Episode 48: Death and The Information Gap
Episode 48 of M3CS’s Contemplative Science Podcast saw Jamie dive into new research plans from our very own Dr Mark Miller - chatting about predictive mechanics, uncertainty and death.
For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
Why we need to surround ourselves in uncertainty to train our predictive minds.
Horror movies, public speaking and illness - how they link to our cognitive mechanics.
The different contemplative paths to confronting the reality of our own death.
Dr Mark Miller is currently triple-affiliated at Monash University, University of Toronto and Hokkaido University. A philosopher, cognitive scientist and happiness aficionado, Mark’s research seeks answers on fundamental questions about human cognition.
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
Healthy predictive systems test their belief networks.
”So what a good predictive system will have, is it will occasionally blow up its own belief networks to some degree to check to see, are there other kinds of believing that are actually better for me? So you know, you get stuck in a flat-earther realm, it would behoove you to occasionally push against that belief network to see whether or not there is actually a better collection of beliefs that are more adaptive, but that requires you to actually move through uncertainty in order for that to happen.”
Reducing uncertainty is the lifelong mission of the brain.
”We have a temporally long model of how things work in the world. So that just means we care, not only about making it work right now but about making it work in the long run, of course. It's one of the things that we're good at. So mind-wandering forward and mind-wandering backwards in the contemplative tradition, it can sound like we're supposed to curtail those dynamics. But in fact, it's those dynamics that actually make us really adaptive to the kind of niche we're in. We are long-term prediction machines. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce uncertainty over our whole lifetime.”
Surrounding ourselves with uncertainty is the path to minimising its impact.
”You can only get good evidence about how you behave in scary situations, if you repeatedly put yourself in scary situations and let the system garner the evidence from that experience. So you have to be in the experience long enough that the system figures out: ‘Oh, that's what adrenaline cascades are like when we're under duress.’ And the more that it knows about its own scary reactivity, the better able it is to manage that reactivity. ”
The best place to find Mark is here.
See you next week!
