Lectern Live Q&A with Mark Miller (03.29.26)

26:54Mark Miller:That's hard. That's a skill. Right. Imaginal practices that help you augment your perception, right? Like a short term thing. So you can practice this like selective sampling, but with a different frame. Mindfulness, we talked about that already, right? Your ability to monitor and direct your attention. Exclusive attention. attention exclusive attention which turns the volume up on that data set yeah and and embodiment as well which is just really being able to understand like interoceptively within the confines of your skin okay what's happening how am i processing that information how is it coming up for me right and understanding how that works that is a lot of what you're saying really really makes sense but i also have like a young part of me and i say this because i want to segue into Sebastian's question.

27:42Mark Miller:So bear with me, I'll give her a little bit of an anecdote, right? Well, sort of, but I'll do the imaginal thing, right? So when I was younger, I existed in kind of a space where science and faith existed in two different worlds, right? Well, science and religion existed in two different worlds. Religion is parked over there and science is over here. One is more hard knows the other is more magical. And if I try on that, what was it, 16, 17-year-old me, to look at predictive processing, depending on which side of the fence I choose to stand, right? Let's say I stand on the science end of the pole, right?

28:26Mark Miller:I will feel like, oh, okay, cool. Here is a cool framework that helps explain kind of what I'm experiencing, be it in prayer or in a D &D game, right? Or at a rock concert, right? Or standing on top of a mountain whatsoever. But there's a way in which I might feel precious about the magic part of it, right? That which remains ineffable. And sometimes when I hear the word computation, you know, it falls to that younger part of my mind squarely within the science realm of it and has me looking over the fence going like yeah but where's the where's the where's the the fairy dust where's the the amazingness where's that that sense of bliss or ecstasy um you know and I don't want to lose that so what would you say to somebody who might be coming in from that place because John and I and talking about this little dichotomy yeah what would you say to that yeah there's a lot there's lots to say here let's let's um let's roll roll here um one uh it's important to know

29:37Ethan Hsieh:that any teacher or teaching or tradition is always going to have a hermeneutic from which it's seeing the thing it'll always be a limited view um and so you're not trying to get everything from everywhere or everything from somewhere. You're appreciating that different ways of looking, different overlapping ways of looking are going to be better at getting you a whole look at something rather than looking at it purely from one lens. Okay. That being said, science is just one tool. It's one tool for understanding these things. And it's importantly, science done well and with like a lot of intellectual humility is importantly non-reductionist about some of the magical things so for instance like a colleague of mine um who's working with these uh christian contemplatives that speak in tongues um did i ever tell you about this because i'll share it again here if i have it no yeah so um he he um he works with churches of practitioners whose principal practice is speaking in tongues.

30:47Ethan Hsieh:There's this autodidactic way of speaking, and they self-report that when they speak in this way, at some point in time, the Holy Spirit or an angel or God starts speaking through them, and then it's a holy thing. It's an invitation of holy powers to come here and through and into the world, okay? And it's a language nobody else speaks. They're just speaking it from themselves, okay? um and he put he's done eeg hyper scanning and fmri data on these practitioners so he gets them yeah gets them to an fmri and says okay do your thing and then click the button when you feel the holy spirit take over okay one of the interesting findings is there's a little bit of the tpj the um temporal parietal junction um where there's a few neurons in the tpj that we think index whether or not the information that you're processing is endogenous or exogenous or exogenously generated meaning if i'm the one speaking they crowd a little bit one way and then when i stop speaking and you start speaking they crowd the other way because they're saying now that information is coming from out there and this is us speaking and now that's you speaking now this this is me behaving this is me watching you behave given this is me behaving okay that's what those little clusters of neurons do and when they click the button and the holy spirit takes over you see the tpj flip just like it is somebody else speaking okay now here's the interesting thing what what benefit does that have actually it's very little benefit in terms of spiritual development other than um if you have a church full of um contemplatives doing this we can put them in a scanner and then tell you whether or not they're actually having an experience of the holy spirit or if they're just saying they are because you can't fake you can't fake the neuronal shift okay so you look under the hood and you go whoa that's they're having an altered experience they're not just saying they're having it's not just a cultural artifact their their brain is registering something weird it's registering exogenous when it's in dodge when it looks like it's endogenously created here's the interesting thing okay there's two answers to what's happening here one is they found a way to hack their own neurobiology to give themselves an altered

33:11Mark Miller:experience okay that's the yeah yeah yeah accident more staunchly scientific yeah okay or or the brain is correctly indexing that the holy spirit is speaking because it's somebody else speaking and you can't get that from the science the question it's importantly non-reductionist All it can tell you is the mechanism. All it can do is say the brain is doing this. It doesn't actually take a step towards clearing up whether or not that's actually the Holy Spirit or not. That's actually maybe not even what science is for. Okay, so that's an important thing to keep in mind.

33:52Ethan Hsieh:Okay, land there. And then I want to tell you about computationally modeling some of these things and why it's beneficial. Anything there you want to jump in on?

