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Open Socrates

2026-05-05T20:12:31Z

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Meno's Paradox */

== Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example ==
* Why am I doing any of this?
* You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
* Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
* The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
* The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
* The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
* "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
* The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
* Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
* Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
=== 1. The Tolstoy Problem ===
* One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
* Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
* You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
* Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
* You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
* Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
* When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
* What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
* Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
* Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
** Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
** Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
*You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
*Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
*Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
*Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
*But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
*We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
*Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
*All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
*The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
*In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
*Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
*Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
*What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
*Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
*If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
*Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.
=== 2. Load-Bearing Answers ===
* Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
* There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
* A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
* When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
* When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
* I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
* What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
* We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
* One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
* By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
* Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
* If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
* We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
* People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
* Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
* What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
* Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
* We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
* You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
* No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
* The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
* While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
* There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
* You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
* If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
* Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
* When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
* Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
* When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
* If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
* But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
* The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
=== 3. Savage Commands ===
* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
* Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
* These commands are savage.
* When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
* As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
* Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
* A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
* We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
* It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
* Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
* Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
* The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
* For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
* Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
* Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
* We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
* Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
* Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
* Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
* Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
* We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
* According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
* Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
* Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
* The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
* We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
* You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
* We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
* Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
* I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
* The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
* Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
* Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
* Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
* Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
* All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
* The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
** No one deserves to be harmed.
** It's never right to do wrong.
** Being bad can never be what makes something good.
*Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
*When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
*When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
*The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
*Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
*Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
*The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
*The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
*Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
*If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
*Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
*Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
*The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
*A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
*It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
*Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
*Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

=== 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
*To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world - but so is death.
*For Socrates, when Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as "the just" and "the advantageous" he is not describing two things out there. He's just wavering. There's only one thing out there: the good.
*What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational version of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.Three strands of Western ethics

==== Kantian Ethics (Deontology/Contractualism) - The Kinship Answer ====

* Constraining one's actions by respect for humanity (in one's own person and that of others).
* Foregrounds respect for each individual's place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer
* Center's ethics around membership ("I belong to the group of rational beings.")
* Legalistic/regulative form - works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint.
* Caring about justice.
* Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. They believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger.
* Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal's kinship relation to itself.
* Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality.
* Kant's community is "the kingdom of ends", and his test for an action's value "the categorical imperative".
* John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts.

==== Utilitarianism (Consequentialism) Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick - The Bodily Answer ====

* Bring about the greatest good for the greatest number.
* Foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer
* Centers ethics around experience ("I feel pleasure and pain")
* Calculative form - works by cost-benefit analysis.
* Caring about advantage
* Comes out of Epicureanism. They showed that is is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
* So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life

==== Virtue Ethics (Neo-Aristotelian ethics) ====

* Do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
* Believes that to exercise virtue - to behave as a just, courageous, wise, and decent person does - is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society.
* If one is raised well in a good society, the voices of the body and of society will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue.
* Kalon (beautiful, noble) - combines the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
* The virtue ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles, but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: you can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
* Aristotle agrees with Socrates that there really is no tension between justice and advantage

==== Neo-Socratic ethics ====
*Callard will propose through this book.
*The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
*Socratism is similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
*Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system.
*Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and those pertaining to kinship.
*We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth between an impulse towards a calculative or a legalistic form of resolving the question.
*For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either or both) of the savage commands.
*Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as "the will", which will be tasked with battling it. The virtue ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures.
*If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don't know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
*The three features of Socratism (that we don't now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person) add up to an intellectualism that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
*The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways that are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called "knowledge".
*Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need; the need to already know. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
*There is no firm ground, and you don't ever get to take foundations for granted.
*There is a problem with utopia. It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we'd recoil from. This is the paradox of utopia and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
*The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
*Plato (not Socrates!) divides the soul into three parts:
**The spiritual part - Which reflects the demands of kinship.
**The appetitive part - Which reflects the demands of the body.
**The rational part - the natural ruler over the other two.
*The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very question to whic the other two commands provide automatic answers - this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.

== Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
* Each of the three ingredients of Socratism, open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity - conceals a paradox.
* We tend to prefer problem-solving to inquiry, which is why, so often, when faced with a genuine question, our first instinct is to try to turn it into a problem. When Einstein was confronted with "What is Time?", he turned it into "How would clocks behave under various circumstances?"
* Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
* Kleist: "I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself."
* Kleist's insight - that I can give you more than what I seem myself to have - is Socratic.
* Our tendency is to assume that thinking is like breathing: something each person does for themselves.
* Aporia - The absence of a route or a way forward or path by which to proceed.
* As a midwife, Socrates claims that what his interlocutor is doing is recollecting something they already know, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.
* Is Socrates as arrogant as he seems, or as ignorant as he claims to be? Is he a provocative gadfly or a cooperative midwife?
* Plato's dialogues are typically divided into three periods:
** Early - Showcasing the person and views of the historical Socrates, with a special focus on the events surrounding his death.
** Middle - In which Plato is beginning to produce and to put forward some of his own original ideas.
** Late - Where he does so to an even greater degree and Socrates either does not appear or is not the main speaker.
*Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. The gadfly and the midwife are the same person.
*James: "We must know the truth; and we must avoid error - these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws."
**If you have the goal of avoiding falsehood, you should always suspend judgment (be skeptical)
***If a question strikes you as one that leaves you fully free to indulge in the luxury of indefinitely holding out for objective evidence, you can call it a "Cliffordian question".
***Descartes started in a Cliffordian manner, but his skepticism seems more credible than the edifice he builds afterwards.
**If you have the goal of securing truths, you should never suspend judgment (be credulous).
***James wants to invoke this "preliminary faith", which he also calls a "will to believe", only in areas of inquiry where the question is momentous, and where there is a need to act. But even in theoretical pursuits, we are forced to invest in the truth of an idea in advance of decisive evidence.
***Aristotle starts in a more Jamesian way, but the risk is that he isn't sufficiently skeptical
**Trying to be credulous and skeptical at the same time is like trying to go forward and backward at the same time or trying to build what you are concurrently tearing down.
*Anscombe pointed out that although a person usually finds out what other people are doing by observation - by going out and looking at the evidence - a person doesn't find out what he himself is doing in that same way. If I say I'm talking, it's because that's what I intend to be doing.
*Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don't count as knowing what they are doing. Still, a person clearly stands in some especially non-skeptical relation to those events in the world that are her own actions.
*But even if we don't have knowledge of what we are doing, it seems true to say some of our beliefs about what we are doing are distinctive; they seem to have been freed from the usual demand to check whether what we believe is actually the case. We could call these "Jamesian beliefs".
*Socrates conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person the avoidance of error. The Jamesian rule and the Cliffordian rule don't conflict if they are given to two different people.
*If refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? It is because they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do. Socrates comes across as someone who offers to cooperatively divide the task of shopping - and then follows you around the supermarket taking things our of your cart and putting them back on the shelf. If he seems to be interfering with your part of the work, that's only because you've inflated the size of your part.
*You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you're sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do.
*Arguing is stressful - thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that's because you're not actually thinking.
*Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call "thinking to ourselves", that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
* Error does not tend to survive introspective awareness of itself; when you catch your mind in going astray, at that very moment your mind cleans up its act.
* You can look at the erroneous though, but you can no longer look at the world through it. Our errors are blind spots, which is why real open-mindedness is so difficult.
* Sentences in the form "p is the case, but I believe it isn't" or "p is the case, but I don't believe it is" - are sometimes called "Moore sentences" after GE Moore.
* The Moore sentence is not a contradiction; it is a blind spot.
* Conventional wisdom says it's just straightforwardly impossible to believe or sincerely assert a Moore sentence.
* Socrates understood refutation as the hallmark of his philosophical activity, and the Socratic dialogues even have a name for the experience in which refutation culminates: aporia
* Aporia - being refuted - is something that is experienced and felt by the person who undergoes it.
* Being refuted feels like ignorance, confusion, perplexity, whereas once you have changed my mind, the perplexity is over and I think I am now in the right. And if I have suspended judgment I at least know I am not wrong, so that is a kind of safety as well.
* The possibility of asserting Moore sentences and the possibility of refutation are one and the same. What is at stake in Moore's paradox is nothing less that the practice of philosophy itself.
* Socrates is not telling Alcibiades that he is wrong, but getting Alcibiades to say, "I'm wrong" and then he's making sure that Alcibiades sees that those were his own words.
* Moore sentences are, first and foremost, evaluative judgments about some belief. The problem with first personally asserting a Moore sentence is that it would require me to take a critical attitude towards my own thoughts, and I do not seem able to do this. When I assess what you think, I compare it to the way the world really is. But looking at how the world really is is how I figure out what I think in the first place. When I ask myself what I think about something, I am already asking what is true about that thing. There is no room for a separate assessment step, which means that my thoughts are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* To say I am biased to myself is a wild understatement; I am not more likely to judge my beliefs true; I am utterly incapable of judging them false. I am not evaluating them at all, because they are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* The act of seeing is, in some way, self-blind. What does the seeing cannot see itself, just as what does the knowing cannot know itself - at least, not by itself.
* Suspending judgment is the conceptual analog to twisting or turning my body to bring parts of myself I can't usually see into view.
* It is Socrates who identifies the philosophically troubling form of self-blindness, namely our stubborn inability to subject certain of our beliefs - the ones whose guidance matters most ot us - to evaluative standards. It is our load-bearing beliefs - the ones that answer untimely questions - that we struggle to evaluate.
* Socrates is playing Clifford, whereas his interlocutor is playing James. The interlocutor uses his answers to furnish the thesis to be examined, whereas Socrates uses his answers to examine that thesis. It is because the Clifford role is entirely responsive, skeptical, and critical and negative that Socrates denies having said anything.
* Once the project of saying what Alcibiades thinks is distributed over two people, "p, but I don't believe it" becomes both sayable and thinkable. Socrates discovered that the space of speech is more capacious that the space of thought. It allows a person to see their own mistakes.
=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
* We are not sure what we mean by "think". Forget about machines. When do I myself count as thinking? Do nonhuman animals think? What is thinking? If we cannot answer these questions, we seem very far from bring able to say what it would be for a machine to think.
* Philosophical inquiry is not an attempt to solve well-defined problems; it is, instead, an attempt to ask important questions.
* When philosophical questions can be formulated as problems, that is when they leave the orbit of philosophy and become part of science or economics, etc.
* Meno's paradox calls into question the very possibility of searching: either the search is unnecessary, because you already have what you're look for, or it is impossible, because you don't know what you're looking fro, and so wouldn't know it if you found it.
* A problem is something you need to move out of the way so that you can go on with what you were doing before the problem arose. A question is a very different sort of beast. To ask a question is to be on a quest.
* When Socrates insists that Meno keep virtue whole and not split into parts, he is reminding Meno that "What is virtue?" is a question, not a problem.
* A misunderstanding characteristic of the primal scene (when a philosopher speaks philosophically for the first time with a non-philosopher) is when the philosopher is asked to provide a definition of the very term she hoped the conversation would explicate. The non-philosopher sees definition as the prerequisite for solving whatever problem the philosopher wanted us to solve, but there was no such problem. The philosopher wasn't posing a problem. She was asking a question.
* WVO Quine famously denied the existence of a priori knowledge; and even those who don't deny it outright might be inclined to limit its scope to math and logic.
* Socrates' commitment is to the possibility that there are real, genuine questions, and that improving our answers to these questions is a project worthy of our efforts.
* The Socratic method is inquisitive refutation, refutation cures normative self-blindness, inquiry allows us to ask questions (as opposed to solving problems). This is what thinking is.
* Thinking is the road from ignorance about the most important things to knowledge about them.
* A Socratic (as opposed to dictionary or stipulative) definition must come at the end, and not the beginning, of a process of inquiry: it is the upshot of having figured out what something really is.
* It is the Socratic method that allows us to think about untimely questions in an open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-directed manner.
* If I do multiplication, it is not obvious that what I have done counts as thinking. "Will computers ever be able to think?" is a difficult question. Someone who is convinced that deploying an algorithm such as multiplication amounts to thinking must concede not only that nonhuman calculators think, but that they are much better at it than we are.
* In order to qualify as a thinker, it is not good enough that the computer imitate a human being. It has to imitate a human being who is, in the paradigmatic sense of the word, thinking.

== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
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=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
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=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
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=== 10. Love ===
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=== 11. Death ===
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Open Socrates

2026-05-05T16:25:27Z

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge */

== Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example ==
* Why am I doing any of this?
* You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
* Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
* The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
* The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
* The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
* "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
* The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
* Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
* Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
=== 1. The Tolstoy Problem ===
* One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
* Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
* You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
* Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
* You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
* Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
* When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
* What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
* Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
* Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
** Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
** Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
*You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
*Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
*Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
*Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
*But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
*We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
*Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
*All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
*The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
*In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
*Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
*Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
*What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
*Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
*If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
*Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.
=== 2. Load-Bearing Answers ===
* Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
* There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
* A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
* When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
* When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
* I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
* What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
* We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
* One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
* By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
* Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
* If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
* We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
* People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
* Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
* What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
* Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
* We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
* You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
* No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
* The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
* While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
* There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
* You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
* If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
* Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
* When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
* Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
* When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
* If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
* But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
* The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
=== 3. Savage Commands ===
* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
* Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
* These commands are savage.
* When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
* As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
* Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
* A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
* We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
* It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
* Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
* Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
* The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
* For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
* Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
* Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
* We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
* Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
* Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
* Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
* Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
* We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
* According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
* Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
* Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
* The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
* We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
* You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
* We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
* Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
* I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
* The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
* Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
* Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
* Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
* Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
* All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
* The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
** No one deserves to be harmed.
** It's never right to do wrong.
** Being bad can never be what makes something good.
*Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
*When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
*When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
*The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
*Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
*Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
*The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
*The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
*Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
*If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
*Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
*Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
*The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
*A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
*It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
*Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
*Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

=== 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
*To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world - but so is death.
*For Socrates, when Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as "the just" and "the advantageous" he is not describing two things out there. He's just wavering. There's only one thing out there: the good.
*What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational version of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.Three strands of Western ethics

==== Kantian Ethics (Deontology/Contractualism) - The Kinship Answer ====

* Constraining one's actions by respect for humanity (in one's own person and that of others).
* Foregrounds respect for each individual's place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer
* Center's ethics around membership ("I belong to the group of rational beings.")
* Legalistic/regulative form - works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint.
* Caring about justice.
* Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. They believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger.
* Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal's kinship relation to itself.
* Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality.
* Kant's community is "the kingdom of ends", and his test for an action's value "the categorical imperative".
* John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts.

==== Utilitarianism (Consequentialism) Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick - The Bodily Answer ====

* Bring about the greatest good for the greatest number.
* Foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer
* Centers ethics around experience ("I feel pleasure and pain")
* Calculative form - works by cost-benefit analysis.
* Caring about advantage
* Comes out of Epicureanism. They showed that is is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
* So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life

==== Virtue Ethics (Neo-Aristotelian ethics) ====

* Do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
* Believes that to exercise virtue - to behave as a just, courageous, wise, and decent person does - is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society.
* If one is raised well in a good society, the voices of the body and of society will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue.
* Kalon (beautiful, noble) - combines the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
* The virtue ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles, but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: you can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
* Aristotle agrees with Socrates that there really is no tension between justice and advantage

==== Neo-Socratic ethics ====
*Callard will propose through this book.
*The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
*Socratism is similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
*Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system.
*Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and those pertaining to kinship.
*We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth between an impulse towards a calculative or a legalistic form of resolving the question.
*For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either or both) of the savage commands.
*Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as "the will", which will be tasked with battling it. The virtue ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures.
*If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don't know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
*The three features of Socratism (that we don't now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person) add up to an intellectualism that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
*The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways that are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called "knowledge".
*Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need; the need to already know. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
*There is no firm ground, and you don't ever get to take foundations for granted.
*There is a problem with utopia. It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we'd recoil from. This is the paradox of utopia and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
*The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
*Plato (not Socrates!) divides the soul into three parts:
**The spiritual part - Which reflects the demands of kinship.
**The appetitive part - Which reflects the demands of the body.
**The rational part - the natural ruler over the other two.
*The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very question to whic the other two commands provide automatic answers - this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.

== Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
* Each of the three ingredients of Socratism, open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity - conceals a paradox.
* We tend to prefer problem-solving to inquiry, which is why, so often, when faced with a genuine question, our first instinct is to try to turn it into a problem. When Einstein was confronted with "What is Time?", he turned it into "How would clocks behave under various circumstances?"
* Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
* Kleist: "I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself."
* Kleist's insight - that I can give you more than what I seem myself to have - is Socratic.
* Our tendency is to assume that thinking is like breathing: something each person does for themselves.
* Aporia - The absence of a route or a way forward or path by which to proceed.
* As a midwife, Socrates claims that what his interlocutor is doing is recollecting something they already know, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.
* Is Socrates as arrogant as he seems, or as ignorant as he claims to be? Is he a provocative gadfly or a cooperative midwife?
* Plato's dialogues are typically divided into three periods:
** Early - Showcasing the person and views of the historical Socrates, with a special focus on the events surrounding his death.
** Middle - In which Plato is beginning to produce and to put forward some of his own original ideas.
** Late - Where he does so to an even greater degree and Socrates either does not appear or is not the main speaker.
*Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. The gadfly and the midwife are the same person.
*James: "We must know the truth; and we must avoid error - these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws."
**If you have the goal of avoiding falsehood, you should always suspend judgment (be skeptical)
***If a question strikes you as one that leaves you fully free to indulge in the luxury of indefinitely holding out for objective evidence, you can call it a "Cliffordian question".
***Descartes started in a Cliffordian manner, but his skepticism seems more credible than the edifice he builds afterwards.
**If you have the goal of securing truths, you should never suspend judgment (be credulous).
***James wants to invoke this "preliminary faith", which he also calls a "will to believe", only in areas of inquiry where the question is momentous, and where there is a need to act. But even in theoretical pursuits, we are forced to invest in the truth of an idea in advance of decisive evidence.
***Aristotle starts in a more Jamesian way, but the risk is that he isn't sufficiently skeptical
**Trying to be credulous and skeptical at the same time is like trying to go forward and backward at the same time or trying to build what you are concurrently tearing down.
*Anscombe pointed out that although a person usually finds out what other people are doing by observation - by going out and looking at the evidence - a person doesn't find out what he himself is doing in that same way. If I say I'm talking, it's because that's what I intend to be doing.
*Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don't count as knowing what they are doing. Still, a person clearly stands in some especially non-skeptical relation to those events in the world that are her own actions.
*But even if we don't have knowledge of what we are doing, it seems true to say some of our beliefs about what we are doing are distinctive; they seem to have been freed from the usual demand to check whether what we believe is actually the case. We could call these "Jamesian beliefs".
*Socrates conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person the avoidance of error. The Jamesian rule and the Cliffordian rule don't conflict if they are given to two different people.
*If refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? It is because they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do. Socrates comes across as someone who offers to cooperatively divide the task of shopping - and then follows you around the supermarket taking things our of your cart and putting them back on the shelf. If he seems to be interfering with your part of the work, that's only because you've inflated the size of your part.
*You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you're sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do.
*Arguing is stressful - thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that's because you're not actually thinking.
*Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call "thinking to ourselves", that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
* Error does not tend to survive introspective awareness of itself; when you catch your mind in going astray, at that very moment your mind cleans up its act.
* You can look at the erroneous though, but you can no longer look at the world through it. Our errors are blind spots, which is why real open-mindedness is so difficult.
* Sentences in the form "p is the case, but I believe it isn't" or "p is the case, but I don't believe it is" - are sometimes called "Moore sentences" after GE Moore.
* The Moore sentence is not a contradiction; it is a blind spot.
* Conventional wisdom says it's just straightforwardly impossible to believe or sincerely assert a Moore sentence.
* Socrates understood refutation as the hallmark of his philosophical activity, and the Socratic dialogues even have a name for the experience in which refutation culminates: aporia
* Aporia - being refuted - is something that is experienced and felt by the person who undergoes it.
* Being refuted feels like ignorance, confusion, perplexity, whereas once you have changed my mind, the perplexity is over and I think I am now in the right. And if I have suspended judgment I at least know I am not wrong, so that is a kind of safety as well.
* The possibility of asserting Moore sentences and the possibility of refutation are one and the same. What is at stake in Moore's paradox is nothing less that the practice of philosophy itself.
* Socrates is not telling Alcibiades that he is wrong, but getting Alcibiades to say, "I'm wrong" and then he's making sure that Alcibiades sees that those were his own words.
* Moore sentences are, first and foremost, evaluative judgments about some belief. The problem with first personally asserting a Moore sentence is that it would require me to take a critical attitude towards my own thoughts, and I do not seem able to do this. When I assess what you think, I compare it to the way the world really is. But looking at how the world really is is how I figure out what I think in the first place. When I ask myself what I think about something, I am already asking what is true about that thing. There is no room for a separate assessment step, which means that my thoughts are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* To say I am biased to myself is a wild understatement; I am not more likely to judge my beliefs true; I am utterly incapable of judging them false. I am not evaluating them at all, because they are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* The act of seeing is, in some way, self-blind. What does the seeing cannot see itself, just as what does the knowing cannot know itself - at least, not by itself.
* Suspending judgment is the conceptual analog to twisting or turning my body to bring parts of myself I can't usually see into view.
* It is Socrates who identifies the philosophically troubling form of self-blindness, namely our stubborn inability to subject certain of our beliefs - the ones whose guidance matters most ot us - to evaluative standards. It is our load-bearing beliefs - the ones that answer untimely questions - that we struggle to evaluate.
* Socrates is playing Clifford, whereas his interlocutor is playing James. The interlocutor uses his answers to furnish the thesis to be examined, whereas Socrates uses his answers to examine that thesis. It is because the Clifford role is entirely responsive, skeptical, and critical and negative that Socrates denies having said anything.
* Once the project of saying what Alcibiades thinks is distributed over two people, "p, but I don't believe it" becomes both sayable and thinkable. Socrates discovered that the space of speech is more capacious that the space of thought. It allows a person to see their own mistakes.
=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
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== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
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=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
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=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
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=== 10. Love ===
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=== 11. Death ===
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Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-05-05T15:50:29Z

