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Consciousness Catching Its Own Tail





Excerpt to first link above:


"Jake Eaton: I’ve noticed while reading your work over the past few weeks: There's a warmth, a personal voice in your writing, both on your Substack and in your academic papers. I think a lot of people in the meditation/consciousness/neuroscience space tend to hide themselves behind empiricism, and shy away from sharing their own experiences.


I read your papers and feel a personality coming through in a way that I don't from, say, some of the neuroscience labs. I wonder how you think about that. 


Ruben Laukkonen: No one’s really mentioned that to me before, but I think you're right.Part of the inquiry into reality for me is this — the key thing is sincerity.


As scientists, we're trying to be sincere in our attempts to understand the world. There's been this strange cultural idea of pretending to be a third person when it's you writing and saying what you think.


To me, that’s a little bit insincere. As part of our pursuit of knowledge, I think we need to somehow build in our first-personness. You can't remove the scientist from the science completely, especially when you're writing and you're talking about theory or ideas. 


Early on, I embraced being honest about what I think. In this field especially — which is tracking the first person and the third person — I think we have to be very honest about how our own experience is feeding in. If we're not, we end up pretending that our experiences aren't influencing our science. But ultimately they are. That’s not a bad thing — as long as we're transparent about it.


J: I’ve had this a version of this conversation with other scientists in the U.S. working in meditation — that it’s not yet possible to put forward your full self, given the way that the scientific funding landscape works. Do you feel similarly? You’ve worked in both the Netherlands and Australia. Is there a cultural difference there?


R: No, I think that’s probably right about the current funding situation. But I just don't value that enough to sacrifice being honest. There's another subset of funders and readers that appreciate that, so things have worked out fine for me. I think at a personal level, most people agree with what I'm saying. They think this pretense of pretending our own experiences aren't feeding into our scientific ideas is BS and it's just better to be honest. 


But it has costs and benefits. In some people's eyes it'll come across as either woo or bias. In other people's experience, it'll come across as honest and transparent. I think ultimately the latter will win out, but we need to articulate why this is important. 


J: I wanted to talk to you today about your paper with Karl Friston and Shamil Chandaria, A beautiful loop.


I'm going to assume that our readers have some basic familiarity with predictive processing, so maybe you can start by describing how the paper builds upon predictive processing, and what it is that you, Shamil, and Karl are trying to do in the paper.


R: Predictive processing — also called active inference, or “the free energy principle” — has really taken cognitive neuroscience, mind sciences, and people interested in phenomenology by storm.


The reason is that it seems to track how experience unfolds, and does so much better than other overarching models of mind and consciousness. You can find active inference models applied to everything — from emotion, to sensory perception, such as the visual system, to interoception, all the way up to higher cognition thought, self-construct, and then even to the edges of psychedelic experiences."

 
 

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