A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything

http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/a-neuroscientists-theory-of-everything

by dnetesn • 6 years ago

107 48 6 years ago

boothead• 6 years ago

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

obiefernandez2• 6 years ago

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

I’ve done some so-called heroic doses that dissolved my ego, what he calls depersonalization. If one is not prepared for that sort of thing to happen and/or doesn’t have the appropriate setting or people around to make sure you don’t hurt yourself or others then yeah it can certainly turn into a bad trip.

diffrinse3• 6 years ago

Really not seeing people go in on this, trips aren't free lunch. If not for friends, I would have had a real bad trip at an Amon Tobin concert. Some of us, our brain wants to defend itself against the disintegration and it doesn't get pretty.

yters• 6 years ago

What do you see and feel during a bad trip?

suifbwish• 6 years ago

Spiders everywhere

shoes_for_thee2• 6 years ago

"I was given this drug in order to pull myself out of my previous extremely low-level of consciousness. The people who are with me seemed to be friends but I now realize they are therapists who are struggling to put me into a place where I can properly express myself, which has heretofore been impossible. I seem to be relearning how to speak. Facial expressions and crying are more effective. When this is over I will go back to my previous state but be entirely unaware that I am essentially disabled. Maybe my therapists are my parents and they are teaching me the meaning of basic words."

it's complicated. i haven't taken acid in a decade or more.

tasty_freeze• 6 years ago

Not from personal experience, just from what I've read...

One kind of bad trip is where you are aware you have taken a drug, but you are convinced you screwed up the dose this time and you are dying, and are filled with regret and fear that won't abate for hours. Or you 100% believe you are stuck in this new state and there is no way to get back to normal. Some people can have PTSD from it.

Another is you are confused enough that you have forgotten you have even taken a drug and might not even remember the stuff you were doing after the fact. But when you come around you find yourself in a jail cell or a hospital bed and realize that oh, crap, things must have gone horribly wrong. That's when you find out your roommate tried to calm you down but you apparently thought they were trying to take your soul so you ran into the street and stripped off your clothes to make it harder for the soul-stealers to grab you, then the police were called and wrestled your sweaty body to the ground and then you peed in the back seat of the police car. That kind of stuff.

nefitty• 6 years ago

I took mushrooms once at a strange house. I didn’t correctly anticipate how strong they were. The kitchen table had violent police tabloid magazines that I skimmed before my trip. Insanely terrible idea.

I ended up staying up for hours hallucinating that the world was covered in undercover police. A car would drive by and I would see the police. It was just a barrage of bad thoughts stacking on each other. Reality got lost somewhere and I forgot that I was tripping. I basically thought I was in a modern 1984-style society.

I could have probably kicked myself out of that with some logical thoughts: “How does the government afford to make 80% of the population a cop?” The feelings were too overwhelming for me to get there, and I don’t think my friends realized how bad of a time I was having.

cmehdy• 6 years ago

Many things can happen, and it's hard to be exhaustive when the stories are so subjective and not a lot of research can be done on psychedelics yet.

First, for some people, psychedelics can trigger things they were not aware of (but likely in their family history or personal history) such as schizophrenia or episodes of past trauma. This is not really the norm, but is sometimes not mentioned by people who are afraid of the "demonization" of those drugs.

Depending on the dose, the drug, and the susceptibility of the person, one can also experience gaps in memory which create confusion in the moment (and in some cases after the trip), or a psychotic state (which can end up being manageable with knowledge and support for some, and a trip to sleep through the night in a hospital for others).

If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. For example: seeing horrific visions (when closing your eyes most often, sometimes even with eyes open), having a "body feeling" that just doesn't feel quite right (messed up proprioception, nausea), having thought patterns that take you down a negative spiral..

Examples of horrific visions: fractals of upsetting images that may or may not be related to experiences you've had (from past traumas to movies, or even random bits of your perception you weren't quite aware of).

Examples of body feeling issues: feeling like parts of the body aren't where they are ("my nose is a few centimeters off"), speech impediment/slurring, losing control of limbs temporarily (which can create a lot of fear and confusion)

Examples of thought patterns that create panic/anxiety/fear: thinking that the current state will last forever (forgetting that the psychedelic effect will wear off), feeling a lot of emotions without understanding the specific cause, perceiving some past trauma and not being resilient against it, heightened empathy being overwhelming, forgetting that perceptions are altered which affects behaviour ("I can't walk this path because it's too steep" on a flat path).

