The Cognitive Science of Happiness with Mark Miller

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0:41Welcome, everyone, to this special session. I'm here with somebody who is a joy in my life. He is a former student of mine. He is a co-author. He's a colleague. He has replaced me while I was on sabbatical and continues to do so in some of the courses I've taught for the cognitive science program at the University of Toronto. He is much loved by the students. My students who I have a good relationship with come in and tell me how much they love him, how great he's doing. I'm doing everything in my power to try and get him to fully replace me. Of course, the bureaucracy will do what it does in its mysterious and non-justifiable ways.

1:25But Mark Miller is somebody who I feel a deep kindred spirit with. Mark and I might defront some theoretical details here and there, but that's how good science works. But in the deep things about a big picture view of cognitive science that synoptically integrates, and then using that to address fundamental questions of human flourishing, meaning and mindfulness and the ways in which human beings can go awry and the ways in which they can excel. This is something that Mark and I deeply share. I foresee that Mark is going to be in my life to the end of my life, and I'm very grateful for that. Mark is a prolific author.

2:16He publishes more than anybody I know. And he publishes in high-impact journal, both theoretically rigorous papers and empirically insightful papers. And he attends conferences. He is a star. And all we need to do is get more and more people to recognize that. So the purpose of this is to get you to turn your head and consider a part of the horizon you may not have looked at before and bear witness to Mark Miller, who is going to be teaching a course for the lectern. And that's what Mark is here for. We'll talk a little bit about that. But first of all, I'll let Mark introduce himself and say what he would like to say.

3:05And then we'll all introduce the topic, the course, and then we'll get into it bit by bit. Wow. I feel like I'm getting introduced a lot recently on things, but John, I'm so humble and so grateful. And what you say about some of the things that we share, I couldn't say it better, the thing that I do. thinking about the application of new cognitive science, architectural ideas and paradigms, specifically to better understand how it is that we run into trouble and how we can flourish and not just survive, but flourish and excel, just as you say. It's exactly the program. You said my program better than I say my program.

3:52That's exactly what I'm interested in. What can I say? can I tell you where I am? Is that interesting? Some of the places that I'm working? Yeah. So, um, I I'm instructing at the university of Toronto right now, which is a lot of fun in the psychology department. Um, I'm also still a researcher at Monash university, um, in their center for consciousness and contemplative studies led by Yakup Hui, a wonderful, a wonderful center. Um, a big amount of money was donated to generate a center that would do excellent science of meditation research and turn that research into good pragmatic practical programs for the communities around the world to actually get better so that's a wonderful thing to see some money donated to and it's one of the best centers in the world now i think and um and i'm still um a visiting researcher at hokkaido university in the center for human nature artificial intelligence and neuroscience where i'm still doing some ai techie and well-being things um and all together then the big thing that I'm doing is something like, um, like a new science, a new science of happiness and wellbeing.

4:58Um, and the new science part is the, is the hook. Yeah. Yeah. And so the, the title of your course, which follows immediately upon what you just said is the, uh, generations of joy, the cognitive science of happiness. Um, and exactly. It's yeah. Yeah. This, this is the, this is the best part about working with you, John. I mean, this is, um, you've created a space for me to build and teach. If I could pick any course, this is just a, what a, what a, what an opportunity. If I could pick any topic to talk about for eight weeks to an interested group of people, this is exactly what I would teach right now in my life.

5:39And it's the, it's the thing that I think I'm best, I'm best positioned to share. And it's because the work that we're going to be covering isn't 20 years old. It's not five years old. the research that we're going to be covering is happening in real time. It's absolutely living. We are right at the very cutting edge as things are developed. I mean, actually, I have the slides, I have the slide decks all built for this teaching, and I'm augmenting them day by day as new preprints are coming out on the computational dynamics of these various interesting topics that we're going to cover, like depression and addiction and happiness and joy.