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Thought and Reason */

== 1. What is Consciousness? ==
*Aristotle believed that consciousness exists as a continuum of different types of souls:
**Plants have a vegetative or nutritive soul, which controls their growth, nutrition and reproduction.
**Animals have, in addition, a sensitive soul, which allows them to perceive things and move about, and they also have fears and desires.
**Humans have, in addition, a rational soul that allows them to reason and reflect.
*Locke and Hume came up with a properly materialist view of consciousness, but their explanations did not explain how each individual mind feels like a unified, individual phenomenon, rather than just a mass of unconnected experiences (binding problem)
*Chalmers sees the hard problem of consciousness as explaining this subjective sense we have as individuals of being us, with all that implies in terms of our specific responses to, say, a sunset or a work of art, the particular way we felt when we first fell in love or any personal experience, in purely material terms.
== 2. Tools and Symbols ==
* Parrington argues that human self-conscious awareness arose as a consequence of two other unique human attributes - our capacity for language and our ability to continually transform the world around us by designing and using tools.
* Engels, in 1876, proposed that humans first began to diverge significantly from other primates when our ancestors started walking on two legs. This freed the hands for using and designing tools in a systematic way to transform the world around them. Importantly, such design and subsequent use of different types of tools was carried out with other proto-humans in a socially cooperative manner. Because of the need to communicate with their neighbors about how to carry out such innovative actions, our ancestors also began to develop the first forms of language. Subsequently the development of both systematic tool design and use, and language, led to a dramatic growth and restructuring of the brain.
* Practically all of our interactions with the world are through tools that we have created.
* Human language, is an interconnected system of abstract symbols, linked together by grammar in such a way that it can convey complex meaning. It is for this reason that only human beings are able to use language to convey complex ideas like past, present, and future, individual versus society, location in space, and even more abstract concepts.
* We can see tool use and language as activities that do not just guide our interactions with the external world, but also act as "mental tools" that have transformed the brain in the process.
* Vygotsky argued that egocentric speech - children's tendency to talk to themselves as they play - is the first stage in a child starting to organize their actions using words and that while this form of speech seems to disappear, what is actually happening is it becomes internalized as "inner speech", which in adults plays a central role in the organization and development of our thoughts.
* Inner speech differs from outer speech in some important ways. It is likely to be much more rapid, and far more fluid in meaning, than the speech we use in conversation with others. There are also probably different types of inner speech, ranging from that which emerges from our innermost, half-formed thoughts to the type that structures our outer speech when we express ourselves to others.
== 3. Nerves and Brains ==
* Neurons contain:
** A cell body
** Dendrites - Tendrils that receive incoming signals from other neurons
** An axon - A long protuberance that conveys signals to the next neuron in the circuit
*When a neuron is stimulated through its dendrites, this triggers an electrical impulse called an "action potential", which races along the axon at speeds that can reach around 200mph in the fastest human neurons. The speed at which impulses can travel along an axon are greatly enhanced by a structure called a "myelin sheath". This is a fatty layer that both protects the axon but also allows the neural signal to jump between gaps in the sheath in a process called "saltatory conduction". At the end of the axon, the electrical impulse is transmitted to a dendrite on the next neuron in the circuit, at a gap between neurons called a "synapse". The action potential does this by stimulating the release of a chemical called a "neurotransmitter" into the synaptic gap. The neurotransmitter diffuses across the gap and, at the other side, it acts like a key in a lock to trigger a cellular response that activates a new action potential in the target neuron.
*The human brain is estimated to contain around 86bn neurons, linked by 100tn connections.
*Neurons make up half the brain. The rest is made up of glial cells including oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and microglia.
== 4. Evolving Minds ==
* Jellyfish are a simple type of large multicellular organism whose nervous system consists of:
** Sensory neurons - Which pick up signals from the environment.
** Motor neurons - Which trigger a response in the organism
** Interneurons - Which coordinate these two activities in the central nervous system (CNS).
*The human brain has three main parts:
**The forebrain - Includes:
***The Cerebellum - which has two hemispheres and a highly folded surface cortex
***The Cortex - Is particularly developed in humans, twice the expected area for a primate of our size
****Broca's area - For producing words
****Wernicke's area - For understanding words
****Sensory and motor maps, with most space taken up by nerves going from and to the lips, tongue and pharynx and to and from the hands and digits.
***The Limbic System - emotional or lizard brain
****Thalamus - Central postal-sorting depot channeling information into and out of the cortex
****Hypothalamus - Underneath the thalamus, regulates thirst, hunger, desire, reproduction, and the body clock
****Amygdala - Plays a central role in processing emotions, being involved in generating fearful, but also pleasurable sensations
****Hippocampus - Plays important roles in memory
**The midbrain - alos involved in processes such as vision, hearing, and movement
**The hindrain - Includes
***The Pons, which controls sleep
***The medulla, which regulates vital functions such as breathing and heart rate
***The cerebellum (little brain) - With, once again, two hemispheres and a highly folded surface. Involved in regulating and coordinating movement, posture, and balance and also in creativity and imagination.
== 5. Thought and Reason ==
* The combination of an almost unlimited vocabulary and an instinct for correct grammar is what provides human beings with the ability to communicate with other humans in a precise fashion and with a creativity that, while often only used in everyday, mundane circumstances, can allow some humans to reach dizzy heights of novel artistic or scientific expression.
* Spoken words, music, visual art, literature and film - all of these symbolic forms might be part of the thought process.
* Because our thoughts are so infused with the conceptual framework that language provides, it is almost impossible for us to imagine how it might feel to not have such a framework. Therefore, as a species, when we distinguish different colors or recognize that something happened in the past, as opposed to something that might happen in the future, or that we are an individual person and therefore distinct from other people, it can be easy to assume that other species have similar feelings.
* Inner speech and other inner symbols act like a transmission belt between thought and outward expression. However, that does not mean that human thought and speech are equivalent, since all our thoughts arise from a biological brain that has much in common with other species' brains.
== 6. The Sensual World ==
* All species on Earth, from unicellular bacteria to complex multicellular organisms like ourselves, have evolved ways to detect changes in the environment and respond accordingly, such activity being crucial to their survival. Demonstrating the unity of life on our planet, it is remarkable how similar, at least at the level of molecular biology, mechanisms of sensing the environment are between species. Such unity can be demonstrated by comparing the sense of a bacterium and a human.
* While one part of the visual cortex receives signals relating to an object's shape, another area receives ones about its color and another about whether the object is moving.
* Kittens kept in enclosures painted with only vertical lines never learned to see horizontal ones, for instance, a chair seat, while kittens only exposed to horizontal lines could not make out vertical ones, and would therefore bump into a chair leg.
* Human infants from about 8-10 months of age generally begin to notice the presence of snakes and spiders, avoid heights at the edge of a drop-off and withdraw at a stranger's approach.
* But there seems to be no evidence that human infants' responses to spiders, snakes, drops and strangers are either universal or primarily fearful. Instead, the responses were shown to be highly variable, driven initially primarily by curiosity rather than fear, and were very dependent on the context in which infants encounter such stimuli, for instance, fearful reactions by parents or carers. The extraordinary curiosity that human infants show in their encounters encourages them to explore new things, while maintaining the flexibility to develop a fear if they discover something truly threatening.
* The developing human brain is far more primed to respond to new experiences that the brains of other species, which undoubtedly affects our perception of the world around us.
* Human language provides a means for the expression of abstract concepts such as time and place, self vs other and so on, and through the medium of inner speech this brings abstraction into our inner thoughts. However, such an ability to think in abstract terms also affects the way we perceive the world.
* At the heart of conceptual thinking is the ability to group things hierarchically. In terms of color, this means humans have an overall concept of color, with the individual colors subordinate to this. Similarly, we have an overall concept of shape and subordinate to this are specific shapes, for instance, circles, squares, triangles and so on.
* Language is central to conceptual thinking because it allows us to describe concepts such as colors and shapes, and also to employ even more general terms, such as "characteristics" or "properties".
* Drawing does not require words, although language can accompany it, but it does require an ability to abstract. Such abstraction is shown by the fact that we can recognize a series of crudely drawn lines as a person as equally as we do a finely drawn, or photographic image. This is important in terms of perception because it means we also perceive the world as an abstraction. That such a capacity is a uniquely human ability is shown be the failure of attempts to teach apes representational drawing.
== 7. Learning and Memory ==
* Bullet point
== 8. Mind Chemistry ==
* Bullet point
== 9. Philosophy of Mind ==
* Bullet point
== 10. Individual and Society ==
* Bullet point
== 11. Information and Meaning ==
* Bullet point
== 12. Chance and Design ==
* Bullet point
== 13. Structure and Function ==
* Bullet point
== 14. Circuits and Waves ==
* Bullet point
== 15. Free Will and Selfhood ==
* Bullet point
== 16. Consciousness and the Unconscious ==
* Bullet point
== 17. Modernity and Its Contradictions ==
* Bullet point
== 18. Sanity and Madness ==
* Bullet point
== 19. How Ideas Change ==
* Bullet point
== 20. Future of Mind ==
* Bullet point

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-05-04T20:13:22Z

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Evolving Minds */

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-05-04T20:13:04Z

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Nerves and Brains */

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-05-03T16:50:21Z

Robert.adlington: /* 1. What is Consciousness? */

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-05-03T16:32:04Z

Robert.adlington: /* 1. What is Consciousness? */

== 1. What is Consciousness? ==
*
== 2. Tools and Symbols ==
* Bullet point
== 3. Nerves and Brains ==
* Bullet point
== 4. Evolving Minds ==
* Bullet point
== 5. Thought and Reason ==
* Bullet point
== 6. The Sensual World ==
* Bullet point
== 7. Learning and Memory ==
* Bullet point
== 8. Mind Chemistry ==
* Bullet point
== 9. Philosophy of Mind ==
* Bullet point
== 10. Individual and Society ==
* Bullet point
== 11. Information and Meaning ==
* Bullet point
== 12. Chance and Design ==
* Bullet point
== 13. Structure and Function ==
* Bullet point
== 14. Circuits and Waves ==
* Bullet point
== 15. Free Will and Selfhood ==
* Bullet point
== 16. Consciousness and the Unconscious ==
* Bullet point
== 17. Modernity and Its Contradictions ==
* Bullet point
== 18. Sanity and Madness ==
* Bullet point
== 19. How Ideas Change ==
* Bullet point
== 20. Future of Mind ==
* Bullet point

Films

2026-05-03T16:30:37Z

Robert.adlington: /* 2026 */

== Films to Watch ==

[https://www.cinealcazar.fr/fichier/programme.pdf Cinema Alcazar Program]

* Mind trips
** Triangle
** Beyond the infinite two minutes
** Enemy
** Under the Silver Lake
** The Vanishing
** Angel Heart
** Following
** The Invisible Guest
** Perfect Blue
** Resolution
* fast times
* the Jerk
* Mutiny on the Bounty
* Entrapment
* Mask of Zorro
* PTA - Hard Eight, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, etc
* Little Big and Far - weird scandinavian film
* This is Spinal tap
* Big Night - Tucci and Shaloub
* Punch drunk love
* Boyhood
* Kind hearts and coronets
* A night at the opera
* Blazing saddles
* Lives of others
* Lost in Translation
* One flew over
* Get out
* Maltese falcon
* Early mad maxes
* Joule of the Nile
* the man with two brains
* Psycho Therapy - Steve Buscemi is a serial killer who wants to advise an author, but ends up playing a marriage counselor.
* Early Steve Martin
* A Complete Unknown
* la La Land -
* The Phoenician Scheme - new Wes Anderson comedy espionage thriller
* Thelma - Grandma fights con artists
* Kinds of Kindness
* 2001
* The Elephant Man
* The Fabulous Baker Boys
* Network

== Films Watched ==

=== 2026 ===

* 28. Escape from Alcatraz
* 27. The Sting
* 26. Pulp Fiction
* 25. Failure to Launch
* 24. Hudson Hawk
* 23. Mystère à St Tropez
* 22. The Thomas Crown Affair
* 21. The Three Amigos (1986)
* 20. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Jonathon Demme
* 19. Top Secret (1984)
* 18. One Battle After Another (2025) - Paul Thomas Anderson
* 17. Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 16. Pleasantville (1998) - Gary Ross
* 15. The Fisher King (1991) -
* 14. The Mastermind
* 13. The Birdcage
* 12. Fight Club (rewatch)
* 11. Knives Out: Glass Onion (rewatch)
* 10. Twins
* 9. The Remains of the Day
* 8. The Ladykillers
* 7. Us (rewatch)
* 6. Saving Private Ryan (rewatch)
* 5. Event Horizon
* 4. Insomnia (2002) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 3. Knives Out (rewatch)
* 2. Gattaca (1997) - Andrew Niccol
* 1. Eddington (2025) - Ari Aster

