A Materialist's Credo

This post passes on a recent effort to put down some basic ideas in as few words as I can manage.

A Materialist’s Credo

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions.  They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.

We are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.

Personal and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of  our autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our well-being in each instance of the present.

We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow  the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.

Hopefully the deconstruction that takes us into this metaphorical engine room makes us more able to discern and employ illusions that enhance continuation rather than termination of our personal and social evolutionary narratives.

Architectural experience influences the processing of others’ body expressions

An open source article by Presti et al:  

Significance

The motor system has been recognized as a fundamental neural machinery for spatial and social cognition, making the study of the interplay between architecture and social behavior worthwhile. Here, we tested how a virtual architectural experience alters the subsequent processing of body expressions, showing that the motor system participates at two distinct stages: the earliest influenced by the dynamic architectural experience and the latter modulated by the actual physical characteristics. These findings highlight the existence of an overlapping motor neural substrate devoted to spatial and social cognition, with the architectural space exerting an early and possibly adapting effect on the later social experience. Ultimately, spatial design may impact the processing of human emotions.

Abstract

The interplay between space and cognition is a crucial issue in Neuroscience leading to the development of multiple research fields. However, the relationship between architectural space and the movement of the inhabitants and their interactions has been too often neglected, failing to provide a unifying view of architecture's capacity to modulate social cognition broadly. We bridge this gap by requesting participants to judge avatars’ emotional expression (high vs. low arousal) at the end of their promenade inside high- or low-arousing architectures. Stimuli were presented in virtual reality to ensure a dynamic, naturalistic experience. High-density electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded to assess the neural responses to the avatar’s presentation. Observing highly aroused avatars increased Late Positive Potentials (LPP), in line with previous evidence. Strikingly, 250 ms before the occurrence of the LPP, P200 amplitude increased due to the experience of low-arousing architectures, reflecting an early greater attention during the processing of body expressions. In addition, participants stared longer at the avatar’s head and judged the observed posture as more arousing. Source localization highlighted a contribution of the dorsal premotor cortex to both P200 and LPP. In conclusion, the immersive and dynamic architectural experience modulates human social cognition. In addition, the motor system plays a role in processing architecture and body expressions suggesting that the space and social cognition interplay is rooted in overlapping neural substrates. This study demonstrates that the manipulation of mere architectural space is sufficient to influence human social cognition.

Does a "P-factor" underlie core attributes of mental health maladies?

I want to point to an open source "Core Concepts" article in PNAS by David Adam that presents "the views of some psychiatrists who argue that the same bit of biology—genetics gone awry or some misplaced brain circuitry—could underlie the vast majority of humanity’s mental health problems. Studies have shown, for example, that many of the same genes seem to drive increased risk for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depression, and schizophrenia. They call this as-yet-unidentified common cause the “psychopathology factor,” or “p-factor” for short."

Mental problems from early life adversity passed down three generations.

Early life adversity can result in emotional and behavioral problems throughout adulthood in both humans and mice. Battaglia et al. show than in mice this effect can persist through three generations. Exposure to the drug amiloride throughout the three generations can reverse this persistence of anxiety and pain sensitivity by inhidibint the increased activity of membrane ion channels that are its apparent cause. Here is their abstract:

Early-life adversities are associated with altered defensive responses. Here, we demonstrate that the repeated cross-fostering (RCF) paradigm of early maternal separation is associated with enhancements of distinct homeostatic reactions: hyperventilation in response to hypercapnia and nociceptive sensitivity, among the first generation of RCF-exposed animals, as well as among two successive generations of their normally reared offspring, through matrilineal transmission. Parallel enhancements of acid-sensing ion channel 1 (ASIC1), ASIC2, and ASIC3 messenger RNA transcripts were detected transgenerationally in central neurons, in the medulla oblongata, and in periaqueductal gray matter of RCF-lineage animals. A single, nebulized dose of the ASIC-antagonist amiloride renormalized respiratory and nociceptive responsiveness across the entire RCF lineage. These findings reveal how, following an early-life adversity, a biological memory reducible to a molecular sensor unfolds, shaping adaptation mechanisms over three generations. Our findings are entwined with multiple correlates of human anxiety and pain conditions and suggest nebulized amiloride as a therapeutic avenue.

