, but I would agree with that if this, if this wisdom routine is working the way that we think it is, there will be a background felt sense of control and of competence. You’ll have a sense of competence and I really do experience that, you know, the better I get at not getting stuck in any one place. The more that I’m comfortable in uncertainty, the more I’m comfortable at going out of my window of tolerance and coming back with control, the more ease filled I am, regardless of what happens next because my predictive system has learned that it has enough resources that regardless of the volatility, it can digest it. So think of Socrates in dialogue with many different interlocutors coming from many different positions, often challenging what is being proposed, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. Right. Right. So it’s totally comfortable. It’s totally comfortable in the uncertainty. Yes, it’s. Yeah, I don’t like to use the word comfort. I know what you mean, because I think I’m sensitive to people like Han who talked about, we’ve reduced beauty to things being comfortable in the sense of being easy for us. Right. We’ve reduced the beautiful to the smooth, and that’s not what we should be doing. But I wanted to, I wanted to pick up on other people, especially like Costa and others. And he talks about meaningfulness, like in meaning in life as being mood like, it’s not focal like, right, it’s this, it’s this sense. And he even compares it to an atmosphere and he even plays with it how it affords us to breathe in and breathe out but also distorts the light and refracts it, but we adapt right blah blah. Yeah, it’s a beautiful extended metaphor. He’s talking about a secular version of wonder. And the thing that got me is that I take it that meaning in life is exactly. And just give me a minute on this is exactly at that level you’re talking about you’re not making a judgment about how did I do in this task or how did I do it, you’re making it a judgment in your overall capacity to be fitted to the world and right. And so that’s what meaning it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sense of connectedness to yourself to others and the world. And so that’s what I’m talking about at this general level, and think about the metaphors that people use. I mean, there’s another dimension in this but one part is people want to be connected to something larger than themselves that has a value and a reality independent of the, so of their ego centered concerns this is Susan Wolf right and also a lot of the experimental work. So people want this connectedness. Right, they’re looking for that kind of connectedness, you’re talking about, obviously that they’re using size as a right as a metaphor for something that is beyond my ego centric preference set and try, I want to be connected and think about how that maps up onto exactly what you’re talking about here about the person who says no no no what I’m after is that I want this, I want this fluid ability to be a clarity of cognition that allow I can, I can do the fine grip but I can do the wide embrace and I can, and I’m moving between them at all. And I think meaning in life is actually, and notice how it meaning hangs between cognition and affect so perfectly here and I think meaning in life is I think that atmospheric sense we have that you’re talking about here. That’s really lovely I completely agree and like, then we would be, we would do well to know that and then to make it our aim to learn what it’s like to be a human living in the world rather than any particular end because if your aim is to get a car. That’s a really fixed. It’s a really fixed set. Yeah, you could also aim at what is it like to be a human. And sometimes I get cars. Yeah, that’s a totally different name, and that aim does exactly what you were just saying which is now you’re starting to, whether you get the car or not. So, you’ve learned something about being a human in a car getting capacity, and that’s so much more the meaning infused directive. And that’s a huge thing for this kind of a system imagine if we weren’t aiming those highly expected states weren’t zero some activities like getting a car getting a money or getting a particular kind of career, but we’re rather non zero some activities like what if your highly expected state was to know who you are or what it’s like to be a predictive system or what it’s like to be a conscious thing. Then think about the difference in your experience of the world also because whether you do good or bad. You are at a higher level succeeding at learning what it’s like to be you, you’ve now hacked the predictive system and I think Buddhist do this really well. They go, I want to be super good at knowing about suffering. I want to know I want to be, I want to be a connoisseur of understanding what it’s like to experience volatility. So now the local volatility is high, you get hurt, you grow old, you get sick, you’re going through a death process, somebody you love is going through a death process and you get big volatility. So the local is now volatile, but the global is enjoying all these big era slope reductions because you have as your highly expected state to be one who understands what it’s like to be in a world in a volatile world as a system that doesn’t like volatility, what is the nature of suffering. Now suddenly you’re getting rewarded, the system is lifting your mood, even though locally you’re in an extremely challenging situation. And that’s something that the system is just happy to do if we reset our expectations. So there’s the problem with part of our culture today is that the expectations it’s generating in us are exactly the ones that lead us to be sticky little cul-de-sacs that are quick to end and light on nutrition. And if we were just to change our expectations a little, then suddenly we would find that there were good slopes everywhere, even when it looks like there’s bad slopes, they’re actually on a bigger good slope, even though they’re locally quite challenging slopes. So this is not only the Buddha, this is Socrates and this is the Socratic know thyself and the know thyself is not your know, it’s not know your autobiography. It’s exactly this. It’s getting, it’s getting, it’s not your autobiography, it’s the owner’s manual of you. Figure out your owner’s manual, right? And so there’s that and then that gets taken up in the Stoic, right? And notice, and the Stoics talked about the smooth flow of life, they’re talking about like a flow state