Pineal gland stories are mostly myths (the DMT one is, psychedelic activity without psychedelics on meditation is possibly created by global entropic activity, like what psychedelics do), if you want to locate concrete brain region as source of consciousness, it might be thalamus https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(20)30005-2 , but the whole brain works as heavily interconnected network with fluid functional regions, not as isolated parts, so looking at just one part is eh [Luiz Pessoa | Funsy Seminar | The entangled brain: the integration of emotion, motivation, ... - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA_X6NLU8pU) and QRI suspects it might be a topological pocket in the EM field corresponding to brain activity (or organism's in general) that generates, or to be more precise: that is unified conscious experience [Solving the Phenomenal Binding Problem: Topological Segmentation as the Correct Explanation Space - YouTube](https://youtu.be/g0YID6XV-PQ) https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/992213422274003066/1116749438183030884/Screenshot_2023-06-09-17-23-16-856_com.google.android.youtube.jpg And I suspect sense of dualism collapses when the neuronal networks encoding self and other distinctions get so correlated with activity (through nondual meditation or psychedelics or other ways) that the statistical indenpendence markov blanket boundary between them dissolves and they merge into one and you abide in some monistic ontology as a result [The Bayesian Brain and Meditation - YouTube](https://youtu.be/Eg3cQXf4zSE) Dissociation from thoughts as abiding in an observer might be implemented by creating lots of metacognitive highorder neuronal networks modelling the process of self and world model construction and having those processes as fundamental bayesian prior energy sinks 🤔[Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference - PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34457352/) Both psychedelics and alkohol dissolve and create global thinking about priors and priorities but psychedelics create more implicit synchronizations of solutions and alcohol creates more implicit desynchronizations Effective collective wellbeing engineering Meaning meta crisis Do you wanna see humanity thrive? Let's increase sufficient conditions for basic needs (Pinker stats), mental health, collective meaning, sense of community, adaptability, mitigating existencial risks (mention EA týpek.. Toby Oxford?), ability to relax, ability to do what we value in the most compatible way Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke, movement for Meaning, QRI, wellbeing science, basic needs, selfactualization, universal principles of motivation, evolutionary niches of objective functions by nature and nurture All framed in active inference Hello I'm a independent researcher that is focusing on the science of individual and collective wellbeing, but I'm also cooperating witg the qualia research institute that focuses on figuring out how wellbeing works in the brain and many other things. My focus is lots of topics, mathematics, engineering, physics, neuroscience, philosophy, economic, political theory. My favorite lens is adaptive dynamical complex systems theory. My favorite framework combining all of those is quantum information theoretic free energy principle by Active Inference institute where I'm part of the community. What I'm thinking about: how to make society well, how to formalize it in technical terms Objective functions our mind generates are deeply evolutionary forces tied to basic needs combined with compatible with evolutionary niches cultural frameworks with their own objective functions. Metacrisis obrázek Existencial risks obrázek Toby Ord Existuje Meaning crisis mapa? Map of depression causal factors https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06403 Sources of Richness and Ineffability for Phenomenally Conscious States Xmodernism in Active Inference Agency and free will is top down mental causation 1. Think of the differences between annealing and canalization. How to avoid/fix canals? Examples can cover both social, cultural, and psychological contexts. Our main focus is psychedelic therapy. 1.1. Think of situations that lead to maladaptivity in canalization and how to prevent them. For example, psychotherapists can use tests to determine a client's attachment style which is important for understanding anxious/avoidant/disorganized emotional background and the way that they make assumptions about the world ("Everyone always leaves", "People look at me like they hate me", "I am afraid I will say something stupid", etc.). Previously diagnosed disorders and traumas should be taken into account and thought of with caution. *Presumably, emotions are embedded within the low-frequency range, which is the one that can travel through the anatomical obstacles within the brain, while high-frequency harmonics tend to stop at the boundaries of brain regions. These emotions act as Bayesian priors for our limbic system. === Love