=== 2025 ===
* 65. Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out 3)
* 64. Miller's Crossing
* 63. Blood Simple
* 62. Crazy Stupid Love
* 61. Happiest Season
* 60. Bridge of Spies
* 59. Identity
* 58. Clueless
* 57. Ace Ventura 2: Call of Nature
* 56. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
* 55. Apollo 13
* 54. LA Confidential (rewatch)
* 53. Inside Llewyn Davis
* 52. M3gan
* 51. Clear and Present Danger
* 50. 12 Monkeys
* 49. No Country for Old Men
* 48. The Hudsucker Proxy
* 47. La Cuisse ou l'aile
* 46. Mission Impossible : The Final Reckoning
* 45. Dumb and Dumber
* 44. Rear Window
* 43. Raising Arizona
* 42. Tenet (rewatch)
* 41. The fifth Element
* 40. Burn Without Reading
* 39. The Big Lebowski (rewatch)
* 38. Fargo (rewatch)
* 37. 28 Days Later (rewatch)
* 36. O Brother, Where Art Thou
* 35. Mickey 17
* 34. Empire of the Sun
* 33. The Fugitive
* 32. Wet Hot American Summer (rewatch)
* 31. Ted
* 30. Hundreds of Beavers
* 29. Wayne’s World (rewatch)
* 28. True Grit (Coen Bros)
* 27. Groundhog Day (rewatch)
* 26. Moonrise Kingdom
* 25. Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
* 24. Adaptation (rewatch)
* 23. Romancing the Stone (rewatch)
* Easter Film Festival
** 22. Mad Max: Fury Road (rewatch)
** 21. Witness
** 20. The Grand Budapest Hotel (rewatch)
** 19. Conclave
** 18. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
** 17. Lincoln
** 16. Being John Malkovitch (rewatch)
** 15. AI (rewatch)
** 14. The Royal Tenenbaums (rewatch)
** 13. Total Recall 1990 (rewatch)
** 12. In the Line of Fire (rewatch)
* 11. Flow
* 10. Juror No. 2
* 9. The Savage Robot
* 8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (rewatch)
* 7. Dead Poet's Society
* 6. Notting Hill (rewatch)
* 5. My Neighbor Totoro (rewatch)
* 4. Kiki’s Delivery Service (rewatch)
* 3. Dr Strangelove (rewatch)
* 2. Dune 2
* 1. Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me (rewatch)

=== 2024 and Earlier ===
* The Big Lebowski
* The Holiday
* Love Actually
* Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
* The Mask
[[Category:Films]]

Open Socrates

2026-05-03T14:00:31Z

Robert.adlington: /* Part Two: The Socratic Method */

== Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example ==
* Why am I doing any of this?
* You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
* Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
* The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
* The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
* The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
* "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
* The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
* Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
* Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
=== 1. The Tolstoy Problem ===
* One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
* Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
* You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
* Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
* You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
* Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
* When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
* What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
* Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
* Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
** Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
** Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
*You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
*Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
*Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
*Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
*But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
*We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
*Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
*All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
*The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
*In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
*Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
*Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
*What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
*Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
*If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
*Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.
=== 2. Load-Bearing Answers ===
* Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
* There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
* A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
* When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
* When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
* I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
* What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
* We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
* One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
* By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
* Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
* If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
* We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
* People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
* Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
* What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
* Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
* We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
* You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
* No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
* The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
* While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
* There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
* You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
* If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
* Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
* When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
* Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
* When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
* If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
* But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
* The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
=== 3. Savage Commands ===
* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
* Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
* These commands are savage.
* When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
* As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
* Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
* A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
* We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
* It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
* Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
* Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
* The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
* For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
* Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
* Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
* We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
* Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
* Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
* Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
* Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
* We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
* According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
* Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
* Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
* The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
* We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
* You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
* We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
* Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
* I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
* The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
* Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
* Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
* Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
* Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
* All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
* The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
** No one deserves to be harmed.
** It's never right to do wrong.
** Being bad can never be what makes something good.
*Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
*When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
*When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
*The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
*Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
*Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
*The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
*The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
*Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
*If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
*Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
*Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
*The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
*A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
*It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
*Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
*Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

=== 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
*To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world - but so is death.
*For Socrates, when Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as "the just" and "the advantageous" he is not describing two things out there. He's just wavering. There's only one thing out there: the good.
*What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational version of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.Three strands of Western ethics

==== Kantian Ethics (Deontology/Contractualism) - The Kinship Answer ====

* Constraining one's actions by respect for humanity (in one's own person and that of others).
* Foregrounds respect for each individual's place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer
* Center's ethics around membership ("I belong to the group of rational beings.")
* Legalistic/regulative form - works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint.
* Caring about justice.
* Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. They believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger.
* Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal's kinship relation to itself.
* Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality.
* Kant's community is "the kingdom of ends", and his test for an action's value "the categorical imperative".
* John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts.

==== Utilitarianism (Consequentialism) Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick - The Bodily Answer ====

* Bring about the greatest good for the greatest number.
* Foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer
* Centers ethics around experience ("I feel pleasure and pain")
* Calculative form - works by cost-benefit analysis.
* Caring about advantage
* Comes out of Epicureanism. They showed that is is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
* So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life

==== Virtue Ethics (Neo-Aristotelian ethics) ====

* Do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
* Believes that to exercise virtue - to behave as a just, courageous, wise, and decent person does - is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society.
* If one is raised well in a good society, the voices of the body and of society will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue.
* Kalon (beautiful, noble) - combines the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
* The virtue ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles, but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: you can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
* Aristotle agrees with Socrates that there really is no tension between justice and advantage

==== Neo-Socratic ethics ====
*Callard will propose through this book.
*The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
*Socratism is similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
*Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system.
*Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and those pertaining to kinship.
*We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth between an impulse towards a calculative or a legalistic form of resolving the question.
*For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either or both) of the savage commands.
*Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as "the will", which will be tasked with battling it. The virtue ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures.
*If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don't know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
*The three features of Socratism (that we don't now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person) add up to an intellectualism that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
*The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways that are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called "knowledge".
*Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need; the need to already know. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
*There is no firm ground, and you don't ever get to take foundations for granted.
*There is a problem with utopia. It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we'd recoil from. This is the paradox of utopia and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
*The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
*Plato (not Socrates!) divides the soul into three parts:
**The spiritual part - Which reflects the demands of kinship.
**The appetitive part - Which reflects the demands of the body.
**The rational part - the natural ruler over the other two.
*The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very question to whic the other two commands provide automatic answers - this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.

== Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
* Each of the three ingredients of Socratism, open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity - conceals a paradox.
* We tend to prefer problem-solving to inquiry, which is why, so often, when faced with a genuine question, our first instinct is to try to turn it into a problem. When Einstein was confronted with "What is Time?", he turned it into "How would clocks behave under various circumstances?"
* Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
* Kleist: "I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself."
* Kleist's insight - that I can give you more than what I seem myself to have - is Socratic.
* Our tendency is to assume that thinking is like breathing: something each person does for themselves.
* Aporia - The absence of a route or a way forward or path by which to proceed.
* As a midwife, Socrates claims that what his interlocutor is doing is recollecting something they already know, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.
* Is Socrates as arrogant as he seems, or as ignorant as he claims to be? Is he a provocative gadfly or a cooperative midwife?
* Plato's dialogues are typically divided into three periods:
** Early - Showcasing the person and views of the historical Socrates, with a special focus on the events surrounding his death.
** Middle - In which Plato is beginning to produce and to put forward some of his own original ideas.
** Late - Where he does so to an even greater degree and Socrates either does not appear or is not the main speaker.
*Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. The gadfly and the midwife are the same person.
*James: "We must know the truth; and we must avoid error - these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws."
**If you have the goal of avoiding falsehood, you should always suspend judgment (be skeptical)
***If a question strikes you as one that leaves you fully free to indulge in the luxury of indefinitely holding out for objective evidence, you can call it a "Cliffordian question".
***Descartes started in a Cliffordian manner, but his skepticism seems more credible than the edifice he builds afterwards.
**If you have the goal of securing truths, you should never suspend judgment (be credulous).
***James wants to invoke this "preliminary faith", which he also calls a "will to believe", only in areas of inquiry where the question is momentous, and where there is a need to act. But even in theoretical pursuits, we are forced to invest in the truth of an idea in advance of decisive evidence.
***Aristotle starts in a more Jamesian way, but the risk is that he isn't sufficiently skeptical
**Trying to be credulous and skeptical at the same time is like trying to go forward and backward at the same time or trying to build what you are concurrently tearing down.
*Anscombe pointed out that although a person usually finds out what other people are doing by observation - by going out and looking at the evidence - a person doesn't find out what he himself is doing in that same way. If I say I'm talking, it's because that's what I intend to be doing.
*Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don't count as knowing what they are doing. Still, a person clearly stands in some especially non-skeptical relation to those events in the world that are her own actions.
*But even if we don't have knowledge of what we are doing, it seems true to say some of our beliefs about what we are doing are distinctive; they seem to have been freed from the usual demand to check whether what we believe is actually the case. We could call these "Jamesian beliefs".
*Socrates conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person the avoidance of error. The Jamesian rule and the Cliffordian rule don't conflict if they are given to two different people.
*If refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? It is because they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do. Socrates comes across as someone who offers to cooperatively divide the task of shopping - and then follows you around the supermarket taking things our of your cart and putting them back on the shelf. If he seems to be interfering with your part of the work, that's only because you've inflated the size of your part.
*You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you're sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do.
*Arguing is stressful - thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that's because you're not actually thinking.
*Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call "thinking to ourselves", that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
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=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
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== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
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=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
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=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
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=== 10. Love ===
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=== 11. Death ===
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Open Socrates

2026-05-03T11:06:29Z

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Socratic Intellectualism */

== Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example ==
* Why am I doing any of this?
* You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
* Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
* The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
* The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
* The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
* "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
* The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
* Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
* Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
=== 1. The Tolstoy Problem ===
* One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
* Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
* You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
* Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
* You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
* Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
* When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
* What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
* Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
* Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
** Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
** Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
*You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
*Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
*Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
*Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
*But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
*We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
*Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
*All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
*The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
*In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
*Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
*Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
*What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
*Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
*If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
*Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.
=== 2. Load-Bearing Answers ===
* Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
* There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
* A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
* When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
* When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
* I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
* What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
* We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
* One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
* By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
* Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
* If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
* We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
* People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
* Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
* What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
* Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
* We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
* You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
* No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
* The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
* While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
* There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
* You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
* If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
* Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
* When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
* Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
* When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
* If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
* But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
* The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
=== 3. Savage Commands ===
* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
* Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
* These commands are savage.
* When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
* As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
* Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
* A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
* We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
* It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
* Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
* Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
* The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
* For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
* Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
* Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
* We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
* Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
* Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
* Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
* Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
* We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
* According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
* Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
* Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
* The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
* We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
* You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
* We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
* Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
* I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
* The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
* Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
* Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
* Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
* Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
* All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
* The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
** No one deserves to be harmed.
** It's never right to do wrong.
** Being bad can never be what makes something good.
*Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
*When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
*When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
*The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
*Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
*Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
*The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
*The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
*Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
*If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
*Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
*Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
*The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
*A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
*It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
*Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
*Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

=== 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
*To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world - but so is death.
*For Socrates, when Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as "the just" and "the advantageous" he is not describing two things out there. He's just wavering. There's only one thing out there: the good.
*What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational version of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.Three strands of Western ethics

==== Kantian Ethics (Deontology/Contractualism) - The Kinship Answer ====

* Constraining one's actions by respect for humanity (in one's own person and that of others).
* Foregrounds respect for each individual's place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer
* Center's ethics around membership ("I belong to the group of rational beings.")
* Legalistic/regulative form - works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint.
* Caring about justice.
* Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. They believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger.
* Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal's kinship relation to itself.
* Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality.
* Kant's community is "the kingdom of ends", and his test for an action's value "the categorical imperative".
* John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts.

