A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything
nautil.us
nautil.us
- The Pleasure Principle states that the mind's goal to ensure relative homeostasis.
- The mind does this by navigating a specific course of entropy in the face of the external world, this is the Death Drive.
- Selfhood is constituted by the presence of an Other and forces our minds to form an ego as a defensive behavior. Like in Kant and Hume, for Freud, the imaginative capacity of human beings is a very distinct and modular component of human sentience, used by various forces and for various effects, because it basically provides the bare material our minds bricolage into various schemas and apparatuses, such as an ego, phobias, etc. And already we're at the distinction between signifier and signified.
- Time is not a property of the unconscious, its an artifact of negotiating with the outside world. Literally the horizon of sensory organization as we have to sample the world discretely or go insane.
- Traumatic memories tend to be recalled in a 'timeless', 'disjoint', or 'dilated' fashion; trauma is literally the overwhelming and paralyzation of the defensive-sensory layer as a final defense. There is a continuous magnitude stuck in your discrete sampling system.
- The purpose of therapy/psychoanalysis is to, much like its early life, provide it the tools for assimilating this continuous magnitude so that you can begin to act by discovering its contours sorta like how people figure out what Black Holes are: by their effects - the purpose of free association is observe the automatic tendencies of the brain in how it uses sensory bare material to describe its organization, dreams, jokes, etc are places of life where this is easier to come by than when the ego is holding court.
Both in Freud and in OP, Kant holds dominion. It's starting to look like his speculations were pretty damn good. For example, Kant is the first person to say, well before Roger Penrose, that we know there's external matter out there we just have no way of directly attesting to it via sense-experience since that'd be circular as the brain's duty is to generate unified sense-experience.
So there's only subjectivity, you ask? NO! Not at all! Kant's entire point is that precisely because there is a necessary structure to subjective human experience, subjective human experience is objective, meaning there are rules that can be ultimately be derived about its form and operation.
If you haven’t read Rovelli’s beautiful account of the relationship between time, entropy, and space, I highly recommend purchasing it from your local bookstore. The hardback version is especially worth acquiring!
I hope someone with more time for these kinds of subjects can correct any inaccuracies
I’ve done some so-called heroic doses that dissolved my ego, what he calls depersonalization. If one is not prepared for that sort of thing to happen and/or doesn’t have the appropriate setting or people around to make sure you don’t hurt yourself or others then yeah it can certainly turn into a bad trip.
it's complicated. i haven't taken acid in a decade or more.
One kind of bad trip is where you are aware you have taken a drug, but you are convinced you screwed up the dose this time and you are dying, and are filled with regret and fear that won't abate for hours. Or you 100% believe you are stuck in this new state and there is no way to get back to normal. Some people can have PTSD from it.
Another is you are confused enough that you have forgotten you have even taken a drug and might not even remember the stuff you were doing after the fact. But when you come around you find yourself in a jail cell or a hospital bed and realize that oh, crap, things must have gone horribly wrong. That's when you find out your roommate tried to calm you down but you apparently thought they were trying to take your soul so you ran into the street and stripped off your clothes to make it harder for the soul-stealers to grab you, then the police were called and wrestled your sweaty body to the ground and then you peed in the back seat of the police car. That kind of stuff.
I ended up staying up for hours hallucinating that the world was covered in undercover police. A car would drive by and I would see the police. It was just a barrage of bad thoughts stacking on each other. Reality got lost somewhere and I forgot that I was tripping. I basically thought I was in a modern 1984-style society.
I could have probably kicked myself out of that with some logical thoughts: “How does the government afford to make 80% of the population a cop?” The feelings were too overwhelming for me to get there, and I don’t think my friends realized how bad of a time I was having.
First, for some people, psychedelics can trigger things they were not aware of (but likely in their family history or personal history) such as schizophrenia or episodes of past trauma. This is not really the norm, but is sometimes not mentioned by people who are afraid of the "demonization" of those drugs.
Depending on the dose, the drug, and the susceptibility of the person, one can also experience gaps in memory which create confusion in the moment (and in some cases after the trip), or a psychotic state (which can end up being manageable with knowledge and support for some, and a trip to sleep through the night in a hospital for others).