6:14Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Mark and I are working. As some of you know, I recently got a paper published in philosophical psychology on an idea I've been working on for quite some time, the cognitive continuum that basically goes from fluency to mystical experience. And then Mark and I and some other people are working on a grant to try and, among other things, the project is provide more empirical evidence for that hypothesis, which I find very exciting. um yeah we we we are at work right now um and so um mark is not being hyperbolic he is um he's right on the the edge of the wedge so and actually we're gonna just as a little just a little side note there we're gonna talk about that research actually um it's one of the it's one of the nodes in this course yeah we're doing we're doing sort of i'm part of a team um that's doing uh i think the most rigorous science on the buddhist contemplative practices called jhanas these these advanced concentration states um and that that little network um we call our project um the neuroscience of expert meditation um uh co-led with uh yonas maggo who's just a wonderful researcher yeah yeah we're we're doing the first real serious eeg research on jhana practitioners and then taking that science on what's happening in the brains of advanced meditators and, and, and, um, marrying it to your theoretical idea, which is just, it's just a perfect fit.

7:49It's just wonderful that we can see that happen. Um, and we're going to, we are, we're going to, I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to, uh, digest that and convert it into something that's useful in the course. I'm looking forward to that. So, uh, that's cool. Hey, yeah. So as Mark indicated, I'm going to be with Mark in three of the sessions. And we're going to be discussing, just like we're doing now, some of the topics where his work and my work and our joint work shows up. So I'm very excited about that. So let's start with this. I mean, this is an ancient topic. And this, I mean, Plato would be happy with the title of your course, to my mind, very much.

8:30because it has always been my contention that ancient philosophy, especially under the influence of the reading of it that was given to us by Pierre Hadot, ancient philosophy is much more like cognitive science than it is like current academic philosophy. It was a much broader framework involving aspects of psychology, aspects of the religious and spiritual life, spiritual exercises, as Hedo made famous. And so I think that cognitive science is actually the stronger analog to the ancient philosophy. And of course, the ultimate concern of all of that ancient philosophy, whether it's Socrates or Plato or Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, it's human happiness.

9:20And so the fact that Mark is doing something that is both cutting edge, because happiness seems to be so problematic today and also perennially important. This speaks to the depth and the ultimacy of this topic. Oh, you know, I've never heard it said like that. And I absolutely love that, to be able to root some of these ideas, some of these movements that we're in all the way back to the early philosophers is lovely. That's lovely. Early cognitive scientists. Well, yeah. And I mean, because you and me and us, we're studying not just theoretical explanations, we're also studying training practices and interventions.

10:02Sure. And it's much more comprehensive. So, I mean, let's start philosophical, but in that sense, the ancient sense of philosophical, the cognitive science sense. Because one of the things that I think might become clearer to people, I mean, this is a very Socratic thing to say, is while everybody is in some sense seeking happiness, it's not the case that everybody's very clear on what happiness in fact is. Socrates made his career such as it was. out of that, that the fact that people are deeply attracted to it, but they're not very clear on their understanding of it. So first of all, what's some of your initial framings of this very important topic?

10:48So one thing I want you to perhaps, you know, bring your critical eye to bear on is sort of popular media presentations of happiness don't seem to line up. They don't provide good guidance for human flourishing. So what would you say to that? What's the initial, in that, like I say, in this perennial philosophical sense, and I'm not talking about conceptual analysis, I'm talking about what is it we're trying to get a hand on? Everybody wants it. And if everybody wants it and we're all pursuing it, why is it so difficult to realize? Yeah, good. I'm going to do, I'm going to do a slightly cheeky thing and I'm going to, I'm going to cut the line a little bit, a little bit closer to the source and the thing that you're saying.

11:39We don't have, one of the, one of the big issues is, is that we're not clear. We're not clear about what these terms mean. So we don't know where to aim. We don't know where to set our mind and our time. Right. And just like you say, not, not only do we have a confusing ontology, we're not sure what we're even talking about. And we're all talking about different things. right but we're being waylaid of course we're being waylaid by popular media and i don't think that's necessarily like a malevolent hand i think it's just a it's an emergent it's an emergent feature of the kinds of things we're attracted to because of the kinds of things that we are um but nevertheless it's deceptive it's deceptive and it's it's probably it's problematic and along a number of dimensions that are really important we're going to talk about that in the course too but especially social media and conspiracy theories and why they're so alluring why these sort of parasitic frameworks and sources of material are so problematic for the kind of thing that we are.

