Hello everyone welcome to the active inference lab today. It's September 9th 2021 or a guest stream number 10.1 double digits or double digits with a decimal and We're really honored and appreciative to have Professor Philip Garens today Coming in from Australia and also Dave joining us on stream We're gonna have a presentation from Philip and then we're gonna have some time for discussion and dialogue So if you're watching live, please feel free to leave questions in the live chat and we will address those on the stream and We're just really looking forward to this and again appreciative that you're coming on our stream So thanks and take it away Philip. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation I spoke to Anna Keaneca who told me that she had a great experience with you guys so I'm very very happy to be able to Present and to tell you a little bit about the background to this talk I was originally a philosopher of mind and of cognitive science, and I'm very interested in the use of models and techniques in cognitive science to understand psychiatric disorder and I found predictive processing very helpful when I was writing a book on this a few years ago But looking back at some other psychiatric disorders like the Cotard delusion and so on I think it's really great to kind of go a little bit deeper and more more fundamental If you think of predictive processing as kind of like a computational structure at the level of representation and algorithm But of course a lot of psychiatric disorders, I think you've got a very sort of bottom-up Genesis we really need to know about how the brain is working to control the body and even how the body is working in its social world So the active inference framework for me has been very helpful in rethinking this in this book that I'm writing right now And also, I think it's it's actually crucial to understanding a phenomenon that I'm talking about right now that the Cotard delusion The Cotard delusion is so interesting because Well, it's interesting in itself as you'll see it's fascinating phenomenon, but it points us to some really interesting Interesting facts or interesting evidence about the way the mind is mind is working at a really basic level and how that ramifies and Cascades upwards throughout cognition and behavior. So let's go. I'll just tell you what the Cotard delusion is it's a delusion of sometimes people think of it in the folk world as The delusion that you're dead. I was discovered in 1882 by Jules Cotard, but We described it more accurately. I think as a delusion of in existence So here's a here's someone who has it. She had the experience of having no identity or self and being only a body without content She convinced that her brain had disappeared and the whole body was translucent Another one more recent one I speak and breathe and eat, but I'm dead Okay, so there's some classic examples, but here is a really recent one published in the last couple of years This is fascinating cases coming from Mexico. There's a really good group there that works on this So mr. A was referred to the National Institute of neurology because of psychotic and catatonic symptoms His appetite diminished. He barely slept. He stayed withdrawn and silent He complained about his body saying his tendons were dried up and his organs were getting bigger Speak of an internal hemorrhage. His organs have been torn apart.  He said he's improved slightly But he said I don't have feelings because I'm dead He had a right-sided heart and that had stopped And then he kept on saying even after persisting treatment his nihilistic delusions as they're actively called You know delusions of inexistence of nothingness I am dead among other human beings. It's like a program where I'm dead And he said he was a dead person among the corpses under the earthquake debris now the genesis of this case of cotard delusion is um Encephalitis a form of encephalitis switch and an autoimmune reaction against proteins in the brain. So it's one of the most basic Things that can go wrong at the the cellular Level and if the protein is in methyl deaspartate the condition is called Nmdr antibody encephalitis. Okay, so that's what mr. A had but of course our interesting question is If we know what's happening, you know at the molecular level at the level of kind of membranes and receptors Why on earth would that make you think that you didn't exist? So they were addressing that they were in the in the field of addressing the question You know, how does the brain and navel experience? And cognition that's it. That's the questions of cognitive neuroscience And psychology and anyone else who wants to Get involved in that topic phenomenology philosophy. Okay, but it's a really pertinent question So here's the outline of the talk I just told you about the delusion and then I'm going to tell you about some of the classic attempts to explain it I just run through those And point to a problem with those And then in discussing one of the most recent and persuasive and really interesting explanations That we owe to alexandra beyond I'm going to introduce the active inference approach And I'm going to show how the active inference approach Can rectify a problem with our beyonds account But also point to point to some other deep sort of unifying themes Across cognitive science and across disorders. So the the active inference framework, I think gives it an elegant and persuasive Way to explain not just, you know cases like mr. A But a lot of other other disorders And pathologies where our experience of our self That goes astray so things like pain a symbolia where people say that they're