34:00Mark Miller:Well, maybe Sebastian's question can help frame a little bit of where I anticipate you're kind of moving next, which is, so he says, I would like to explore the limits of the word prediction in the predictive brain model. Prediction is tightly coupled to action and control as in our scientific worldview. What if we foreground the poetry, understanding, attunement, and appreciation of beauty as important qualities of the brain body, does prediction still hold as an encompassing framework? Yeah, does it still hold as an encompassing framework?

34:39Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, good. So, okay, so two things there. One, the speaking about generative models and anticipation dynamics and prediction and error resolution, that's a language for expressing how an information processing system like you processes information. Now, the outcome of that subset of computational features is the rich human experience that you're having, including beauty, meaning love, balance, harmony. So they're not mutually exclusive. You're talking about levels of analysis, I think. We could talk about the process dynamics of neuronal communication. That doesn't stop us from talking about the beautiful harmonies that arise for us as animals with other animals.

35:39Ethan Hsieh:I don't think there's any problem here. You can keep both. And more than that, what we have suggested here is a possible unifying framework for cognitive science. This is maybe the first really serious bid for a unifying framework of the mind. If it is the case, what we have is something very simple and very elegant that makes use of few parameters that nevertheless is expressible as the massively diverse, wondrous, horrible human experience that we're having. And if you buy that, then there's a wonderful project to be had for looking at, well, what do we mean by beauty? What do we mean by harmony?

36:25how is that expressible in computational terms is it expressible um and if it's a unifying framework it ought be expressible in these ways and then the question is well does it give us anything new and that's where i wanted to go next um which is why does it matter to model these things why not

36:42Ethan Hsieh:just live in harmony in beauty talk about intellectual humility why do you need to model anything um one because we can is interesting we want to understand how things work they might already work but we don't know how they work why would we want to know how something works rather than just if it works one reason is because i guess probably i i don't think i'm gonna i don't think i'm gonna hurt anybody here to say i sort of suspect that every tradition around the world is mixed like it's a mixed bag of good and bad it's a mixed bag of stuff that was culturally like it was cultural stuff and really really like important stuff and they get all mixed up together um and unless you know how it works we can keep making mistakes about which parts are important and which ones are less important um so one of the things that we're getting right yeah i'll give you one really great example um one thing that we saw when we started modeling the way that attention and awareness improve modeling dynamics in meditation was to what what we saw was that it wasn't attention staying on an object now i think for seasoned meditators here you're going to know this but i bet if you're a seasoned meditator you know lots of people who make this mistake it's not having attention stay on an object that makes you better that's not what liberates you.

38:16Ethan Hsieh:What the work actually is, is the mind moving away, attention moving in its natural way, and you meta-modeling the nature of attention. It's your modeling of attentional dynamics that is the big glow up for your computational framework. Now, the direction, stay with the object. When it moves notice let it be let it go return to the object has that in it but i but here's my question back to you how good are we at knowing that that's what we're supposed to be doing and if you want a clear indicator that we're pretty shit at it how many people have you said heard say i can't meditate my mind moves that's everybody okay so i'm like a long-term meditation everybody everybody starts from there.

39:10But what that clearly shows is you need the mind moving normally and optimally.

39:16Ethan Hsieh:You need the mind moving so that you can learn about the movements of the mind so that you can have some of these, it's a longer discussion we're going to be doing in the course in slow form, some of these meta-modeling capabilities that are the ones that actually make you better over time, that stop you from getting stuck in these bad local minima like depression and anxiety and pain and all these other ones. It's an artifact of modeling those attention dynamics. So that means you need attention moving and you need to model attention. That's actually where the stress should be. So it's now the direction has to be keep your mind on a single object because it's by trying to keep it on an object that it gets distracted so that you can model it.

39:57But that's not clear from the direction by itself that that's where

40:00Ethan Hsieh:the magic is happening, which is why we make that mistake. But it turns out loads of things are like that. Now, so does that mean you have to have a science to have a good spiritual practice? No. We've had excellent spiritual practitioners making excellent changes in their life and in the way they see the world for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. But is it valuable to use this scientific technological exploration toolbox to get clear about the cause and effect of these mechanisms so that we can better discern what's good, what's bad, what was just uninteresting leftovers from another time?

40:39Ethan Hsieh:Was that important? Was that just a cultural artifact? And remember, each teacher is only going to hit the points that are relevant for them. They're always going to be mixing the thing that's relevant plus the way they felt it. How do you unravel those things? It's so hard. And then the last point, and I'll kick it back to you, is because we're living in a world where we've been burned by religion, I think, like systematically and sort of like relentlessly burned by religion. Of course, we don't want to wholesale swallow anything anybody says. You know, that's just that's not available to us anymore, I think, in our world.

41:16Ethan Hsieh:Not really. This is at least one way that I think we can start making traction again, back into those traditions. If you're one of those people who are like, I just can't, I'm not going to believe what somebody says just because they say it anymore. I'm going to need some, I'm going to need some evidence before I'm going to be investing three, four or five hours a day before I'm going to be doing long retreats before I'm going to be changing my job. I need to know that I'm not just being, I'm not just being brainwashed. I'm not just being convinced of something here, but there's real, there's real reasons to think that this is going to be valuable for me.