12:34We'll talk about that. But so we don't really know what we're aiming at. That's part of the problem. And we're being confused by the kinds of things we're getting feedback on. So one of the things that I think myself and you and the community of people that are sort of working in the way that we're working today are doing very well is we're not starting from this particular ontology that may have been misguided but we're starting from something earlier so we're not starting from for instance in psychology often the way psychological research works is well you you pick an idea and it's usually a folk idea and who knows where that ontology came from yes i mean like the idea that there's a difference between cognition and emotion like that's fine for talking about stuff but actually the ontology doesn't cut down to the brain and the nervous system those those aren't separate things they're singular things and and maybe even perception and behaviors sort of singular in an important way deep down in the in the matrix we we talk about emotions and cognition so that we can get through our day but when we build science just on our ho-hum ontology who knows what we're getting out of it And that's fine because we've got to start somewhere and we've got to cut in somewhere.

13:47And the brain is totally alien technology. I mean, it's fabulously, recklessly complex. I mean, woe unto you who want to study the brain. I mean, it's just the deepest possible mystery. um so we're doing something a little different than that approach in psychology starting at a concept and then saying okay well like okay let's start from short-term memory and then let's do some experiments to see how it works the more interesting thing that we're doing and the analog for us is we're not starting from what is happiness i'm not going to start from saying well what is happiness because that's already an ontological idea you can go you can go farther upstream first and you can say well well let's go to a first principle view of of how the cognitive system might be might be organized what's our best view of the way that the perceptual cognitive emotional behavioral subsystems are organized let's start there and if you start there and you start to look at at well how does can we get a glimpse of some of the core or computational concerns that all life has first of all and maybe all things have as a foundation the same mathematics apply to all living things uh they get nuanced of course and then to minded and brainy living things like us and you start if you start from there you start getting glimpses about some core computational concerns and cares that we have as organisms once you get it once you get that in hand, how we are detrimented by or supported in our flourishing starts to reveal itself and not in a ho-hum down the stream ontological way, but from a first principle, right from the source way.

15:36And I'll just give like just one little quick one and then I'll kick it back to you. But for instance, when we come right back to the shape of the cognitive system itself, One of the things among many that we're going to talk about that is revealed is that we're epistemic organisms first and foremost. The thing that you are, the computational dynamics expose the kind of thing that you are is a thing that's seeking to understand itself in the world. And that's not just a poetic. I mean, it is poetic and it's deeply mystical and deeply beautiful, but it's not just those things. It's, it's comes right out of the maths.

16:10that the way that the brain and nervous system evolved to help you adapt to a changing niche is it first and foremost has to figure out what it is and what the world is like and what other people are like so it can aptly bring to bear those behaviors and perceptions that allow it to adapt first and foremost you need to know who you are that comes right out it comes so know yourself is that the thing to know what you could say you could say yeah well look socrates said it we can say something else now too. We can say, no, no, right from the maths, the very just first principle mathematics of the, of the, of the brain and how it operates.

16:44That's the very first thing you should appreciate. So knowing yourself is critically important. So what do we already have available to us? Deep deception, deep fakes, highly problematic, maybe even evil. If you're going to even call, if you're going to call anything evil, you might be like systematically undermining your ability to get a good grip on how it is in the world might be the closest thing to evil that we've got because that's the core thing and then what is it to be well well we're already starting to creep towards that which is you want to be you want to self-organize in a way where you as a living system are able to come into contact with with real things yes to to figure out what the world is actually like the skills and practices and know-how of figuring out who you are the way to communicate non-violently with your partner to figure out who they are these are all like that comes right out of the first principle view that those are good things for us and they're going to support what we are so that's what we've done as a research program come back to basics come right back to the bone and then inch forward and that's all the course is going to be i'm going to bring you right back to the first kernel and then we're going to inch towards um these bigger ideas i mean so uh again not to not to diminish what's uh theoretically original and novel about this but But this is, as you said, hearkening back to the Socratic proposal of knowing yourself, which is, as I tell people, is not knowing your autobiography.

