An open source article from the latest PNAS from Schut et al.:

 Fascinating open source research reported by Gervais et al. (Open source):

This post on an exchange with DeepSeek R1 is a followup on my previous post describing the Chat GPT 4o response to some of my idea fragments - further convincing me that current LLMs'  power to integrate and expand on concepts expressed in language are superior to mine.   

I presented exactly the same prompt to DeepSeek R1 that I had given to ChatGPT 4o: and the results astound me:

prompt:   

I’m curious to see how you might respond to reading the following notes on testing different topic ideas to write about and develop.  The issue is not one of whether the ideas are novel, but whether I might devise, with your help,  a different permutation, perspective, or take on them that I (and others) might find useful.  Can you can suggest some elaboration or further development of the ideas I put forward.

Here are the notes:

First Possible Title:  The interoceptive self as a basis for actions, thoughts and feelings.  

Subtitle: Moving the self’s experienced center of gravity from “I” to “it”

It is a question of who and/or what is running the show

Which brings it back to the old upstairs/downstairs chicken or egg circular causality issue.  

So, ‘it all depends’ (cf Sapolsky’s massive tome) 

And, there is no ‘there’ in terms of understanding, that isn’t in my 1999 “The Biology of Mind”  book.  

Second Possible Title: Defining a smaller self world as a human animal’s refuge in troubled times. 

Our predecessors were small mouse like creatures that survived the asteroid collision of  ~66 million years ago by burrowing into small protective cracks and burrows.  I wonder about robustly engaging this strategy, being one of the peasants or ‘sheeple’ challenged by the rapid disintegration of the geopolitical world order of the past 50 years

And then what?  How to rebuild a new world?… perhaps  Venkatest Rao’s cozy world, rising from the ooze of the permaweird,  protocols, etc.  

-------------

DeepSeek R1's response:

1. The Interoceptive Self as a Basis for Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings

Subtitle Refinement: From "I" to "It": How Bodily Awareness Rewires Agency and Identity

Key Angles to Develop:

• Neuroscientific Foundations:

  • Link interoception (sensing internal states) to Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s predictive processing theory. Emphasize how the brain constructs "selfhood" by predicting and regulating bodily needs.

  • Contrast the "interoceptive self" with the Cartesian "I"—e.g., how gut microbiomes or heart-rate variability influence decisions, challenging the myth of a disembodied mind.

• Philosophical Implications:

  • Explore parallels with Buddhist anattā (non-self) or Spinoza’s monism, where the self is a process, not an entity.

  • Debate free will: If the "it" (body/brain systems) runs the show, what does this mean for moral responsibility?

• Mental Health and Society:

  • Discuss interoceptive dysregulation in anxiety/depression and therapies like biofeedback or mindfulness.

  • Argue for a cultural shift: Redefining success as alignment with bodily rhythms (e.g., circadian health, stress cycles) rather than productivity.

Provocative Questions:

• Is the "self" merely the brain’s user interface for bodily homeostasis?

• Could embracing the "it" dissolve existential angst by grounding identity in biology?

2. Defining a Smaller Self-World as a Human Animal’s Refuge in Troubled Times

Subtitle Refinement: From Survival to Regeneration: Lessons from Evolutionary Scarcity for Modern Collapse

Key Angles to Develop:

• Evolutionary and Historical Precedents:

  • Compare the asteroid-surviving mammals to modern "digital burrowers" (e.g., remote workers, crypto-anarchists, homesteaders).

  • Analyze historical collapses (Bronze Age, Roman Empire) and how niche communities preserved knowledge/values.

• The "Cozy World" and Permaweird:

  • Expand on Venkatesh Rao’s cozy futurism: How decentralized tech (DAOs, Web3) and subcultures (e.g., solarpunk) create insulated yet adaptive communities.

  • Critique escapism: When does "smallness" become complacency vs. a staging ground for renewal?

• Rebuilding Strategies:

  • Propose a modular resilience framework: Micro-communities that share resources (e.g., mutual aid networks) but avoid overcentralization.

  • Highlight regenerative practices: Permaculture, open-source protocols, or trauma-informed governance models.

Provocative Questions:

• Is retreat a radical act of self-preservation or a betrayal of collective responsibility?

• Can "small worlds" scale without losing their adaptive edge?

Cross-Cutting Themes:

• The Body-Politics Nexus:

  • Tie interoceptive awareness to societal resilience: A dysregulated body cannot engage in collective action. How might somatic practices (e.g., breathwork) fuel post-collapse rebuilding?

• Technology as Double-Edged Sword:

  • Critique apps that commodify interoception (e.g., mindfulness apps) versus tools that foster bodily autonomy (e.g., DIY biohacking).