41:53Ethan Hsieh:I want to know why it works. I want to know how it works. I want to know why it goes wrong. If it goes wrong, I want to know what to do about it. Now you're going to have spiritual stories about that. But I think I'm not coming way out of left field when I say have a computationally robust backbone on why those things are relevant, helps us have faith, and helps us practice more diligently and more coherently and with more of our heart. I just think that that's just the case. At least it's the case for me. And it seems to be the case for the people that I bump into.

42:26Mark Miller:Yeah, I mean, you're naming something here, which I think is, for me, I've seen a real impact of. When I started, when I learned about this framework, I started saying this to participants who are coming to my workshops and who go through the meditation. And I think while a big part of the misconstrual around, like, say, just the practice of meditation as an example, part of that is, you know, the kind of baggage that comes with it, Whether it's religious baggage, right? Or it's the tradition that they're learning it from, something like that. And I do admit that I think part of it is that we have been burned by religion.

43:02Mark Miller:I think we've also developed a network that is so fast at distributing information that it becomes very, very difficult to parse out what actually works, what doesn't. Totally, man. Totally. When I learned about this framework, I started saying to participants, even if you're just doing the first stage of how John teaches Vipassana, just doing the centering. And we have this piece of like, you're distracted, label it with the ING word and then come back to the breath. But the attitude by which we do that is, this is the part that I tell them, it's like each distraction is an opportunity to practice.

43:41Mark Miller:If you have an idea that your mind is meant to be blank and nothing is happening or that you're only focused on one thing, It's like you're missing all the good stuff, right? That move, that coming back, which is what I'm hearing you say is where the meat of it is.

44:00Ethan Hsieh:It's really interesting that you say that. Let me just jump in quick. One of the things that comes out of the model two is that your suffering is always going to be relevant to the goal because error experienced by the system is divergence from expectation. So if you expect the mind to be clear, and that's the principal goal, then any deviation from that is logged as suffering. It's logged as pain. It's error in the system. But if you learn that you can adjust your goal profile to now pay attention to all of the distractions because those are opportunities to learn, that's a meta skill you're learning there, which is the meta skill of appropriate goal application, which is right at the base of our meaning crisis.

44:45Ethan Hsieh:if you want to be a rock star then all you aim at is to be a rock star then all of the days between there and being a rock star are a pain for you but if your principal aim is to sleep in a van with your friends and drive around the country and and play your guitar more than you work at a job and then go to dive bars and like try stuff out then you're gonna be rewarded every day as you're reducing the uncertainty relative to that goal set, which you're fulfilling. You're managing that uncertainty moment to moment to moment. Now, what's the likelihood that the first person becomes a rock star if they're punished every day for their craft development?

45:25Ethan Hsieh:And what's the likelihood that this band in the van are going to become rock stars? The probability spectrum is vastly different. They are much more likely to become rock stars, not because they're principally aiming at being a rock star, but because they're aiming, because they've learned to adjust the goal to fit the niche. That's so critical. So like you say, even just doing, now Vipassana has become an opportunity for learning how to set goals well. Wonderful. Right?

45:56Mark Miller:Yeah. I think that's a compliment. I appreciate that. And also one thing, is this just coming to Guru Charan's question before we sort of open it up broader for folks who are writing in or who might want to call in. The goal state and the way that we attribute goal states or form those expectations are also particularly important to me, especially when as a facilitator, I'm considering like, okay, well, how do I communicate goal states to folks who are coming in a little bit more green? but also being aware that the practices, even the practice of science, the presence of a framework is an intervention on character, cognition and consciousness.

46:43Mark Miller:So Guru Charan asked this question of, for many years, I pursued a transcendent consciousness through meditation and nature, embracing the experience of being embodied, of being open with another who is open with me, of transcending form, yielding to the formless, I see consciousness as individual, group, and universal. Please comment. And there's a clarification here around individual consciousness versus group consciousness versus universal consciousness. Yeah. And oh, yeah, something here also, what's the relationship between human consciousness and transcendent consciousness?

47:22Ethan Hsieh:so a lot of instances of that there's there's not much i can say to this question um because i want to keep the hat on that i have i want to keep talking from this point of view um there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of terminology a lot of like conceptual richness in that question that we'd have to get really clear on what it is that we mean

47:49Ethan Hsieh:um so this is this may be unsatisfactory but um let me let me use it as a as a launch point for i i think it'll be i think it's a relevantly i think it's a relevant segue to something that i hope will um that will help scratch the itch but not not head on so um one interesting place where this computational work is impacting for instance the dharma now just to be clear um the dharma and science have a really interesting relationship that's not straightforward the dharma is always proposing mind models okay but you know they're not interested in coming up with faithful metaphysics of what the mind is actually like.

48:41Ethan Hsieh:That's weird for people to hear that, but that's true. The Buddhist approach isn't principally metaphysical. It's satoriological. They're coming up with maps that will make you sane and well. But the maps are only good if they're just useful maps. Now, the interesting thing is that for the map to be useful, it probably accidentally overlaps with what's the case. But they don't care about if it's the case. So if you come at that with a science mind and you say, that doesn't make sense scientifically, you're actually talking cross purposes. They don't care. It doesn't matter if it's metaphysically apt.