Using AI to find retinal biomarkers for patient sex that opthalmologists can be trained to see.

Delavari et al. do a demonstration of using AI to find aspects of human retina images that identify whether they are male or female retinas, a distinction that had not previously been accomplished by clinical opthalmologists. Here is their abstract:

We present a structured approach to combine explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) with the scientific method for scientific discovery. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in a proof-of-concept study where we uncover biomarkers from a convolutional neural network (CNN) model trained to classify patient sex in retinal images. This is a trait that is not currently recognized by diagnosticians in retinal images, yet, one successfully classified by CNNs. Our methodology consists of four phases: In Phase 1, CNN development, we train a visual geometry group (VGG) model to recognize patient sex in retinal images. In Phase 2, Inspiration, we review visualizations obtained from post hoc interpretability tools to make observations, and articulate exploratory hypotheses. Here, we listed 14 hypotheses retinal sex differences. In Phase 3, Exploration, we test all exploratory hypotheses on an independent dataset. Out of 14 exploratory hypotheses, nine revealed significant differences. In Phase 4, Verification, we re-tested the nine flagged hypotheses on a new dataset. Five were verified, revealing (i) significantly greater length, (ii) more nodes, and (iii) more branches of retinal vasculature, (iv) greater retinal area covered by the vessels in the superior temporal quadrant, and (v) darker peripapillary region in male eyes. Finally, we trained a group of ophthalmologists (⁠N=26⁠) to recognize the novel retinal features for sex classification. While their pretraining performance was not different from chance level or the performance of a nonexpert group (⁠N=31⁠), after training, their performance increased significantly (⁠p<0.001⁠, d=2.63⁠). These findings showcase the potential for retinal biomarker discovery through CNN applications, with the added utility of empowering medical practitioners with new diagnostic capabilities to enhance their clinical toolkit.

Blithe Spirits and Heavy Souls

This post is another abstracting/condensation of a recent Ventkatesh Rao essay with the title of this post (Its subtitle: ‘ Learning an experiential posture for the Permaweird.’) In this case, it is a 4-fold reduction in the words I need to scan through when I return to this MindBlog archive to recall the ideas.  

I’ve found some useful “unexpected validation for unexpressed thoughts the reader already holds’” in his contrasting of ‘insight porn’ with ‘presence prose,”  as well as his distinction of Blithe Spirits and Heary Souls to make the point that you don’t have to retreat from the world to feel good.

Rao doesn’t make it easy on readers. He assumes a thorough knowledge of contemporary and classical culture.  I suggest going to bard.goole.com if  references to ‘fingerspitzengefühl’, ’Red Pill/Blue Pill’ , or ‘larps’ mystify you. Here’s my reduction:

…the kind of writing I am choosing to do is vaguely unsatisfying.. in “the endocrine circuitry and muscle memory around this behavior isn’t tuned right” way. The vibe is off. I’m “not feeling it.” It feels like more of a grind…writing in the kind of hard mode I’m in right now, when the fingerspitzengefühl doesn’t feel quite right, feels draining rather than energizing. It has the desired objective outcomes, but lacks the subjective payoff.

I think the problem isn’t with me, but the growing fogginess of the world. So let’s start by looking at why insight porn used to work, why it stopped working, why writing in the new mode feels less satisfying, and why that’s actually a good thing.

Insight porn works by covertly constructing satisfying models of the world starting with nuggets of unexpected validation for unexpressed thoughts the reader already holds…Insight porn rarely tells you something you don’t know. Instead, it gives you permission to consciously believe something you already unconsciously suspect to be true, and to drop the opposed belief you didn’t realize you were only pretending to hold. That’s why a sense of relief is a primary response to consuming good insight porn.

Insight porn at its most sophisticated was a delivery mechanism for pills, as in red pill/blue pill…With relatively few words, you could “pill” people in various ways, using oblique approaches against which they had few cognitive defenses, causing large sections of their world-views to collapse, generally in favor of some flavor of cynical anomie or radicalized fervor, and they’d thank you for it…with an array of pills, eroding and destabilizing the entire landscape of worldviews…

…it was actually a useful, perhaps even critical thing to be doing roughly between 2009-17, when serious problems were beginning to manifest across the civilizational stack. If mental models hadn’t been developing cracks and fissures along with the worlds they were supposed to be describing, we’d all have suffered much more mightily than we did through the culture wars and Great Weirding. Through the shadow war of mass, mutual pilling, we inoculated ourselves with a diverse array satirical skepticisms of the prevailing societal order. We became better prepared to inhabit the Permaweird we now find ourselves in.

