Exploring Predictive Processing and the Science of Happiness with Mark Miller

22:13Mark Miller:Let me see if I can test run this by you. I was thinking about this as like, what is, it's something like, what's the cognitive science of

22:25Ethan Hsieh:Oh, God. Oh, can I say something here? Is it too soon? Because we want to... Okay, you tell me.

22:31Mark Miller:Well, okay. So, let's run it by, right? So, okay. This is the thing that I was thinking. Like, okay. So, what happens if you lie? So, you have a particular experience, right? Of, and let's say an event, right? And so, now if you have to reflect on and relay that event to somebody else, you report it, you represent it through a story, through image, through gesture whatsoever. There's a way in which the person who is telling the story knows the degree of like deviance, like how different it is from that. So let's say I tell my partner one version of it. So and that has some deviation. I tell another person and it deviates further.

23:11Mark Miller:Now I have to hold not just the story but I also have to hold the complexities behind that. Does she know this person does if I tell a third person do they have to do that and then I now have to hold I have to spend my attentional resources juggling where that's gonna go and so what um what honesty does in a sense is keep a certain degree of invariance so I don't have to spend that much attentional resources I can go here it is and I can form a coherent line between that and therefore I might experience that as more rested or more peaceful. Is this the kind of thing that I'm trying to... I mean, I agree.

23:55Ethan Hsieh:I agree. I agree. Actually, I would start one level deeper. Just think about this, okay? Let's start right from those first principles. Here's just an example of some of the things we're going to do, okay? If this framework is right, then what the brain and nervous system are are um are processes that have evolved in order to figure out how the world works yes right at the very this is a beautiful i indeed poetic it's a poetic outcome from computational neuroscience that you were built you are built to know how the world works and you're built to know who you are. This is the ground floor. This is not something we came up with.

24:40Ethan Hsieh:This is not, oh, wisdom we made up. It's not that. You, every life form, every life form, if you, because, you know, people like Carl Fristin think that the same framework is widely, widely applicable to everything that's alive. Indeed, maybe everything enjoys some version of this entropy resistance that we're talking about here. We'll get into that. But just think, what it is to be you at the very base is a process that's trying to figure out how the world is and who you are. That investigation is at the ground of you. And why? Why? Because for you to live well, for you to adapt well, for you to survive, you need to have a good understanding of the world and yourself so that you can make apt predictions about what's likely to happen next.

25:27Ethan Hsieh:the more that your model of the world and who you are deviates from real world statistical invariance the more that you deviate from real world dynamics the more in danger you are of losing your adaptive grip because now you're not seeing the car that's coming to you you're not you expect things are going to be one way rather than another way this is hallucination delusion ignorance are all examples of model divergence i mean can you not hear the buddha clapping in some heaven being like, very nice. Ignorance is model divergence. Okay. It's also at the base of all of our pathological outcomes.

26:04Ethan Hsieh:And the ones that we're studying are all this model divergence, depression, anxiety. These are all versions of where the model is no longer convergent with real world dynamics for whatever reason. Okay. If you have a divergent model from the real world dynamics then you're constantly being inundated with the error signal your system is constantly telling you this isn't working well this isn't working well this isn't working well that's completely exhausting for us so you're right lying is a way of pulling the model pulling away somebody's vision of the world from the real world stuff so think about gaslighting that's the sort of like systematic violence you produce by drawing somebody away from their real world dynamics okay It's very, very heavy duty stuff for us.

26:52Ethan Hsieh:And we have limited resources. You can't stomach that kind of divergence for very long. You don't have endless chemicals for trying to bring those back together. So exhaustion and sickness behaviors that accompany depression are going to be part because the model is so divergent from the world. And we can't stand that divergence. We're constantly trying to bring it back together. Okay, but here's the more important thing. Let me bring it back to honesty. first principles you are an epistemic machine you are trying to figure out how the world works and who you are so that you can adapt that means that means fidelity and honesty are core virtues and dishonesty is like one of the worst possible things it's one of the worst possible things that you can be inundated with as this kind of a system if you are systematically deceived systematically deceived by leaders by politicians by people you trust by your partner no wonder we when we know that right we naively know that when you're when your partner for however many decades uh is is deeply dishonest that ruins that ruins people's lives people's lives come to an end when that happens that's because you've built all of these systems to understand the world, utilizing that honest signal, and we have to use each other.

28:18Ethan Hsieh:This world is so complex. It's so uncertain. It's so dynamic that a single predictive system like you or like me doesn't fare well in that incredibly complex and increasingly complex socio-technological environment that we're in. We need each other in order to figure out what it is and figure out who we are. And systematic deception relative to that pulls, it just pulls the model away from reality, which is endlessly painful for us. Really, really catastrophic. I love this view because we've known for a long time, every culture knows that honesty is important, but why is it important? Well, it's important because you need to trust people, blah, blah, blah.

29:03Ethan Hsieh:This says something deeper. This is the thing you are is epistemic by its nature to to break that is to break the heart of the thing you are honesty humility uh resistance to deception those are those are core those are core no wonder it shows up in every culture something about honesty and deception it's right at the very heart of us and it changes the whole program i think when you know that i mean we've got to change our politics. We've got to change these things because it's really important for us. No wonder we're in a meaning crisis when we can't believe the signals that come in anymore.

29:41Ethan Hsieh:It's very, very problematic for our kind of animal.

29:44Mark Miller:Yeah. Yeah. Trust apocalypse, harmonious suspicion, things that we've been talking about in this space. And And like, right, right. When you said it, like just when you, when you started this piece of you are, so I'm, I'm going to try and, I'm going to try and paraphrase it, but it's like, you are, you exist to know who you are and what reality is.

30:08Ethan Hsieh:That's it. That's what it's trying to, if you're making predictions, predictions are adoption, then you need to have a model of how to predict.