49:24Ethan Hsieh:What matters is that this is a map that's useful for the practitioner to get out of a bunch of these traps. Okay? Okay. So to do a science of that is already a bit weird. Now there are some accidental overlaps. So that's cool. Where there's accidental overlaps, there's a rich opportunity for a confluence of approaches to that topic. That's cool. And meditators make good scientists. That's another one of the cool relationships that they can have. And I think scientists make good practitioners, at least Buddhist contemplative practitioners, because the analytical investigation, making lists, breaking things down, investigating them bit by bit, that's where we trade in philosophy and science.

50:14Ethan Hsieh:And that's exactly the kind of mind you want to cultivate along a number of dimensions for a number of the subsets of, for instance, the Buddhist contemplative program. Okay. I just wanted to lay out a little bit of that map work. Now, there are some really interesting places where they do meet, and here's one of them, I think. There's a lot of talk about non-conceptuality and pure awareness, this sort of talk. And I think it can be confusing. it can be that talk can confuse um i think it's confusing for the western practitioner who maybe doesn't have a culturally embedded sense of what those words mean and translation is always a little bit confusing um but for instance there's a big to-do about how oh now i'm gonna have pure consciousness or pure awareness or some i'm gonna have a transcendent awareness maybe maybe that's what you mean, maybe it's not.

51:13Ethan Hsieh:But if that's what you meant. One interesting thing is, maybe you just mean it soteriologically. Maybe you're like, there's a kind of mode of being that I find is beneficial. It's different than my ordinary mode. And here are some practices that put me into that alternate mode. If that's what you mean, then that's fine. Then that's great. But if what you mean is that there's a state that we can be in that somehow has no conceptuality or is completely free of the dim-sightedness of conceptuality. The wonderful thing that this model suggests is all experience is conceptual. So experience is by its very nature conceptual, according to this neuroscience framework.

51:56Ethan Hsieh:So here's just one interesting place for some tension, is that there is no such thing as pure awareness. There is no such thing as non-conceptuality, because it's always top-down generated. Even very, very basic forms of awareness, pure consciousness states that say white and blackout cessation events, they too are concepts. They're just rarefied, thin concepts or potentially temporally deep concepts. They're a particular subspecies of concepts. Now you might think, oh gosh, now we've really diverged because that's not what I believe at all. And I just reel us back in by saying, um you know it's not just scientists who've said this dogen dogen famously did um these sorts of investigations dogen you know the superhero in zen he went around debating uh buddhas of his time so-called buddhas of his time who said that i'm i'm completely free and he made the argument that as long as you're in sort of the meat brain with the meat body you there's no such thing as that He said, once the flower falls from the tree, you can't put the flower back on in the same way.

53:06Ethan Hsieh:Once you're born into dim sightedness, there's no evacuating dim sightedness. He said, enlightenment is dim sighted. Enlightenment is ignorant by its nature because it's apprehended ignorantly. Okay. So then what the hell are we doing? If you can't get rid of, if you can't get out of dim sightedness, like no practice will transcend the dim sighted. It's all the same. consciousness, transcendent consciousness, animal consciousness, monkey mind, pristine shamatha. Actually, this is all, it's all the same basic material expressed in different ways. And they share more than they have divergence. So what did Dogen say?

53:47Ethan Hsieh:Well, he said, it's clearly apprehending that it's all dim-sighted is the escape from the trap, is that I know I'm dim-sighted. I see this process as dim-sided. I see it for what it is. And so that gives me this big space of adaptive action selection relative to the world and relative to myself. I just love that. So I know this probably doesn't map exactly onto the question. We would need a more full-fledged conceptual discussion. One interesting thing, though, is that I see pressure being generated is the way that this computational framework is making dharma teachers be careful of the way they talk about these states.

54:38Because if what you mean is this is different than ordinary consciousness, then that's okay. But you better know that that's what you mean and that it's a useful distinction. If that's not you though, but if you accidentally believe that there's a state

54:53Ethan Hsieh:that you can be in that is free from your conceptual processing, then the neuroscience today says you may be mistaken. That it's all conceptual. By its very nature, it's dim-sided. And actually, that fits with lots of dharma masters of our past. Sages have said similar things in the past. I just think it's a wonderful place where we see some tension to resolve. And I love it. I love it because I think non-dual communities are very, very powerful. I think they're very, very powerful. That language is very powerful. But it is sort of high and narrow in an important way because you can make the mistake easily.

55:30Ethan Hsieh:There's lots of ways that you can be mistaken. There's lots of ways that you can insulate ignorance by using the right kind of language, which is highly problematic.

55:41Mark Miller:Yeah, you can create dependencies, yeah.