experiencing pain But oh, sorry that their body is experiencing pain, but it's not happening to them But it feels as though it's not their pain or depersonalization disorders In which people will say not just that pain is not theirs, but they feel outside of or detached from their whole experience Okay, so and of course in the solution that I'll propose I'll give you um, which the short summary right now is that as part of the Project or process of active inference the body the brain Makes hierarchical models of itself and the world of deep the deep structure of the world as As populated with objects and properties that the external world with which it interacts But of course the brain also has to make a model of its own internal Functioning the processes that that keep it keep keep us alive and functioning And in order to do that it makes a model of itself as a unified persisting entity And that's what we feel the self. That's what we feel When we feel like like persisting people when we feel like a self we we are The model that's what we're we're experiencing activity in the circuitry that makes that Self model, okay, and in a cotard delusion. There's the self model Goes wrong in a certain way that processes self modeling goes wrong in a certain way But we can see other disorders in which that process of self modeling goes wrong And I think that Theory makes it maps really nicely to the the neural substrates of all these disorders It explains the symptoms and so on. So let's go So of course as we saw Such an interesting disorder that the cotard delusion because You know, there's there's questions in sort of philosophy and about rational belief fixation and and so on I mean how could someone coherently say I've died or I don't exist and there's a question about Rationality there and the nature of reasoning and so on on the basis of experience, which is interesting in itself Which is that's part of the philosophy of delusions I guess or the philosophy of psychiatric disorder where I came into this topic a while ago But of course, it's also very interesting in okay, how can you also have the experience of not existing? You know what it so it points us to the question of what is going on when you actually feel like Aself, okay, and of course, it's also a great test case for theories that Try and explain experience and cognition in terms of underlying Neural functioning So here's the kind of broad brush of the kind of classic approaches to these topics that you get in theories of delusion since I guess The early 90s which tried to wed philosophy of belief rational belief fixation to the neuroscience of delusion formation and that The most top-level abstract way of putting it is There's two stages in delusion formation. The first one, you know, is an unusual or anomalous as they say sensory Experience so something goes wrong, you know at the level of sensory motor functioning gives you an unusual experience and then the second stage is A metacognitive response to that experience. So this is why someone for example who lost control or was unable to feel Unable to feel that they were the agent of their actions when they're picking up things and moving around the world Okay, that's the loss of it as they call sense of agency due to you know, normally problems in the Prior to lobule inferior prior to lobule something goes wrong there with the kind of sensory motor Uh in action of agency and then the people what the person will say to explain that weird experience Of moving around the world But not feeling like they are the person who initiated the movement or controlling it Let's say someone else is controlling me, you know So delusions of control as they say that would be a classic case. We have an anomalous experience At the first stage and then the delusion is a belief or some kind of metacognitive Or story that the person tells Okay Now there's two implications of the the two-stage theory one is that well if the patient doesn't have A problem with higher-order processing Then she won't develop a delusion because the delusion is a metacognitive response, right? So in that case the person should have An anomalous experience. You should feel like She's making movements that aren't hers, for example Or you might feel like you're hearing voice. You might hear like feel like you're hearing voices And the person will just report that. I mean having an unusual weird Uh distressing experience But they wouldn't go on to have a delusion because the delusion is the result of a Problem at this stage of as they call belief fixation or metacognition Okay And if this is really right then there should be cases in which people have the unusual experience But they don't go on to have a delusion and of course we are all familiar with this in everyday life if you think about it You've probably had feelings of deja vu or jamais vu You know in deja vu you think i've been here before i've had this experience before even though you know that you haven't Okay, and this is the point that you know you can have an experience That is completely anomalous or weird Don't go on to have a delusion about it. Okay, and in this case you say well it feels as if i've been here Before or in the opposite case jamais vu You know you walk into your bedroom and it feels where you sleep every night that you just have this fleeting instant of What this is new or for this is feels like a duplicate of my bedroom or something but You don't go on to form a delusion because rational insight is retained Unlike the classic case of delusions of misidentification which i spend no time on In a delusion of misidentification A person will say something like