30:17Mark Miller:Like I felt teary when you said that, like something dropped for me, which is like, yeah, No, because this is really powerful. I want to double click on some of this because it's like... Double click. No, you didn't explicitly say this, but it's what I'm extrapolating. So I'm asking for some charity here, which is... Tell me. On an existential level, to be at all is to be virtuous. like we need we need the virtues that you're talking about like humility like honesty um and we're not falling into a kind of like biological reductionism of like oh they're just hormones no no no it's not it's not that you're talking about something deeper that is fundamental to our our being and you know this is where i want to play a little bit um contrarian because there are, we've talked about this before, the things that, say some things that John has said around, say like propositional tyranny and, you know, don't tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice.

31:30Mark Miller:You hold a somewhat like orthogonal view, which is that, hey, you know, our beliefs are actually bloody important. So I want to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, actually. And how you fold that criticism in.

31:42Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, so actually, it's not, that's not a criticism. They're completely convergent. the the update that's needed the update that's needed is the beliefs that we're talking about here are not agent level beliefs uh they're the system's beliefs the the the shape the shape of the system itself i'm calling a belief not not what ethan believes or mark believes but what the system believes so that your behaviors are always an expression the behaviors that you're selecting are an expression of the shape of the model. So when John says, I don't want to know what you believe, I want to know what you do.

32:19Ethan Hsieh:I would just say, what you do is a reflection of the shape of the belief networks. That is what you're doing. So that's what he's saying. I don't want to hear what the agent believes. I want to know what the system believes. And I'm going to see that reflected in the behaviors that you take. That's where you find out what people really believe. So, um,

32:40Mark Miller:so is this something closer to like, it's not about what you believe is how you believe anything at all?

32:46Ethan Hsieh:No, it's more like, here, I'll give you an example. So one thing that we're going to cover in the course is placebo. The power of placebo is really special here. Um, we, we know placebo works. So you go to the doctor and they give you sugar pills and they say, this will make you better. And it does double blind every time it makes you better. Okay. Part of the reason why that works, it turns out is because you're an anticipatory system. The thing you expect to happen is dictating all sorts of, all sorts of cascading sub processes. So that that's, if it's like brick or brack. So in a way you can like control optimism yourself in a variety of ways.

33:24Ethan Hsieh:So we're going to talk about hacking the predictive system using controlled optimism, not not silly reckless optimism but controlled optimism actually actually we can talk about i don't know maybe we leave it for the course um but it's pretty amazing what you can do with controlled optimism we have some wonderful research on this um but i hear a little bit

33:41Mark Miller:what controlled optimism is we can we can do a bit of sneak preview yeah yeah okay let's flag it

33:45Ethan Hsieh:i'll come right back so here but here's the really interesting thing did you know that if i take you to the hospital and we go up the elevator and we meet a doctor and they're wearing a white coat and they have a stethoscope and they go, Hey, these pills will help you. And they give them to you. Will that make you better than just the pills alone? Yes, it will. But here, here's the one that blows my mind. Did you know that if we do that exact same thing and then we show up and the doctor shakes the pills and hands them to you and I say, Hey, Ethan, by the way, this is Jeff. He's a friend of mine.

34:16Ethan Hsieh:He's an actor. He's not even a doctor. Okay. He's just here acting as a doctor today okay does the placebo effect still work it does it has exactly it has exactly the same impact okay so here's why i know that's awesome isn't it okay so here's the reason why uh ethan at the level of the agent now believes this is an actor i'm telling you the truth we're friends, okay? But your system is trading entirely on probabilistic outcomes. What's the likelihood that you come to a hospital, see somebody in a white coat with a stethoscope who gives you a pill, tells you it'll work? What's the likelihood given the kinds of information that you've taken in in this lifetime, that that's an actor?

35:04Ethan Hsieh:How many times in your data acquisition of being at a hospital, have you ever bumped into an actor giving you pills? How many times has that happened to you? How many times has it happened to any of your family members? How many times have you heard that story at Thanksgiving? Zero. The system itself is now convinced and it doesn't matter what the agent knows. The system is like, no, the probabilities are what matter here. This walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. That's a duck. And you're giving me one radical data point that says it's an actor? There's just no way. We're not hedging our bets.

35:39Ethan Hsieh:We're not hedging our adaptive bets on this one little thing you think you know okay this is the same reason you can go to a dharma talk and you can hear somebody talking about awakening and you can say oh well that sounds good i i get it i get it like i oh wow i intellectually get it oh oh it's impermanent i get it and then the next day your girlfriend leaves you and you go into a depression for a year but i thought you just caught that it's impermanent i thought you caught that it's always changing, that you're always going to lose your loved ones, that this is a passing by place, that this is a place where you don't get to hold things.

36:16Ethan Hsieh:So why do you have this crushing depression when the world just worked the way that it typically does? That's because it doesn't matter what you know. It's what the system knows. And the system trades on probabilities, which means if you want to change deep level beliefs, like the world is permanent, and you want to do a little model updating to be like, yeah, actually the world is impermanent. And there There are a variety of kinds of permanence, semi-permanence that we can rely on, but actually ultimately at the ground, everything is changing given enough time. That's a better belief actually to have because it's closer to the world.

36:50Ethan Hsieh:Notice where we're holding sub-personal, subconscious patterns of belief that are divergent actually from reality, right? That the world is permanent. You're always going to be young and beautiful and potent. These are deeply held beliefs that are structuring the way you see the world and selecting the kind of behaviors you have. if you want to update those then you need to produce the conditions in order to garner the kind of counter evidence that's going to overturn those beliefs and then you need to expose yourself to that counter evidence for a long enough period of time with a high enough caliber of attention on it which is exactly what meditation is meditation is developing those skills and abilities that allow you to and tell you what to look at and how to look at it in order for counter evidence to come into the system in order to transform those deeply held beliefs into a better shape.