55:43Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, you know, like using Tilopa's doctrine of like no practice to mean, well, I can just have Orgies and eat cheeseburgers and then I'm doing Tilopa's work is a mistake. But people do that. They take the no practice suggestion from a lofty end of his life, end of career yogi talking about his lofty, super ultra refined state and apply it today. And it problematically can stunt development, right? Because you're like, oh, I'm just being free. I'm just being loose and natural. okay that's probably not the lucid natural talopo was on about um there's a different kind of lucid natural he's pointing to and to get clear on that's really important and i think this can this can this might not do the work but i think it makes us i think it forces us to think about the concepts and even spiritual concepts that we may be um that we may be utilizing without having really thought about, well, what do they mean?

56:51Ethan Hsieh:And what does it mean for me? And is it right? And is it useful? Yeah.

56:56Mark Miller:Just even what you were just sort of sharing that was already germinating kind of like, wow, I think I kind of get a sense of what the next theme of our Q &A will be. And you know, I want to, because I know you as a scientist, I also know you as a philosopher, and I also know you as a practitioner. And I don't take it that, I take it that everybody wears multiple hats. And that the more we can sort of like spin the D20 around, the more we see different aspects of something that we understand not just what the topic of what you're looking at, right? But also kind of the view in which you hold. And I hope that, you know, for folks who have seen you more as like a scientist and really talking about, you know, vision optimization and, you know, like this, like, but also, you know, look at Mark, like, please, like, recognize that, you know, there is a deep well of an ethical understanding, a virtuous orientation, and a deep care.

57:59Mark Miller:I get that sense from you, like a deep care about the ways in which this framework has so much to offer and solves actually quite a lot of, let's say, issues, problems, contractions that folks might have as they're trying to take it into their life. So I say that so that I can pop the door open for folks who might be listening already. If you would like to, and you have the facility available to you, please call in if you are with us on the Riverside chat. We'll give it a few usually awkward moments while we wait to see like, is somebody coming in? Please hit the button and we will welcome you with open arms while I look for a question that I might be able to pick up from the chat.

58:50Mark Miller:Feel free to do that as well. Mark, you can scan the chat for anything that might sort of like prick your eye up. Yeah. It's like this is, oh, there it is. There we go. I cannot see that.

59:09Mark Miller:Okay.

59:13Mark Miller:Anybody want to come in?

59:21Okay.

59:23Mark Miller:All right. Okay. So Sebastian had this question. It came in quite a while ago, which is, is openness directly correlated to humility?

59:36Ethan Hsieh:poorly yeah it's really it's really good yeah i think he means uh big five openness yeah exactly maybe yeah yeah openness openness so right so here's something interesting i'm not sure if i've said it here if it was in the course but it's it's worth reiterating so norm farb and zindel siegel have done this wonderful work on depression and mindfulness of the body mindfulness of sensory information they have an excellent new book called better in every sense it's a powerhouse it's so so so good if you're a practitioner or a scientist really great their science is really excellent um and they have this story about depression did i tell you this already yes i told you about this like where when depression turns on it closes the sensory

1:00:19Mark Miller:channel did i tell you about here oh you didn't go to that level of granularity go there yes Yeah, this is good because it's about openness and humility too.

1:00:28Ethan Hsieh:So what they found 10 years ago, I think around 10 years ago, they found that there's a fingerprint in depression where they see these midline structures are really powerfully activated in people with long-term medicine-resistant depression. And what that indicates is a lot of self-relevant processing. That makes sense phenomenologically because depression is very self-relevant. That shows me I'm not working right. There's another indicator that I'm not working right. I'm no good. The world doesn't fit with me. I want this, I can't get this, all that self-relevant processing, we can see it overwhelm the system here in the midline.

1:01:02Ethan Hsieh:And they thought, well, look, there's a nice signature for depression. That was the research. 10 years later, they found a correlation between when that midline is particularly powerfully activated. At the same time, like a teeter-totter, these sensory channels are closed. And literally, it works like a teeter-totter. So when you are extremely confident about some midline thing like i'm no good at the degree to which you're confident that you're no good is also the degree to which the doors are closed for taking in any new information about who and what you are so open-mindedness there is shut because of overconfidence okay and the opposite is true too if you start getting more evidence into the system computationally and this just fits with the predictive processing framework like brick or brick um as soon as you start getting in more evidence by the very fact that you're taking in evidence you are less confident about the thing that you believe otherwise what does it mean to take in evidence taking in evidence means you're updating beliefs which means you have a sufficient amount a sufficient amount of uncertainty about the belief you have so confidence and sensory input are just they work like a flywheel okay so how do you get over depression there's lots of ways it depends on what kind of depression but here's a very interesting one you could just do body scanning you can be mindful of the body mindful of the present moment now why does that help because that sounds ludicrous you've ever been depressed and you're like oh pay attention to your walking and you're like uh that how is that gonna help me i'm dying here and you're like be present have a cold shower and go for a walk you're like this is not going to cut deep enough man but the magic is that the more you become mindful of the room and your body and your experience whatever those experiences are you're forcing that flywheel open here which is inevitably reducing the certainty that you have in these midline potentially pathological belief sets okay so in that sense this is open-mindedness you are open for business to take in new evidence so yes open-mindedness is deeply related with humility because open-mindedness is a is computationally an expression of low confidence in your model which just is humility so they may even just work like a flywheel together um so if you have humility as a virtue then what you mean is, is that you're putting some like bricks up under that flywheel so they can never completely close.