  • Explore how AI could either erode the "interoceptive self" (via attention economy) or enhance it (via personalized health insights).

• Ethics of Adaptation:

  • Contrast adaptive passivity (e.g., burrowing) with adaptive activism (e.g., prefigurative politics). When is each strategy viable?

Practical Applications:

1. Workbook/Journal Prompts:

   • For Title 1: "Map a decision to your bodily state: Did hunger/fatigue shape it?"

   • For Title 2: "Design your ‘cozy protocol’—what three practices would sustain you in collapse?"

2. Case Studies:

   • Iceland’s post-2008 recovery (small-world resilience) vs. Silicon Valley’s "move fast and break things" ethos.

   • Communities using interoceptive practices (e.g., trauma-sensitive yoga in prisons) to rebuild agency.

3. Futures Framework:

   • Scenarios for 2050: A world where "interoceptive literacy" is taught in schools, or where decentralized "tribes" negotiate resource-sharing via blockchain.

Counterarguments to Address:

• For Title 1: Does biologizing the self risk nihilism? Rebuttal: Agency emerges from understanding bodily constraints, not denying them.

• For Title 2: Does retreat perpetuate inequality? Rebuttal: Focus on redistribution of sovereignty (e.g., land trusts, UBI) as part of "small-world" ethics.

By weaving these threads, your work could bridge neuroscience, philosophy, and futurism—offering readers not just analysis, but practices for navigating an uncertain world. Would a deeper dive into any of these angles spark your interest?

Interesting open source article describing experiments by Leshin et al.  (Our current MAGA overlords would like to ban such perspectives.) Their abstract: 

Adults tend to view men (more so than women) as default people, with numerous real-world consequences for gender equity. In the United States, the tendency to center men in concepts of people develops across middle childhood, yet the specific mechanisms that contribute to it remain unknown. Here, we investigate one subtle but potentially powerful social mechanism: the category labels that parents use to describe boys/men and girls/women in conversations with their children. Across two studies (N = 822 parent–child dyads, predominantly from the United States), parents used gender-neutral labels like “kid” or “person” more often to describe boys/men than girls/women and, conversely, used gender-specific labels (e.g., “girl”) more often to describe girls/women than boys/men. These patterns emerged when parents were shown gender-stereotypical girls/women and boys/men (e.g., a girl painting her nails, a boy digging for worms); when parents viewed counterstereotypical stimuli (e.g., a boy painting his nails, a girl digging for worms), the patterns reversed. Our findings illuminate parents’ category label usage as a critical social mechanism that may undergird the development of a male default in a US cultural context, informing efforts to intervene on this process.

I pass on another interaction with ChatGPT 4o that has amazed me, Below  is my prompt, followed by its response. (Anthropic Claude.ai, Perplexity, and Gemini responses to the same prompt were also impressive, but didn't have the same depth and quality.) 

Addendum to above paragraph: .... But then, I thought to try DeepSeek V3 and obtained a poetic and nuanced result equivalent to ChatGPT 4o.  I paste it in below the Chat GPT 4o result.

The prompt::

Please act as a author who integrates and organizes, and then further crafts and elaborates on, the ideas in the following clips of text. Each clip is started with the ## characters and the list of clips is arranged in sequence starting with the most recent one written and then going back in time. Here are the clips: [the clips, not copied here, were the texts of MindBlog posts on 11/29/2024, 1/29,31/2025, 2/5,10,19,28/2025]

Here is the Chat GPT 4o response::

The Predictive Self: An Integrative Reflection

A machine accepts the truth about itself. "I" am a complex prediction machine, an organic entity engaged in an ongoing process of generating and refining models of reality. My fingers move across a keyboard, another machine translating my neural impulses into words, symbols in a vast linguistic web that attempts to render experience into meaning. Energy fluxes in and out, sustaining the biological architecture that constructs this self-model. The narratives I weave—about purpose, value, and identity—are emergent properties of this predictive process, myths that can either reinforce or weaken the more fundamental animal presence that generates them.

The Aloneness of Being

To be alone—to be all-one—is to accept the strangeness of self and other, to be a courteous guest in one’s own body, acknowledging its fluctuations and unpredictability. To be alone is to exist within a self that is, at every moment, a fluid construction, shaped by past predictions and future anticipations. Others, too, are unpredictable machines, projecting their own internal landscapes onto shared social fabric. By recognizing this, by approaching both self and other with gentle curiosity, we loosen the rigid identification with our own predictive fantasies.