18:09It's knowing your owner's manual, which is a very different thing. Oh, I love that. That's exactly what we're going to say. Exactly. That's right. And then what comes up right away is an ancient proposal, one that has been lost. So, you know, Arjun Arora, he's a shared student of Europe. He and I just did a, not that long ago, a video essay. We're working towards a paper on the critique of the current psychological construct of meaning in life. And the critique is extensive, but it sort of boils down to this idea, unlike everything else or, and everywhere else, you know, like all of the work in the past and cross cultures, we have a construct of meaning that is separated from wisdom.

18:57And given what you've just said, that is deeply problematic. If we are fundamentally epistemic and we fundamentally face self-deception and deception by others, then wisdom cannot be separated from this project in any significant way. yeah because wisdom is about being able to discern and harvest and apply uh the right meaningful things at the right time right so not just to be inundated with information collection but being able to select the right information at the right time and leverage it for the for the benefit of the whole this is why if you like even in the lay understanding which like you i'm i i always take as a starting point and not an ending point and not a foundation it's just a starting point but even in that lay level the thing that seems to most for most people because i was on the wisdom task force we'll talk about this in the course right exactly because you're co-teaching you're co-teaching the wisdom week with me so we'll be able to have this in long form yeah and this sort of uh perspectival metacognition the ability to see through illusion and reality and And for most people, if I was to say to you, well, she's not very creative, but she's very wise, you'd go, oh, yeah, I can sort of see that.

20:18And she doesn't have a lot of theoretical knowledge, but she's very wise. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's not very insightful, but she's very wise. And people go, what? No, that doesn't, no. Whoa. Being able to see into messy situations and show up for them in the right way is actually crucial. And that's what you were just talking about. It's messy to be with a partner. It's verbatim what I'm talking about because the ability to selectively sample from the world in ways that bear on to you, the real world dynamics that matter to you and to others, that's the whole thing. And the world is infinitely complex and wonderfully, horribly complex.

21:05And so it's not exactly, that's another point that we're going to make is it's not obvious how you penetrate that complexity to grip the meaningful subsets. And that's a hard and absolutely fundamentally necessary road to walk if you want to be not only an adult, but a wise adult, which I think is the natural evolution. I think being an adult is just something like having enough responsibility put on you makes you an adult. And being a wise adult is something else. And that's a hard thing. This is an ancient adage as well. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. It's good. It's good.

21:47It's a nice one. Very good. And then the sage is to the sacred. Can I pick up on one little thing quick? Yeah. Yep. Please. You said, you said just one thing quick. You said not to disparage or not to belittle the like the freshness of this thing that we see it in the ancient tradition. I just wanted to say one thing quick there in case it's relevant. Actually, in no way, in no way does that diminish or minimize the freshness of this thing. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. The framework that we're going to be presenting in this course is not just another framework, which, you know, may be interesting or might not be interesting, but it is currently the, it's, I think the most radical, the most revolutionary, but it's also now the standard in computational neuroscience.

22:31And it's our first real glimpse of what might be the beginning of a unified cognitive framework. That's part of the promise. But if it's a unified framework, if it is actually how life forms work, we should see it echoed and expressed always everywhere. you know like we should be like look it's just what we thought all along the sages have been talking about this for ages it should be that if it's real so i love to see i love to see the correlations come up this is one of the things i mean so i i um there's been a lot of work uh you know about the the three generations of cog sci you know the the gofi generation the neural network and then the dynamical system generation um which is has been basically taken up into 4e cog sci I think there's a similar thing with respect to, I don't have a good name for this because the usual name religion is exactly contested.

23:29I'm going to be talking about this at Utyism. But let's say something like sacred traditions. And if you watch the initial cog-sci around this, it's like, well, why do people believe these silly things? Like, why do they believe in these? And so it's very dismissive. And now we're moving more and more into maybe there's some wisdom here. Yes, maybe some of the theoretical claims are false. So what? Many scientific frameworks share that property, right? Sure. We should be looking at maybe there's a lot of wisdom here. And to my mind, you're in that newest generation. Your attitude towards the sacred is one of respect and recovery.