****

The kind of writing I’ve been practicing … over the last few years is about trying to make myself, and the reader, feel present in the world. Let’s call it presence prose. …One visible sign of this is that I often talk about current events these days, which I rarely did ten years ago. I actively aimed for “timeless” a decade ago. Now, at least in this newsletter, I’m fine with transient relevance… presence prose is not news. Nor is it “analysis” in any legibly scoped and bounded way (analysis within a “niche” is another 2010s genre of writing that feels increasingly dated these days). It’s a kind of mental time travel into a mode of experiencing some leaky corner of the entangled world in real time.
 
To write for presence, you must begin by setting aside mental models and theories in favor of whatever flow of raw data you can find and consume…. Where possible, you must also travel closer to empirical and phenomenological sources, while being ever mindful of the fact that such close-in loci today also feature people consciously crafting livestreamed narrative theaters of validation rather than actually paying attention. Such people are part of the phenomenology you must make sense of. Elon Musk visiting the US border isn’t a citizen journalist looking into the immigrant crisis there. It is a bit of theater that is itself part of that crisis, which comes swaddled in multiple overlapping theaters of this sort.

***

The thing is, insight porn is simply more satisfying to produce and consume than presence prose. Writing or reading in that mode reliably produces the dopamine required to produce or consume more. While not quite entertainment — insight porn has utility, and often calls for demanding levels of effort on both sides — you don’t do it for the utility.

A diet of insight porn, I think, creates and sustains a certain light-hearted and carefree way of being present in the world. It turns you into a blithe spirit. Under the right conditions, it can make you worldy, yet carefree. You feel present in the world, but untroubled, if not untouched, by your experiences in it.

The right conditions are obvious: This diet works when the world is doing well enough, at least for you, that you don’t have to choose between being present and feeling good. When most of the things you could choose to think, write, or read about, or even directly experience, are pleasant. When you only have to add a calibrated amount of discomfort through insight porn to feel present, like a dash of pepper on bland food, there are no real tough choices to be made.

Through the 2000s and 2010s, even my most serious-minded and altruistic friends, working on difficult social problems that entailed a great deal of misery for other living beings (both human and animal) typically could find refuge in other areas of interest that were pleasant to think about. The subsisted on a diet of insight porn. The world had problems, and if you were in a position of privilege, you could choose to work on some of them, but it didn’t look like a dumpster fire in every direction. You didn’t have to put yourself through escape-artist contortions to indulge in a bit of restorative escapism. You didn’t have to build entire reactionary larps to inhabit.

You didn’t have to retreat from the world to feel good.

it does seem that regardless of ideology or how hopped up on pills you are, the dumpster-fire index has been growing higher for everybody. In 2023, it is still possible to hold on to a generally pollyannish worldview of all being for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but it takes significantly more cognitive effort than in 2013. Having a mansion helps, which is one reason I’m scheming to get one. Having a particular talent for a an absorbing pursuit of excellence in something like wood-working in a cabin in the woods helps as well.

What are the consequences of polyannish postures being more expensive and less attractive to sustain?

From my observations, I’d say most people switch modes. They go from being blithe spirits to being heavy souls. People who operate with a default mindset of a sense of a world on fire, a default joyless world where ease and pleasure do not come naturally,

Most people, I suspect, have a preference for one mode or the other, but don’t have psyches rigidly anchored to either blithe spiritedness or heavy soulfulness. Depending on the dumpster-fieriness of the world, most people can experience either mode of being. I suspect most of us are naturally blithe-spirited, just as most of us are naturally right-handed. But we can all experience heavy souls, just as we can all use our left hands. And as with left-handed behaviors, heavy souled behaviors are awkward, janky, and unnatural for most people.