37:38Ethan Hsieh:And indeed, the shape is more convergent with reality. It's one of the reasons why Buddhist practitioners, we're going to talk about this in the course, so I don't blow all of it here on this little preamble. But this is why Buddhist practitioners who focus a lot on illness, old age, suffering, death, heartbreak, why is it that they ruminate every day, hours a day on suffering? and when we put them in an fMRI they hit all the markers for happiness like like professional sports players for happiness and well-being why is it that they get to think about terrible things and get better that might sound paradoxical but it's not because they're not doom strolling they're updating their model to better reflect the real world dynamics and the closer you get your model to real world stuff the better the model gets the better the person gets

38:25Mark Miller:isn't that awesome dude yeah so you're you're you're talking about like actually changing the framing device the framing of perception at all rather than the context of perception

38:37Ethan Hsieh:you got it and just remember remember exactly remember perception is produced by this belief matrix the beliefs of the system are the reality generating matrix yeah so that that actually is what perception is and it's conditioned by all sorts of beliefs evolutionarily installed beliefs and all sorts of stuff that you've started to believe in this lifetime and some of that stuff is easily changeable some of it is much more challenging to change um but um given the right sorts of cognitive emotional spiritual technologies this is what you can do is you can metacognate which beliefs need updating and you can start putting pressure against them yes this is this

39:20Mark Miller:is exactly what I'm working on as well, where it's like, look, there's degrees of arousal that are constantly fluctuating, right? And there's a way in which you can have, you can fall into what Vellman calls sort of like the one turn, right? And just like you lose the metacognition and it's just, oh, here's all that. But then if you do that, you're not able to adjust the framing. But there is a way in which you can practice to get those in balance such that you can both be aware of what's happening, but at the same time also experience it deeply. And in doing that, do the model updating. But then, you know, this is, am I tracking that so far?

40:00Mark Miller:Because I have a follow-up question to that.

40:02Ethan Hsieh:Yeah. So we just finished a two-year, part of what this course, one special thing about this course that we're going to be running and then hold your idea so that it doesn't go away. One of the special things that we're doing in this course that I don't think you get in every kind of course like this is that this is living research this isn't something that happened 20 years ago and now we're you know we're just teaching yeah yeah right that's that's not it this this is a research project that's unfolding in real time and john and i are like deep are deep in the research community so we're going to be we're going to be exposing in real time research so i expect the classes to change between the structure that i have now and the day that i deploy them because it'll be updated by whatever evidence is coming out including research from that day or from that week um and a big chunk of this is actually being built out of a two-year program that i just had um an sshrc funded canadian funded project called the predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being it's a two-year um program that i led and um one of the one of the big core discoveries fits with what you've just said, which is part of what it is to be happy and well as this kind of system is to balance local things with global things, being able to monitor, hyper monitor, meta monitor, how the system is functioning, plus how, you know, particular habits are being deployed.

41:30Ethan Hsieh:So we'll be talking about that, like, like deep layer processing and why it's valuable for us and why it's practical for us as well. So if any of this sounds scientifically complex, the way that this gets deployed in a course like this is going to be sexy and interesting and dynamic, but totally graspable and completely applicable. One of the most important things for me as a university professor and as a meditation teacher as well, is that I'm able to convert this science into practical, real world, applicable stuff. I'm not interested in doing science unless it makes people's lives better. Yeah.

42:13Mark Miller:And I think this is why, this is something that we had talked about very early on when we were chatting, like the ways in which we're not just theorizing over here, but saying, okay, how does it make a real world impact? So this is one of the questions which I was holding, right because i can hear what you're saying as a way of it being taken up is oh we live in an illusion and there's a way that opens up into all kinds of solipsism but i don't get the sense that you're that you're without a foil for that right like so what's the difference between living in the matrix versus having a matrix that generates uh predictions of reality what would you say

42:55Ethan Hsieh:yeah it's real good um right so um shantideva was clear you want to you want to look for these near enemies to emptiness uh the near enemies are things like solipsism idealism and nihilism and in a way in a way you could say and i'm happy to say this that what we have here is a kind of neuroscience of emptiness and this is a this is a way of understanding what emptiness might mean which is everything you're experiencing is self-generated. Now, does that mean that it's not there? This is a form of idealism? No, of course not. Actually, what you find is the world is so deep and miraculous and complex and noisy and fuzzy and changing and shifting and full, that it's very, very hard for animals like us, like poor us, it's very hard to see through that complexity of the thing that really matters for us moment to moment to moment.

44:01Ethan Hsieh:That's a really, call it the frame problem in cognitive science. I guess lots of people here will know that this is one of the things John talks about quite a lot. It's a really hard problem. How do you figure out what matters to you in this moment when the world is so full? So this isn't getting rid of the world. No, the world is full and wonderful. But for limited animals like us that are trying to make our way in this very complex world, it actually behooves us to evolve systems that are capable of quieting out most of that noise and locking onto the things that matter. It just turns out that one of the best ways to do that isn't to take the whole mess and try to decode it one bit at a time, which is just too hard.

44:45Ethan Hsieh:Instead, start the other way. Start to build expectations for the kinds of signals that are likely to be there. And then lock onto those ones that matter. And update your model and change your behaviors relative to the differences relative to the things that you expect, which reduces the size of the puzzle down to the things that matter for you, moment to moment to moment. So rather than this getting the world out of there, now we're just living the matrix, It might sound paradoxical, but it's not. But actually, having a brain that self-generates your experience from the top down, and then augments that model based on what it's actually learning from the world, is a powerful way for our kind of system actually to lock onto the world in a meaningful way.

45:32Ethan Hsieh:Rather than just taking everything all at once, we're really able to cut through the noise and grab the thing that matters. But that's at the heart. That's at the heart of a discussion about where it goes wrong and where it goes well, because there's so much information you could lock onto. What are you locking onto? So, you know, if you have friends, like if you have two friends, one's an optimist and one's a pessimist, then you'll know this already. But the way that they grip, the way that they lock on and grip this complex world are very, very different, isn't it? And one leads to a better life and the other one leads to a potentially problematic life.