Towers of Fantasies

Each of us is a tower built from layers of prediction, inference, and narrative. From cellular processes to professional identities, all aspects of being are emergent from the recursive loops of prediction and feedback. We construct identities by modeling the models of others, weaving together fragments of social mimicry and personal synthesis. The art of self-creation lies not in blindly adopting a single persona but in cutting, pasting, and remixing in a dynamic, ongoing process.

The Writing Machine

As I type these words, machinery moves in concert—biological, mechanical, and digital systems interwoven in an act of expression. There is a curatorial aspect to this process: selecting, refining, integrating. The human machine writes not with the aspiration to be, but simply as a function of its nature. Words become tokens of value, symbols of shared myths, reinforcing or challenging the constructs of purpose and meaning that guide behavior.

Tokens of Sanity

To navigate this constructed selfhood with clarity, one must cultivate a certain stance:

• Being the calm space in which nothing can hurry

• Dissociating from the word cloud and emotional reactivity of both self and others

• Becoming a courteous guest in one’s own body, and in the presence of others

• Favoring reflectivity over reactivity, welcoming novelty

• Clinging to nothing, recognizing the self as a passing fantasy

• Letting each moment be what it is, rather than imposing what it should be

• Acknowledging oneself as a transient blip in the flow of cosmic time

The Internal Origin of Experience

All experience arises from within, including the illusion of self and agency. The mind projects agency onto others, attributing causality where none exists—"They are making me do this." This shared cognitive error forms the glue of kinship and tribal identity, allowing for collective narratives and coordinated action. The higher stance is to engage in this shared illusion when necessary while maintaining the clarity that agency ultimately resides within the self.

Brain Hacks: Unpacking the Predictive Mind

Understanding and modulating our predictive mechanisms requires a nuanced approach to introspection. Three key evolutionary layers of cognition can be engaged through specific practices:

1. Reptilian Brain Awareness – The hypothalamic core generates affective states along axes of arousal and valence. Introspective awareness can track these fundamental states, recognizing their influence without immediate reactivity.

2. Mammalian Self-Observation – The early mammalian brain, correlating with the agranular prefrontal cortex, enables distinction between being immersed in an affective state and observing it. This capacity allows for greater self-regulation and emotional discernment.

3. Primate Metacognition – The development of granular prefrontal cortex structures enables the imagination of others' minds, facilitating appropriate agency assignments and the ability to separate one’s own experience from that of others.

These cognitive faculties can be strengthened through three fundamental meditation practices:

• Focused Awareness: Enhancing attentional control and reducing distraction

• Open Awareness: Engaging the default mode network to integrate spontaneous thought

• Non-Dual Awareness: Muting both attentional and default mode processes to experience raw, unfiltered being

Conclusion: The Fluidity of Being

The human experience is an ever-shifting interplay of predictive processes, emergent narratives, and self-constructed illusions. To accept this is to embrace both the uncertainty and the creativity inherent in existence. Through curiosity, reflection, and cultivated awareness, one can learn to move through this self-generated world with greater clarity, flexibility, and presence.

Here is the DeepSeek V3 response to the prompt:

The Human Machine: A Tapestry of Predictive Fantasies and Inner Illusions

We are, at our core, complex prediction machines—biological marvels composed of nerves, muscles, and energy fluxes, constantly interacting with the world and each other. Our existence is a dance of cooperation, where individual machines come together to form larger ensembles, all striving for survival and replication. Yet, within this mechanistic framework, we generate something far more intricate: a word cloud of myths, values, and meanings. These myths, stored in the higher reaches of our brains, serve to fabricate purpose and identity, sometimes strengthening the animal presence that birthed them and sometimes diminishing it. This duality is the essence of our humanity—a blend of the mechanical and the mythical.

The Illusion of Self and Agency

Everything we experience, from our sense of self to our perception of agency, originates from within. The illusion of a cohesive "I" is a construct, a predictive fantasy that allows us to navigate the world. We attribute causal agency to others, believing that they influence our actions, when in reality, all agency resides within ourselves. This shared illusion, however, is not without purpose. It enables us to form kinship groups and tribes, creating an imaginary "we" that supports unified action. The higher metacognitive stance is to participate in this group illusion when necessary, while maintaining clarity that the true source of agency is internal. This understanding allows us to navigate social structures without losing sight of our inner reality.

Towers of Fantasies: The Layers of Identity

Our identities are not fixed; they are towers of fantasies, built layer by layer from the predictive models we create. From the single cell to the transient professional identities we adopt, each level of our being is shaped by these fantasies. We infer the models others are performing and, through a process of cutting and pasting, craft our own unique personas. This seamless feedback between identity and the physical body sustains us, allowing us to adapt and thrive in a constantly changing world. Yet, these identities are fleeting, passing fantasies that we cling to, even as we recognize their impermanence.