1:03:47Ethan Hsieh:But that means, of course, you can't ever be super confident. And there's a cost to that. There's a metabolic cost. To maintain uncertainty is costly. That's why we can't do it when we're tired and sick and belabored and homeless and underfed and abused. That's not the conditions to be cultivating more open-mindedness and more humility. You need to be very confident about where you're going to get your next food, very confident about who you can trust. You need to collapse down into rigidities.

1:04:21Ethan Hsieh:But if you have the metabolism to spend, then keeping some humility and some open-mindedness in play lets the system optimally update and change the way it's operating and find those opportunities to improve over time. So yeah, it was a great intuition. Is it Sebastian? It's a great intuition that those are going to be related. And they computationally might just be like two sides of the same coin, actually. Yeah.

1:04:51Mark Miller:I want to add to this. Now that I heard this story again, I want to tag onto this. There was a study that was done, I think, 2020 at McMaster University. I think you love this, right? I don't know if I told you this before. they took actors and then they chucked them in an fMRI machine. And wonderful experimentation. So they had them, they were Canadian actors, right, out of the theater department. And then they were doing Romeo and Juliet. So they've been practicing for a while. And then they had them do a series of tasks within the fMRI machine in three different ways. So the first one was they had it, they called first person.

1:05:32Mark Miller:So they will ask questions to the actor while they were in the fMRI machine, and they would just answer as themselves. Then the second one, they did fictional first person. So they would answer as characters from Romeo and Juliet about the world of Romeo and Juliet. And what they found was a down regulation in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex.

1:05:54Ethan Hsieh:Sure, because they can't rely on their old models, which are the more probable ones, because that's who they actually are.

1:05:59Mark Miller:Yes. So there was a down regulation and they called it self processing. So there isn't the attribution to the self, which is just so interesting to hear as you name almost the opposite in depression that we're talking about pretend play. Now, the third way that they did it, which I thought was really fascinating, was they had people, they had the actors do a gestural change. So they would answer questions in a British accent. And what they found was the same brain regions were down-regulated to the same degree across a longer period of time. So to the same depth, albeit slower. So when I read this, I was like, wow, right.

1:06:48Mark Miller:The way in which you might pretend play is not just a mentalizing of facts and stories and things. You could do that. But the gestural move, right? Being able to take something on, try something on physically in a different way. If you're, the way that I battled depression is I would get up and do something different, right? Like I will feel it come through and just get like, no matter how much. Take yourself out of the pattern. Yeah, take yourself out of the pattern and then it overcame it. and over time now it's like i can feel it i'm like ah okay right oh i think that thing is coming oh i feel really burnt out okay well i could let me just shift my attention somewhere do something

1:07:30Ethan Hsieh:i love that it's actually it would be a very fruitful way to think about things like guru yoga where you put on the mind of the guru or you see uh you see a spiritual figure and you let yourself wear them and then practice from there because it would automatically have this decentering open-mindedness activated and then you could work in that sphere get better evidence into the system um and then you put back on your old mind so it's like you're finding a sneaky sneaky back door to getting in some of this new evidence when you've got a bunch of guards up for who and what you are and i think we feel that but you put on jesus if you put on jesus's mind and then try to like like if that's your jam and then give love to somebody that you don't love you can do it and you can feel the love in it because this midline is being over-controlling.

1:08:21Ethan Hsieh:What's this? Oh yeah, Dao De Ching.

1:08:22Mark Miller:Yeah, so we did this. We exactly had this practice called Axio Divina. We did it yesterday on the Dao De Zing, right? Get people to read the text, invite a perspective, walk around, do something regular, then do the gesture again, right? Invite a perspective, do something regular. And it's a profound effect. I really enjoy that practice as a contemplation. So there,

1:08:44Ethan Hsieh:just like let's just use that for a moment but look like you could just do that practice because you trust ethan and ethan says this works ethan believes john john says it works ethan did it it worked for ethan ethan shows you you believe in ethan you believe in john you do it it works for you that works fine but isn't it lovely that we can look at that and say yeah that works. And then I say, yeah, okay. And look, isn't this interesting? It may work because when you have this overly powerful midline superstructure, you're not taking in new evidence, which means you're not finding new ways that you can be in the world.

1:09:22Ethan Hsieh:And that might be a really not great way you're self-organizing. And just by putting on the mind of somebody other than yourself, you're sidestepping some of those harsh midline structures. You're allowing more open-mindedness to be available, which means you're going to sneak in some counter evidence, which might free up some of those resources that might give you some cognitive flexibility, which we know is highly correlated with long-term wellbeing. Then you might choose a different way of being in the world. And even if you don't, if you do this enough times, your meta system is learning that there's lots of different ways that you can be when something isn't working right, which again is increasing its adaptability, its flexibility, its fluidity, its resilience.