46:09Ethan Hsieh:The one who locks onto the world and is noticing the reasons to be grateful, are noticing the opportunities for service, are noticing where the world works and works for them, are noticing kindness, and that's engendering kindness, are noticing where they can do better and they're operationalizing over that versus the person who is locking onto the data that says, i'm no good the world is no good this is a big problem this is hate that this is scary actually you can find data basically to to as evidence for almost any deeply yeah so then part of the game is going to be you have to learn how to and develop the skills to lock on to the right sorts of things and that doesn't mean rose-tinted glasses but it does mean training yourself to discern what sorts of experiences moment to moment to moment are the ones that are most relevant and most useful, most wholesome and helpful for you.

47:08Ethan Hsieh:That's what the training program all becomes. All the wisdom training programs are just that, I think. They're just ways of helping you cut through the noise to the thing that actually should matter for you. Yeah.

47:21Mark Miller:I mean, this comes back around to the earlier point about like, it reveals how we care. Yeah. And, you know, so it's, if I use a metaphor, it's something like, it's not that we live in a simulation and there is nothing here that's real. It's more like looking at the world through a camera and you're trying to sort of like tilt the focus dial on it, but so that it can actually auto-focus on things.

47:45Ethan Hsieh:Of course there's a world you end up with, there's no world. Then you've practiced yourself. You've practiced yourself into a, into like a, a not a very intelligent position, right? Of course there's, of course there's stuff out there that's never what emptiness has meant um of course there's a world out there it's just that our experience of that world is always interpretive and that's a wonderfully it's a and and all the contemplative programs know this that's a wonderful liberative uh fact because what it tells you is that if you don't like the world it may not be the world's fault. It may be that the lens is twisted in a way where you are selectively sampling the wrong sorts of data.

48:26Ethan Hsieh:And that's not your fault. Part of the reason that that happens, well, it's because you're built. You're built to select information in a particular way. But if you didn't know that the world is partially interpretive, that your experience of the world is interpretive, then you may not be locking on yet that I can untwist the lens, that I can actually fiddle with the lens and so change the world you have a sort of um naive metaphysics where you're like no the world that i'm experiencing is the world and almost every contemplative tradition has pushed against that and said no no no hold on that's not the world capital t capital w that's your very small subset based on the kinds of things that you're expecting to be there of the great, miraculous, holy, wholesome world.

49:16Ethan Hsieh:And if you're busy being like, oh, the world is like this. And how dare you think the world is like that? Let's have a war about that, right? Because you can't think that. It's like this, don't you know? And it's never been like that. It's so complex. Are you talking about the Maya? Meaning what in that instance?

49:38Mark Miller:So it's that I'm seeing my interpretation of the world, but it is not capital T, capital W, the world, right? And so what I'm understanding, there's an implication to this, right? Which is then the question of where does one's agency sit? And so I think the claim that, and I want to deliberately throw this out, but it sounds like the claim you're making is that agency is not about controlling the content of your interpretation. it's about actually changing the framing of your, of how your interpretations form at all.

50:12Ethan Hsieh:I would say it's probably both, but that's a wonderful sort of uncovering there, right? It's not just about changing the world out there, but changing the view, changing your view. And that's an incredibly powerful thing to know that, yeah, you can change the world. And that's important that we change the world too. And we're going to talk about that as well. These dynamics are occurring at the same time. But what you might not know, what you might not know, and that one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this research, I mean, isn't it so interesting that you can be passionate about neuroscience research, not just because you're a big brain geek, but because like knowing this stuff is really, really imminently valuable, like to know that your experience isn't the world right away, that softens you up.

50:54Ethan Hsieh:It should soften you right up. Yes. So that when you hear somebody saying, oh, the world is like this and it's very divergent from you. The first thing you think, should think is like, oh, that's weird. So that's the world they're experiencing. So if I want to try to understand that person or reconcile with that person, we need to find a way to temporarily share a space. Let's start there. So we need to spend a little bit of time together. We need to get to know each other. We need to get to see each other's belief matrix so that we can sort of start to share a world a bit more so that we can start making some decisions together about, you know whatever happens next um you might not know that until this is until this is said to you that it's not the world it's your world in a way and that doesn't mean there's not our world there is our world it's just that you don't have access to the whole world nor would you want access to the to the whole of reality as it as it stands that's like that's not great that's just too much i mean we can't adapt how would you get the apple out of the tree if you're like looking at quantum bits like banging into each other i mean that would just wouldn't mean anything we don't want that but you do but but somewhere in the middle is what you do want you don't want the full thing but you don't want to you don't want a hyper virtualization of it that's deviant from it either you want to draw near it but you want to draw near it in a meaningful way um yeah

52:13Mark Miller:so because so this is really really important because you you touched on it like you somewhat sort of like floated over it, which is the notion of play. And, you know, we talked about this before. We were big D &D geeks, both of us, right? Both DMs in our own way. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there is, how does... So, okay, wait, I want to go at this slow because, you know, John and I have been talking a lot about the imaginal ritual, right? The way in which you use the imaginal to augment your perception, to change your view such that it opens up. new information, even if that new information is how little information you might have about a way of being, right?

52:57Mark Miller:Or a way in which the world opens itself up to you, like reality opens itself up to you. So where does play sit in this framework?

53:12Ethan Hsieh:yeah it's a little uh yeah i mean there's lots to say um we've written a big um an important paper on the cognitive science of play which we're going to talk about in this course um and closely related to that is a new line of research that i've been um i've been enjoying for the last couple of years on um the value and the potential problems around video games and horror movies and horror media for our kind of brain. And we're going to talk about that in this course as well. What do I want to sort of reveal here? Like pre-course material?

53:56Ethan Hsieh:Well, we'll get into the nitty gritty in the course proper. But one thing to say is that for our kind of system to work well, as we've said, it needs to model the world. and then it makes predictions and then it updates those predictions relative to the information it's getting in and one of the things it's really paying attention to is every time there's deviants every time i make a prediction and there's a and it doesn't hit exactly yeah that's an error in the system right then that error is really really useful that error drives behaviors that make the world better aligned with the model you already have on tap and that error is used to update your model update the way that you're making predictions in the future so that they make a better grip.

