Make my own thinking come out of superposition

Intro

Just logging some stuff into a micropost, mainly for my own sake and sanity. Thinking is action in imagined space. That is fine. There is a fundamental difference, yet and still, between imagined space and physical reality. Embodiment, the messiness if microphysics.

There is one fundamental, categorical difference between the imagined and the physical realms I want to highlight. Imagination can sustain multiple option paths (superposition) no problem, physical reality can do so at the quantum level but not at the macroscopic scale, it is the exception rather than the norm.

This means, that putting your thoughts into action by speaking out loud, writing it up, or do something else yet in a way which is more conventionally associated with “action”, like changing your pension plan, going to a protest, helping someone out, forces your superposition bundle of thinking to decide, for once.

In many cases you can still change your mind later on, but importantly, forcing the collapse of your imagination waves into one single thing for a moment, makes a difference for all your thinking, as it percolates back through your brain. OK, that took longer than I anticipated.

Predictive brain presentation

So, I did a presentation on the “predictive brain” at a work event a week ago. There, we have a weekly meeting with the purpose of keeping in sync as a team and we are experimenting with formats of how this can be accomplished in an effective and entertaining way. Currently, the format is, one person picks “anything” they would like to rant about uninterruptedly and then do so. This was my turn, and the “predictive brain” was is just the most astonishing thing I learned about in my entire life.

Why is that? “Predictive brain” means a couple of things. First, it changes who’s got the lead from the world to yourself. Our organism is not a stimulus-response machine, but is actually ahead of the wav(e).

Perception is not a passive taking in of things “as they are objectively”. Perception is active prediction of what is going to happen next, from the micro- to the macro-scale. You must not underestimate how your assumptions change your perception. Testified to by cognitive illusions (eg the perceived size of the moon when near the horizon). And many more, literature to the testimony, see my review of “Surfing uncertainty” book by Andy Clark.

Predictive brain books: Seven and a half lessons about the brain

After my presentation I read “Seven and a half lessons about the brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett on recommendation by a witness colleague. I can only recommend it, very compact read and it has all the things I cherish, plus some I wasn’t even aware of. For a super-tight summary, let me go through these three items:

• Energy budget: I was “brought up” in these things by the concept of “the brain is a motion computer” and what we use for thinking is motion metaphors. Probably true to large extent. Lisa adds a concept on top, saying that the brain is a budgeting machine. What it does is to allocate the body budget. Where do we spend. Looking back, looking ahead, what is important this next second, this next hour, this next week. This is what informs its activity.
• The triune brain is fake. The triune brain is the idea, originating from the 1950s roughly, that we have the reptile brain, the limbic brain, and rational control by way of the frontal cortex. It’s crap, all these people work together to create the experience of the self.
• And yeah, it is predictions all the way down. One of the seven + 1/2 lessons is about how perception is prediction.

Predictive brain books: Eye and brain

And sure, I started rereading Eye and brain, a 1960s book by Richard Gregory, neuropsychologist. The books is in its 10th or so edition, extremely well informed and on the cutting edge. It undoes a lot of riddles and false understandings about anything from the physiology at the front to what happens at the back. Let me just say one thing: vision without touch is impossible, aka not happening. Realizing that the “image” of the world was projected on the retina upside-down, people were wondering, do babys have to learn this? Nyearp. Maybe, the self-image of touch is upside-down. What is the intrinsic coordinate system of the brain?

Social fallout and where to go next

We went on to ponder the ongoing rise of fascism and AI slop, how these mindsets go together, and what we gonna do about it. I went into the realization how I have come to hate AI aesthetics, in art, in code, in culture, in business, in thinking. Good reference probably, Karen Hao: Empire of AI. The mindset is disgusting.

OK, I downloaded our twitter archives a while ago, and then what. I’ve been following this “rewilding” narrative put forward by Venkatesh Rao, which I appreciate. The rewilding is a kind of anti-social-media stance, saying well lets put up all these bespoke websites instead of insta posts, to make the web wild, distributed and more independent again. Enabled by vibe coding these fancy one-off websites. To some extent I like the notion, to some other extend I worry deeply about maintainability. Not that social media crap is maintainable, anything else but. Either way, the idea is to publish your twitter archive as a custom web site using vibe coding apprioach.

Asking myself about the next action point, I decided to do “nothing” again, rather get another book and read it, I bought “Chokepoint capitalism” by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Techno-feudalism, right. Work for free to increase Zuck’s or some other useless character’s value, such that they can use these resources to fuel our depression. Keep you posted.

Post mortem

I write this, and last week’s post, without diving into notes and without pasting slop. Last week’s post took me 30 minutes literally, this one was more :sweat:

Some links are missing and could be filled in, hit me up if you can’t find them using a search engine.

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