or seeing constructedness (illusorynessness) of mental phenomena seems to be an universal dissolver of any mental object or conditioned reactive patterns of behavior canalizations. Or explicit relaxation of any contracted qualia. Canalized Mr Meeseeks protective subagents - dissolve by showing them counterfactual proof that they dont need to be so defensive in a new environment and that they can relax. Dissolving held psychotic (misaligned with other processes or destructive rather than helping) beliefs with showing them opposite evidence, relativizing them away. Avoiding overly protective subagents by not getting into hostile environments or consume limbic hijacking fear inducing memeplexes on social media or news. Satisfy the objective functions and create compromises in your whole ecosystem of subagents having different priotiries, don't isolate any as then he tends to canalize protective structures hostile against others. Depressive beliefs such as "Everyone always leaves", "People look at me like they hate me", "I am afraid I will say something stupid" are also dissolvable with counterfactual evidence. One can create a dialog between the hurt subagent and a "healer" subagent, asking about what it is, what its priorities are, how it was formed, what other beliefs or subagents it depends on Some linguistic or abstract mental construction is seen as true if many observes agree on its validity using different epistemological strategies, beliefs present in a population can be disrupted or reinforced or novel ones created by mutating or creating a new belief that is compatible with the culture's current aethetics (superstructure framing priors that are preffered according to their consonance with the whole) and spreading it succesfully darwinianly. === 2. We are aware of many examples/techniques for energy raising. Discuss techniques that can be applied for energy dampening and energy shifting. (For example, think of examples of how to manipulate energy sinks and sources by applying what we know from the STV. Which other activities/techniques can you think of? Discuss the role of attention!) *Thalamic gating serves attention. "Cleansing the doors of perception": psychedelics disrupt thalamic gating, they excite neurons in the PFC and desynchronize their collective ability to represent coherent self-referential beliefs. Thalamus is especially rich with 5-HT2A receptors found to be important for distinguishing between the quality of serotonergic impact of SSRIs and psychedelics. == Any neural operator (psychotool or a substance) that symmetrifies neurophenomenology tends to also increase energy, probably because of disintegration of energy sinks so unsinked energy flows randomly with much less attracting forces, which might lead to seeing visuals as well. Energy sink can act as a neural classifier taking sensory data as input and outputing other thoughts or actions. Low energy depression seems to be damping energy through no learned agency. (hopelessness isnt learned, its that no agency is learned [Helplessness Is Not Learned - Neurofrontiers](https://neurofrontiers.blog/helplessness-is-not-learned/) ) Which might be seen as no sensory patters cascading into possible actions, no dopaminogentic motivation. Symmetrical representations can create global cascade of activation of neural representations from just one through more interconnected neural topology (meditation and psychedelics increase that). We can damp energy by getting into gettign stuck into some one solid mental object. One can collapse from deconstructed entropic state back into some highly specialized context to concetrate all that free computational power into one task and use it all there, its asymmetry (high overfitted specialization) can damp overall energy. Any mental and physical activity that increases energy follows period of decreased energy, so thats a way to overall dampen energy as well. The stronger the increase, the stronger the decrease tends to be. Gradual increasing can be achieved by slow gradual increase such that neural networks adapt to a new baseline, just like progressive overload in fitness. When it comes to shifting energy from one task to another one, one can in the global context see reason for doing that to generate motivation. We climb valence gradients realized as error reduction slopes of solving the problem better than expected, so depending on our aethtics and current problems we solve in life, we can shift our attention by lubricating those fundamental objective functions in our deepest bayesian priors, which also increases wellbeing through increased sense of meaning and motivation and reduces procrasination. == 3. How important do you consider the role of positive expectancy in psychedelic therapy? Should there be a chapter dedicated to the creation of a positive and trustworthy relationship between therapist and client/shaman and tripper, and tripper and the drug? What kind of setting do you find ideal? == Yes, more trust, more bayesian prior, aethetics, goal synchronization, leads to more