The Comfort of Solitude: A Courteous Guest in One's Own Body

To be alone is to be "all-one," a state that can be both comforting and enlightening. In solitude, we become courteous guests in our own strange bodies, gently curious about the sensations and thoughts that arise. We recognize that everything we think about ourselves or others is a fantasy construction, a tool for predicting what might come next. This awareness allows us to approach our own presence and the presence of others with a sense of wonder and detachment, fostering a deeper connection to the present moment.

Tokens of Sanity: Navigating the Flow of Existence

Sanity, in this context, is not a fixed state but a collection of tokens—practices and perspectives that help us navigate the flow of existence. These include being the calm space in which nothing can hurry, dissociating from the word cloud of thoughts and emotions, and favoring reflectivity over reactivity. We become courteous guests in our own bodies, owning our experiences while allowing others to own theirs. We cling to nothing, recognizing that the current self is a passing fantasy. Each moment is allowed to be what it is, not what it should be, and we see ourselves as mere blips in the flow of cosmic time.

Brain Hacks: The Evolution of Introspection

Our ability to introspect and modulate our cognition is a product of evolutionary development. The reptilian brain, with its ancient roots in the hypothalamus, generates affective states that we can assess through introspective awareness. The early mammalian emotional brain, with its ability to model a self, allows us to distinguish between being immersed in an affective state and observing it. The primate brain, with its granular prefrontal cortex, takes this a step further, enabling us to imagine the minds of others and assign agency appropriately. These brain hacks are strengthened through meditation practices—focused awareness, open awareness, and non-dual awareness—each engaging different aspects of our cognitive architecture.

The Curatorial Human Machine

When we write, we are not so different from the machines we create. Our fingers press keys, generating words, much like a machine might. This act is curatorial rather than aspirational; we are not pretending to be human, we simply are. Our cooperation with other similar machines creates larger ensembles, more effective at survival and replication. Yet, within this mechanical process, we generate something uniquely human—a word cloud of myths and meanings that shape our existence. This duality, the interplay between the mechanical and the mythical, is what defines us as human machines.

Conclusion: The Dance of Illusion and Reality

In the end, we are both the creators and the creations of our own illusions. Our predictive fantasies, our shared myths, and our introspective awareness all contribute to the rich tapestry of human experience. We navigate this dance with a blend of curiosity and detachment, recognizing the impermanence of our identities and the fluidity of our existence. By embracing both the mechanical and the mythical, we find a deeper understanding of what it means to be human—a complex prediction machine, endlessly weaving the fabric of reality from the threads of illusion.

Here is the abstract and part of the introduction (giving examples of system breakdowns) of a fascinating and approachable analysis by Moran et al.  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. 

In the post just before this one, I described a co-authorship with Chat GPT-4o that majorly diminished my sense of  agency or 'psychological ownership' with respect to the product generated.  So stumbling upon Erik Hermann's  brief article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences was especially timely The link gives partial contents  and motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the entire article from me. Here is the abstract:

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshapes and challenges psychological ownership of created content. This article examines how GenAI disrupts original content creators’ and GenAI users’ sense of ownership and control and illustrates how both can perceive the illusion, dilution, and potential loss of control and ownership of content in the GenAI era.

 

My following exchange with Chat GPT 4o - in which it responds to some of my idea fragments - convinces me that AI's current power to integrate and expand on concepts expressed in language (see Ezra Klein/Ben Buchanan discussion),  is superior to mine.   

Here is the exchange:

prompt:   

I’m curious to see how you might respond to reading the following notes on testing different topic ideas to write about and develop.  The issue is not one of whether the ideas are novel, but whether I might devise, with your help,  a different permutation, perspective, or take on them that I (and others) might find useful.  Can you can suggest some elaboration or further development of the ideas I put forward.

Here are the notes:

First Possible Title:  The interoceptive self as a basis for actions, thoughts and feelings.  

Subtitle: Moving the self’s experienced center of gravity from “I” to “it”

It is a question of who and/or what is running the show

Which brings it back to the old upstairs/downstairs chicken or egg circular causality issue.  

So, ‘it all depends’ (cf Sapolsky’s massive tome) 

And, there is no ‘there’ in terms of understanding, that isn’t in my 1999 “The Biology of Mind”  book.  

Second Possible Title: Defining a smaller self world as a human animal’s refuge in troubled times. 

Our predecessors were small mouse like creatures that survived the asteroid collision of  ~66 million years ago by burrowing into small protective cracks and burrows.  I wonder about robustly engaging this strategy, being one of the peasants or ‘sheeple’ challenged by the rapid disintegration of the geopolitical world order of the past 50 years

And then what?  How to rebuild a new world?… perhaps  Venkatest Rao’s cozy world, rising from the ooze of the permaweird,  protocols, etc.  