They'll see their wife or see their husband or boyfriend or something and say they're a stranger See and you say why do you say that? You know don't they do they look the same as their appearance train and then they look identical But they are like a replica or duplicate or an imposter in the classic delusion And the story is what has gone wrong here is there's a problem at the level of sensory processing That's thought is that normally when we see a familiar face We get an affective response to that face which is part of a signal that that's a familiar person You know i see you I see my sister or my partner and then it's like oh, yeah, that's that's her So it's a feeling of familiarity that's based in affect, but when that goes missing Then all the other perceptual information is intact I recognize the face the shape of the face and so on but i don't they don't feel familiar And in the case of delusions of misidentification The person rationalizes these losses or alterations to the sense of familiarity by saying You know my wife's been replaced What an imposter okay amazing delusions, but there you go But that's just an example of the kind of two-stage theory of delusion formation which was developed for delusions of Misidentification now in turning to the cotard delusion What is the first stage within this framework? Well, alexandra beyond Says that it's the loss of what people call the sense of mindness Or our subjective presence is what anneal said causes and people from sussex who work on depersonalization the basic idea is that Something that philosophers and many people have remarked on thought about Is that when you have experiences Part of that experience is an awareness that you are the person who's having experience as yasper's said Every psychic manifestation perception bodily memory It carries with it this feeling of being mind and having an eye quality of personally Belonging it's been termed personalizations And so the thought is just as when you see familiar people there's this kind of subtle Just this little subtle feeling of familiarity which you don't even notice that it's there until it goes missing And so it's the case that with your everyday experience. It feels like it's yours I mean who else so there's this kind of aspect of subjectivity or subjective presence That you wouldn't even become aware of until it went missing We only see it as we only even notice that this is an experience a kind of subtle accompaniment to all of life until We are confronted with as be on says exceptional and pathological cases and then if it goes missing you're really in trouble right, so for example In the case of pain a symbolia What can happen is that someone can have A pain they can have the experience of pain Um, and they can report that experience of pain saying yeah, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm in pain But it doesn't feel like it's my pain Or I feel detached like it's not happening to me and think you know, you're not interrogation you say Yeah, yeah, you know, it feels hot. I feel kind of pressure. It feels intense. In other words they can be still able to detect And represent Bodily damage through the process of as it's called, you know, no deception the primary representation of pain stimuli Okay, but something else has gone missing right and what uh in this nice This and there's two theories about pain a symbolia One is that what's gone missing is an emotional response to pain. So that would be the thought that In the normal case of pain you have no deception You know the detection and representation of bodily damage And then there's if you like an affective or an emotional response or interpretation to that And the resultant pain experience is like a merger or combination bodily damage plus Distress and that's what you report. But when you take the distress part out, you just get the representation of bodily damage That's one theory of pain But Colin Klein had a different account Not Colin Klein's view. It's not a loss of affect. That's not loss of affect It's a loss of the sense of Mindness So a symbolia on his view is a localized version of Depersonalization experience a symbolia is if you like a restricted case Just just to the pain processing where the connection between The processing of bodily damage or no deception as it's called And the subtle feeling that the experience belongs to you comes apart. So as he says this sort of unity may fail Okay, and this leads to what he calls Depersonalization or pain as opposed to Depersonalization in the general case where The the loss of the sense of mindness is not just for pain But for everything So someone with severe personalization disorder Will move through life You know having sensations Sensations of movement, you know perceptual sensations bodily experiences, but feeling as if Those things don't belong to them as someone says here It feels almost like I have died but no one was thought to tell me so I'm living in a shell that I don't recognize Uh I felt my brain was somewhere else and just watching me I couldn't tell whether I was present or whether I was the part that it was gone There was the one watching and the other It's light seeing life as if it were played in a film or a movie, but in that case who is watching the film I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb I'm outside my own body and individuality. I'm Depersonalized So just to recap Okay, Klein gives us the idea that you know in pain a symbolia you lose this sense of mindness or belonging to me for One particular channel of bodily processing. That's um, no seception or pain signaling But in depersonalization this loss is global