efficient belief transmission, more efficient updating of maladaptive priors. Ideal setting definitely depends on the cultural aethetics of the client - some people are raised religious, some secular, some think more in mechanistic terms, some think more in fantasy narratives and so on. == 4. Role of music in psychedelic therapy. For example, the global flow of energy in the brain and reduced thalamic gating. Memorised music play VS jazz improvisation serves as an analogy for how the brain "plays" in the sober state VS on LSD. Could lower-frequency instruments such as hearing the bass-line play an important role in information propagation? == Songs are definitely also subjective to high degree as they active consonant memories through contextd ependant associations leading to good transformative trips. Songs with long global consonant tones are great for global information processing. Extremely fast songs are good at local information processing. Some songs have both in parallel which is great for combined information processing. == 5. Good meditation objects. For example, cute things, breath as the most secular meditation object, tuning into empty space. (Mind the cultural differences.) Alternatively, do you have an interesting annealing habit? 6. It seems that high-frequency harmonics are in charge of higher cognitive functions, while lower frequencies store information and priors that activate the limbic system and DMN (Default Mode Network). This is widely discussed by Atasoy. Think of techniques that can be used for belief updating. Another question for discussion (related to what you wrote in the document): How to navigate big-picture thinking (between therapist/shaman and client/tripper)? There are lots of ideas but I think we should come up with as many practical techniques as we can. Also in general to just enable people for having more "surprising" moments in daily life, it seems that dedication to building knowledge is important. This doesn't have to be academic knowledge, but also philosophical. Many people are not equipped to understand how it's done just by hearing or reading instructions. It needs to be trained! It could be cool if we could find approaches for people with all sorts of different backgrounds. But when it comes to politics in that chart i kind of doubt most of it. When talking with people that do politics irl in my country and suggesting some wellbeing science stuff, sometimes I feel like it would be better if there was some top down illuminati single ton controlling the system instead of this crazy selforganizing chaotic flow of competing economic or moral or other cultural incentives happening. 😄 sleep I sense it feels like its turning off the whole operating system so that certain organism's homeostatic functions can go back to their homeostasis when nothing is happening and then running stochastic activity as form of defragmentation its so similar with deconstructive meditation and when you excercise maintaining awareness enough, you can sleep while being conscious too https://medium.com/@rogerthis/maintaining-awareness-during-deep-sleep-how-to-19a3bd1a3561 unconsciousness can be also conceptualized as no saving into memory which also kills sense of time as the frequency of savings into memory also seem to determine time [The Pseudo-Time Arrow](https://qri.org/blog/pseudo-time-arrow) by turning off i meant the deep sleep that we dont remember there might be qualia such as pain happening actually but since its not saved into memory we dont recall it 🤔 like people on alcohol doing stuff and not remembering it 🤔 by stochastic i meant flow of energy gets injected randomly, but what interacting qualia is selforganized in the neural networks is definitely not stochastic so thats why dreams have patterns and insights about us or anything else and solutions to problems when activity gets injected into correct neural networks encoding concrete patterns, otherwise pure stochasticity wouldnt have patterns injection of computational power, start of cascading brain activity is core feature of neural annealing that relies on injection of energy long term memory also seems to be halted as the dreams we remember seem to be those that were generated right before we woke up stored in the short term memory and we still rewrite it a lot after waking up and trying to make sense of it as its not very ordinary experience which is similar to interpreting and integrating psychedelic trips [Active Dreaming is More Powerful than Meditation and Safer than Psychedelics](https://superbowl.substack.com/p/dreaming-is-better-than-meditation) I tried to draw the various states the brain can be in here the total amount of energy corresponds to the total amount of brain activity (electrochemical activity) which corresponds to yellow lines stochastic because its not conditioned by external stimuli and in similar ways how you think "randomly" about your future when doing nothing and not dissolving sensations technically its not random as its dependant on what you're currently problem solving in the