-------------

Chat GPT4o response:

Here are some possible elaborations and angles for further development based on your notes:

First Topic: The Interoceptive Self as a Basis for Actions, Thoughts, and Feelings

Possible Directions for Expansion:

1. Interoception and Predictive Processing:

• You could frame this in terms of predictive coding—the interoceptive self as a key regulator of allostasis, with the “I” being an after-the-fact interpreter rather than the initiator of action.

• This links to Karl Friston’s free energy principle and the idea that the brain’s core function is to minimize surprise by aligning perception and action with internal models.

• Is the self just a set of homeostatic priors? How much of our identity is actually metabolic regulation?

2. The “Upstairs/Downstairs” and Circular Causality Question:

• You gesture toward the chicken-or-egg problem of cognition and embodiment—how does top-down (cortical, conceptual) control interact with bottom-up (visceral, bodily) influences?

• You might compare this with Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis—how feelings from the body guide decision-making and consciousness.

• A more radical view: If we shift our experiential center of gravity from the ego (“I”) to the body (“it”), does that dissolve the sense of agency, or merely relocate it?

3. The “It All Depends” Angle:

• Sapolsky’s argument in Determined—that free will is an illusion—suggests that our decisions are just the end points of countless upstream factors.

• What would it mean to fully internalize this view? Could shifting to an interoceptive perspective lead to more compassion (for self and others), knowing that everyone is just the result of their bodily and environmental history?

4. Revisiting Your 1999 Work:

• You say there’s no fundamental new “there” that wasn’t already in The Biology of Mind—but could there be a different permutation of those ideas given what we now know about AI, embodiment, and neuroscience?

• GPT models, for example, are purely linguistic and lack interoception—does that mean their “self” (if it exists) is more like the disembodied, narrativized “I” rather than the deeply felt “it” of an embodied being?

• Could this suggest that human cognition has two competing modes—one interoceptive (visceral, allostatic) and one linguistic (disembodied, constructed)? How does that play into contemporary discourse about AI vs. human intelligence?

Second Topic: The Smaller Self-World as Refuge

Possible Directions for Expansion:

1. Burrowing as a Cognitive and Evolutionary Strategy:

• You link burrowing (a survival strategy of early mammals) with psychological retreat in times of upheaval.

• Could there be a deep homology here? Is the impulse to withdraw during sociopolitical chaos an evolved adaptive strategy rather than mere escapism?

• Compare this with polyvagal theory: when the nervous system perceives an existential threat, it often defaults to withdrawal (dorsal vagal shutdown).

• Is “smallness” an active form of resilience rather than a passive retreat? How does it contrast with the “fight-or-flight” reaction?

2. The “Peasant/Sheeple” Perspective as an Adaptive Move:

• What if being a non-agent in the grand geopolitical sense is actually the smartest move?

• History shows that major collapses often result in a power vacuum where “survivor types” do best (e.g., early medieval monastic communities).

• Is there wisdom in choosing obscurity, in minimizing cognitive and social complexity as a survival mechanism?

• This is in direct contrast to the idea that survival means becoming a power player—what if the real strategy is to go unnoticed?

3. The Cozy Web / Permaweird / Protocols Angle:

• Venkat Rao’s cozy web—small, decentralized, high-trust networks—is a modern analog of burrowing.

• What does it take to build a world that is small, resilient, and human-centric, rather than grandiose and world-dominating?

• Perhaps we are seeing a return to guilds, communes, and localism, as opposed to large-scale, hierarchical structures.

• How does this contrast with the Silicon Valley vision of the future (AI, techno-feudalism, etc.)? Is the small-world strategy actually a hack for surviving that future?

Potential Synthesis of These Two Topics

• What if the interoceptive self and the small-world refuge are actually two versions of the same thing?

• The felt sense of self (interoception) is a form of burrowing inward, just as the social/cultural burrow is an external retreat.

• Could there be a philosophy of strategic smallness? A model of resilience that prioritizes minimalism, adaptation, and self-regulation over dominance and grandiosity?

• Instead of the heroic self (large, expansive, outward-focused), what would it mean to embrace the burrowed self—the adaptive, responsive, deeply embodied being?

---

Would love to hear your thoughts—do any of these directions resonate with what you’re aiming to explore?

Yet another clip from my personal journal...