==== Utilitarianism (Consequentialism) Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick - The Bodily Answer ====

* Bring about the greatest good for the greatest number.
* Foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer
* Centers ethics around experience ("I feel pleasure and pain")
* Calculative form - works by cost-benefit analysis.
* Caring about advantage
* Comes out of Epicureanism. They showed that is is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
* So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life

==== Virtue Ethics (Neo-Aristotelian ethics) ====

* Do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
* Believes that to exercise virtue - to behave as a just, courageous, wise, and decent person does - is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society.
* If one is raised well in a good society, the voices of the body and of society will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue.
* Kalon (beautiful, noble) - combines the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
* The virtue ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles, but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: you can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
* Aristotle agrees with Socrates that there really is no tension between justice and advantage

==== Neo-Socratic ethics ====
*Callard will propose through this book.
*The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
*Socratism is similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
*Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system.
*Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and those pertaining to kinship.
*We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth between an impulse towards a calculative or a legalistic form of resolving the question.
*For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either or both) of the savage commands.
*Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as "the will", which will be tasked with battling it. The virtue ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures.
*If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don't know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
*The three features of Socratism (that we don't now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person) add up to an intellectualism that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
*The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways that are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called "knowledge".
*Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need; the need to already know. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
*There is no firm ground, and you don't ever get to take foundations for granted.
*There is a problem with utopia. It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we'd recoil from. This is the paradox of utopia and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
*The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
*Plato (not Socrates!) divides the soul into three parts:
**The spiritual part - Which reflects the demands of kinship.
**The appetitive part - Which reflects the demands of the body.
**The rational part - the natural ruler over the other two.
*The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very question to whic the other two commands provide automatic answers - this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.

== Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
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=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
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=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
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=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
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== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
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=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
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=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
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=== 10. Love ===
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=== 11. Death ===
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Open Socrates

2026-05-02T14:31:11Z

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Savage Commands */

Open Socrates

2026-05-02T12:54:03Z

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Savage Commands */

Open Socrates

2026-05-01T16:33:31Z

Robert.adlington: /* 2. Load-Bearing Answers */

Open Socrates

2026-05-01T16:12:57Z

Robert.adlington: /* 2. Load-Bearing Answers */

Open Socrates

2026-05-01T10:10:34Z

Robert.adlington: /* 1. The Tolstoy Problem */

Open Socrates

2026-04-30T15:35:23Z

Robert.adlington: /* Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example */

Open Socrates

2026-04-30T15:01:13Z

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== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
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=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
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=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
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=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
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=== 11. Death ===
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Books

2026-04-30T08:51:49Z

Robert.adlington: /* Books to Read */

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn
*[[Open Socrates]]: The Case for a Philosophical Life - Agnes Callard

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*15. [[Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning]] - John Parrington
*14. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*13. [[The Hidden Spring]]: - Mark Solms
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-04-29T15:54:10Z

Robert.adlington: /* 1. What is Consciousness? */

== 1. What is Consciousness? ==
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== 2. Tools and Symbols ==
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== 3. Nerves and Brains ==
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== 4. Evolving Minds ==
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== 5. Thought and Reason ==
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== 6. The Sensual World ==
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== 7. Learning and Memory ==
* Bullet point
== 8. Mind Chemistry ==
* Bullet point
== 9. Philosophy of Mind ==
* Bullet point
== 10. Individual and Society ==
* Bullet point
== 11. Information and Meaning ==
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== 12. Chance and Design ==
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== 13. Structure and Function ==
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== 14. Circuits and Waves ==
* Bullet point
== 15. Free Will and Selfhood ==
* Bullet point
== 16. Consciousness and the Unconscious ==
* Bullet point
== 17. Modernity and Its Contradictions ==
* Bullet point
== 18. Sanity and Madness ==
* Bullet point
== 19. How Ideas Change ==
* Bullet point
== 20. Future of Mind ==
* Bullet point

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-04-29T15:50:50Z

Robert.adlington:

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Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-04-29T15:49:48Z

Robert.adlington: Created page with "== 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1. What is Consciousness? == * Bullet point == 1...."

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Books

2026-04-29T14:18:59Z

Robert.adlington: /* Books to Read */

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Open Socrates] - Agnes Callard
* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/1529096006 How Life Works]: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn
*[[Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning]] - John Parrington

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*14. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*13. [[The Hidden Spring]]: - Mark Solms
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

Books

2026-04-29T14:08:39Z

Robert.adlington: /* Currently Reading */

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Open Socrates] - Agnes Callard
* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/1529096006 How Life Works]: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn
*[[Consciousness]]: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*14. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*13. [[The Hidden Spring]]: - Mark Solms
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-29T05:47:41Z

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Back to the Cortex */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This is the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* We may suppose that consciousness did not exist on earth before brains evolved - and perhaps only when vertebrate brains evolved; therefore, about 525m years ago. I suspect it arose in rudimentary form before that; that a precursor of affect gradually became felt affect, with no sharp dividing line between them, in tandem with the evolution of increasingly complex organisms with multiple competing needs.
* What emerged with the evolution of cortex was cognitive consciousness - that is the additional capacity to contextualize affect exteroceptively and hold it in mind:
** Before the cortex evolved, an animal might just feel "bad" (affect). With a cortex, the brain can link that "bad" feeling to something specific in the environment—like a predator or a rotten piece of fruit. It puts the feeling into a context based on what is happening around you.
** Without this capacity, an organism reacts purely in the "now." With a cortex, you can keep a feeling and the reason for it active in your brain even after the stimulus is gone. You can "stew" on a problem or plan a response because you can hold the information in your conscious workspace.
** "basic" consciousness is just feeling things (being awake and reactive). "Cognitive" consciousness is the higher-level ability to think about those feelings, label them, and use them to make complex decisions.
*David Chalmers three principles for solving the "hard problem":
**The Principle of Structural Coherence
**The Double Aspect Principle
**The Principle of Organizational Invariance
*Solms does not conceive of consciousness as being particularly intelligent - at least not in its elementary form.
*Sheep and cows and pigs are fellow mammals and are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex too, which means they are capable - all of them to some degree - of consciously "remembering the future" and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods.
*As we relinquish the familiar illusion that consciousness flows in through our sense, and the misconception that it is synonymous with understanding, let us take comfort in the fact that it actually comes spontaneously from our inmost interior. It dawns within us even before we are born. At its source, we are guided by a constant stream of feelings, flowing from a wellspring of intuition, arising from we know not where. Each of us individually does not know the causes, but we feel them. Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steel us for the uncertainties to come.

== Postscript ==

* Self-organizing systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of the complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Crucially, the selfhood of self-organizing systems grants them a point of view. That is why it becomes meaningful to speak of the subjectivity of such a system: deviations from their viable states are registered by the system, for the system, as needs.
* Feeling by an organism of fluctuations in its own needs enables choice and thereby supports survival in unpredicted contexts. This is the biological function of experience.
* Needs cannot all be felt at once. They are prioritized by a midbrain decision triangle, where current needs (residual prediction errors, quantified as free energy) converging on the periaqueductal grey are ranked in relation to current opportunities (displayed in the form of a 2D "saliency map" in the superior colliculi). This triggers conditioned action programmes, which unfold in expected contexts over a deep hierarchy of predictions (the generative model of the expanded forebrain). The actions that are generated by prioritized affects are voluntary, which means they are subject to here-and-now choices rather than pre-established algorithms. Such choices are felt in exteroceptive consciousness, which contextualizes affect.

== Appendix: Arousal and Information ==

* Arousal, fueling drive mechanisms, potentiates behavior, while specific motives and incentives explain why an animal does one thing and not another.
* Generations of behavioral scientists have both theorized and experimentally confirmed that a concept like arousal is necessary to explain the initiation, strength, and persistence of behavioral responses. Arousal provides the fundamental forces that makes animals and humans active and responsive so they will perform instinctive behaviors or learned behaviors directed toward goal objects.
* Pfaff's own principal component analyses suggest that the proportion of behavior across a wide range of data that can be accounted for by "generalized arousal" is between 30-45%.
* How do internal and external influences wake up brain and behavior, whether in humans or in other animals?
* Generalized arousal is higher in an animal or human being who is:
** S - More alert to sensory stimuli of all sorts
** M - More motorically active
** E - More reactive emotionally.
* This is a concrete definition of the most fundamental force in the nervous system. All three components can be measured with precision. Clearly there is a neuroanatomy of generalized arousal, there are neurons whose firing patterns lead to it, and genes whose loss disrupts it. Therefore generalized arousal is the behavioral state produced by arousal pathways, their electrophysiological mechanisms and genetic influences. The fact that these mechanisms, produce the same sensory alertness (S), motor reactivity (M), and emotional reactivity (E) as our definition affirms the existence of a generalized arousal function and the accuracy of its operational definition.
* In Shannon's equation, the information in any event is in inverse proportion to its probability. Put another way, the more uncertain we are about the occurrence of that event, the more information is transmitted, inherently, when it does happen. When all events in an array of events are equally probable, information is at its top value. Disorder maximizes information flow.
* For a lower animal or human to be aroused, there must be some change in the (interoceptive or exteroceptive) environment. If there is change, there must be some uncertainty about the state of the environment. Quantitatively, to the degree that there is uncertainty, predictability is decreased.
* Arousal of brain and behavior, and information calculations are inseparably united.
* Unknown, unexpected, disordered, and unusual (high-information) stimuli produce and sustain arousal responses.
* Central nervous system arousal systems battle heroically against the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a very special way. They respond selectively to environmental situations that have an inherently high entropy - a high degree of uncertainty and therefore information content. But in responding, CNS arousal systems effectively reduce entropy by compressing all of that information into a single, lawful response. Arousal neurobiology is the neuroscience of change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise - that is of information science.
* The huge phenomenon called habituation, a decline in response amplitude on repetition of the same stimulus, pervades neurophysiology, behavioral science, and autonomic physiology; and it shows us how declining information content leads to declining CNS arousal. Thus arousal theory and information theory were made for each other.
* It is important to recognize that the "mathematics of information" explains the behavior of neurons in both arousal processes and learning processes, which, combined, determine what the brain does. Therefore, although "information" is not a physiological construct, it lawfully explains the physiological activity of the brain. It is the function that is selected by evolution; the physiological phenotypes follow.

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-28T15:06:10Z

Robert.adlington: /* Postscript */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* We may suppose that consciousness did not exist on earth before brains evolved - and perhaps only when vertebrate brains evolved; therefore, about 525m years ago. I suspect it arose in rudimentary form before that; that a precursor of affect gradually became felt affect, with no sharp dividing line between them, in tandem with the evolution of increasingly complex organisms with multiple competing needs.
* What emerged with the evolution of cortex was cognitive consciousness - that is the additional capacity to contextualize affect exteroceptively and hold it in mind:
** Before the cortex evolved, an animal might just feel "bad" (affect). With a cortex, the brain can link that "bad" feeling to something specific in the environment—like a predator or a rotten piece of fruit. It puts the feeling into a context based on what is happening around you.
** Without this capacity, an organism reacts purely in the "now." With a cortex, you can keep a feeling and the reason for it active in your brain even after the stimulus is gone. You can "stew" on a problem or plan a response because you can hold the information in your conscious workspace.
** "basic" consciousness is just feeling things (being awake and reactive). "Cognitive" consciousness is the higher-level ability to think about those feelings, label them, and use them to make complex decisions.
*David Chalmers three principles for solving the "hard problem":
**The Principle of Structural Coherence
**The Double Aspect Principle
**The Principle of Organizational Invariance
*Solms does not conceive of consciousness as being particularly intelligent - at least not in its elementary form.
*Sheep and cows and pigs are fellow mammals and are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex too, which means they are capable - all of them to some degree - of consciously "remembering the future" and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods.
*As we relinquish the familiar illusion that consciousness flows in through our sense, and the misconception that it is synonymous with understanding, let us take comfort in the fact that it actually comes spontaneously from our inmost interior. It dawns within us even before we are born. At its source, we are guided by a constant stream of feelings, flowing from a wellspring of intuition, arising from we know not where. Each of us individually does not know the causes, but we feel them. Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steel us for the uncertainties to come.