1:10:01that's just it's just wonderful to know that like you maybe don't need it but it's like you plus me in that situation it's very potent medicine because you can say look i know this works here's how the practice works and you build on see here's a bit of a science backbone for it

1:10:17Ethan Hsieh:give that as a package you know it's just wonderfully potent i think it's good that you

1:10:24Mark Miller:mentioned confidence again. So Jiminy Cricket asked on the chat, could you say openness is akin to resilience, whereas confidence is akin to efficiency, right? So invoking the efficiency, resiliency trade-off as a higher order trade-off.

1:10:43Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, it's really good. Confidence, efficiency, for sure. Openness, resilience. Yeah, where you're finding lots of different ways to come back to to back to a homeostatic set point yeah that's good yeah that's good yeah like the best the best part of open-mindedness is flexibility and so you're going to find more ways back into a good predictive set yeah that's resilience yeah it's good and actually it's a little bit it's even better than resilience it's more like anti-fragility because you're not just getting back to an old state but you're using openness to new evidence to find better ways of being that's going to be resilient insofar as like the better way of being is going to bring you back to a homeostatic set point quicker but it may bring you back in a way that you're better able to do that in the future which is more like anti-fragility so that's that's great wow yeah that's a that's a great insight yeah i think that's exactly right but what would what would

1:11:44Mark Miller:you say to because i think i i just sorry sorry i just gotta flag this other comment be your own mental support girl. That's awesome. Yeah, true. Preach. Okay, sorry, go. I may have assumed that when we talked about openness initially with Sebastian's question, it was referring to big five, so big five personality, right? So openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism. And I think there is a way in which we tend to understand culturally that personality doesn't shift. And this is the consensus that right, that personality is kind of more predispositional. So what, now, having said that, I am also aware of that study that mystical experiences moved the needle on openness.

1:12:31Mark Miller:I'm very aware of that, which is fantastic. But what would you say to folks who perhaps, you know, decide to take up a big five score. And then if you realize, oh no, like my openness is low. I remember doing this when I was coaching a Chinese company during COVID. I was running a, I ran a big five test for all of them. And one of the, one of the ladies came up to me and she asked me, how do I get full marks for everything? On the big five, I went, I don't think you want a hundred for neuroticism.

1:13:05Ethan Hsieh:That's no good.

1:13:07Mark Miller:Yeah. What do you think about that?

1:13:08Ethan Hsieh:Yeah, I think we need lots of diversity. We need to be lots of different kinds of people. That's one thing. Too much of anything is a problem. Aristotle was right. You want the meaty middle. So too much openness is just as problematic, actually, as too little closeness. pathological under certainty in models is a bummer um because then you're either not able to remove the noise out of the moment because you have no good model to rely on that's incredibly costly if you can't extrapolate out abstract like abstractions out of the mess then you can't sidestep the mess which means you live in the mess every breath like if you like terry pratchett he talks about this right terry pratchett has like a remarkably refreshing take on liberation where he's like who would want their eyes to be fully open to all of existence at all times he goes no that's that's a terror that's no good that's no good like it's okay to get a glimpse so that your eyes don't stay like slam shut but like you can't be imbibing the you can't be imbibing too much you you need you need to get rid of the noise and that's all abstraction work so um same thing with like schizophrenia.

1:14:26Ethan Hsieh:Having models that are too open is one of the characteristics of schizophrenic delusion because you're too willing to update your deep models relative to uninteresting evidence. You act a little bit different. So then I think, oh, you're a robot. You're a robot sent from the CIA. That kind of delusional stepping happens because my models are imminently open to even unimportant evidence to give them a little jitter. You don't want that. Gosh. You know, also, you don't want everything that anybody texts online to be relevant for you. Or even everything that loved ones say to you can't be relevant to you because people are going to say all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons on different days in different contexts.

1:15:15And to have a thick skin means you repel most of what's being said to you where you say, well, that's just not relevant for me. That not relevance is because you have a good firm model of what is relevant. And so you're able to easily turn the volume down or up on the chaos. That's so valuable. So, you know, being somewhere on this personality spectrum, just remember low

1:15:40Ethan Hsieh:or high doesn't mean, it doesn't mean no open-mindedness and full open-mindedness that actually isn't articulated on that spectrum. It's just, you have a proclivity for open-mindedness or not and both are relevant both are meaningful you want to be in a community where there's lots of different kinds of people i like that evolutionary story where you wouldn't want homogeny actually the best thing the best thing we can do is tribes of people is that lots of different types of people together because we're going to catch each other's blind spots

1:16:12Mark Miller:yeah and that's where the the aristotelian character intervention comes in like we need diversity of other people who have different dispositions, but can teach us different ways of operating in the world such that we pick it up from them and we compensate for the deficiencies or the, let's say, we learn from each other's differences such that we can be better together.

1:16:34Ethan Hsieh:You want a group of friends where you have at least one friend who's very open-minded and one who's not open-minded at all. You want friends who are like, yeah, let's do that. And other friends be like that's a terrible idea and somewhere in between that you find the right the right amount of open-mindedness right i mean we can't do everything so that's that's good because the friends who only have let's do it they don't maybe they don't live long enough to have to have kids you know and the ones who never do anything maybe the same like you've got a yeah the mix is a good thing anyway on the back of that um i know we're coming up to the end of our time but um on the back of that, the brain is radically plastic.