54:41Ethan Hsieh:You have this ongoing behavioral perceptual updating grip so that you're always getting a little bit closer to the world and you're using this difference to help you do that. And one of the things that you might think when you hear that is that our kind of system then doesn't want any uncertainty. It doesn't want any of this prediction error. It wants a good grip. So why is it then that we don't just go somewhere where we don't have any of those errors? And why doesn't that sound delightful to us like why don't you just say well why don't we just go into a pod like a sensory deprivation chamber forever and just be fed intravenously like doesn't that just feel so nice to us because then there would be no errors to resolve there would be no mismatch and so the system could finally relax it'd be a kind of nirvana why don't we think of that that's a kind of nirvana it's not it's a hell realm right nobody would want to be stuck in a closet for a long period of time.

55:33Ethan Hsieh:So what does that mean? Well, one of the things that turns out to be the case is that for our kind of system to be well, it doesn't need no uncertainty. It's actually an uncertainty minimizing system, not a maximally low uncertainty system. So the system doesn't want no uncertainty. Actually, what your brain is built to do is reduce uncertainty. And latent in that, of course, is that you need some uncertainty to reduce. Yes. Right. So that's what we do. as systems, we eat uncertainty. We eat entropy. We go around finding uncertainties that we can manage, errors that we can manage, and then we reduce them and we feel really good.

56:15Ethan Hsieh:We'll get into this in the course, but what your valence system, the good feelings and bad feelings you have, they're tracking how well or poorly you're managing errors in your environment. So it feels really good. It feels really good to reduce errors. And now, okay, let me bring it back down underground in case you've lost me a bit. Here's the interesting thing about play. Play is always managing uncertainty. So if you look at games, so my toddler is just learning how to run. So running itself is fun. Like she runs and laughs and like looks at her legs and she's like, this is amazing. Look, I'm running.

56:49Ethan Hsieh:Did you think it's awesome? Okay. That's the game. That's the play for her right now is just running. And that's because there's a healthy amount of uncertainty in that dynamic process that she's still managing and reducing she's still modeling what it is to run and she's still selecting the kind of musculature behaviors that lead to good running and there's a there's a there's enough uncertainty in that program and she's already skillful enough to be reducing some of that uncertainty that she feels good in that program Now that will run out. It will run out of joy when she's sufficiently modeled and can sufficiently select the right behaviors in order to run.

57:29Ethan Hsieh:There won't be any uncertainty left there to digest. And so it will cease to be attractive. And that's what you want as part of your progression. You want to lose interest once something has been brought inside and you've developed all of the expectations that are needed to drive that thing well. You want that to become less attractive so that you can move on to the next interesting thing, which might be skipping or hopping or running faster or bicycling or whatever. But then look at how we play games. So think about like when you go to a picnic or something and you play a game with people. What you might do then is you have to find a way to increase the uncertainty that the system has to digest.

58:14Ethan Hsieh:So what do you do? blindfold kids, get them to run now with no eyes or tie their legs together. So you have two people running with three legs. That's a new thing. You can run, but have you practiced running with somebody else? What we're doing there is increasing the uncertainty that you can then digest. And we love that. We love digesting the uncertainty. So a big part of this course will be a training. it will be it will be a theoretical explanation of but also um like lots of training stuff for how do we uh become sensitive to and locate and make the most of the right kinds of uncertainty in our environment and that is not only a matter of for instance um like if you think about an airplane between weather systems when you think about that as a kind of window tolerance where it gets bumpy gets bumpy when you go up and it gets bumpy when you go down yeah you might think one way that you reduce uncertainty here is you learn how to steer in the middle.

59:15Ethan Hsieh:That's part of it. But actually, the more important thing is you make a bigger plane. You make a plane that can tolerate more uncertainty. It's really, really important for our kind of system. That'll be a big thing that we're doing. And we'll be using play, and especially scary, safe play, to be exploring some of that. And that's what I think horror movies can do, is it can give us an opportunity to, um, to experience what it feels like to be in a variety of uncertain experiences in a safe way to help, to help make the system more comfortable with being uncomfortable, more certain with being uncertain.

59:51Ethan Hsieh:It's a big part of the training program. Yeah.

59:53Mark Miller:I'm feeling, I'm really encountering this, uh, quite a lot in music actually. Um, Oh, nice. You know, it's like, it's one thing to kind of like learn, learn scales in a particular way. And then it's like different genres create different windows of tolerance. And so it's like the more fluency there is in terms of like, okay, this is where I can go with it. The more genres of music I can play and I look for new challenges, like, you know, okay, moving from blues to jazz, moving jazz to math rock, whatever that is.

1:00:25Ethan Hsieh:That shows a high amount of capability. That's really great. That's really great. Right. So we know it from baby studies, babies naturally orient towards complexity dynamics. They're just over the one that they expect. So babies are always looking for the little bit more complex thing. Rats do the same thing. You put a rat in a maze and there's like lots of complex, the rooms increase in complexity. It will tend to explore the one that's just over the one it's most comfortable with. So you're like in a good community here of like natural playfulness and curiosity leading you through your exploration.

1:01:00Ethan Hsieh:And I might just add also, I was on a long retreat one time with Viva Kananda as a Vipassana teacher in Nepal. And I went to him one day for our interview and I was like, I have a question about craving. And he said, yeah. And I said, I'm finding now that I'm really, really excited to look at my pain and to look at my frustration. it's really exciting for me like i had a migraine yesterday and i was like yes oh man i got like 15 hours today to look really closely at a migraine um on the mat and uh i just want to double check like is that a kind of attachment and he said no no no he said no when you start to be really interested in the challenging stuff he's like there's almost there's almost nothing more somebody can teach you actually that that interest itself will bring you through the training by itself.