I certainly am naturally blithe-spirited. I don’t go out of my way to see the world as a dumpster fire, even if I don’t go out of my way to retreat from a pressing sense that it is. The preference is perhaps not as strong as my right-handedness. I can only write slowly and very badly with my left hand, but I can write tolerably well in heavy-soul mode. Almost as well as I can in a blithe-spirit mode.

This understanding feels correct to me. Writing today feels unsatisfying today in the same way using my left hand for a task requiring any sort of dexterity does. The fingerspitzengefühl is off because I’m using fingerspitzen I’m not used to using. I’m not feeling it, because I don’t often use this hand, and the finger-tips haven’t developed as much sensitivity.

But I’m getting slightly more comfortable with each essay. And the resulting posture in the world feels slightly less wrong each time. I don’t think I’d go back to a blithe spirit posture even if I could. Any more than I’d go back to right-handedness if I managed to practice my way into full ambidexterity.

The world is changing, and it feels right to change with it. And if the appropriate posture for experiencing the Permaweird is a heavy-souled one, so be it.

Unification of physics and biology by "Assembly Theory"

An international collaboration of researchers  in an open source article in Nature Magazine,  has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature. Here is their abstract:  

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection. To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary^. We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units. We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly. By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

Added note:  I am grateful to Julio Salazar for his comment below providing critiques of Assembly Theory :

On the Salient Limitations of the Methods of Assembly Theory and their Classification of Molecular Biosignatures 

The 8 Fallacies of Assembly Theory 

Assembly Theory and Agnostic Life Finding

What your brain is doing after the light turns green.

 Gandhi and collaboratores show that if you step out to cross the street without looking right or left the neural activity in the brain is different than if you look from side to side first to be sure no cars are coming. Population level analysis of movement-related transient activity patterns in a population of superior colliculus neurons change in the two different contexts, and this difference is not readily identifiable in single-unit recordings.  Here is their technical abstract:

Sensorimotor transformation is the process of first sensing an object in the environment and then producing a movement in response to that stimulus. For visually guided saccades, neurons in the superior colliculus (SC) emit a burst of spikes to register the appearance of stimulus, and many of the same neurons discharge another burst to initiate the eye movement. We investigated whether the neural signatures of sensation and action in SC depend on context. Spiking activity along the dorsoventral axis was recorded with a laminar probe as Rhesus monkeys generated saccades to the same stimulus location in tasks that require either executive control to delay saccade onset until permission is granted or the production of an immediate response to a target whose onset is predictable. Using dimensionality reduction and discriminability methods, we show that the subspaces occupied during the visual and motor epochs were both distinct within each task and differentiable across tasks. Single-unit analyses, in contrast, show that the movement-related activity of SC neurons was not different between tasks. These results demonstrate that statistical features in neural activity of simultaneously recorded ensembles provide more insight than single neurons. They also indicate that cognitive processes associated with task requirements are multiplexed in SC population activity during both sensation and action and that downstream structures could use this activity to extract context. Additionally, the entire manifolds associated with sensory and motor responses, respectively, may be larger than the subspaces explored within a certain set of experiments.

Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind

This post describes the first of my personal encounters with AI  that has left me completely in awe of its capabilities. Since 1993 I have been placing the label *mind* at the beginning of paragraphs in my personal journal that I think are  relevant to understanding our minds. Here I pass on the results of asking Anthropic’s Claude GPT engine to process 56 pages of paragraphs with this *mind* label written so far in 2023. (Chat GPT-4 was unwilling to process more than ~9 pages at a time). The first paragraph of the 56 pages of text submitted to Claude was the following instruction:

"Claude, please organize, edit, reduce redundancy, condense, find major themes, patterns, connections and write a new version of the following series of paragraphs that I have written:"

The following is Claude's first response to the above prompt (Response 1),  then a 'retry' or regenerated version  (Response 2) which is shorter and more concise, and finally Response 3 is an even shorter response to the simple instruction:  "Claude, please organize and rewrite the following paragraphs of ideas marked with the label *mind*  from my personal journal into a continuous text that makes them more understandable to others as well as to myself:"

I am amazed by Claude's responses...