And in the and when the loss is global the person reports Depersonalization for everything and the feeling there is like Well, they say it feels as if I don't exist. It feels like I'm not there, right? And so How should we explain what's going on here? Well, there's different theories Uh beyond has one I had one 20 years ago. It's a bit out of date now. I think I'm updating it today Even as we speak And then we have the one I'll be talking about today which We owe to that active inference guys like Seth's a curious and so But here's beyond's take on it, which is very interestingly So Dion what beyond says Is that depersonalization is this case of an anomalous experience and the anomalous or strange experience is the feeling that the self Is unreal and is not there And so if we go back to the cotard delusion remember the two-stage theory of delusion is that A delusion arises when you have an anomalous experience and then you have some problem at a higher level of Rational interpretation narrative organization or metacognition so that you You have no rational insight into the experience or unable to Explain it or you end up just taking it for granted And that's beyond's idea about Depersonalization, it's the first stage of cotard delusion So when someone with depersonalization says it feels as if I don't exist It feels as if I'm not here it feels as if Experiences outside me or I'm not involved in it That's because they're having the same experience as the cotard person had the cotard patient has But they have rational insight and intact metacognition So they can look they can as well look at that experience and say It feels as if I don't exist It feels as if experience isn't mine but I know that's not true. So I report it just saying it feels that way, but I don't they don't develop the delusion So what differentiates cotard and depersonalized delusions is that the cotard patient has the same experience as a As a patient with depersonalization But they have intact rational insight Okay Now That's the philosophical angle, but recently Very interesting group of guys in mexico Have a neuropsychiatric version of Alexandra beyonds two-stage account, which is they explained mr. A's case, you know the man who thought that his organs had dried up and that he was dead He has insular cortex dysfunction and that insular cortex dysfunction is the first factor Okay, so the insular cortex dysfunction produces the experience Of depersonalization the feeling that The one sensory experiences and cognitions don't belong to to the subject Or that and then there's a prefrontal cortex dysfunction That produces a second fact. It's the second factor. So this is the story Look on the left. You've got the the first stage insular cortex Produces this anomalous subjecting feeling state So if you have hypoactive insular cortex or maybe lesion or you know, neurochemical disruption Then you're going to have insular cortex problems And that's going to lead to the feeling that experiences are not yours in some way that could manifest as pain a symbolia depersonalization Or it's also in alexa thymia, which we didn't talk about today But in any case that gives rise to this abnormal sensory state or if they call it your abnormal perception So something has gone wrong with your ability to feel that experiences belong to you thanks to your insular cortex dysfunction and then If you also have a prefrontal cortical dysfunction, then you can't Explain that you have no rational insight into that and so you end up with the delusion Now just to recap the the assumption here that's shared by our beyond And by Ramirez Bermudez and his collaborators Is that the first stage is essentially the same or similar between Depersonalization experiences and cotard delusion Okay, so the anomalous experience of depersonalization With rational insight Well, that's depersonalization But if you have the anomalous experience of depersonalization with no rational insight Then you get the cotard delusion And the result and this is because of our hypoactivity or lesion maybe in your insular cortex But this is this is where I want to go today. This is wrong This doesn't fit with the phenomenology of cotard syndrome or the neurases of cotard syndrome, which is typically a profound and catastrophic Reconfiguration of the bodily and effective life world of the patient.  It's not just the in not just the insular cortex I want hypoactive.  It's not just I feel like I have Intact perception and cognition It just feels like it's it's not mine or I feel detached from it I mean typically some of cotard delusion undergoes like completely profound and quite catastrophic Reconfiguration of their whole life experience.  It's a complete catastrophic breakdown Often it's progressive, but there's no doubt about it. That's a catastrophic breakdown Okay, so there's a first one. We can disagree with the foundational assumption But at the same token but at the same type sorry at the same point It is true that insular malfunction is associated with cotard delu with with de-personization. I beg your pardon So let's look at that first and it's also true that insular malfunction among other things is profoundly involved in cotard delusion and I think we can see why and this is where active inference Makes its appearance into interstage right active inference theory active inference and predictive processing provide this really nice framework to tie all these ideas together to explain de-personization cotard Assymbolia and to fit together the kind of neural correlates the phenomenology and symptomology symptomology. Okay Well, first let's let's start with the kind of the restricted