1:01:54Ethan Hsieh:Like you will now orient towards the thing that's hard. And so you will evidence accumulate what those things are. You'll learn about how they work. You'll learn about how to, you'll learn about their nature. So I just love to hear that. And what you just said sounds very wise to me. Not only are you like curious, but you've, you've done the anti-fragile thing, which is what we're going to talk about in this course as well. Not just resilience, but you're anti-fragile now. You're like, now I'm on the lookout for music that like messes me up. because that's where the good stuff is going to happen.

1:02:24Ethan Hsieh:Imagine you take that attitude for your life though. So now it's not resilience. You're not going out and having something hard and then coming home and re-regulating. Not that. But now you go out and something hard happens and you're like, yes! Hard stuff is good stuff. Hard stuff is going to make me bigger, better. It's going to prepare me more for the future. Like I like, of course, there's a healthy amount of that and we'll talk about that. But that's a really lovely place to be where you start to like the complexity.

1:02:51Mark Miller:Yeah, it's not about like running headlong recklessly into something that's way out of your reach, but it's... With your tolerance. Yeah, exactly. You're talking, I mean, obviously this dovetails very well with Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow, right? Like enough challenge, not too much challenge, but enough support. And at the same time also, like you're, it's really dovetailing with a lot of the work that I'm doing around existential resilience, right? so that it's, in a way, I found, you know, my personal journey in music has been very on and off, but it's something around like being in, for lack of a better term, like a sangha or like being surrounded by people who model and exemplify what it is to touch that right amount of challenge with a good amount of grip is actually deeply inspiring for being able to do that at all.

1:03:48Mark Miller:And, you know, this is, so I'm interested on two fronts. One is the relational piece. How do, how does the social fold into that? How does the cultural fold into that? And of course, that opens up questions around developmental trauma, intergenerational trauma, which I know people are interested in, particularly in our pop culture. And then there is the other piece, which is almost the antithesis to that, which is something you had named earlier. I'm also doing a lot of work on because I work with actors, right? And it's loosely dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization. So not being in, I suppose, not being in the world, what Talik would call non-being, right?

1:04:36Mark Miller:But then there's also that sense of, oh, I am not real. Everything else is or the opposite. The world is not real and I am not, right? And I can see how when we start to, again, this is, I'm playing the role of kind of like a hostile reader, right? Like when we start talking about the system, the system, the system, there's a way in which it can sound like one is outside of that as opposed to what I know you to be saying, which is that you are in it, you're constitutive of it. And so, like, how would you hold these, the relational, social, cultural pull and the depersonalization, derealization, dissociation bit?

1:05:18Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, it's nice. Yeah. So, there is, of course, a big story to be told about the role of social dynamics here, of course, because we're social animals and we're always predicting together. And in a way, that's vanilla. I mean, it just comes along for the ride that we're in brain together in a variety of complex ways um what we find relevant in the world and the sorts of predictions that we have on tap which is going to change the way that we see the world of course is being tuned in a variety of ways especially social ways and really unexpected social ways like um you you bring up trauma and and the transmission of cultural trauma uh which is just another way i mean in the in the parlance of the framework you're just talking about you're talking about the kinds of beliefs that a system is running and of course that's producing their reality that the one thing that's nice about that is it changes a little bit the way that we view our cultural narratives and rather than rather than landing on some particular teaching here one thing i what might be nice just in this little preamble because in the course we'll take our time and we'll build up some of the mechanisms so that we're ready and able to hear this thing well but um you you might say today something to take home is that it opens it opens an opportunity for us to think seriously and critically about the stories that we tell about ourselves because they really do matter.

1:07:04Ethan Hsieh:And that will be both on the side of making sure that we understand what our trauma is and being able to express that well and to understand it well, to understand the implications of that story for the way that we're seeing the world. And on the other side, it invites us to consider some of the problematic elements of over-identification with particular stories or narratives because um self-fulfilling prophecies are everywhere in this framework you are a strange loop according to this just dynamic looping processes so it's always making predictions and then looking for evidence that consolidate the prediction which gets us new evidence which consolidates the prediction you get a belief deeply held that's strong enough, it will bend the evidence towards it.

1:07:59Ethan Hsieh:It's one of the things that the predictive system does in order to manage this uncertainty is that if you have a very powerful, you're very confident at some level of the system, you will go actively out to find exactly that evidence. And counter evidence will be ignored or will be bent to be in line with the thing that you strongly predict. Very, very strong predictions can have a lot of power. So we have to be careful about the things that we say in the mirror to ourselves every day. Because if you say to yourself every day, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim.

1:08:32Mark Miller:Yeah, you become one. You turn yourself into one.

1:08:34Ethan Hsieh:There's enough evidence out there to support any strongly held belief that you will invariably find the data to confirm that deeply held belief. Rather than, and this is part of intellectual humility, not being sure who and what you are, not being 100 % sure if this is true or this is true. What that does is it's a little bit more metabolically costly because it leaves you open to interpretation. So it's a little bit more complex. But the value of that metabolic expenditure is that you remain dynamic in order to look at what is the evidence actually showing you in your life and in your world. And you might find that the evidence doesn't conform well with certain predictions that you have about who you are and what you are.

1:09:25Ethan Hsieh:So Norm Farb here at the University of Toronto has a wonderful new book called Making Better in Every Sense, which will be actually, I'm going to use in this course a little bit. And he just does amazing work. So he's a contemplative neuroscientist. He runs a great lab here at University of Toronto. And like 10 years ago or a minute ago, they found, this is just a quick little foray, but it's really demonstrative of this. So bear with me. He found that one of the things that you see in people who have long-term depression, like medicine resistant depression, is that there's this really powerful midline activation when we put them in brain scanners.