== Postscript ==

* Self-organizing systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of the complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Crucially, the selfhood of self-organizing systems grants them a point of view. That is why it becomes meaningful to speak of the subjectivity of such a system: deviations from their viable states are registered by the system, for the system, as needs.
* Feeling by an organism of fluctuations in its own needs enables choice and thereby supports survival in unpredicted contexts. This is the biological function of experience.
* Needs cannot all be felt at once. They are prioritized by a midbrain decision triangle, where current needs (residual prediction errors, quantified as free energy) converging on the periaqueductal grey are ranked in relation to current opportunities (displayed in the form of a 2D "saliency map" in the superior colliculi). This triggers conditioned action programmes, which unfold in expected contexts over a deep hierarchy of predictions (the generative model of the expanded forebrain). The actions that are generated by prioritized affects are voluntary, which means they are subject to here-and-now choices rather than pre-established algorithms. Such choices are felt in exteroceptive consciousness, which contextualizes affect.

== Appendix: Arousal and Information ==

* Arousal, fueling drive mechanisms, potentiates behavior, while specific motives and incentives explain why an animal does one thing and not another.
* Generations of behavioral scientists have both theorized and experimentally confirmed that a concept like arousal is necessary to explain the initiation, strength, and persistence of behavioral responses. Arousal provides the fundamental forces that makes animals and humans active and responsive so they will perform instinctive behaviors or learned behaviors directed toward goal objects.
* Pfaff's own principal component analyses suggest that the proportion of behavior across a wide range of data that can be accounted for by "generalized arousal" is between 30-45%.
* How do internal and external influences wake up brain and behavior, whether in humans or in other animals?
* Generalized arousal is higher in an animal or human being who is:
** S - More alert to sensory stimuli of all sorts
** M - More motorically active
** E - More reactive emotionally.
* This is a concrete definition of the most fundamental force in the nervous system. All three components can be measured with precision. Clearly there is a neuroanatomy of generalized arousal, there are neurons whose firing patterns lead to it, and genes whose loss disrupts it. Therefore generalized arousal is the behavioral state produced by arousal pathways, their electrophysiological mechanisms and genetic influences. The fact that these mechanisms, produce the same sensory alertness (S), motor reactivity (M), and emotional reactivity (E) as our definition affirms the existence of a generalized arousal function and the accuracy of its operational definition.
* In Shannon's equation, the information in any event is in inverse proportion to its probability. Put another way, the more uncertain we are about the occurrence of that event, the more information is transmitted, inherently, when it does happen. When all events in an array of events are equally probable, information is at its top value. Disorder maximizes information flow.
* For a lower animal or human to be aroused, there must be some change in the (interoceptive or exteroceptive) environment. If there is change, there must be some uncertainty about the state of the environment. Quantitatively, to the degree that there is uncertainty, predictability is decreased.
* Arousal of brain and behavior, and information calculations are inseparably united.
* Unknown, unexpected, disordered, and unusual (high-information) stimuli produce and sustain arousal responses.
* Central nervous system arousal systems battle heroically against the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a very special way. They respond selectively to environmental situations that have an inherently high entropy - a high degree of uncertainty and therefore information content. But in responding, CNS arousal systems effectively reduce entropy by compressing all of that information into a single, lawful response. Arousal neurobiology is the neuroscience of change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise - that is of information science.
* The huge phenomenon called habituation, a decline in response amplitude on repetition of the same stimulus, pervades neurophysiology, behavioral science, and autonomic physiology; and it shows us how declining information content leads to declining CNS arousal. Thus arousal theory and information theory were made for each other.
* It is important to recognize that the "mathematics of information" explains the behavior of neurons in both arousal processes and learning processes, which, combined, determine what the brain does. Therefore, although "information" is not a physiological construct, it lawfully explains the physiological activity of the brain. It is the function that is selected by evolution; the physiological phenotypes follow.

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-28T13:50:53Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* We may suppose that consciousness did not exist on earth before brains evolved - and perhaps only when vertebrate brains evolved; therefore, about 525m years ago. I suspect it arose in rudimentary form before that; that a precursor of affect gradually became felt affect, with no sharp dividing line between them, in tandem with the evolution of increasingly complex organisms with multiple competing needs.
* What emerged with the evolution of cortex was cognitive consciousness - that is the additional capacity to contextualize affect exteroceptively and hold it in mind:
** Before the cortex evolved, an animal might just feel "bad" (affect). With a cortex, the brain can link that "bad" feeling to something specific in the environment—like a predator or a rotten piece of fruit. It puts the feeling into a context based on what is happening around you.
** Without this capacity, an organism reacts purely in the "now." With a cortex, you can keep a feeling and the reason for it active in your brain even after the stimulus is gone. You can "stew" on a problem or plan a response because you can hold the information in your conscious workspace.
** "basic" consciousness is just feeling things (being awake and reactive). "Cognitive" consciousness is the higher-level ability to think about those feelings, label them, and use them to make complex decisions.
*David Chalmers three principles for solving the "hard problem":
**The Principle of Structural Coherence
**The Double Aspect Principle
**The Principle of Organizational Invariance
*Solms does not conceive of consciousness as being particularly intelligent - at least not in its elementary form.
*Sheep and cows and pigs are fellow mammals and are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex too, which means they are capable - all of them to some degree - of consciously "remembering the future" and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods.
*As we relinquish the familiar illusion that consciousness flows in through our sense, and the misconception that it is synonymous with understanding, let us take comfort in the fact that it actually comes spontaneously from our inmost interior. It dawns within us even before we are born. At its source, we are guided by a constant stream of feelings, flowing from a wellspring of intuition, arising from we know not where. Each of us individually does not know the causes, but we feel them. Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steel us for the uncertainties to come.

== Postscript ==

* Self-organizing systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of the complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Crucially, the selfhood of self-organizing systems grants them a point of view. That is why it becomes meaningful to speak of the subjectivity of such a system: deviations from their viable states are registered by the system, for the system, as needs.
* Feeling by an organism of fluctuations in its own needs enables choice and thereby supports survival in unpredicted contexts. This is the biological function of experience.
* Needs cannot all be felt at once. They are prioritized by a midbrain decision triangle, where current needs (residual prediction errors, quantified as free energy) converging on the periaqueductal grey are ranked in relation to current opportunities (displayed in the form of a 2D "saliency map" in the superior colliculi). This triggers conditioned action programmes, which unfold in expected contexts over a deep hierarchy of predictions (the generative model of the expanded forebrain). The actions that are generated by prioritized affects are voluntary, which means they are subject to here-and-now choices rather than pre-established algorithms. Such choices are felt in exteroceptive consciousness, which contextualizes affect.

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-28T12:13:20Z

Robert.adlington: /* 12. Making a Mind */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* We may suppose that consciousness did not exist on earth before brains evolved - and perhaps only when vertebrate brains evolved; therefore, about 525m years ago. I suspect it arose in rudimentary form before that; that a precursor of affect gradually became felt affect, with no sharp dividing line between them, in tandem with the evolution of increasingly complex organisms with multiple competing needs.
* What emerged with the evolution of cortex was cognitive consciousness - that is the additional capacity to contextualize affect exteroceptively and hold it in mind:
** Before the cortex evolved, an animal might just feel "bad" (affect). With a cortex, the brain can link that "bad" feeling to something specific in the environment—like a predator or a rotten piece of fruit. It puts the feeling into a context based on what is happening around you.
** Without this capacity, an organism reacts purely in the "now." With a cortex, you can keep a feeling and the reason for it active in your brain even after the stimulus is gone. You can "stew" on a problem or plan a response because you can hold the information in your conscious workspace.
** "basic" consciousness is just feeling things (being awake and reactive). "Cognitive" consciousness is the higher-level ability to think about those feelings, label them, and use them to make complex decisions.
*David Chalmers three principles for solving the "hard problem":
**The Principle of Structural Coherence
**The Double Aspect Principle
**The Principle of Organizational Invariance
*Solms does not conceive of consciousness as being particularly intelligent - at least not in its elementary form.
*Sheep and cows and pigs are fellow mammals and are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex too, which means they are capable - all of them to some degree - of consciously "remembering the future" and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods.
*As we relinquish the familiar illusion that consciousness flows in through our sense, and the misconception that it is synonymous with understanding, let us take comfort in the fact that it actually comes spontaneously from our inmost interior. It dawns within us even before we are born. At its source, we are guided by a constant stream of feelings, flowing from a wellspring of intuition, arising from we know not where. Each of us individually does not know the causes, but we feel them. Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steel us for the uncertainties to come.

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-28T10:35:16Z

Robert.adlington: /* 11. The Hard Problem */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* Bulleted list item

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-28T10:31:23Z

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Back to the Cortex */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Bulleted list item
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* Bulleted list item

The Hidden Spring

2026-04-27T14:16:12Z

Robert.adlington: /* 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises */

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
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== 11. The Hard Problem ==
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== 12. Making a Mind ==
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The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 8. A Predictive Hierarchy */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 7. The Free Energy Principle */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 6. The Source */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 5. Feelings */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 3. The Cortical Fallacy */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 2. Before and After Freud */

The Hidden Spring

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Robert.adlington: /* 1. The Stuff of Dreams */

The Hidden Spring

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The Happiness of Dogs

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Robert.adlington: /* 8. Sometimes Toward Eden */

