It's 15:55 and Bryan is reading Slavich 2020. See Slavich Questions

• Yup. This “dual systems model” has been put out from a bunch of angles.
  • So the question is... Is a two-system approach just an easy one to come about?
  • Why not three systems?
  • What makes us think there's two?
  • Or are the two approaches related. Like... the brain came about in imitation of the immune system. Or is there another system that's more primary than immunity?
  • We need to know more about these first things that have specific immunity
  • I love these questions. Because there’s been a lot of debunking relatively recently of the dual system cog model. Just doesn’t cleanly map to ... a lot
• Yeah I wondered about that. But I'm very attached to this idea right now that is annoyingly related to Kahneman, which is just that I see there as being two sources for rationality. One is inductive, bayesian, acausal, and social, the other is deductive, causal, and not social
  • And this relates to Darwin vs Kelvin and complexity vs ML of course
• Kahneman is a bad writer. Tversky was smarter. Kahneman as primarily inhibitory?
  • Specialization in collaboration in the explore/exploit roles.
  • Which obviously, specialization is also super important. Both for the brain, the environment, and the specific immune system

Since we haven't gone through the above I'm going to keep going here. Today I'm thinking about crystallization, from two sections in Scientific Revolutions (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Especially in the accounts of Foucault and Hacking, new conceptual spaces are constructed and may "crystallize" (Hacking) rapidly. Once they become canonical, they seem to be such obvious frameworks for making true or false claims that the corresponding categories of thought and action appear to be given as part of the nature of things, as written in the language of nature, so to speak, when they are in fact a product of the cultural conditioning of our socio-cognitive systems.

Yet people living before and after the historical crystallization of a style would find each other mutually unintelligible.

Also thinking of Jaynes:

The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning of action in novel situations.

In my reading, humans switch from explore mode (in which they hear and obey the gods, heading into new territories) and exploit mode (in which what they have learned "crystallizes" into culture).

• I want to look at actual crystallization

I also want to start thinking about Kuhn's "essential tension" vs McGilchrist's "necessary distance." - Is this this related to #3 below (which I have become interested in from a few perspectives including how new ideas emerge, change, crystallize through the tension in paradoxes (particularly "very good" paradoxes): "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress." - Niels Bohr

1. free energy/connectionist models of depression/mood
2. Intersubjectivity: developmental, self/other distinctions in buddism
3. Contradictions/paradoxes: a tighter, more reliable truth emerges from the best
4. collaborative energy: the push/pull of different left/right hemispheric tensions, your inductive/deductive systems, etc. (I know you categorize the supra-topic as something different
5. Social Baseline Theory: (a) social is safe, flexible, freeing up energy for everything; (b) adaptive function of empathy/cooperative (related to tend/befriend stress response)
6. Depression as normative/adaptive https://psyche.co/ideas/if-you-stay-mentally-well-your-entire-life-youre-not-normal?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=bce2561727-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_02_15_01_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-bce2561727-71753952
7. Mindful attention exposes the transitory nature of all sensations and emotions: Implications for meaning making (for self, with others)
   1. a) separating attention (beam) from consciousness more generally.
8. the tension between creativity and accuracy
9. Going meta: putting some goal posts to mini-projects that have an endstate
10. Principles of the most effective/world-chaning (kind of) creative collabs

1. Slavich: dive in and discuss
2. Sapolosky: watch from beginning to learn about good/evil and its biological roots
3. Re-watch Weinstein video

• Eternalizing tendency, relation to attention, and relationship to identity
• Kids shouldn't meditate
• Free energy: uncollapsed state that you feel you must collapse
  • Crystallization as collapse?
  • Tetlock: People hate probablistic thinking, they can do 0%, 100%, or (if they absolutely must) 50/50.
  • Normative? Kahneman
  • In some (many?) psychological processes, anxiety seems to be synonymous with free energy
• Idea that consciousness is primarily social, only latterly can exist in a single skull and be online when not in conversation
• Salon on interconnecting brains
• BK: The Last Question by Asimov
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
• Tyler Faith: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/811.abstract
• Truth as a process of discovery; works as signposts or dialogues; "live" wikis simiar to Socrates' dialogues
• May be interesting to do a salon on tools for collabortive thought; One example: - Author: David Chapman
  • Source: https://meaningness.com/curiosity?utm_source=Maker+Mind&utm_campaign=23534f5fe4-MAKER_MIND_041&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d634852cd6-23534f5fe4-129718935&mc_cid=23534f5fe4&mc_eid=4b2b9c2adb
    • an amazingly deep and textured analysis and exploration of the different elements of curiosity-driven thought and action
    • TONS of further links on how to develop, play, and create as a function of understanding processes of curiosity
    • a hyperlinked book with a meta-blog commenting on the book's concepts
    • author's description: "General explanation: Meaningness is a hypertext book (in progress), plus a “metablog” that comments on it. The book begins with an appetizer. Alternatively, you might like to look at its table of contents, or some other starting points. Classification of pages by topics supplements the book and metablog structures. Terms with dotted underlining (example: meaningness) show a definition if you click on them. Pages marked with ⚒ are still under construction. Copyright ©2010–2020 David Chapman."

