So long as shortform is salient for me, might as well do another one on a novel (in that I’ve not heard/seen anyone express it before) idea I have about perceptual control theory, minimization of prediction error/confusion, free energy, and Buddhism that I was recently reminded of.
There is a notion within Mahayana Buddhism of the three poisons: ignorance, attachment (or, I think we could better term this here, attraction, for reasons that will become clear), and aversion. This is part of one model of where suffering arises from. Others express these notions in other ways, but I want to focus on this way of talking about these root kleshas (defilements, afflictions, mind poisons) because I think it has a clear tie in with this other thing that excites me, the idea that the primary thing that neurons seek to do is minimize prediction error.
Ignorance, even among the three poisons, is generally considered more fundamental, in that ignorance appears first and it gives rise to attraction and aversion (in some models there is fundamental ignorance that gives rise to the three poisons, marking a separation between ignorance as mental activity and ignorance as a result of the physical embodiment of information transfer). This looks to me a lot like what perceptual control theory predicts if the thing being controlled for is minimization of prediction error: there is confusion about the state of the world, information comes in, and this sends a signal within the control system of neurons to either up or down regulate something. Essentially what the three poisons describe is what you would expect the world to look like if the mind were powered by control systems trying to minimize confusion/ignorance, nudging the system toward and away from a set point where prediction error is minimized via negative feedback (and a small bonus, this might help explain why the brain doesn’t tend to get into long-lasting positive feedback loops: it’s not constructed for it and before long you trigger something else to down-regulate because you violate its predictions).
It also makes a lot of sense that these would be the root poisons. I think we can forgive 1st millennium Buddhists for not discovering PCT or minimization of prediction error directly, but we should not be surprised that they identified the mental actions this theory predicts should be foundational to the mind and also recognized that they were foundational actions to all others. Elsewhere, Buddhism explicitly calls out ignorance as the fundamental force driving dukkha (suffering), though we probably shouldn’t assign too many points to (non-Madhyamaka) Buddhism for noticing this since other Buddhist theories don’t make this same claims about attachment and aversion and they are used concurrently in explication of the dharma.
So long as shortform is salient for me, might as well do another one on a novel (in that I’ve not heard/seen anyone express it before) idea I have about perceptual control theory, minimization of prediction error/confusion, free energy, and Buddhism that I was recently reminded of.
There is a notion within Mahayana Buddhism of the three poisons: ignorance, attachment (or, I think we could better term this here, attraction, for reasons that will become clear), and aversion. This is part of one model of where suffering arises from. Others express these notions in other ways, but I want to focus on this way of talking about these root kleshas (defilements, afflictions, mind poisons) because I think it has a clear tie in with this other thing that excites me, the idea that the primary thing that neurons seek to do is minimize prediction error.
Ignorance, even among the three poisons, is generally considered more fundamental, in that ignorance appears first and it gives rise to attraction and aversion (in some models there is fundamental ignorance that gives rise to the three poisons, marking a separation between ignorance as mental activity and ignorance as a result of the physical embodiment of information transfer). This looks to me a lot like what perceptual control theory predicts if the thing being controlled for is minimization of prediction error: there is confusion about the state of the world, information comes in, and this sends a signal within the control system of neurons to either up or down regulate something. Essentially what the three poisons describe is what you would expect the world to look like if the mind were powered by control systems trying to minimize confusion/ignorance, nudging the system toward and away from a set point where prediction error is minimized via negative feedback (and a small bonus, this might help explain why the brain doesn’t tend to get into long-lasting positive feedback loops: it’s not constructed for it and before long you trigger something else to down-regulate because you violate its predictions).
It also makes a lot of sense that these would be the root poisons. I think we can forgive 1st millennium Buddhists for not discovering PCT or minimization of prediction error directly, but we should not be surprised that they identified the mental actions this theory predicts should be foundational to the mind and also recognized that they were foundational actions to all others. Elsewhere, Buddhism explicitly calls out ignorance as the fundamental force driving dukkha (suffering), though we probably shouldn’t assign too many points to (non-Madhyamaka) Buddhism for noticing this since other Buddhist theories don’t make this same claims about attachment and aversion and they are used concurrently in explication of the dharma.