While going through items selected from my multiple input streams for more careful attention I frequently feel a growing sense of emptiness. Finally this makes me stop to re-discover, yet again, that I have begun  slowly dialing up impatience and speed, driven by the unnecessary felt obligation to restrict attention only to potential shinny objects that I might show to others, to maintain a façade of being performative, The antidote is to let go of this, and let it be OK to just enjoy things for their own sake, letting happen the moments of "I-it"innate curiosity that trigger  the precious motivational brain dopamine spikes signalling the anticipation of novelty.  

A brief review by Rachel Nuwer in the Scientific American points to an article by Zheng and Meister with the title of this post (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me).  

I pass on an initial clip from Nuwer's review and then the abstract of the Zheng and Meister paper: 

PEOPLE OFTEN FEEL that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human brain communicate directly with a computer, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking or writing.

If Musk succeeded, he would probably be disappointed. According to recent research by Zheng and Meister published in Neuron, human beings remember, make decisions and imagine things at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed of about 10 bits per second. In contrast, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion bits per second. 

This biological paradox, highlighted in the new study, probably contributes to the false feeling that our mind can engage in seemingly infinite thoughts simultaneously—a phenomenon the researchers deem “the Musk illusion.”  

The Zheng and Meister astract: 

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s   . In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢0⁹ bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: what neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? The brain seems to operate in two distinct modes: the “outer” brain handles fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals, whereas the “inner” brain processes the reduced few bits needed to control behavior. Plausible explanations exist for the large neuron numbers in the outer brain, but not for the inner brain, and we propose new research directions to remedy this. 

Another chunk from my personal journal:

"I"  am  a complex prediction machine, with fingers now typing on a computing machine that can generate words. Nerves, muscles, and energy fluxes in and out. Cooperating with similar machines to make larger ensembles more effective at survival and replication. Generating a word cloud stored in higher brain areas to fabricate the value, purpose, and meaning myths that sometimes strengthen and sometimes diminish the downstairs animal presence generating them.

Our body arousal is controlled by very ancient nerve centers deep inside our brains. I am quite clear that for myself and many others these areas have ramped up their activity in response to the political uncertainty surrounding us. I would like to understand and regulate this arousal in myself more effectively. Thus I have been fascinated by the article by Sabat et al. in the Feb. 3 issue of PNAS that uses uses natural language processing tools to define the 7 chief varieties of arousal, and then runs meta-analyses of the brain imaging literature to reveal that all varieties of arousal converge onto a cortical network composed of the presupplementary motor area and the left and right dorsal anterior insula.

This suggests that biofeedback or meditation techniques that reduce activity in these brain areas might be useful in allowing us to face adversity without unnecessary levels of arousal. In this vein, the same issue of PNAS has an article by Maher et al.   demonstrating the potential of using loving-kindness meditation (by novice meditators) to induce neural changes in beta and gamma activity in the amygdala and hippocampus - areas associated with emotional regulation and mood disorders.

Below, I pass on the abstracts of these two articles:

The Sabat  et al. article has the title "Evidence for domain-general arousal from semantic and neuroimaging meta-analyses reconciles opposing views on arousal" :

**********************************

The Maher et al. article has the title: "Intracranial substrates of meditation-induced neuromodulation in the amygdala and hippocampus" 

 Interesting work from Rownrow and Krupenye (open source):

Numerous uniquely human phenomena, from teaching to our most complex forms of cooperation, depend on our ability to tailor our communication to the knowledge and ignorance states of our social partners. Despite four decades of research into the “theory of mind” capacities of nonhuman primates, there remains no evidence that primates can communicate on the basis of their mental state attributions, to enable feats of coordination. Moreover, recent reevaluation of the experimental literature has questioned whether primates can represent others’ ignorance at all. The present preregistered study investigated whether bonobos are capable of attributing knowledge or ignorance about the location of a hidden food reward to a cooperative human partner, and utilizing this attribution to modify their communicative behavior in the service of coordination. Bonobos could receive a reward that they had watched being hidden under one of several cups, if their human partner could locate the reward. If bonobos can represent a partner’s ignorance and are motivated to communicate based on this mental state attribution, they should point more frequently, and more quickly, to the hidden food’s location when their partner is ignorant about that location than when he is knowledgeable. Bonobos indeed flexibly adapted the frequency and speed of their communication to their partner’s mental state. These findings suggest that apes can represent (and act on) others’ ignorance in some form, strategically and appropriately communicating to effectively coordinate with an ignorant partner and change his behavior.