thing let's talk about De-personization why would insular damage Lead to de-personization. Why would it be the case that if you had hypoactivity in your insular cortex? You would feel like your experience wasn't happening to you It's pretty interesting and amazing sensation Well, the reason is that the insular cortex It does a lot of things, you know, does it as they say it's a enigmatic Um, and ubiquitously involved neural structure. It's very kind of deep It's kind of it receives afference from almost everywhere. It communicates with almost every every part of the brain Okay, and you'll see it involved in in so many things So it's hard to it's always been very hard to work out a particular function that the insular cortex does right It's not like, you know, for example looking at part of the visual cortex that, you know processes wavelength information or something like that or was involved in You know These these neural circuits are involved in determining movement or trajectory or something like that It's not like that the insular cortex somehow seems to contribute to so many things as a as an integrative There's a device of integration and I would say as a device of organization and coordination And it's like a relay station actually between all these other different things But the posterior insular cortex is very important in somatosensory vestibular and motor integration Okay So that the posterior insular cortex is basically involved I would say in integrating all the information about what's happening in your body While the anterior insular cortex, which is our real culprit here has projections to limbic regions Which are you know, that's that's one of the substrates of emotional processes And is associated with integrating autonomic and visceral information In other words the basic information about how your body is functioning You know my blood pressure my blood acidification oxygenation, you know State of my organs and so forth this kind of really basic keeping you alive kind of information Integrating that with emotional cognitive and motivational functions In other words, and here's the killer it brings internal signals into consciousness and emotional interpretations supporting the neural constructions of subjective feelings So just to go Let me stay here for a moment So the thought you know that we get with people like bud craig and everything like that is that the anterior insular cortex Basically takes all these signals about what's happening on the inside on the inside of your body You know my blood pressures up my heart is beating whatever my organs are functioning well or not And integrates that with all the other cognitive systems that are telling you what's going on outside You know what you see what you hear what you smell and the higher cognition what you remember what you imagine what you're thinking about Okay, and that creates it integrates all this in other words to kind of to allow you to to Create if you like a representation of how what is happening in the world Is interacting with what's happening inside my body to enable me to function Adaptively in context And as they say well, what is that except a sense of self the sense of the sense of self or representation of the self is On the thing that has to manipulate my body around the world to interact and engage Adaptively with it and to do that I need to integrate all the information that's relevant to that task That's what we need a sense of self for and that's what the anterior insular does Anterior insular looks down at the bodily processing Looks out to the world and integrates them to give you a sense of as I say subjective feeling in the moment now so with that in place we can see why when um anterior insular goes wrong you or you know malfunctions you might get a The sense of not being involved in experience now the most um Persuasive I think explanation of how this might go wrong is that it's a dissociative response To trauma this comes from medford's here and david the people who work on it But they explain it in kind of emotional terms. So they call they call the result as emotional numbing. So the thought is You're having a traumatic experience.  It's just turn it just turns it off And what is the result? You still end up and you still end up, you know seeing feeling thinking And so on but you don't have the kind of effective as I say effective response or this as uh sierra puts it You no longer have the emotional coloring of experience So it leads to a qualitative change of conscious awareness, which is reported by the subject as unreal or detached So the basic idea is you shut down effective processing So that you can cope with uh extreme distress or trauma And to shut that down you shut off the anterior insular cortex. So you no longer feel That it's happening to you. So you can see what you have here is really an effective or an emotional theory of Our self-awareness the basic idea is self-awareness is really created by The emotional coloring of experience And when that is gone You end up in an emotionally monochrome world so to speak And here's some evidence that lack of anterior insular insular is related to a diminished emotional responsiveness seen in dpd And that when the if the insular comes back online Not only they restore their effective responses, you know Um Then they start to feel that they are this feeling of detachment and disengagement disappears I just make the point that um this theory of um this theory this inhibitory theory of Depersonalization as dissociative it actually It really requires a predictive processing framework because it's not just the fact for example that The subject doesn't feel effective responses.  