There's so much more to say about that, and also so much to say about proper preparation (set, setting, support) which can prevent almost all the problems listed, but it's important to remember that psychedelics are not a joke. Particularly so when getting into high doses, "research chemicals", or simply powerful ones (DMT comes to mind for intensity, or STP/DOM for length)

obiefernandez2• 6 years ago

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

I could go on and on but the bottom line is that yes it did eventually wear off and I was fine, but left with a lasting, visceral sense of empathy for the plight of mentally ill people.

lux• 6 years ago

In my worst trip (LSD), I started vividly experiencing other people's lives, including seeing through the eyes of a child, a heroin addict, and a dying old man among several others, and I was convinced this reality was just one of them and not the one I was supposed to be in, and that if I didn't figure out a way to end up in the right one by the end I'd be stuck in whichever I was in last.

I definitely had a panicked feeling towards those around me trying to help, and felt they were trying to deceive me and trap me in their reality, with one friend in particular being the orchestrator of the deceipt. Thankfully, I have good friends who worked through it with me and who were experienced in psychedelic use.

That said, I've done acid several times since, as well as mushrooms, and I do plan on doing them again. I feel like every time I do, there's new work for me to do on myself that they bring to the forefront whether I want to look at it or not, and that's been overall quite helpful for me. Psychedelics are no "party drug", but rather a serious thing undertaken for the purpose of exploring ideas like identity and meaning, and to be done in the right setting and with the right supports. I'm also quite interested in trying DMT for the same reasons, if I could find any around here...

shoes_for_thee2• 6 years ago

I believe depersonalization is distinct from ego death,

where ego death is the dissolution of boundaries between self/non-self but an observer exists and sensations are experienced (but by whom?)

And depersonalization is the inability to identify sensations as belonging to the observer: "Stuff is happening 'out there'", like watching a movie.

I could be wrong. This is just my understanding.

dqpb• 6 years ago

My take is that Karl Friston's description of depersonalization is a technical description of the partition that occurs in the neural communication graph, along with some hints of the qualitative experience of that partition.

Ego-death on the other hand is a name that the community of connoisseurs have given to a common qualitative experience, which does not attempt to explain the underlying physical process that causes it.

oarabbus_2• 6 years ago

What would be fascinating is to reconcile how dissociatives (Ketamine, Salvia, etc) and psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc) produce a similar end-states, despite operating primarily on different classes receptors, and most fascinatingly, having the _opposite_ "high-level" effects on the brain!

Psychedelics operate primarily on serotonin (5HT2A) receptors, and are said to "increase connectivity" and brain activity when measured via fMRI. Dissociatives, on the other hand, operate on NMDA receptors, and _decrease_ brain activity when studied.

While the actual qualitative experience may differ, it's fascinating how "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" both lead to the same place - ego death, depersonalization, feelings of connectivity and one-ness, experiences of seeing gods/aliens/the universe, etc.

type02• 6 years ago

"more connectivity" and "less connectivity"

It's not "more/less connectivity". It's likely just dis-inhibition of negative feeback loops that leads to the same result. Interesting question is what pharmacology would be best to study consciousness, if or when one could define it.

diffrinse3• 6 years ago

A lot of these ideas have been trending for over a hundred years, as early as the psychoanalyst Freud and some as early as the philosopher Kant, its interesting to see how they bore out in the domain of science:

- The Pleasure Principle states that the mind's goal to ensure relative homeostasis.

- The mind does this by navigating a specific course of entropy in the face of the external world, this is the Death Drive.

- Selfhood is constituted by the presence of an Other and forces our minds to form an ego as a defensive behavior. Like in Kant and Hume, for Freud, the imaginative capacity of human beings is a very distinct and modular component of human sentience, used by various forces and for various effects, because it basically provides the bare material our minds bricolage into various schemas and apparatuses, such as an ego, phobias, etc. And already we're at the distinction between signifier and signified.

- Time is not a property of the unconscious, its an artifact of negotiating with the outside world. Literally the horizon of sensory organization as we have to sample the world discretely or go insane.

