My following exchange with Chat GPT 4o - in which it responds to some of my idea fragments - convinces me that AI's current power to integrate and expand on concepts expressed in language (see Ezra Klein/Ben Buchanan discussion), is superior to mine.
Here is the exchange:
prompt:
I’m curious to see how you might respond to reading the following notes on testing different topic ideas to write about and develop. The issue is not one of whether the ideas are novel, but whether I might devise, with your help, a different permutation, perspective, or take on them that I (and others) might find useful. Can you can suggest some elaboration or further development of the ideas I put forward.
Here are the notes:
First Possible Title: The interoceptive self as a basis for actions, thoughts and feelings.
Subtitle: Moving the self’s experienced center of gravity from “I” to “it”
It is a question of who and/or what is running the show
Which brings it back to the old upstairs/downstairs chicken or egg circular causality issue.
So, ‘it all depends’ (cf Sapolsky’s massive tome)
And, there is no ‘there’ in terms of understanding, that isn’t in my 1999 “The Biology of Mind” book.
Second Possible Title: Defining a smaller self world as a human animal’s refuge in troubled times.
Our predecessors were small mouse like creatures that survived the asteroid collision of ~66 million years ago by burrowing into small protective cracks and burrows. I wonder about robustly engaging this strategy, being one of the peasants or ‘sheeple’ challenged by the rapid disintegration of the geopolitical world order of the past 50 years
And then what? How to rebuild a new world?… perhaps Venkatest Rao’s cozy world, rising from the ooze of the permaweird, protocols, etc.
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Chat GPT4o response:
Here are some possible elaborations and angles for further development based on your notes:
First Topic: The Interoceptive Self as a Basis for Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings
Possible Directions for Expansion:
1. Interoception and Predictive Processing:
• You could frame this in terms of predictive coding—the interoceptive self as a key regulator of allostasis, with the “I” being an after-the-fact interpreter rather than the initiator of action.
• This links to Karl Friston’s free energy principle and the idea that the brain’s core function is to minimize surprise by aligning perception and action with internal models.
• Is the self just a set of homeostatic priors? How much of our identity is actually metabolic regulation?
2. The “Upstairs/Downstairs” and Circular Causality Question:
• You gesture toward the chicken-or-egg problem of cognition and embodiment—how does top-down (cortical, conceptual) control interact with bottom-up (visceral, bodily) influences?
• You might compare this with Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis—how feelings from the body guide decision-making and consciousness.
• A more radical view: If we shift our experiential center of gravity from the ego (“I”) to the body (“it”), does that dissolve the sense of agency, or merely relocate it?
3. The “It All Depends” Angle:
• Sapolsky’s argument in Determined—that free will is an illusion—suggests that our decisions are just the end points of countless upstream factors.
• What would it mean to fully internalize this view? Could shifting to an interoceptive perspective lead to more compassion (for self and others), knowing that everyone is just the result of their bodily and environmental history?
4. Revisiting Your 1999 Work:
• You say there’s no fundamental new “there” that wasn’t already in The Biology of Mind—but could there be a different permutation of those ideas given what we now know about AI, embodiment, and neuroscience?
• GPT models, for example, are purely linguistic and lack interoception—does that mean their “self” (if it exists) is more like the disembodied, narrativized “I” rather than the deeply felt “it” of an embodied being?
• Could this suggest that human cognition has two competing modes—one interoceptive (visceral, allostatic) and one linguistic (disembodied, constructed)? How does that play into contemporary discourse about AI vs. human intelligence?
Second Topic: The Smaller Self-World as Refuge
Possible Directions for Expansion:
1. Burrowing as a Cognitive and Evolutionary Strategy:
• You link burrowing (a survival strategy of early mammals) with psychological retreat in times of upheaval.
• Could there be a deep homology here? Is the impulse to withdraw during sociopolitical chaos an evolved adaptive strategy rather than mere escapism?
• Compare this with polyvagal theory: when the nervous system perceives an existential threat, it often defaults to withdrawal (dorsal vagal shutdown).
• Is “smallness” an active form of resilience rather than a passive retreat? How does it contrast with the “fight-or-flight” reaction?
2. The “Peasant/Sheeple” Perspective as an Adaptive Move:
• What if being a non-agent in the grand geopolitical sense is actually the smartest move?
• History shows that major collapses often result in a power vacuum where “survivor types” do best (e.g., early medieval monastic communities).
• Is there wisdom in choosing obscurity, in minimizing cognitive and social complexity as a survival mechanism?
• This is in direct contrast to the idea that survival means becoming a power player—what if the real strategy is to go unnoticed?
3. The Cozy Web / Permaweird / Protocols Angle:
• Venkat Rao’s cozy web—small, decentralized, high-trust networks—is a modern analog of burrowing.
• What does it take to build a world that is small, resilient, and human-centric, rather than grandiose and world-dominating?
• Perhaps we are seeing a return to guilds, communes, and localism, as opposed to large-scale, hierarchical structures.
• How does this contrast with the Silicon Valley vision of the future (AI, techno-feudalism, etc.)? Is the small-world strategy actually a hack for surviving that future?
Potential Synthesis of These Two Topics
• What if the interoceptive self and the small-world refuge are actually two versions of the same thing?
• The felt sense of self (interoception) is a form of burrowing inward, just as the social/cultural burrow is an external retreat.
• Could there be a philosophy of strategic smallness? A model of resilience that prioritizes minimalism, adaptation, and self-regulation over dominance and grandiosity?
• Instead of the heroic self (large, expansive, outward-focused), what would it mean to embrace the burrowed self—the adaptive, responsive, deeply embodied being?
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Would love to hear your thoughts—do any of these directions resonate with what you’re aiming to explore?