So, you know, because we have plenty of our experiences That are emotionally neutral walking down the street, you know, I don't know doing your tax return Reading a book you're not especially interested in all that kind of jazz listening to a talk, you know Going to department meeting or all that is a slightly distressing experience But you know, you know what I mean the mere fact that there's no effective response doesn't make you feel depersonalized It's the loss of effective response in a condition where your mind predicts it. It's that it's the It's the disjunction between or the the contradiction between There should be affect and now there isn't And that's reported by then that's the thought is I feel like I'm not here. Okay and so the hypothesized mechanism is that the you in a traumatic situation And it's too much for your brain to deal with so these inhibitory processes kick in To shut down the affective response in the moment as a dissociative And it's an inhibition of the anterior insular cortex by these inhibitory structures. Okay And this is exactly what I just said Why that produces depersonalization is because affective experience is important in um In getting around life and and also it's predicted, you know, your your mind's model of you acting in the world is that you will have it uh Have uh effective responses to the world Here's where the affective inference um starts to kick in. Okay. So then the question is Our does the mind predict that your progress through the world will have Or it will give rise to affective experiences. How does it do that? Well, I think it does so in a process of What is called? Uh in active inference framework predictive processing framework hierarchical self-modeling Okay And basically Hierarchical self-modeling is as I said before briefly that um Just as the mind, you know makes Makes models or representations of the external world the world out there In terms of its causal structure In the mind has to make a model of what's going on inside the body in terms of its causal structure And the way the mind does this is by integrating all the properties and features of the world and attributing them to unified persisting causes well, that's objects in in the case of the external world That unified persisting causes are objects, you know You don't see smears of colors and movements and changes you see cars driving down the the railway You don't see these kind of weird interacting shapes and properties. You see people's faces smiling and so on so It's kind of obligatory strategy for the mind to integrate Properties and features by attributing them to in underlying Objects or in the case of substances if you want to call it that unified persisting things All right, and that's what that's what we do in outward And the idea of the higher of the self modeling framework is that's what we do inward as well the minds obligatory strategy is to unify and integrate when there are regular coherent predictable flows and sequences of Experiences or sensory information The mind explains that if you like interprets it and predicts it by attributing it to the same object This happens at multiple levels right at the most basic level You know you have to integrate all these different different homeostatic functioning, you know blood pressure Visceral dilation, you know vascular dilation all this kind of stuff that keeps you going Well, actually you don't that is actually integrated Into by attributing all of those things as occurring in the same entity and we feel the result In what in an interoceptive state interoception being the internal analogue of perception So example which makes this point.  You don't have to fine tune Anyway, you can't you can't get in there and change your glycogen levels or anything like that You can just eat so hunger is another example of a kind of interoceptive sensation. That is um You know, this does this kind of aggregative and integrative thing and This kind of type of self modeling. This is very familiar from the predictive process from from the takes place at multiple levels given the kind of imperatives That we have to survive So let me just spend a little bit this okay at the most within the um active inference framework Okay, the most basic task of any organism self-organizing system is to is to survive it has to maintain its um Maintain its physical integrity, you know, it's boundary with the world Um, it has to take in energy from the world, you know It has and and so on has to engage with the world take in energy from the world And then it has to do something with that energy to maintain itself To keep all its components interacting. So that's at the most basic physical level organisms avoid This inevitable tendency to thermodynamic decay that we all face and you know, the probabilistic and analog of that is They avoid entropy. They have to keep themselves In a state far far from entropy by taking in energy and using it Of course at the biological level, what does that actually mean? That means staying alive surviving prospering in the world And the most when we look at the physiology Okay, and then obviously we're talking about homeostatic mechanisms. We're talking about mechanisms of self maintenance for a For a discrete, you know unique individual so to speak now there can be obviously cases where um borderline cases of homo homeostasis where, you know Uh Where organisms are dependent on other organisms for example, there are lots of cases where there's a kind of, you know Chris crossing of boundaries, but let's keep it simple for the moment Think of a cell or think of an organism got