that’s at this higher level. And that brings another connection, somebody deeply influenced by the Stoics, which is Fromm. And Fromm made a distinction between the having mode in which you’re organized towards having things that is right and the being mode. And what culture does is confuse us and exploit us by trying to have us satisfy the being needs, these needs for know thyself, become wise, like become somebody who is in love, right? Confuse those with having, having a car, having the house, having as much sex as you can. And so modal confusion is, I think, Fromm’s point, because it goes back to the Stoics and the Socrates, it’s a perennial problem, but it’s also a historical problem in that our culture is biasing us increasingly into this kind of modal confusion. And I think it’s Dubois who even takes it one step further, which is from the having to the looking like you have, to the appearance. So not only are you not trying to be something, you’re not even trying to have it anymore. Now all that matters is looking like you have it, right? And there’s lots to say here. So we have a new paper, we have a new paper just dropped and the Aeon article touches on this as well, about why given this cognitive framework, this is increasingly problematic. For our kind of being, but I think we’re really onto the pulse here that if you go back along this, why would you want to do that? Well, here’s one real good reason why. Because if you’re positioned here, the system is going to be better at getting good grips on lots of different things, even if it’s not working very well. And that’s going to lift your mood. It’s going to make you more resilient. In fact, it’s going to make you anti-fragile, meaning you’re going to get stronger when you’re perturbed. And in fact, it might even make you tropophilic, which is our, we have a paper coming out on anti-fragility. Tropophilic means you turn into a lover of uncertainty. You kind of now dig, you kind of dig, perturbating the system because you’re kind of like, what’s it like to be pertubated? That’s so interesting to be pertubated. If you’re focused here, the predictive system ends up getting a better grip, I think more quickly than if you’re in the having state or especially than if you’re in the appearing to have state. This goes into work I’m doing also with EpiUGEN on consciousness and other things. So we’re now, like, so you know in biology there’s, you know this, we brought it up when we were doing the paper, that we move from discussing the evolution of traits to the evolution of the meta trait of evolvability itself. And that’s exactly what is being proposed here. That’s right. That’s all it is to be focused on being, is it’s a meta, it’s a meta concern. Yes, because it’s no longer about any particular having. Now it’s about what is it like to be a haver. And if that’s the aim, then regardless of the having, you’re improving your grip on the world, which means there’s going to be all these juicy little slopes and your mood’s going to be elevated. And even if you don’t get it, if the aim is to figure out what it’s like to be a haver, then that becomes superfluous in a way. Not completely superfluous, of course we need shelter and food and medicine. But Ratio, it properly proportions our care. Ratio, it properly proportions our care, right? That’s what we’re talking about here. That’s what we’re talking about. And so for me, I think also not only is it lifting your mood, I mean, everything can be hijacked, but I think that that phenomenology is pointing to, you’re actually putting yourself into an arena in which you’re prioritizing evolvability, which I think will overall, longitudinally, not locally, but longitudinally, is going to enhance your capacity for relevance realization. And that’s, you know, that’s exactly the good news to take home out of this theory. It doesn’t only have the propensity for all these negative, vicious feedbacks. It has all of these positive feedbacks as well, which is, if you could get the right expectations in play, that you are starting to get little successes all the time, then the system starts to expect to be the kind of thing that can get a good grip. And so it starts highlighting those new opportunities to improve its grip, which is right at the edge of your capability. So now the edge is becoming attractive, and the more you’re attracted to the edge, the more you’re growing, the more people you’re getting involved in, the better your relationships are, and the more you’re expecting it to work. So the braver you are, the more you’re at your edge, the more people you’re learning, the better the opportunities there are, and around and around it goes. And that could really start just by something as simple as try to change a little of the expectation. Try to today, just set the intention to know a little bit more what it’s like to be you. It could be as easy as that, or start feeling a little bit grateful a couple of times a day for the things you’ve already got going, because if you start setting that high level expectation in that there’s good things going on, the system is quick to pick up on it. And then it starts to create a system that starts highlighting the things that are working, and then you’re going to be more willing to go out. I mean, the hot hand phenomena is a real thing, you know, like where basketball players think, well, if I’ve won a couple games, and we’re sure to win another one, and then they tend to win them. It’s a weird phenomena, right? But it works, because if you expect it to work, then you play in a different way, you play more courageously, you play at your edge. Yeah, very much. If you’re going to do the know yourself better throughout the day, remember, this is not about reviewing your autobiography endlessly. Our culture loves that. This is about, like I said, your owner’s manual. Pay attention, learn, learn about the machinery of your cognition, learn about the machinery of your affect, learn about the connections between the machinery of your cognition, your affect, and your embodied movement in the world. That’s what this means. That’s what this means. Absolutely. Absolutely. This has been fantastic, Mark. Mark, of course, you’re coming back again. Yeah, great. Multiple times, multiple times. But this has just been wonderful. Thanks. Actually, send me a link and I’ll put the link for your paper in this video. Read the paper. It’s beautiful. And this was beautiful, Mark. So thank you very much. And we will definitely talk again. Thanks, John.