== 1. Shadow's Rock ==
* Dogs as happy Sisyphus
== 2. The Unexamined Life ==
* Reflection occurs when your mental acts turn back ether on you or on some part or facet of you, a part or facet that you recognize as yours, whether this is mental or physical.
* Shame is only possible for a creature capable of reflection. Shame is shame in the eyes of a nominal other - whether that other is someone else, or you, or some non-existent alternative.
* The humble sea squirt eats its own brain.
* A brain, fundamentally, is a biological strategy, and any strategy stands or falls on the relative weight of its costs and benefits. Sometimes, the costs of brains can outweigh their benefits.
* With the development of literacy our outstanding natural memory started to wither.
* Existential phenomenology - Its goal is to understand the fundamental structures of consciousness by virtue of which a conscious creature exists in the specific way it does.
* Reflection is consciousness turning back on itself and thus turning away from the world, turning inwards rather than outwards. Reflection pulls us out of the world and into ourselves.
* Our lives are eerie in the sense that we have no real home. Because of reflection, we are unhomed creatures: never quite a home in the world, never quite comfortable in our skins any more.
* The highest expressions of human creativity are flow experiences where the reflective sense of self is at its most attenuated.
* Sports take us back to a time before the Fall, when we were creatures untainted by reflection. When we play, and all is going right, and we flow from one movement into the next, never thinking about ourselves and what we are doing, because we know thinking would be flow's death, that is when we are most like our dogs.
* Reflection is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures.
== 3. Mirror, Mirror ==
* A creature capable of pre-reflection is necessarily aware of itself, but pre-reflectively rather than reflectively. Any animal - human, canine, or otherwise - that is conscious of the world at all will be pre-reflectively aware of itself too.
* Seeing is a predictive process (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, through to modern neuroscience) and there is a kind of implicit, tacit awareness of self that is built into the process of seeing).
* Awareness of one's body and awareness of one's mind are two very different abilities. There is nothing in mirror self-recognition that demonstrates an ability to engage in the second - meta-cognitive - form of reflection.
* You first learn to understand what it is for someone else to think something, or to want something, and then you learn to apply the concepts of thinking and wanting to yourself.
* Split in two, we can never again be whole - single, undivided, of one heart and one mind. Thus we live and at the same time we watch ourselves doing this. We can never be fully immersed in our lives; never be quite fully committed to what we think and do.
* Our commitment is always conditional. It is what we might call troubled commitment. For we are troubled creatures.
* A dog's mind is serene: unruffled, untroubled, an early-morning sea on a summer's day. But the minds of creatures of reflection are choppy and never calm.
* It is no coincidence that ancient philosophy from Socrates on and modern philosophy from Descartes are obsessed with radical, methodological doubt. Doubt runs deep in us.
== 4. A Gambler's Freedom ==
* For a dog or any animal untainted by reflection, freedom is to act according to necessity, on the insistent commands of his nature.
* What is your nature, ultimately, if not your place in the world? Your nature picks out an identifiable portion of the universe and says: This is me. This is what I am. This is my place. This is my home. The resulting picture of freedom is, then, clear. Freedom results from your connection to the world. Freedom results from all the things that bind you to the world, pull you into the world, hold you tight in that world. Freedom is the world's embrace. This is the freedom of a belonging. For a dog, there is no other sort.
* For Sartre, consciousness is a hole in being - akin to a clearing in a forest. A clearing can only exist if there are trees around it.
* Sartre's insight, shared with Wittgenstein, was that if you are aware of something, then it does not have meaning on its own. If it means anything at all, this meaning must derive from your interpretation of it.
* Pictures, even realistic ones, do not mean anything - are not about anything - in themselves. Any picture might mean many things, and what it in fact means always depends on an interpretation supplied by the viewer.
* As an object of my awareness, a motive, resolution, decision or choice has no meaning in itself. For it to have meaning, I must interpret it, and whatever meaning it then has will depend on precisely how I interpret it. This, according to Sartre, is why I am free. And this freedom is very different from the Spinozist freedom of dogs. In fact, whether this is a freedom worth having is a legitimate question.
* The reformed gambler understands that his resolution not to gamble is useless (ultimately baseless), and it is useless precisely because he is aware of it. This realization Sartre calls angst.
* Nothing can compel any interpretation.
* We are free in the sense that nothing that we decide, nothing that we resolve to do, nothing that we choose can ever make us do a thing. The realization of this fact - the recognition of our freedom in this sense - is anguish.
* The only thing we cannot choose is not to choose, for this is itself a choice.
* Our actions are not free, not in any sense of freedom we would recognize. Our actions are groundless. And there is nothing we can do to ground them.
* We use bad faith to combat the groundlessness of our existence. It is a little story we tell ourselves about how we are not free.
* Human freedom is the freedom of exile.
== 5. Good Dogs ==
* In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that to act virtuously you must be able to ask yourself: is this the right thing to do? And if you decide that it is, you must do it because you want to do the right thing.
* Kant's categorical imperative says: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
* Anthropofabulation - A pronounced human tendency to provide overcomplicated accounts of how we manage to do things.
* If Sartre is right, critical scrutiny of one's motivations does the opposite of supplying one with control over them. Becoming aware of one's motivations means that they no longer have any intrinsic meaning or intentionality.
* Empathy is not a feeling but an ability to feel what is going on in the mind of another.
* Projective empathy involves imaginatively putting yourself in the shoes of another
* Receptive empathy is a sophisticated form of what's called emotional contagion, which is likely endemic in all or most social creatures.
* If a dog's distress at a baby's cry is simply caused by the baby's distress, then they could mitigate their distress by vacating the immediate area. But if they are distressed that the baby is distressed, they can only mitigate their own distress by mitigating his.
* The distress of another is not simply the cause of your distress, it is what your distress is about. When this occurs, an inclination to help is automatically triggered precisely because you are concerned with their distress rather than with your own.
* The neural basis for this type of emotional contagion is what is sometimes called a shared representation system. In humans, other apes and, very likely, dogs too, this system is underwritten by what are known as mirror neurons, whose function is to mirror what is going on inside another. They do this by recruiting the same neural mechanisms in both self and other.
* Morality always involves inconvenience. Morality is a restriction one voluntarily places on one's behavior in the quest for survival, and morality always has the potential to cost you. In morality, what you don't do - even though you really want to - can be as important as what you do.
* The morality of a dog rests on two pillars. One of these is empathy, the ability to take the distress of another and make it one own. The other pillar is inhibition, the ability to make ones behavior conform to one's values. We find both pillars in dogs. Empathy is primary. Inhibition occupies the interstices left by empathy, and only works is a foundation of empathy has already been established. What a dog lacks in one, it will have to make up for in the other.
* This is true of humans too. The urge to help and the urge to hurt are both moral emotions. We act on these emotions, or we inhibit them, and out of these patterns of action and inhibition emerges the moral character of a person.
* The critical scrutiny of choice promoted by Aristotle and Kant is a morality devised for a creature of a certain sort, a timid, indecisive creature, prone to the habitual second-guessing of itself. A dithering, faltering, neurotic creature, a creature of doubt rather than of conviction. Sometimes we are damned not by what we do but by what we think we should do.
== 6. A Design for Life ==
* Dogs can reason logically. It is just that, all things being equal, and if they can possibly help it, they would rather not.
* Dogs find reading human faces much easier than executing disjunctive syllogisms.
* Through domestication, dogs found a way of offloading one of the most difficult and unpleasant aspects of life: thinking.
* In effect, we became part of the dog's extended mind.
== 7. Just Dogs with the Yips ==
* Why do dogs love life so much more than we do? The answer, I think, is that life is always more precious for a dog than for a human because we have two lives and dogs only have one.
* There is the life we live from the inside, and there is the life we live from the outside. But for a dog, life is something lived ineluctably from the inside alone. There is only an inside to the life of a dog, and it is a life that has no limits - in the way that a visual field has no limits.
* It is not possible, as Wittgenstein pointed out, to see the limit of your visual field. The limit is where the seeing stops and not seeing begins.
* Similarly, he claims, death is not an event in life. It is the limit of a life and so cannot be part of that life. Unfortunately, however, this is only true of a life seen from the inside - a life as it is lived. Since dogs live only this sort of life, their life has no limits in Wittgenstein's sense. But it is not true of human lives. We live our lives from the inside and from the outside, simultaneously. And when viewed from the outside, life has clearly identifiable limits. Death is an event in a life viewed from the outside.
* The body-as-lived is not so much an object as an activity or process - a process of disclosure or revelation broadly understood. It is, we might say, the body understood from the inside, the body as it is lived rather than as it is seen or thought about.
* The life-as-object is the life I think about, about which I have hopes and fears, satisfaction and regret. It is my life viewed from the outside. It is a series of events that I orchestrate or that happen to me, a sequence of actions and consequences.
* In my life-as-object, I am an insignificant speck in the great scheme of things, finite and mundane. We all are when we view life from the outside.
* My life-as-lived matters. The things that happen in my life-as-lived matter - at least to me. And even if I were to try, I cannot stop them mattering. It is a hub of meaning and purpose.
* Both perspectives can't be true. But I cannot rid myself of the view from the outside because, among other things, I am pretty sure it is true. However it is psychologically impossible, requiring a depth of nihilism beyond most people's capacity, to dispense with the view from inside.
* Philosophy is a little like the measles. No other animals can catch it, for no other animal can be absurd the way humans can. It's like a rash that you can't ignore, because it itches. From the outside innocuous, but from the inside, maddening. And, as such, is a perfect allegory for human life.
* Moritz Schlick: "The meaning of life is play."
* Choking denotes a general collapse in the face of pressure exerted on you by an opposition player or team.
* The yips is a specific form of choking centered around reflection. If one focuses too much on the details of technique and execution, rather than simply getting on with the business of playing, then one is suffering from the yips. It is a kind of paralysis through analysis.
* When the yips appears outside of a sporting context, it is often called shame. The essence of shame lies in the inexperience of oneself as an object for another (Sartre at the keyhole).
* Most of the time, happily, one does not experience one's body as an object of awareness. Rather one lives through one body or lives one's body. Undue focus on yourself is a sign that somewhere things have gone wrong.
* Reflection is the death of commitment, and commitment is just another word for love. The pathological overuse of our ability for self-reflection, therefore, tears love out of our lives.
* Humans are all just dogs suffering from the yips.
== 8. Sometimes Toward Eden ==
* During writing, it's when you are exhausted, when your thoughts are tired and no longer recognize their customary, agreed-upon rules and avenues, when they start stumbling down paths they never would have travelled down if your brain was working properly - that is when the interesting things happen.
* Writing only really begins when it starts to hurt.
* We humans left Eden long ago, but dogs never did.
* Meaning in life is not essentially a moral phenomenon.
* Meaning in life is deeper than engagement. It is deeper than attraction, deeper than grip. It is need. Meaning in life arises from need. And deeper than need, always deeper than need, is love.
* The more love there is in a life, the more meaning this life thereby contains. The more you love your life, where this love is an expression of your nature, true and untainted, the more meaning there is in your life. To love what you do, when what you do is an expression of what you are, is at the same time to love yourself. Dogs love their lives more than we love ours. That is why their lives are more meaningful than ours.
* A dog has only one life, and of it he is actor and not spectator, author and not critic.
* The nature of a dog is heavy, a granite slab of essence. Our natures, however, have fractured beneath reflection's hard stare. To the extent that any of us have a nature at all, it is insubstantial, diaphanous, perhaps even gossamer thin. What we call our natures are, for us, merely an initial basis for further negotiation. We are self-interpreting creatures, and as such we have the most attenuated natures of all animals.
* Meaning in life is happiness that erupts from nature. But there is little in my nature that is fixed. My nature is soft, pliable. It is, more than anything, labile: the attempts of others to interpret me might easily feed into my own interpretative efforts. There is no firm foundation in my nature to provide a springboard from which happiness might spring forth.
* Some of my memories have a grim destiny. They will live on - re-emerge into the world - as ideas. For me, an idea is just a perfunctory summary of a memory I once had. An idea is just a memory drained of life; a memory that must be reanimated. The fact that I have chosen a life filled with ideas, I suspect, shows just how hard I must have tried to hold on to my memories.
* This is the idea my memories have become: meaning in life is authentic happiness. Meaning in life exists wherever happiness erupts from nature. If you want to know the meaning of life, get a dog.
* Without uttering a word, my dogs tell me of a time before The Fall. Through them, I remember a time before reflection's canyon had opened within me, a time when I was one man and not two, when I had but one nature, one history and one life, a life that I loved with one heart and one mind, undivided. I will never walk in the Garden again. My exile is complete and irrevocable. Yet my dogs occasionally allow me to glimpse it, veiled, a distant shimmering on the far bank of the Jordan. As I walk with my dogs in memory, I find myself gazing sometimes towards Eden.

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-22T09:56:16Z

Robert.adlington: /* 6. A Design for Life */

Books

2026-04-22T09:34:18Z

Robert.adlington: /* 2026 (week 16) */

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Open Socrates] - Agnes Callard
* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/1529096006 How Life Works]: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*14. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*13. [[The Hidden Spring]]: - Mark Solms
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

Books

2026-04-21T06:00:17Z

Robert.adlington:

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Open Socrates] - Agnes Callard
* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/1529096006 How Life Works]: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*13. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-20T14:55:31Z

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Good Dogs */

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-20T14:37:02Z

Robert.adlington: /* 4. A Gambler's Freedom */

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-20T14:23:43Z

Robert.adlington: /* 1. Shadow's Rock */

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-20T14:02:12Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Shadow's Rock ==
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== 2. The Unexamined Life ==
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== 3. Mirror, Mirror ==
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== 4. A Gambler's Freedom ==
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== 5. Good Dogs ==
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== 6. A Design for Life ==
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== 7. Just Dogs with the Yips ==
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== 8. Sometimes Toward Eden ==
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The Happiness of Dogs

2026-04-20T14:00:46Z

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Books

2026-04-20T13:58:54Z

Robert.adlington: /* Currently Reading */

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gertrude-Stein-Afterlife-Francesca-Wade/dp/0571369316][https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Socrates-Case-Philosophical-Life/dp/0141994835 Open Socrates] - Agnes Callard
* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Life-Works-Users-Biology/dp/1529096006 How Life Works]: A User’s Guide to the New Biology - Phillip Ball

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*[[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn
*[[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 16) ===

*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

[[Category:Books]]

The Interpretation of Dreams

2026-04-19T10:13:07Z

Robert.adlington: /* E: The Primary and Secondary Processes - Repression */

This is the first in a sequence of Freud readings, recommended by Liz

== VII: The Psychology of the Dream-Processes ==

=== A: The Forgetting of Dreams ===

* An observation which I have been able to make in the course of preparing this manuscript has shown me that dreams are no more forgotten than other mental acts and can be compared, by no means to their disadvantage, with other mental functions in respect of their retention in memory.
* It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds.
* The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
* We must conclude that during the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent.