If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. For example: seeing horrific visions (when closing your eyes most often, sometimes even with eyes open), having a "body feeling" that just doesn't feel quite right (messed up proprioception, nausea), having thought patterns that take you down a negative spiral..
Examples of horrific visions: fractals of upsetting images that may or may not be related to experiences you've had (from past traumas to movies, or even random bits of your perception you weren't quite aware of).
Examples of body feeling issues: feeling like parts of the body aren't where they are ("my nose is a few centimeters off"), speech impediment/slurring, losing control of limbs temporarily (which can create a lot of fear and confusion)
Examples of thought patterns that create panic/anxiety/fear: thinking that the current state will last forever (forgetting that the psychedelic effect will wear off), feeling a lot of emotions without understanding the specific cause, perceiving some past trauma and not being resilient against it, heightened empathy being overwhelming, forgetting that perceptions are altered which affects behaviour ("I can't walk this path because it's too steep" on a flat path).
There's so much more to say about that, and also so much to say about proper preparation (set, setting, support) which can prevent almost all the problems listed, but it's important to remember that psychedelics are not a joke. Particularly so when getting into high doses, "research chemicals", or simply powerful ones (DMT comes to mind for intensity, or STP/DOM for length)
This is a very important observation. Unlike mental components, physical ones are much harder to overcome by will power. Unbearable excitement or alertness fogs the mind in a way that also makes them invisible to logical thinking. The bodily distress takes control of the mind.
I'd suggest people with such tendencies for having physically exhausting trips keep real life reminders around during the recreational substance use.
For example, have a friend who didn't take the drug sit close to you and ask them to be caring, calm and providing during the trip. Watch unstressful TV shows such as nature documentaries instead of "the news". Don't mix different substances during the same trip. Drink water and have a bottle around, always! Most importantly, don't do new drugs in places where you've never been before (i.e a party) or with people you barely know!
On the occasion of a bad trip, make sure you note down the bad moments after you wake up from it. Keep those notes close to you in case you need remembering them during another bad trip. During a paranoid moment -a moment of distrust towards people around you-, those notes will help you recover since reading your own notes doesn't require trust towards others.
I could go on and on but the bottom line is that yes it did eventually wear off and I was fine, but left with a lasting, visceral sense of empathy for the plight of mentally ill people.
Empathy and humility are needed in all walks of life.
Then I wonder if reading others' thoughts on the Internet is quite a bit like browsing a giant shoerack.
wag the dog
I have done psychedelics with friends, at raves (in nature), at Burning Man, and walking around NYC (each had some scary moments). Would not advise doing that until you've had enough experiences in calm surroundings several times.
I definitely had a panicked feeling towards those around me trying to help, and felt they were trying to deceive me and trap me in their reality, with one friend in particular being the orchestrator of the deceipt. Thankfully, I have good friends who worked through it with me and who were experienced in psychedelic use.
That said, I've done acid several times since, as well as mushrooms, and I do plan on doing them again. I feel like every time I do, there's new work for me to do on myself that they bring to the forefront whether I want to look at it or not, and that's been overall quite helpful for me. Psychedelics are no "party drug", but rather a serious thing undertaken for the purpose of exploring ideas like identity and meaning, and to be done in the right setting and with the right supports. I'm also quite interested in trying DMT for the same reasons, if I could find any around here...
where ego death is the dissolution of boundaries between self/non-self but an observer exists and sensations are experienced (but by whom?)
And depersonalization is the inability to identify sensations as belonging to the observer: "Stuff is happening 'out there'", like watching a movie.
I could be wrong. This is just my understanding.
Ego-death on the other hand is a name that the community of connoisseurs have given to a common qualitative experience, which does not attempt to explain the underlying physical process that causes it.
Psychedelics operate primarily on serotonin (5HT2A) receptors, and are said to "increase connectivity" and brain activity when measured via fMRI. Dissociatives, on the other hand, operate on NMDA receptors, and _decrease_ brain activity when studied.