We were talking about academia's tendency to go very narrow. How can it be connected? Through a Kuhnian revolution, basically. We're in a pre-paradigm/crisis period?

• there are principles/flags that mark these pre-paradigm/crisis periods: can we identify them in the present? Across disciplines?

Deffeyes said he had asked his friend Jason Morgan—whose paper “Rises, Trenches, Great Faults, and Crustal Blocks” defined the boundaries of the plates—what he was going to do for an encore. Morgan said he didn’t know, but possibly the most exciting thing to do next would be to prove the theory wrong.

That would be a reversal comparable to the debunking of Genesis. I remembered Eldridge Moores, of the University of California at Davis, telling me what it had been like to be in graduate school at the height of the plate-tectonics revolution, and how he had imagined that the fervor and causal excitement of it was something like landing on Guadalcanal in the middle of the action of “a noble war.” Tanya Atwater, a marine geologist who eventually joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was then a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In a letter written to Allan Cox at Stanford, she re-creates the milieu of the time. “Seafloor spreading was a wonderful concept because it could explain so much of what we knew, but plate tectonics really set us free and flying. It gave us some firm rules so that we could predict what we should find in unknown places … From the moment the plate concept was introduced, the geometry of the San Andreas system was an obviously interesting example. The night Dan McKenzie and Bob Parker told me the idea, a bunch of us were drinking beer at the Little Bavaria in La Jolla. Dan sketched it on a napkin. ‘Aha!’ said I, ‘but what about the Mendocino trend?’ ‘Easy!,’ and he showed me three plates. As simple as that! The simplicity and power of the geometry of those three plates captured my mind that night and has never let go since. It is a wondrous thing to have the random facts in one’s head suddenly fall into the slots of an orderly framework. It is like an explosion inside. That is what happened to me that night and that is what I often felt happen to me and to others as I was working out (and talking out) the geometry of the western U.S … The best part of the plate business is that it has made us all start communicating. People who squeeze rocks and people who identify deep-ocean nannofossils and people who map faults in Montana suddenly all care about each other’s work. I think I spend half my time just talking and listening to people from many fields, searching together for how it might all fit together. And when something does fall into place, there is that mental explosion and the wondrous excitement. I think the human brain must love order.

"Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena" - Václav Havel

• zettel Mindful attention exposes the transitory nature of all sensations and emotions.
  • maybe not rumination, but sitting with yourself, sitting with your emotions, recognizing their heft, their pull, their seeming dominance over... everything, of the whole self/selves
  • then not just sitting with those emotions (obviously I'm talking about negative shit, not happy-happy stuff), but exploring them, looking beneath, behind, around them.
  • because examined long enough, they do change. Maybe not dramatically, especially not at first, but any emotional state is not a state at all, it's a fluctuating, morphing set of sensations, perceptions, memory traces, projections, appraisals, images, all of it.
  • just observing these emotional dynamics, there is just one main insight: they change. They're always changing
  • and this brings me to the proprioception meditation. When I meditate and observe sensations in the body, the main thing I notice is they change: sensations shift, amplify, grow slowly or in jagged starts, dissipate and completely disappear. But you can't hold onto those sensations. You can't hold them in place.
    • https://www.dropbox.com/s/aay24yuknrquyr3/Proprioception%20meditationJan31.aac%20alias?dl=0
  • the thing that pushes me into the most devastating places in my mind is the determination that the emotion, the jealousy or depression or intense longing, are forever fixed. They hurt so much not because they are horrifying feelings in and of themselves (they're difficult, yes, but I'd rather feel intensely than not at all... by a long shot), but because I don't see a way out of feeling them. I don't know how to shift out. In fact I doubt there is any way and I'm convinced in the veracity and endpoint of the feeling. And the crazy thing is that there is only one simple way to guarantee the shift out: pay quiet attention, accept, sit with it. And watch as it invariably changes. Connection a single mind to another, through attention:
  • "" Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." quote French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943)"
    • Weil considers the superiority of attention over the will as the ultimate tool of self-transformation (and I would also add, to collaboration and creativity):
    • "We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will:
      • The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different. .. Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.
      • Attention, on the other hand, provides this grace, provides a pure conduit to honest connection and creativity:
        • "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."
        • "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
        • "If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself."
    • obvious connections to meditationmindfulness; relaxing constraints, lack of grace/tightening also reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke The Swan https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-swan/

Rainer Maria Rilke

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

Chapter 11: Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools 12/229b11.

Brian Uzzi, who collaborated with Amaral 12/229b10, said that "Human creativity is basically an import/export business of ideas." The sciences were more successful when they had more far-flung members. Teams made from different institutions were more likely to be successful than those that did not. Teams based in different countries also had an advantage. So did scientists who had been abroad and returned.

Uzzi found, in an analysis of 18m papers, that atypical combinations matter. 1/10 of papers made a combination of two journals that had never been cited together before. They had a slower start, but after three years these papers surpassed conventional papers in citations. After fifteen years, those papers which made novel combinations of citations were way more likely to be in the top 1% of most-cited papers. So they're a slow burn, but in the end much bigger.

Paper is most likely this one.