Response 1 (to first prompt above)

The Mind

-The mind is like space, the canvas on which experiences, thoughts, and feelings arise. It is not any one of the transient appearances within it.
-Thoughts and feelings are evolutionary mechanisms, ultimately serving to defend and propagate one's group. Kindness, compassion, joy - these arise impersonally, they are not intrinsic qualities of a "self."
-From a cosmic perspective, concepts like meaning and purpose play out on a small scale, driven by motivations that evolved to promote altruism and group bonding. Awe, wonder, reverence can be motivators to learn, persist, and reproduce.

The Self

-The self is a perceptual construct, an "emotion of ownership" assembled from models of others, emotions, perceptions etc. There is no fundamental self, only the feeling of occupying an expanded space of awareness.
-We exist as multiple input/output processes (eat, breathe, think, act). Various "avatars" or selves arise transiently from awareness, each with its own biases and correlates.
-Language and imagined futures enabled the evolution of complicated selves and societies. But selves dissociate us from nature, from being fully present.

Being vs Seeing 

-Awareness can be trained to disengage from thoughts and visceral reactions, to simply observe them without attachment. This allows more freedom in shaping one's experience.
-"Being" means resting as the space of awareness, not caught in any one transient appearance. "Seeing" means identifying a particular self/avatar and its storyline.
-As selves are seen and become opaque rather than transparent, the feeling of being an autonomous agent also becomes optional.

Equanimity

-Equanimity comes from seeing all appearances as equal, not needing to seek or avoid any of them. Pain and pleasure just are.
-Aging can allow more time simply being present vs constantly reacting. The body may dial down metabolic rate when not driven by a storyline.
-"There is no there there" - nothing to obtain, no final place. Just the dance of appearances and disappearance, only the present moment.

The Path

-Let reflectivity trump reactivity. Deflect and distill input, only a fraction needs further attention.
-Release identification with any one avatar or self. Be the river and watcher, neither exclusively.
-Set optimal levels of arousal/valence/agency. Dial down judgment, dial up openness and curiosity.
-Practice simple narrative protocols Just take the next step, being gentle, grateful, generous, curious.

Response 2 (to first prompt above)

The mind is the space in which all experiences arise, rather than any one of the fleeting contents within it. My purpose is to stay present, share insights, and care for self and others. 

Everything is fundamentally impersonal, arising through evolution. Kindness, connection and community emerge to defend and propagate one's group. Awe, joy and meaning motivate learning and reproduction in an indifferent world.

The self is a construct, an emotion of authorship. My fluid identities are tools, not truth. I aim to be the space holding each "I" lightly, rather than clinging to any one.

Reactive habits link thoughts to feelings. Awareness can disengage this clutch, reducing reactivity. 

Equanimity comes from resting as awareness, not any transient contents. Suffering is resisting what is. 

Language generated complicated social order, but also dissociates us from nature. AI may allow a return to more natural, animal ways of being. I seek novelty, discern patterns, and train responses. 

Advanced age permits more resting in present awareness, not lost in narratives. I cultivate gratitude, generosity, curiosity and play. Small actions matter more than big purposes in uncertain times.

The body's wisdom matters most. Health requires some arousal and performance, but also untethered leisure. Balance is key. I aim for agency, pleasure and calm, dialing these as needed.

I share my path, as it has helped me. But each of us is unique, mysterious. People are not what I wish, but what they are. I offer gentle truth, not judgment or control.

Words appear from the ether, then pass. I craft brief tales, a secular Bible, hoping some may resonate. But nothing lasts. A quiet fullness remains, life's gift.

Response 3 (to second prompt above) 

The mind is the space where experiences arise. The self is an illusion, a story we tell. Equanimity comes from resting as open awareness, not any contents.

Human culture requires imagined selves and purpose. But they disconnect us from our fundamental animal nature. AI may free us from excess words and thoughts.

Stay present. Life's meaning is found in connecting, playing, being curious. Avoid sticking to any narrative or goal too tightly.

The body's wisdom matters most. Balance performance with untethered leisure. Calmly surf uncertainty. Dial agency, arousal and valence for wellbeing.

No experience lasts. Appreciate life's brevity. Share insights when inspired, but don't cling. There's no final destination, just this step, then the next.

Treat yourself and others with gentle curiosity, not judgment. We're all equally mysterious. Kindness matters more than control. Stay grateful.

The mind's complexity arises from simple parts interacting. Pay patient attention. Truth emerges slowly, then disappears into the mist.