While the actual qualitative experience may differ, it's fascinating how "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" both lead to the same place - ego death, depersonalization, feelings of connectivity and one-ness, experiences of seeing gods/aliens/the universe, etc.
It's not "more/less connectivity". It's likely just dis-inhibition of negative feeback loops that leads to the same result. Interesting question is what pharmacology would be best to study consciousness, if or when one could define it.
Psilocybin: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
Ketamine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791
It is well known that dissociative anaesthetics reduce brain activity and communication between brain regions. Classical psychedelics on the other hand tend to increase global brain activity, including that between regions (i.e. connectivity)
In other words one optimization for living is to seek out and maximize surprise!
I definitely agree with the compression of information and simulation of potential futures as a default operation for brains, but I don't agree with the blanket "reduction in surprise" as the reward function, as it's much more nuanced.
In other words, cave-man could have been more successful minimizing lifetime surprise, if he sat in his cave all day, not playing with tools or meeting other tribes, and that's clearly not what happened.
I'd say that the bulk of scientific progress is of the "Ah, just as we thought." sort, but it's not the kind that gets headlines (because humans are wired to take notice and remember surprising information, making them less likely to be surprised in the future).
Isn't the drive to create "surprising" results in science creating situations like the replication crisis and incentivizing researchers to manipulate results so as to make them more surprising?
Just wondering if there are any testable predictions in those two papers.
Friston's work is (in)famous for being so vague as to be completely untestable. He has been criticised over the extreme vagueness of his ideas many times, and he has never given a good answer. Sometimes some of his followers try to make it testable as neuroscience or useful for AI. Both have failed so far. As far as I can see, leading working neuroscientists don't take this Friston / free-engery stuff seriously. He's even got a parody Twitter account now: https://twitter.com/farlkriston
He now claims to have the best COVID model based on free-energy. Can I please see the code and form my own opinion? Has anybody seen this code?
I looked at that link but could not find the code that lets me reproduce the results in the paper. Maybe I didn't look hard enough?
"The figures in these manuscripts can be reproduced using annotated (MATLAB/Octave) code that is available as part of the free and open source academic software SPM. The routines are called by a demonstration script that can be invoked by typing DEM_COVID or DEM_COVID_X at the MATLAB prompt. At the time of writing, these routines are available in the development version of the next SPM release."
In my view Friston's ideas are hardly vague. Hard to understand sometimes, yes, but when I have put in the effort to understand them I have always been rewarded.
ideas are hardly vague.
Hard to understand
If read literally, Friston's core intuition is false: people regularly and deliberately expose themselves to surprise, e.g. gambling, watching sports, speed dating. Now there are various ad-hoc fixes to save free-energy-minimisation, which should make the theory more testable, but Friston then has to state clearly which of the many conflicting ad-hoc fixes are in place, and explain how they manifest themselves in the brain! Friston has been confronted with those problems many times, but he basically ignores them.
What follows is my understanding.
> what exactly is the brain doing?
This is outside my area of expertise, but it is updating brain states (whatever that turns out to mean, neural mass activity, individual neural activity), and parameters, likely candidates being neurotransmitters. The mechanism has been proposed to be message passing among hierarchical regions of the cortex.
> Where exactly is the brain minimising 'free energy'?
It is a global effect, but whenever a state or parameter are updated (again whatever those are found to be) the free energy decreases. If these turn out to be localized then that would be the (context dependent) "where".
> Can I have a testable prediction please?
The one I am most interested in is, since generative models are the core of active inference, if active inference is true then we should expect to be able to identify such models and setup conditions under which they update according to the FEP, including actions.
This is a difficult task and I suspect it will be shown in a simple biological system like C-elegans first. My own interest is in cyber-physical systems.
> If read literally, the core intuition is also false because people regularly and deliberately expose themselves to surprise, e.g. gambling, watching sports. Now there are various ad-hoc fixes to save free-energy-minimisation, but then which of them many conflicting ad-hoc fixes?