background, which is probably similar in dreams dreams are more generalizing tho to avoid overfitting this would explain why dreams are symbolic and usually not about highly specific situations or experiences same for psychedelic trips or deep meditative states as in all those cases you shift from local information processing to global information processing (from alpha band to theta band) i call everything causing this symmetrifications as that leads to reduced concrete energy sinks (classifiers) leading to less restricted more free more global information processing and cessations are decrease in neural synchronization in alpha bandwith, dissolution of functional integration, functional linking between different ares of the brain, break down of coordinated message passing, increased phase lag index measure [Ep201: Revealing Nirodha Samāpatti - Delson Armstrong, Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano, Dr Laukkonen - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIEWAerJKOs) [EEG Connectivity Using Phase Lag Index - Sapien Labs | Neuroscience | Human Brain Diversity Project](https://sapienlabs.org/lab-talk/eeg-connectivity-using-phase-lag-index/) https://images-ext-1.discordapp.net/external/9h039ul0po21fIgy9WSTz3dJMUzsoqMp45LGf6BONuQ/%3Fformat%3D1000w/https/images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5037f52d84ae1e87f694cfda/1372924854351-79NNUT5ZQKMG02CGLLDM/%25C3%2591anas%2Band%2BMind%2BSpeed.png?width=1250&height=552 I suspect that insight cycle seems to be result of disintegration of neural networks that used to generate positive valence neural activity (conditioned consonance and dissonance generators linked to pain and pleasure circuitry https://twitter.com/SooAhnLee/status/1668040786368184320) by overflowing it with entropic nonsymbolic activity that it dissolves under the pressure. The search for a new stable configuration while in disintegrated state is a dark night of the soul. Finding a new more global interconnected internally aligned symmetrical configuration of the neural network topology that efficiently does stress dissipation and allows overall uncontracted brain activity corresponding to the phenomenology of qualia just being there without mutual dissonant inteference then leads to equaminity. Usually this isnt overnight but a process that takes time and I sense that do nothing meditation and love and kindness are best ways to do it. I think sometimes its good to just meditate or do just smaller doses of psychedelics as big dose of psychedelics can create the breakdown of everything including meditative progress, or accelerate it - depending on what kind of progress and what kind of psychedelics (strenghtening/transforming/dissolving beliefs) Do not try to escape the Matrix but engineer the most beautiful Matrix possible for everyone adding nervous system dimensionality increase or reduction having different computational advantages and disadvantages in abstract or social problem spaces and existence of evolutionary pretrained mental patterns useful for different specific or general purposes into this puzzle is also useful if one wants to engineer wellbeing [Autism as a disorder of dimensionality – Opentheory.net](https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimensionality/) "We can expect “standard-dimensional nervous systems” to be relatively strongly canalized, inheriting the same evolution-optimized “standard human psycho-social-emotional-cognitive package”. I.e., standard human nervous systems are like ASICs: hard-coded and highly optimized for doing a specific set of things." This default package from mostly outsider perspective is pretty odd in many ways. It just feels some variables that most people try to fill in as answers in the cognitive architecture are not really encoding anything useful. That there are more effective ways as well But still its used for cultural cohesion Some of it feels like evolutionary baggage in the collective cultural frameworks, code that hasnt been refactored, formed chaotically through nonlinear natural selection, just like our gene pool "We can expect many of the behavioral and cognitive symptoms of autism to be compensatory attempts to reduce network dimensionality so as to allow structures to form. The higher the dimensionality and lower the default canalization, the more necessary extreme measures will be (e.g. “stimming”). “Autistic behaviors” are attempts at cobbling together a working navigation strategy while lacking functional pretrained pieces, while operating in a dimensionality generally hostile to stability. Behavior gets built out of stable motifs, and instability somewhere requires compensatory stability elsewhere." That might also be why I love deconstructive meditation and 5-MeO-DMT so much. Ultimate dimensionality reducers. I feel that hostility to stability so much with my total psychological fluidity But hey, that increases symmetry and therefore sense of freedom But some more dimensional metapatterns still can create extreme stability when they're global and reinforced enough