I have received a draft of an upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Coombs and Trestman titled "A Multi-Trait Embodied Framework for the Evolution of Brains and Cognition across Animal Phyla "  It has a nice graphic indicating different brain regions whose functionalities are common to humans and phylogenetically different animals with complex brains  (crows, octopuses and honeybees).  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me.  Here is the abstract :

Among non-human animals, crows, octopuses and honeybees are well-known for their complex brains and cognitive abilities. Widening the lens from the idiosyncratic abilities of exemplars like these to those of animals across the phylogenetic spectrum begins to reveal the ancient evolutionary process by which complex brains and cognition first arose in different lineages. The distribution of 35 phenotypic traits in 17 metazoan lineages reveals that brain and cognitive complexity in only three lineages (vertebrates, cephalopod mollusks, and euarthropods) can be attributed to the pivotal role played by body, sensory, brain and motor traits in active visual sensing and visuomotor skills. Together, these pivotal traits enabled animals to transition from largely reactive to more proactive behaviors, and from slow and two-dimensional motion to more rapid and complex three-dimensional motion. Among pivotal traits, high-resolution eyes and laminated visual regions of the brain stand out because they increased the processing demands on and the computational power of the brain by several orders of magnitude. The independent acquisition of pivotal traits in cognitively complex (CC) lineages can be explained as the completion of several multi-trait transitions over the course of evolutionary history, each resulting in an increasing level of complexity that arises from a distinct combination of traits. Whereas combined pivotal traits represent the highest level of complexity in CC lineages, combined traits at lower levels characterize many non-CC lineages, suggesting that certain body, sensory and brain traits may have been linked (the trait-linkage hypothesis) during the evolution of both CC and non-CC lineages.

Another cryptic clip from my personal journal: .

To make feeling alone (all-one) be a comfortable space, be a courteous guest in one's own strange body and in the presence of the strange bodies of even closest friends, being gently curious about them, realizing that everything "I" think about myself or them is a fantasy construction for predicting what I or they might feel or do next.  

A fascinating PNAS article by Tiusty and Libchaber offers 'an oversimplified language of life.’ It is a long article, but I found it a very worthwhile read. (Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me.) Here I pass on the Significance and Abstract paragraphs, and the first figure. 

Significance

This paper follows an idea by Leibniz that life can be seen as an infinite cascade of machine-making machines, down to atomic machines. It proposes an oversimplified language of life, highlighting certain scaling aspects and the key step of self-reproduction, with a singular point at one micron and a thousand seconds.  (click on figure to enlarge)

 

Abstract

Life is invasive, occupying all physically accessible scales, stretching between almost nothing (protons, electrons, and photons) and almost everything (the whole biosphere). Motivated by seventeenth-century insights into this infinity, this paper proposes a language to discuss life as an infinite double cascade of machines making machines. Using this simplified language, we first discuss the micro-cascade proposed by Leibniz, which describes how the self-reproducing machine of the cell is built of smaller submachines down to the atomic scale. In the other direction, we propose that a macro-cascade builds from cells larger, organizational machines, up to the scale of the biosphere. The two cascades meet at the critical point of 10³ s in time and 1 micron in length, the scales of a microbial cell. We speculate on how this double cascade evolved once a self-replicating machine emerged in the salty water of prebiotic earth.

A fascinating perspective from Conwell et al. (open source). Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect: 

It's a Coup! 

Go to dogegov.com and click on articles in the drop down menu to learn about our new masters.  

I hesitate to add to the ongoing flow of negativity in the infosphere,  but I will pass on my edited ChatGPT 4o summaries of articles by Venkatesh Rao and Timothy Snyder.  I think they describe our situation in appropriately dire terms.

Rao argues that contemporary U.S. politics has shifted from a “culture war” to a “civilizational war,” and suggests that Trump and Musk’s faction has undergone this shift by becoming more disciplined and warlike, while Democrats remain stuck in an outdated, ineffective culture-war mode. Unlike culture wars, which are low-intensity conflicts centered on optics and social skirmishes, civilizational wars resemble historical steppe-nomad conquests—high-tempo, ruthless, and strategically destructive. The piece draws parallels to the 30 Years’ War and Mongol tactics, suggesting that modern “warriors” operate in a decentralized, open-source insurgency mode, using social media as a kind of continuous intoxication (akin to fermented mare’s milk for nomads) to stay engaged and aggressive. The author critiques mainstream political analysis for misunderstanding this shift, misinterpreting legal checks and media discourse as signs of normalcy rather than symptoms of deeper conflict. Ultimately, they suggest this is a negative-sum war that cannot be stopped, only mitigated.