1:10:03Ethan Hsieh:And it's definitive. Like you can look at somebody's neurodynamics and you can say, ah, there's somebody who has long-term major depression. And that's very rare that we can just look at the brain and be like, hey, look, there it is. That's one of the signatures. Okay. This midline activation is thought to do something with, we don't be too reductionist when we talk about the brain, but those networks are important for self-revelence processing. So that person is interpreting everything through who and what they think they are, or everything is a reflection back to who and what they think they are.

1:10:38Ethan Hsieh:and in a very naive way we already know that with depression right every experience in depression is another example for you to confirm that's not good for me that's not working for me that's that's i'm a loser that's why that didn't work that again shows me i'm like this yeah that's exactly what i thought it was going to be like that's that's that's front and center in that pathology okay so that's very interesting what they found was and they're doing they're doing they're using the same framework today that we're talking about here. And what that looks like is very, very strong predictions about the world being the kind of place that you can't make it work.

1:11:13Ethan Hsieh:These are strong predictions about you not being good enough and about the world not being good enough. And they get stuck. They get stuck turned on. Okay? So that was the first thing they found. They've just had a recent discovery like in the last year. It's just a remarkable thing. It's harder to see that when the midline turns on very, very powerfully, like a teeter-totter, when that turns on, it shuts the sensory accumulation areas down. So as you get more confident that the world sucks, the doors to taking in new information from the world close. Now you're not taking new information. The store is closed.

1:11:52Ethan Hsieh:Now, why does that happen optimally? Because when you are very, very confident about how the world is, why would you spend more metabolism getting more information? You know, you know how the world is. Every bit of metabolism you spend now to confirm is wasted energy. And for a biosystem trying to survive in this harsh reality that we're in, metabolism waste is anathema. I mean, it's the big sin, right? You don't want to waste any energy. the brain is maximally cheap if you are very very confident that the world sucks you will stop taking in information yeah okay yeah so if you want to reverse that if you want to reverse that what you need to do is you need to you need to well one you could you could expose that this is a belief you have and you can start putting pressure against it that's one thing you could do but here's something really interesting they found there's another way there's a back door there's a hack which is you can just force you can force the new evidence open and it closes the high level confidence so all you have to do is start looking into intentionally at what's going on in the body what's going on in the world which is just what we mean by mindfulness today yes mindfulness of the body and mindfulness of your environment forces the evidence there's back on, which reduces the certainty that you have and how the world is.

1:13:20Ethan Hsieh:So you start taking in new evidence. So that's a remarkable thing to know. So if you're very confident that you, you know, that things are bad for you, you may not even be taking in the evidence, the counter evidence that actually lots of things are working for you. And we see that when we hear people who are deeply in a view, you can say, Hey, but what about this? and what about this? What about this? And it's like, they don't hear you. They say, I don't know anything about that. This is the way the world is, right? But if you start opening that back up again, you become less confident, but you also become open to new kinds of evidence.

1:13:56Mark Miller:Well, in that sense also, that means that the, I suppose the ambiguity that one experiences when that certainty starts to release its hold is actually an indicator that more information is coming in and therefore the potential to update that model is actually starting to run. And so, this is freaking, oh, wow, this is amazing, right? Because then, okay, so what I've been holding for a while and talking to brilliant people like yourself is that, look, we need to develop ambiguity tolerance because what ambiguity tolerance does is help us to become a little bit more, have a little bit more facility with the degree of certainty that we hold on something such that it doesn't get pushed to an extreme, right?

1:14:49Mark Miller:So, you know, I've been thinking about, say, Jung's notion of the ego, and I talk about this on my courses as well, that you need egocentrism to a certain degree because what it does is it holds the autobiographical narrative, the story of your life in coherence. So, when we talk about the ego being too big or too small, It actually doesn't make sense. That's a really not apt adjective. It's actually more of like, is it too rigid that you can't rewrite the story of your life? Or is it too fluid that you can't hold the chapter together? You know, and you're basically in some kind of postmodern.

1:15:22Ethan Hsieh:You're saying verbatim what comes right out of this framework is verbatim. That's all just bric-a-brac with exactly what we think too. That's exactly, exactly what we think. Too rigid models is a problem. Two loose models, so open-minded that your brain leaks out of your ears, no good either. Schizotypy is an example possibly of high-level models being a little bit too gooey. You're not able to hold a coherent model of the world anymore. You want coherence, but you want flexibility. And it really is a middle way. That's lovely.

1:15:55Mark Miller:And so then what do we do about the deep? How would you speak about sort of like the depersonalization, derealization thing? that sense that I'm looking at myself from the outside all the time. And, you know, as a Jungian, I have to bring him in, right? That's like, there's a way in which one is taken by the persona. So, the idea is the social mass of the persona is not just built on how I want to appear to others. The foundations of that, like the generative matrix of that, is built up of how other people have treated me before. So, for example, if I am unaware of gentleness, for example, right?

1:16:37Mark Miller:So, there's a way in which I did not process or have not been treated with gentleness. Therefore, it's not within my matrix of ways in which I could treat others and how others could treat me. So, suddenly, someone treats me with gentleness and not only do I not register it, it doesn't strike me as relevant at all. I go, huh? What is that? It's a complete and total surprise to use a PP talk.