24:10Like you respect these traditions and you want to recover what can be recovered in a non-dismissive fashion from them. Wow, absolutely. And there's so many, and this is again, I think a wonderful way to recover is you don't in a ho-hum way just say, well, this is valuable and this isn't. That's right. but you if you start and this isn't the only way to do this work but it's just the way that i do it so that's what i talk about starting from this first principle view is one way you can do this recovery process because starting from there and then looking through the lens of religion spiritual practice um you begin to understand by looking under the cognitive hood well why were those things relevant for us and some of them are highly highly relevant in ways that you didn't expect like like honesty honesty for an epistemic agent is is water and food you know it's like water food honesty have to be there like no wonder it's part of every tradition but then what about the other virtues like intellectual humility and bearing uncertainty um all of these things that we're going to find as as native constructs in in various religious and spiritual forms are absolutely critical for our well-being as well.

25:30Yeah, when I was doing work on, like I continue to do it, when I was teaching on the cognitive science and the psychology of insight, we came across a really important thing. This was work actually done, Kaplan and Simon, the Simon of Newell and Simon, by the way, in search of insight, 1990. And they came up with this notice invariance heuristic that what seems to provoke uh uh insight is people that can notice what's what so they have many failed problem framings and what they do is they look for what's what's being shared across the problem framings because that's likely to be what's blocking them now of course that's still combinatorially explosive and it's still how do you zero in on the relevant ones and all of that but then what what occurred to me is oh this is why humility matters.

26:20Because people who can keep track of their feelings and are willing to look at how they might be self-deceptively misframing are more likely to actually get insight into challenging situations. And I was like, oh, because it had always struck me as it was, it's undeniably the case that across these wisdom traditions, humility comes out as a central virtue right if you're not humble you're not a sage right and then it's like and of course yeah yeah exactly exactly you should be hyper confident you should be hyper confident and yes yes yeah this was a problem for the stoics like if the sage is self-sufficient why does the sage like need to defer to others or even have friends and then it came out oh well this is why humility matters because if you're not humble you're going to lose your capacity for insight um oh it's lovely so two things quick one so the flow of the course is going to be introducing some of these principles and then the the two big the two big problems that we're going to look at are craving addiction and the opioid crisis and um depression despair and the meaning crisis i'm going to get you to teach with me on the meaning crisis week which is gonna the great thing too is i get you on the three weeks that i would most want to hear you lecture like if you have the three topics that you're going to teach with me, those are the ones I'm showing up for.

27:52And the reason why we're going to step through the pathology is not only because it's imminently valuable to people to better understand the dynamics of craving, addiction, depression, despair, because I think we're all somewhere on the, you know, we, we frequent these as humans today at some degree. But the, the really, the secondary valuable thing is we start getting some fingerprints about where the system goes wrong so that we can better understand, well, how does the system go right? One of those fingerprints is about stickiness, about inflexibility, about insulating bad beliefs, about picking something that's wrong and then defending it or insulating it and how that actually makes us sick.

28:33And that's the same computational underbelly that we see in addiction and in depression. So when you talk about fluidity, flexibility where intellectual humility is the ability to flow to change to cognitively update no wonder we're seeing things like uh cognitive reframing is just such a hot topic in well-being science because people that are imminently available to cognitively reframe are also very very well over the long run because they're able to see well uh when do i hold the line and when do I just let go of the view and pick up something that's just better? Like you miss your train and you're like, oh no, I'm going to be late.

29:14Oh wait, I get five more minutes to myself. You've just like Kung Fu'd your way around some volatility that other people might have to eat all day. You know, my flexibility is so valuable for long-term wellbeing. So, well, this seems like a good way to segue into, why don't you just take us quickly through the topics you'll be covering in the course. I love that. So, uh, week one, we're going to be talking about the predictive mind and the nature of experience. This is already, um, I don't like to, I don't really like to do, I'm not interested anymore. I'm, I'm not interested at this point in time in my career.