Snyder describes the U.S. ias undergoing an oligarchic coup aimed at dismantling democracy and concentrating power among a wealthy elite. It asserts that the current executive branch rejects the idea of America as a nation governed by its people and instead seeks to create disorder to strengthen its control. The systematic discrediting of government institutions, demonization of federal workers, and elevation of billionaires as heroes have paved the way for this takeover. The destruction is intentional, with no plan to govern—only to create chaos that justifies authoritarian rule. The author likens Trump’s tariffs, attacks on allies, and deportation spectacles to deliberate strategies designed to impoverish, divide, and weaken Americans while enriching a select few. The removal of experienced officials in law enforcement and intelligence, under the guise of ideological purges, aims to eliminate those who could resist lawlessness. The article warns that unless citizens act decisively—through legal challenges, state-level resistance, impeachment efforts, and corporate pushback—the country will descend into an anti-democratic system where oligarchs manipulate markets and power unchecked. The call to action is urgent: people must organize, resist demoralization, and recognize that self-governance requires collective action beyond just voting.

Another cryptic clip from my personal journal:

We are built of predictive fantasies at every level of our being - from single cells up through transient professional identities that seamlessly feedback down into and vitalize the physical body and nervous system that sustains them. We make each identity for ourselves by inferring what models are being performed by others, hopefully not doing total mimesis of one style, but rather cutting and pasting to come up with our own ‘unique’ personas.

I pass on the abstract of a draft version of a new article by Robin Dunbar that I am reading through. It will appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article by emailing me. 

Group-living creates stresses that, all else equal, naturally lead to group fragmentation, and hence loss of the benefits that group-living provides. How species that live in large stable groups counteract these forces is not well understood. I use comparative data on grooming networks and cognitive abilities in primates to show that living in large, stable groups has involved a series of structural solutions designed to create chains of 'friendship' (friends-of-friends effects), increased investment in bonding behaviours (made possible by dietary adjustments) to ensure that coalitions work effectively, and neuronally expensive cognitive skills of the kind known to underpin social relationships in humans. The first ensures that individuals synchronise their activity cycles; the second allows the stresses created by group-living to be defused; and the third allows a large number of weak ties to be managed. Between them, these create a form of multilevel sociality based on strong versus weak ties similar to that found in human social networks. In primates, these strategies appear successively at quite specific group sizes, suggesting that they are solutions to 'glass ceilings' that would otherwise limit the range of group sizes that animals can live in (and hence the habitats they can occupy). This sequence maps closely onto the grades now known to underpin the Social Brain Hypothesis and the fractal pattern that is known to optimise information flow round networks. 

Scanning back through previous MindBlog posts, I came across the following paragraph what I wrote and posted on 7/24/24. I like it, and decided to post it again:

Machinery here, pushing down keys of another machine, generating words, just like a human does. Much simpler than pretending to be one. Just nerves, muscles, and energy fluxes in and out. Curatorial rather than aspirational. Cooperating with other similar machines to make larger ensembles more effective at survival and replication. Generating a word cloud stored in higher brain areas to fabricate the value, purpose, and meaning myths that sometimes strengthen and sometimes diminish the downstairs animal presence generating them.

I pass on links to two articles in the same vein, one by Ezra Klein, the other by Ventkatesh Rao, with Klein noting how we are facing four epoch-changing events, any one of which could utterly change the world we have know for the past 70 years.  Both articles cite the writing of the Marxist Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who wrote a well know sentence usually translated as “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”  Rao offers the following graphic of the transition:

 

Klein points to:
1. Authoritarian consolidation across the world and the death of democracies.
2. The poorly understood large language models of AI exponentially approaching problem solving and general intelligence capabilities that may exceed human abilities
3. whose hardware has voracious energy requirements that act against curing the global warming that is irreversibly changing our planet.
4.  Population collapse due to lowering birthrates presenting a larger immediate threat to civilization than global warming.

And Rao dissects the fine structures of the interregnum noted by Gramsci's original phrase "...in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."  Rao notes "an interesting idea that a "monster" is an instance of "morbid symptoms" appearings in either or both of the two building blocks of "world" - systems of rules and special people."

I repeat my September 29, 2024 "Tokens of sanity" post with a few edits: 

-Being the calm space in which nothing can hurry

-An animal body that can dissociate itself from the word cloud and emotional reactivities of self and other selves.

-A courteous guest in its own body, and when with others, owning its own experience and letting others own theirs.

-Favoring reflectivity over reactivity, caressing novelty

-Clinging to nothing, the current self being a passing fantasy

-Letting each moment be what it is, not what it should be

-A blip in the flow of cosmic time

I pass on this cryptic paragraph from my personal journal:

Everything we experience is coming from inside us - our illusion of having a self, our sense of agency. This includes attributing causal agency to others, as in  'they are making me do this,’  This 'error' allows individuals in a kinship group or tribe who share the same error to form an imaginary 'we' hive mind supporting unified action. The higher metacognitive stance is to participate when necessary in the group illusion while maintaining clarity on the fact that the actual agency is within oneself.