8 ms·

A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything

107 points by dnetesn 6y ago

boothead 6y 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
obiefernandez 6y 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.
- diffrinse 6y 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 6y ago
  What do you see and feel during a bad trip?
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    Spiders everywhere
  - shoes_for_thee 6y 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.
    - slfnflctd 6y ago
      This one hurts. You're not alone in having experienced it.
  - tasty_freeze 6y 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.
- shoes_for_thee 6y 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 6y 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_ 6y 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.
  - type0 6y 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.
    - oarabbus_ 6y ago
      I'm not sure that is correct. Psilocybin: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920304663 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... Ketamine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 It is well known that dissociative anaesthetics reduce brain activity and communication between brain regions. Classical psychedelics on the other hand tend to increase global brain activity, including that between regions (i.e. connectivity)
diffrinse 6y 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 6y 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!
dandare 6y 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.
- 9q9 6y 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 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 6y 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04463
    - 9q9 6y ago
      Thanks. I looked at that link but could not find the code that lets me reproduce the results in the paper. Maybe I didn't look hard enough?
  - ruralman 6y ago
    See https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/ 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.
ccvannorman 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justanotherjoe 6y 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 6y 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__ 6y ago
There won't be a materialist theory of consciousness. https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extrinsic-appearance-of-inner-experience-auid-1372 https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extr...
- meh2frdf 6y ago
  That article doesn’t really say anything, unless I’m missing the point, please unpack your understanding of it?
outlace 6y 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.

107 points by dnetesn 6y 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

obiefernandez 6y 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.

diffrinse 6y 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 6y ago
What do you see and feel during a bad trip?
- suifbwish 6y ago
  Spiders everywhere
- shoes_for_thee 6y 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.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    This one hurts. You're not alone in having experienced it.
- tasty_freeze 6y 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.
shoes_for_thee 6y 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 6y 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_ 6y 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.
- type0 6y 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.
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    I'm not sure that is correct. Psilocybin: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920304663 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... Ketamine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 It is well known that dissociative anaesthetics reduce brain activity and communication between brain regions. Classical psychedelics on the other hand tend to increase global brain activity, including that between regions (i.e. connectivity)

diffrinse 6y 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 6y 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!

dandare 6y 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.

9q9 6y 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 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 6y 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04463
  - 9q9 6y ago
    Thanks. I looked at that link but could not find the code that lets me reproduce the results in the paper. Maybe I didn't look hard enough?
- ruralman 6y ago
  See https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/ 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.

ccvannorman 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justanotherjoe 6y 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 6y 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__ 6y ago

There won't be a materialist theory of consciousness. https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extrinsic-appearance-of-inner-experience-auid-1372 https://iai.tv/articles/matter-is-nothing-more-than-the-extr...

meh2frdf 6y ago
That article doesn’t really say anything, unless I’m missing the point, please unpack your understanding of it?

outlace 6y 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.