
A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/a-neuroscientists-theory-of-everything
======
diffrinse
A lot of these ideas have been trending for over a hundred years, as early as
the psychoanalyst Freud and some as early as the philosopher Kant, its
interesting to see how they bore out in the domain of science:

\- 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.

~~~
mchem
On your point on time: Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, addresses our
interaction with and perception of time extraordinarily well.

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!

------
obiefernandez
“ Psychedelics act on certain kinds of neurotransmitters called
neuromodulators and literally disintegrate your belief-updating, freeing this
neural population from the evidence and the influences of this population.
You’ll now be unable to call on high-level representations of selfhood to
constrain your qualitative experience at a lower level of abstraction. You may
experience a lower-level disillusion of the ego, literally the “self”
representation may now not be able to influence experience. You might be
attending to vivid sensations that would now have other interpretations that
are not glued together by a self-centered, egocentric narrative. You will have
alternative explanations for what caused this sensation and what caused that
sensation. All of this is perfectly sensible under a generative model where we
remove the constraints of one level of processing from another. If that’s
going on, you now have the hypothesis that if I am me, there’s another
hypothesis, I’m not me. If you start to remove the evidence of these two
hypotheses, then you create an enormous uncertainty about me-hood. You’ll get
depersonalization and possibly a bad trip.”

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.

~~~
yters
What do you see and feel during a bad trip?

~~~
obiefernandez
I've had a few, and one in particular was very useful in the long run. This
was about 20 years ago, one of the first times I took mushrooms. It was at an
"afterparty" and I had already been awake for at least 24 hours. Someone gave
me a handful of mushrooms and I ate them. She came back an hour later and
asked me if I felt anything yet. I didn't, so she gave me another handful and
I ate them too. Typical newbie mistake--I began tripping very hard a few
minutes later. Within some hours I think the psychedelic fireworks had
subsided enough that I was no longer catatonic, but then the real internal
drama began. I was with a bunch of other people in altered states, many of
them complete strangers, physically exhausted but unable to sleep. What people
would refer to as a "sketchy situation". I got very paranoid. No matter where
I sat or what I did, I had the sensation that people were talking about me,
and mostly in a not nice way. There were turntables and records, so I tried to
DJ. The challenge was enjoyable, but I couldn't shake the feeling that
everyone was complaining about it and making accusations. I confronted some of
them and they denied it--here was where it became both scary and later
educational--I had enough rational mind left to understand that they were
telling the truth, in reality it was a party and people were mostly having a
good time and having conversations amongst themselves NOT ABOUT ME. I knew it
without a doubt to be true, but I could not control the paranoia. I would go
back to DJing or whatever else I was doing and my mind would imagine the worst
about whoever was near me. A little voice told me "this is what it's like to
be crazy" and from there I spiraled into a delusion of "I'm not coming out of
this. I've gone and broken my brain. This is how crazy people become crazy."
At the same time a rational voice would tell me, nevermind that, you'll be
fine once this wears off.

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.

~~~
ianai
And that’s just one of the ways to experience what other people experience
with mental disorders. Another is how they simulate schizophrenia. They give
you headphones to wear connected to a recording. The recording has several
different voices telling you all sorts of nasty things. Like bullying you and
worse.

Empathy and humility are needed in all walks of life.

~~~
rwnspace
Speaking of walks of life, the whole thing about walking a mile in someone
else's shoes comes to mind.

Then I wonder if reading others' thoughts on the Internet is quite a bit like
browsing a giant shoerack.

~~~
ianai
Except that a script kiddie or state actor can prop up fake shoes, so it’s a
very noisy signal.

~~~
type0
Good old shoe

wag the dog

------
ccvannorman
Cute but a bit trite. I love surprises, particularly in the form of, "Wow, I
can make HOW much money doing $new_thing?" or "Wow, $new_tech is actually
possible?", and have found my optimal path to date is constantly pushing my
boundaries to find such surprises. Likewise in science all progress happens
with surprises, not, "Aha! Just as I thought." but "Oh, that's interesting..."

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.

~~~
calineczka
I would rather argue that we make scientific discoveries to predict the future
and minimize surprises. The discoveries themselves are often indeed
surprising. But once we understand things (electricity, magnetism,
gravitation) we can predict behaviour better (planets location in two weeks)
so we are no longer surprised by how things turn out to be :)

------
dandare
> Friston’s free-energy theory practically sets your brain on fire when you
> read it, and it has become one of the most-cited papers in the world of
> neuroscience. This May, Friston published a new paper, “Sentience and the
> Origins of Consciousness,” that takes his ideas into new intellectual
> territory.

Just wondering if there are any testable predictions in those two papers.

~~~
9q9
Short answer: no!

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](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?

~~~
ruralman
See
[https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/](https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/).
At the bottom:

"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.

~~~
9q9
I cannot see the "these routines [being] available in the development version
of the next SPM release". The development version is a 111 MB zip file [1].
When I uncompress the file I get a big flat directory with 100s of files.
Which of those is is the software used in the paper? I have a bad feeling
about this. I don't see how the authors are displaying intellectual integrity
by _not_ releasing, concurrently with the paper, software for such an
important problem public health issue.

    
    
       ideas are hardly vague. 
       Hard to understand 
    

The core intuition is easy to understand: brain predicts its observations
including observations about itself (proprioception) and acts in a way to
minimise surprise. This can be seen as a form of self-supervised learning in
the terminology of contemporary machine learning. Lots of people have said
somewhat similar things before at a similar level of vagueness. Nobody
disagrees that "somehow" the brain learns about the world by prediction and
interaction. The interesting question is to go beyond this vagueness: what
_exactly_ is the brain doing? Where exactly is the brain minimising 'free
energy'? Can I have a testable prediction please?

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.

[1]
[https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/#software](https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/#software)

~~~
uoaei
Your challenges to the core intuition are predicated on a simplistic and
uncharitable interpretation.

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.

~~~
9q9
I have explicitly stated that I am using a simplistic interpretation.

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.

------
bondarchuk
In what way is this a theory of everything? It looks like a theory of the
brain, perhaps a theory of consciousness (in the sense of the hard problem) if
we're being really generous, but it does not look like a theory that
reconciles quantum mechanics with general relativity.

------
__bradmwalker__
There won't be a materialist theory of consciousness.
[https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-
extr...](https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extrinsic-
appearance-of-inner-experience-auid-1372)

~~~
meh2frdf
That article doesn’t really say anything, unless I’m missing the point, please
unpack your understanding of it?

------
outlace
The free energy principle is so generic and broad so as to be fairly useless.
Sometimes the details matter and endless abstraction doesn’t help. The free
energy principle is the string theory of neuroscience.

------
boothead
Free energy theory is so interesting to me - I think there are some very
interesting, unexplored, overlaps with Boyd's OODA loop that are begging to be
studied