=== B: Regression ===

* Dreams are psychical acts of as much significance as any others; their motive force is in every instance a wish seeking fulfilment; the fact of their not being recognizable as wishes and their many peculiarities and absurdities are due to the influence of the psychical censorship to which they have been subjected during the process of their formation; apart from the necessity of evading this censorship, other factors which have contributed to their formation are a necessity for the condensation of their psychical material, a regard for the possibility of its being represented in sensory images and - though not invariably - a demand that the structure of the dream shall have a rational and intelligible exterior.
* The most general and the most striking psychological characteristic of the process of dreaming: a though, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced.
* Dreams make use of the present tense in the same manner and by the same right as day-dreams. The present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as fulfilled.
* It is not only in dreams that such transformations of ideas into sensory images occur: they are also found in hallucinations and visions, which may appear as independent entities, so to say, in health or as symptoms in the psychoneuroses.

* We will picture the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of which we will give the name of agencies or systems.
* These systems may perhaps stand in a regular spatial relation to one another, in the same kind of way in which the various systems of lenses in a telescope are arranged behind one another.
* All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations (the transmission of energy into a system of nerves or specifically into an efferent system - a process tending towards discharge)
* The psychical apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function.
* A trace is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a "memory-trace"; and to the function relating to it we give the name of "memory". If we are in earnest over our plan of attaching psychical processes to systems, memory-traces can only consist in permanent modifications of the elements of the systems.
* We shall suppose that a system in the very front of the apparatus receives the perceptual stimuli but retains no trace of them and thus has no memory, while behind it there lies a second system which transforms the momentary excitations of the first system into permanent traces.
* Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory - first and foremost according to simultaneity of occurrence. We speak of this fact as "association".
* If the perceptual system has no memory whatever, it cannot retain any associative traces; the separate perceptual elements would be intolerably obstructed in performing their function if the remnant of an earlier connection were to exercise an influence upon a fresh perception. We must therefore assume the basis of association lies in the mnemonic systems.
* Association would thus consist in the fact that, as a result of a diminution in resistances and of the laying down of facilitating paths, an excitation is transmitted from a given mnemonic element more readily to one mnemonic element than to another.
* Closer consideration will show the necessity for supposing the existence not of one but of several such mnemonic elements, in which one and the same excitation, transmitted by the perceptual elements, leaves a variety of different permanent records. The first of these systems will naturally contain the record of association in respect to simultaneity in time; while the same perceptual material will be arranged in the later systems in respect to other kinds of coincidence, so that one of these later systems, for instance, will record relations of similarity, and so on with the others.
* It is the perceptual system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories - not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds - are in themselves unconscious.
* They can be made conscious; but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our "character" is based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us - those of our earliest youth - are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious. But if memories become conscious once more, they exhibit no sensory quality or a very slight one in comparison with perceptions.
* The critical agency, we concluded, stands in a closer relation to consciousness than the agency criticized: it stands like a screen between the latter and consciousness. Further, we found reasons for identifying the critical agency with the agency which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we replace these agencies by systems, then our last conclusion must lead us to locate the critical system at the motor end of the apparatus.
* We will describe the last of the systems at the motor end as "the preconscious", to indicate that the excitatory processes occurring in it can enter consciousness without further impediment provided that certain other conditions are fulfilled: for instance, that they reach a certain degree of intensity, that the function which can only be described as "attention" is distributed in a particular way, and so on. This is at the same time the system which holds the key to voluntary movement.
* We will describe the system that lies behind it as "the unconscious", because it has no access to consciousness except via the preconscious, in passing through which its excitatory process is obliged to submit to modifications.
* When we consider the dream-wish, we shall find that the motive force for producing dreams is supplied by the Ucs; and owing to this latter factor we shall take the unconscious system as the starting-point of dream-formation.
* This path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is barred to dream-thoughts during the daytime by the censorship imposed by resistance. During the night they are able to obtain access to consciousness; but the question arises as to how they do so and thanks to what modification.
* The only way in which we can describe what happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a retrogressive direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system. If we describe as "progressive" the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a "regressive" character.
* This regression, then, is undoubtedly one of the psychological characteristics of the process of dreaming. but we must remember that it does not occur only in dreams. Intentional recollection and other constituent processes of our normal thinking involve a retrogressive movement in the psychical apparatus from a complex ideational act back to the raw material of the memory-traces underlying it.
* In regression, the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.
* During the day there is a continuous current from the perceptual system flowing in the direction of motor activity; but this current ceases at night and could no longer form an obstacle to a current of excitation flowing in the opposite sense.
* Three kinds of regression (where what is older is also more primitive and nearer to perception):
** Topographical - reversal of perception to movement flow
** Temporal - harking back to older psychical structures
** Formal - where primitive forms of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones
* Dreaming is, on the whole, an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it, and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.
* Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood - a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation.
* Nietzsche: In dreams, "some primeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path."

=== C: Wish-Fulfilment ===

* Aristotle: a dream is thinking that persists in the state of sleep.
* Four origins for wishes:
** Aroused during the day and not satisfied - though as adults we are more and more inclined to renounce as unprofitable to form and retain such intense wishes as children know
** Aroused during the day and repudiated
** Emerges from the suppressed part of the mind at night - unconscious wishes are always on the alert, ready at any time to find their way to expression when an opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the latter's lesser one. These unconscious wishes are paths which have been laid down once and for all, which never fall into disuse and which, whenever an unconscious excitation re-cathects them, are always ready to conduct the excitatory process to discharge. If I may use a simile, they are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey - ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood.
** Impulses that arise during the night (thirst, sexual needs, etc)
*A wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one. In the case of adults it originates from the Ucs, in the case of children, where there is as yet no division or censorship between the Pcs and the Ucs, or where that division is only gradually being set up, it is an unfulfilled, unrepressed wish from waking life.
*The mechanism of dream-formation would in general be greatly clarified if instead of the opposition between "conscious" and "unconscious" we were to speak of that between the "ego" and the "repressed".
*The apparatus's efforts are directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli; consequently its first structure followed the plan of a reflex apparatus, so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharge along a motor path.
*The aim of the first psychical activity was to produce a "perceptual identity" - a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.
*Inhibition of the regression and the subsequent diversion of the excitation become the business of a second system, which is in control of voluntary movement - which for the first time, that is, makes use of movement for purposes remembered in advance.

=== D: Arousal by Dreams - The Function of Dreams - Anxiety-Dreams ===

* Consciousness, which we look upon in the light of a sense organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities, is capable in waking life of receiving excitations from two directions:
** From the periphery of the whole apparatus, the perceptual system
** Pleasure and unpleasure, which prove to be almost the only psychical quality attaching to transpositions of energy in the inside of the apparatus. These releases of pleasure and unpleasure automatically regulate the course of the cathetic process.
* In order to make more delicately adjusted performances possible, it later became necessary to make the course of ideas less dependent upon the presence or absence of unpleasure. For this purpose the Pcs system needed to have qualities of its own which could attract consciousness; and it seems highly probable that it obtained them by linking the preconscious processes with the mnemic system of indications of speech, system not without quality.
* By means of the qualities of that system, consciousness, which had hitherto been a sense organ for perceptions alone, also became a sense organ for a portion of our thought-processes. Now therefore, there are, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one directed towards perception and the other towards the preconscious thought-processes.
* The dream is treated by the Pcs just like any other perceptual content; it is met by the same anticipatory ideas, in so far as its subject-matter allows.
* Unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indescructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.
* Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs excitation, serves it as a safety-valve and at the same time preserves sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity.

=== E: The Primary and Secondary Processes - Repression ===

* The effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory or anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression.
* The second system can only cathect an idea if it is in a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it.
* I propose to describe
** The psychical process of which the first system alone admits as the "primary process" (free, mobile psychical energy)
** The process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second system as the "secondary process" (bound, quiescent energy)
* All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. Thinking must concern itself with the connecting paths between ideas, without being led astray by the intensities of those ideas.
* The primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones; it may even by that their complete domination is not attained until the prime of life.
* In consequence of the belated appearance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses that arise from the unconscious.

=== F: The Unconscious and Consciousness - Reality ===

* We may speak of:
** An unconscious thought seeking to convey itself into the preconscious so as to be able then to force its way through into consciousness. ("to force a way through")
** A preconscious thought being represses or driven out and then taken over by the unconscious ("to repress")
* Ideas, thoughts, and psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might say, between them, where resistances and facilitations provide the corresponding correlates.
* The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious.
* The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.
* We are probably inclined greatly to overestimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic production as well. Accounts given to us by some of the most highly productive men, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, show rather that what is essential and new in their creations came to them without premeditation and as an almost ready-made whole.
* There are two kinds of unconscious, which have not yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both of them are unconscious in the sense used by psychology; but in our sense one of them, which we term the Ucs, is also inadmissible to consciousness, while we term the other the Pcs because its excitations - after observing certain rules, it is true, and perhaps only after passing a fresh censorship, though nonethelss without regard to the Ucs - are able to reach consciousness.
* The system Pcs stands like a screen between the system Ucs and consciousness. It not merely bars access to consciousness, it also controls access to the power of voluntary movement and has at its disposal for distribution a mobile cathetic energy, a part of which is familiar to us in the form of attention.
* But what part is there left to be played in our scheme by consciousness, which was once so omnipotent and hid all else from view? Only that of a sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities.
* In its mechanical properties we regard this system as resembling the perceptual systems Pcpt: as being susceptible to excitation by qualities but incapable of retaining traces of alterations - that is to say, as having no memory.
* The psychical apparatus, which is turned towards the external world with its sense-organ of the Pcpt systems, is itself the external world in relation to the sense-organ of the Consciousness, whose teleological justification resides in this circumstance.
* Excitatory material flows in to the Consciousness sense-organ from two directions; from the Pcpt system, whose excitation, determined by qualities, is probably submitted to a fresh revision before it becomes a conscious sensation, and from the interior of the apparatus itself, whose quantitative processes are felt qualitatively in the pleasure-unpleasure series when, subject to certain modifications, they make their way to consciousness.
* By perceiving new qualities, Cs makes a new contribution to directing the mobile quantities of cathexis and distributing them in an expedient fashion. By the help of its perception of pleasure and unpleasure it influences the discharge of the cathexes within what is otherwise an unconscious apparatus operating by means of the displacement of quantities. It seems probable that in the first instance the unpleasure principle regulates the displacement of cathexes automatically. But it is quite possible that consciousness of these qualities may introduce in addition a second and more discriminating regulation, which is even able to oppose the former one, and which perfects the efficiency of the apparatus by enabling it, in contradiction to its original plan, to cathect and work over even what is associated ith the release of unpleasure.
* Thought processes are in themselves, without quality, except for the pleasureable and unpleasurable excitations which accompany them, and which, in view of their possible disturbing effect upon thinking, must be kept within bounds. In order that thought-processes may acquire quality, they are associated in human beings with verbal memories, whose residues of quality are sufficient to draw the attention of consciousness to them and to endow the process of thinking with a new mobile cathexis from consciousness.

The Interpretation of Dreams

2026-04-19T09:44:45Z

Robert.adlington: /* C: Wish-Fulfilment */