This is the dark-room argument, which as you suggest has been beat to death. I admit to not understanding what the problem is. If a system has an internal model that keeps it from exploring then it would die (of starvation). What states are surprising is all about the priors (that are designed by evolution presumably) and experience. I think it is also important to be clear that surprise is used in a very technical statistical sense.
Coincidentally, Friston's treatment [1] of the dark room is not convincing, but it nicely illustrates Friston's tendency to make ad-hoc adjustments, for example in [1] he talks about "average" surprise, but there are many ways you can average. Which one is it? How for example do the 302 neurons of C elegans average? Saying this is a difficult task is correct given our understanding of neurons in 2020, but the fact that Friston seems to think Free Energy accomodates all possibilities means it in "not even wrong" territory. In it's current shape, Free Energy does not make interesting predictions for neuroscience, and none of the progress in AI/ML has come from the Free Energy millieu either.
If "surprise is used in a very technical statistical sense" means something concrete, precise, for example minimising KL-divergence of states, the question becomes: show me that this is what the brain does. Or build an AI that does something that is competitive with other forms of contemporary AI.
[1] K. Friston et al, Free-Energy Minimization and the Dark-Room Problem https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3347222/
I think it is pretty clear from the paper that the average is over time.
The most detailed (and certainly not vague) description is given in "A Free Energy Principle for Biological Systems", Entropy 2012
> How for example do the 302 neurons of C elegans average?
They don't. An agent can optimize an objective without computing it explicitly.
> Free Energy does not make interesting predictions for neuroscience
What is your objection to my proposed prediction above, that we will find brain models with observable activity that follows the FEP?
Friston also has many papers that explain known facts in terms of FEP. I will grant you those are not predictions but they are consistency arguments.
> none of the progress in AI/ML has come from the Free Energy millieu either
Free energy is a dynamical version of variational Bayes, which has had enormous impact in ML/AI.
Regarding "we will find brain models with observable activity that follows the FEP?": abstractly you are saying that your prediction for theory T is that we will eventually confirm T. This does not exclude anything, I can state this for any theory T whatsoever. (For fun, try to instantiate T with outlandish theories, e.g. with "We will eventually find weapons of mass destruction in Irak", or with plausible theories that have failed so far, e.g. "We will eventuallly see supersymmetry". Does your prediction rule anything out?)
Regarding variational Bayes, that was not invented by the Free Energy millieu.
Gambling, watching sports, and speed dating all have secondary motivations (earning money, tribal success, potential to spread your genes, respectively), but what's more is that these are all arenas of controlled and quite specific surprise. You know exactly the type of surprise that you are going to get, and the satisfaction you get from being right or the post-rationalization you perform for being wrong are both useful to the human. Contrast this to the "surprise" of a global pandemic, or massive social unrest. No one knows what's going to happen next and so you have a large contingent of people who are desperately trying to enact conservatism of the "move things back to normal" flavor. This is a stress response, and the stress is induced by not knowing what kind of surprises lay ahead.
The latter is the kind of surprise that is being minimized in the free-energy framework.
I am neither seeing that Friston has (A) produced anything even remotely resembling a testable framework this "kind of surprise that is being minimized in the free-energy framework" and (B) pointed to any plausible mechanisms in the brain that should that this is in fact "the kind of surprise that is being minimized". He just handwaves.
What clearcut evidence can you give me that humans minimise this "kind of surprise"? What evidence would you accept as falsifying this? Where does Friston make clear that "secondary motivations" don't count? Also making a super vague, unquantified statement like "large contingent of people who are desperately trying to enact conservatism ..." in defense of Friston / free-energy doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the social milieu that this theory comes from. All the more so, since my OPs explicitly criticised Friston for vagueness.
Lots of big words, with nothing specific, nothing actionable. Vague as it can be.
Doesn't help that the phrase "free energy" drives most people with any expertise either mad or catatonic. Conspiracy theorist have ruined it.
expertise either mad or catatonic.
Unfortunately it still works really well with students, who are not yet knowledgable enough to be able to recognise the Fristonian ideas for what they are--hot air--and who waste their time with active learning before realising that it's currently mostly hot air. I've seen this play out several times by now with my (current and former) students.