- Traumatic memories tend to be recalled in a 'timeless', 'disjoint', or 'dilated' fashion; trauma is literally the overwhelming and paralyzation of the defensive-sensory layer as a final defense. There is a continuous magnitude stuck in your discrete sampling system.

- The purpose of therapy/psychoanalysis is to, much like its early life, provide it the tools for assimilating this continuous magnitude so that you can begin to act by discovering its contours sorta like how people figure out what Black Holes are: by their effects - the purpose of free association is observe the automatic tendencies of the brain in how it uses sensory bare material to describe its organization, dreams, jokes, etc are places of life where this is easier to come by than when the ego is holding court.

Both in Freud and in OP, Kant holds dominion. It's starting to look like his speculations were pretty damn good. For example, Kant is the first person to say, well before Roger Penrose, that we know there's external matter out there we just have no way of directly attesting to it via sense-experience since that'd be circular as the brain's duty is to generate unified sense-experience.

So there's only subjectivity, you ask? NO! Not at all! Kant's entire point is that precisely because there is a necessary structure to subjective human experience, subjective human experience is objective, meaning there are rules that can be ultimately be derived about its form and operation.

mchem• 6 years ago

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

If you haven’t read Rovelli’s beautiful account of the relationship between time, entropy, and space, I highly recommend purchasing it from your local bookstore. The hardback version is especially worth acquiring!

diffrinse3• 6 years ago

I should add that when I say rules, I mean rules that can be described mathematically.

I hope someone with more time for these kinds of subjects can correct any inaccuracies

dandare• 6 years ago

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

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

9q97• 6 years ago

Short answer: no!

Friston's work is (in)famous for being so vague as to be completely untestable. He has been criticised over the extreme vagueness of his ideas many times, and he has never given a good answer. Sometimes some of his followers try to make it testable as neuroscience or useful for AI. Both have failed so far. As far as I can see, leading working neuroscientists don't take this Friston / free-engery stuff seriously. He's even got a parody Twitter account now: https://twitter.com/farlkriston

He now claims to have the best COVID model based on free-energy. Can I please see the code and form my own opinion? Has anybody seen this code?

sampo• 6 years ago

Here is some article, and there is a software note in the end with some links. I didn't really check it out, though. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04463

ruralman3• 6 years ago

See https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/. At the bottom:

"The figures in these manuscripts can be reproduced using annotated (MATLAB/Octave) code that is available as part of the free and open source academic software SPM. The routines are called by a demonstration script that can be invoked by typing DEM_COVID or DEM_COVID_X at the MATLAB prompt. At the time of writing, these routines are available in the development version of the next SPM release."

In my view Friston's ideas are hardly vague. Hard to understand sometimes, yes, but when I have put in the effort to understand them I have always been rewarded.

jotm• 6 years ago

Ah, that's the word I've been trying to recall while reading the article.

Lots of big words, with nothing specific, nothing actionable. Vague as it can be.

Doesn't help that the phrase "free energy" drives most people with any expertise either mad or catatonic. Conspiracy theorist have ruined it.

ccvannorman• 6 years ago

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

In other words one optimization for living is to seek out and maximize surprise!

I definitely agree with the compression of information and simulation of potential futures as a default operation for brains, but I don't agree with the blanket "reduction in surprise" as the reward function, as it's much more nuanced.

In other words, cave-man could have been more successful minimizing lifetime surprise, if he sat in his cave all day, not playing with tools or meeting other tribes, and that's clearly not what happened.

gooseus• 6 years ago

Likewise in science all progress happens with surprises, not, "Aha! Just as I thought." but "Oh, that's interesting..."

I'd say that the bulk of scientific progress is of the "Ah, just as we thought." sort, but it's not the kind that gets headlines (because humans are wired to take notice and remember surprising information, making them less likely to be surprised in the future).

Isn't the drive to create "surprising" results in science creating situations like the replication crisis and incentivizing researchers to manipulate results so as to make them more surprising?

calineczka• 6 years ago

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

justanotherjoe• 6 years ago

I think you are in some way looking for those information, or have a place ready for those information in your mind, and therefore those are not really a surprise. Anyway, I'm very curious, what are the things you do to 'push your boundaries to find such surprises'?

bondarchuk• 6 years ago

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

__bradmwalker__• 6 years ago

There won't be a materialist theory of consciousness. https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extr...

meh2frdf• 6 years ago

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

outlace• 6 years ago

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

A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything

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