29:54Cause I could change, um, in doing science. It's not useful. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm extremely interested in doing science that I think is useful for us I think we need it we're in crisis yeah we we need some we need some lamps to like help us better understand how to live and so that's the whole thing and we're gonna we're gonna come hot right out of the gate the very first session I think exposing how this framework works is already so absolutely useful because right away you see well how does perception work and it turns out perception works in a very different way than you think. And it's even just by knowing that is something that could be revealed to you in therapy in a certain duration of time, that the view you have of the world is heavily influenced by the way you expect the world to be.

30:48Even just putting that on tap starts softening up and reflexing some of these deep models. So we're going to start just from how the brain creates experience so it sounds like if you'll allow me just a little one for each topic a little please absolutely it sounds that um i mean i mean i i don't want to pretend that we're independent of each other or anything like that we're not we influence the other a lot and we um yeah but this seems very aligned with you know the proposal i've been making for quite some time um that the uh it's a reading of the first noble truth um which is the my reading is with the very processes that make us adaptive make us perennially prone to self-deception and it sounds like that's what you yeah so i love oh gosh i love talking with you right on the back of that dogen is my hero for this from the zen tradition yeah very much he went around to all the buddhas of his time uh so-called buddhas who are saying well we're fully liberated we're fully enlightened and he would debate them and say he was very socratic very socratic isn't it because he's just causing problems everywhere he goes.

31:56One of the things he would say is, well, what could you mean that you are fully liberated? You have no ignorance. What could you mean that you have no ignorance? You have perfect perception. How could you have perfect perception if you have a meat brain and meat eyes and a meat body? What would perfect perception even be? Don't you mean meat relevant perception? And is that perfect perception? And so if liberation and the vanquishing of ignorance isn't, isn't that, then what are we talking about when we talk about liberation? And one of the things he reveals is something like your complete apprehension that you are a system that fabricates and creates its own reality is the beginning of liberation and the beginning of wisdom.

32:39And then wisdom is ongoing. It's not a, it's not a stop. It's the, it's the constant metacognitive process of acknowledging that the world that I am experiencing is always going to be inundated with my own beliefs, my own experiences, my own biases. That's actually the liberative step, not the evacuation of that. So he said, just like a flower falls from a tree, can't be reattached. He says, the second you're born into a body with a human mind, you can't get out of ignorance. It will always be dim-sighted is his term. Perception will always be dim-sighted. The only thing you can do then is be non dim sighted about your dim sightedness.

33:20Yeah. Knowing that you don't know. Yeah. That's the definitive step. So now just in the neuroscience, that's exactly what we're going to do. Class one, because the neuroscience, and I think, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a misstep to say, and I say this frequently that this is the neuroscience of emptiness. I think that's what we've got on our hands here. It's a really wonderful neuroscience framework for thinking about emptiness in the Buddhist sense, because what it shows is that indeed, the experiences that we're having are going to be endogenously generated or self-created in all sorts of important ways.

33:54And that's a really important thing to know, because it allows this backward step that if you don't like the world you're living in, yeah, it could be the world dynamics. Of course it could be. But very often, it's the lens through which the world is being generated. And it's imminently in your hands if you know where to put the pressure to untwist that lens and to help that lens be into a better shape and notice how that's already then making you step back and say but that has that's part of meaning and therefore i've got to rethink we have to rethink how meaning is working uh totally and we're going to do that because i think like one of the great things to pull out of this is how important beliefs are and what you think about yourself and what you think about the world that They're not side effects.

34:40They're not like uninteresting leftovers. You're absolutely at the heart of the reality generating matrix that your brain and nervous system are. So we're going to start there from the predictive mind. Right. And we're going to do like, this is going to be science-based, but it's going to be really digestible and really useful. I don't want to just do this like a sense. If anybody can make this stuff digestible, it's you, Mark. oh thanks for that i and you know the one place i'm gonna blow my own horn with you i've been with you in a pub where you made this digestible to a bunch of people who have been drinking beer for over an hour and you were wildly successful and i was there so yeah let's start from you think you see a beer okay let's um so um we're gonna start from the predictive mind and experience we're going to move on to feelings, emotions, and moods through the same framework, because if we're going to talk about what it is to be well, we have to be talking about what are emotions, what are feelings.