1:17:11Ethan Hsieh:I think we're just, we're increasingly surprised by the amount of adaptability that the neural hierarchy looks like it has in it. So these things that also at one point in time, we thought were fixed and sure, I don't know, our science is updating all the time. For instance, we thought that at 25 sort of neuro neurogenesis is done and then from 25 onward it's like a slow decline to death

1:17:43Mark Miller:that's not true

1:17:44Ethan Hsieh:it's not true no it's bullshit I know right anybody who's not 25 you know here's the good news for today okay that's not true at all

1:17:52Mark Miller:it's not true at all I go Japanese class tomorrow I need to hear this I'm 35 now nice the reason why we thought that was because the studies where we did that were back in the 50s and 60s where we had a lot of stability in the United States.

1:18:04Ethan Hsieh:That's where those experiments were done. So you had a lot of stability and a lot of model accuracy that was possible. You had one house, one job, one set of duties, played cards with the Joneses on Tuesday, bold on Friday. Life was for a little period of time, very stable, relatively stable. And so of course, by the time you were 25, you had modeled the world sufficiently well that you could start jettisoning the leftover gray and white matter because you didn't have any other modeling needs. And that's one way the brain can optimize once it has a good enough model is it can start reducing the diversity of the computational complexity that does those things.

1:18:48Ethan Hsieh:So we just throw out the circuits that aren't being used. Okay. But if you do even, I can't remember the exact number. I think it might be as little as seven or 12 or 15 minutes a day of mindfulness where mindfulness is defined as being with the volatility of the moment not letting your abstraction grab too deep not going to the future not going to the past just being here in the real volatility thing the neural density at 70 is the same as 20 isn't that awesome that's my that's my favorite sales pitch for meditating a little bit every day because essentially what you're doing is in that 50 minutes you're informing your nervous system and brain that every day i'm going to need you to come right down into the volatility so you better not give up all the machinery that's able to track volatility stuff because i'm going to ask you every day i'm going to say hey sample the world in like a in like a heavy duty way for me which means it can't it can't give up all of that sophistication stuff it can't give up all of that evidence accumulation stuff because every day you ask it to do evidence accumulation and it doesn't know it doesn't know what you're going to ask of it tomorrow so it's got to keep lots of it in play it's got to keep that's costly you're gonna have to put more food into your neural anatomy up like to keep it running right but it also means that you have a really rich neural hierarchy for

1:20:18Mark Miller:for like a big portion of your life yes like don't sit don't sit on your laurels in the system

1:20:24Ethan Hsieh:that's that's that's what you're doing you're doing uncertainty um exposure but is this is

1:20:32Mark Miller:also why um there is like a there is like a quite a uh a difference between say like uh the boomer the baby boomer generation the gen x generation the gen y you know millennials right gen z sure

1:20:46Ethan Hsieh:the the uninteresting thing is to say um the differences that we're going to see are going to be complex of course they're just giving me like culturally embedded things but yeah like degrees of uncertainty and the impact that those degrees of uncertainty have on the shape of the arc the cognitive architecture of course is going to be relevant um so yeah like we have radical insecurity today and we're seeing that in real time what are the effects where we're trying to lock on to something and we lock on to all the weird things you know man i i learned something

1:21:22Mark Miller:new, I learned tons of new things from you every single time that I see you, like whether it's for a lecture or for these, like, thank you so much, man.

1:21:32Ethan Hsieh:You're very welcome. Thanks for the great questions. Thanks for the great questions, everybody. It was a great session.

1:21:36Mark Miller:So this is, we're going to come to the end of our Q &A. Please, first, one more thing, one small thing. Thank you all for your excellent, excellent questions. Lauren, I saw your question. I'll see you. and I actually was looking at that and went, oh, I think this will be really good for the next one. So there's an implicit promise that I'm offering here because I was wondering how you would feel about actually on the back of this discussion, perhaps next month when we come back around for our final one, that we could talk a little bit about predictive processing's really like real world ethical ramifications on practice.

1:22:15Mark Miller:Whether it's practice of mental health, religious and spiritual practice, practicing personal development. What do you think? Does that jive with you? If not, you know, we can propose something else. Yeah, love it. No, dig it, dig it. I've got lots to say. Let's do that. Let's do that. Cool, man. So fire. So thank you all so much. Please go to the lectern. Check out the videos that I put out with Mark as well as the latest one on Zen Neoplatonism. The new course between East and West is out now. I'm open for registration. thank you all very very much i'll see you all next month ciao thank you mark

1:23:09craving the coffee flavor you love but without the caffeine cachava's got you covered with their newest coffee flavor. This all-in-one nutrition shake delivers bold, authentic flavor crafted from premium decaffeinated Brazilian beans with 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, and so much more. Treat yourself to the flavor and nutrition your body craves. Go to cachava.com and use code fitness. New customers get 15 % off their first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com code fitness.