1:17:03Ethan Hsieh:You may not even experience it. If you don't have a model for it, if you don't have a prediction for it, it's just noise. You may not even notice it. Which is why if you have an expectation that your partner treats you a certain way, you might not notice all the counter evidence. You might not notice. So they say, I don't know what you mean you don't think I love you. I show you love all the time. And you say, you never show me love. Why does that happen? well if you don't have a model for that being a kind of love if that's not your love language you might not even notice it might not be even a part of your reality that happens all the time the world's complex we have to get rid of most of the noise sorry it's like you literally don't perceive that that at all so just just think like um i love this uh john mccransky llama john mccransky um uh tells this story where he says uh there was a llama that he had to pick up at the airport one time out in california and he had to bring him to this dormitory for to spend the night and then he was going to come and do a workshop the next day and it was a very it's a very like um it's a big honor to pick up this man and get a little taxi ride with him and to drop him off and to ferry him to the talk whatever so he takes him and he drops him off at the student dorm and he notices as he's dropping him off that the student dorm is a bit cruddy and a bit gross like it's not it hasn't been cleaned very well it's very dormy okay you get it okay so he drops him off but he's a bit starstruck so he he like just sort of leaves says goodbye leaves and then he's at home and he can't sleep he's up all night thinking shit i mean i shouldn't have left him there i should have ah i should have got him a hotel or like brought him home and said oh this isn't a nice place like you should come home with me so he goes in the morning to pick him up and he's already got the apology in the chamber so he you know knocks on the door and sees him and says oh i'm like i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i left you here i should have i should have done better there i should have like been more present and like fixed this the problem and of course the llama is like what do you mean and he's like well the dorm is sort of not very nice and he says that the lama said this is pure land John do you not know this is a pure land do you not know this is pure land like where is it not good enough where are you living that you don't see that and I love this story through the lens of this framework because the belief the belief matrix that have been engendered through training have left it such that those things that don't matter are not showing up on the radar and can you even i mean it's almost actually in a way it's transformational in the sense that it's we may not even be able to imagine what that's like on this side of the fence but we can be encouraged that there's another way to structure our model such that the thing that shines forth is the beauty and the purity of this reality, imagine that.

1:20:04Ethan Hsieh:And you think, no, no, no, that's not possible. The world is so ugly and terrible. And you don't have to believe me today, but let's just sprinkle a little bit of uncertainty over that high level model that you have of the world. And that is given this framework, the only reality you know is the one that's being produced by your matrix. A different matrix will produce a different reality. There may be a matrix organization structured such that the world shines forth as beautiful, wholesome, whole, well-supported, pure, so that you don't notice the things that don't matter, like the dorminess of the place you stay.

1:20:41Ethan Hsieh:And what you notice is the care of somebody driving you there, a place which is safe and dry, enough water to be watered, enough food to be well, the opportunity to teach the Dharma. I mean, where does it get better than that? Where would this thing even feature? and imagine the difference in your worldview. I mean, you might not be able to notice, but I mean, we're getting real close to where Jesus says heaven and hell are all around you. We're getting real close. We're getting real close to Samsara and Leela being the same, that the wheel of sharp weapons and the wheel of play are actually one in the same thing because it's just about selective sampling of data.

1:21:21Ethan Hsieh:Which ones are you in touch with? And that's not rose-tinted glasses. it's just that heaven and hell are laid out around you and the difference between being in heaven or being in hell here on earth is the difference on which notes you're hitting they're there they're there to be hit it's which ones are you hitting and that makes all the difference and knowing that is powerful but knowing that and then seeing the kinds of practices that help augment that system to hit the right notes is critical wow

1:21:55Ethan Hsieh:my man is that a sort of is that a sort of nice is that a sort of nice ending place maybe does that feel like a mic drop moment should we just call it quits and then look forward to the course

1:22:06Mark Miller:it's all it's almost there it's almost there i i want to i want to push it just a little bit further which is you know okay if you had a sentence to sum up your chief argument that you're going to be making for eight weeks, what would that be?

1:22:25Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, nice.

1:22:30What I want to explore in this eight weeks will be

1:22:40Ethan Hsieh:to share with people the the immense importance of this shift in what we think about how the brain and nervous system work and i want to suggest that happiness and well-being is going to be less and indeed suffering and pain is less a matter of the contents of our experience and much more to do with the matrix through which those contents are observed. I want to open a space. I want to do what we've done today. I want to open the evidencing portal up again in eight weeks and produce enough uncertainty in your system in this course, that you begin taking in new evidence for who and what you are and what the world is like.

1:23:39Ethan Hsieh:I want to refresh our view over eight weeks using neuroscience, using computational neuroscience, psychology, contemplative science as an opportunity to open these students up to a different way of understanding themselves, their perception, consciousness, each other, the world, and invite some fresh air and some sunshine to come in these old static models and to see what sorts of updates we might be able to produce and encourage and welcome over eight weeks if we have a good view of the matrix and we have a good view of the kinds of skills and states and traits and abilities that are particularly valuable for that kind of a system.

1:24:30Ethan Hsieh:And we push on just the right kinds of topics, which are the topics that John and I have selected for this course. These are the topics where I think presenting them and giving practices around them are going to be the most powerful ones, especially in an age where we're in a sort of meaning crisis. That exposing this and then showing that we can put pressure like this and then inviting that training in this sort of way can have a massive impact. That's the thing. So rather than this course being purely informational, and I hope it is informational, I mean, that's what I trade in is teaching how the thing works.

1:25:08Ethan Hsieh:I want it to be less informational and more transformational. I would like this to be a transformational neuroscience course where we don't worry too much about getting the brain stuff right, but we want to use what's happening in the brain and nervous system as a jumping off point to see ourselves in the world afresh. That's what we hope to do.

1:25:36Mark Miller:That's fantastic. Mark, you came in and you had like a box of mics that you just dropped all over the floor. And this is, wow, wow. I'm blown away. I'm blown away.

1:25:49Ethan Hsieh:Um, I feel very, I feel very honored. I feel very honored to be on this platform. I feel very honored to share with this community. And I think it's going to make a big difference.

1:25:58Mark Miller:It is an absolute honor to have you. Um, and I can't, I can't wait. Everybody, uh, the course is coming in March. Um, thank you so much. Thank you, Mark. Um, it will be for eight weeks. John will be coming in, um, to guest lecture on some sessions as well. and I'm absolutely sure that this is going to be a transformative course. So thank you so much. Good sir. Much love. Thank you. And I will see you in that period of time where we'll be doing lectern Q &As and all sorts of good stuff as well. This is the first of many. Thank you, good sir.

1:26:30Ethan Hsieh:All right. Thanks. Thanks, brother. And thanks, everyone. See you soon.

1:27:10Mark Miller:I'll see you next time.

1:27:14Ethan Hsieh:Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.