to maintain their their Basic functioning and that's what referred to as homeostasis or allostasis slightly larger more sophisticated concept So these are the kind of basic physical imperatives But of course to do that there has to be a lot of um signaling within the system, you know The levels of levels of endocrine function levels of blood pressure levels of blood oxygenation. They are signaled To a brain or a proto brain or a mind if you want to call it that And that signaling okay That signaling requires that their organism in some sense implement or maintain a model which predicts what is um What is uh optimal for it? How far it's departing from optimal and whether the actions that it's taking to get back into uh optimal range Are successful and when it can do that When it can successfully model itself Then it's minimizing what they call variation of free energy And surprise here just refers to departure from Uh the predicted optimal state given the organism's action now if that sounds too Abstract just think you know here's your brain And you're writing up you're starting to ride your bike up a hill or walk upstairs Okay, and you have a kind of good Optimal range of heartbeat function and blood oxygenation Okay, but that needs to change now because you're walking upstairs right and you need to you need more oxygen in your blood You need to work harder and raise your heartbeat So your mind you know sends if you like brain sends instructions Raise heartbeat. You know, this is all at the kind of signaling level.  You've stayed within your optimal bound Okay, and you're not getting any information that's um out of Out of the kind of predicted um Yeah, the violets a prediction a model for that situation but Let's say that you come back downstairs and you sit down and you're resting And having a drink and your heartbeat is still racing. Well, that's outside optimal range.  All right, or i'm sweating sweating furiously But i'm not riding my bike Okay, and it's not 40 degrees outside What's going on? I've got a so a lot of signaling going on all the time About weather and how you are optimizing your bodily function So that's just at the level of signaling and some that's very very dynamic and leads these kind of automatic adjustments but of course at a higher level when you talk about um Um cognition or what you can think of the mind or as what we call cognition as a construction of sort of representation or computational systems You know that exploit these information or properties or that organize these informational and signaling properties So that we end up with a representational architecture. That's how we get perception memory sensory motor control and so on and what That's what the theory of computation gives us for understanding the mind. It gives us What the theory of computation basically is And its most abstract is turning information Information and signaling into representation representations that can be manipulated.  All this signaling is going on and what we call interoception Is the integration of those uh processes? Okay, which attributes them to the thing which is being regulated the thing which is being managed Okay, the thing in which all of these Processes have to cohere to enable adaptive functioning And then we get a readout of that and the readout is your interceptive feeling fatigue, you know, if you feel tired That's because you know glycogen depletion The dnsc levels have changed and a metabolism is slow Blah blah blah muscles are weaker and and not contracting as fast And you feel that as fatigue as it's um integration of all of those Allostatic variables and that happens basically the job of the posterior Insular cortex written there as pi is to do that. That's all that stuff coheres, right? That's where all of that stuff coheres Then of course, there's not just the issue of um How is my body functioning? That's one thing Okay, it is my body de-energized. Well, yeah, that's important to know but then There's a separate kind of what we might call a high level issue of the meaning and significance of those bodily processes for you in context Right. So if your heartbeat is racing And you're riding your bike up a hill or going forward in the gym That's a good thing, right? That shouldn't cause you any particular distress. You will feel that as exhausting But if your heartbeat is racing because you're waiting for your cancer test You know and the doctor has just come back just come out of his office and he's looking at the um He's looking at your chart and he's looking at your um He's looking at your ultrasound with a look of concern and worry Now your heart is racing Right. Why is it racing because you're worried that you've got worried that you might have cancer? That's a different thing But the point is that the the feeling is different the feeling of worry distress anticipatory, you know anxiety Well, that is characterized by racing heartbeat and and feelings of tension and so on But that's the same bodily signature that you can get when you're powering up hill on your bike or you know Or something like that. So the level of heartbeat in itself Is as it were, you know, effectively or emotionally neutral What that level of heartbeat depends on and how it and how you should react to it Well, that's a product of the kind of emotional context and to understand the emotional context That's when you need to bring in the rest of your perceptual memory and so on faculties and indeed your self representation of, you know How I am functioning in the world and so to do that you need to Uh interpret or I just put it here transcribe those bodily feelings Into emotional feelings of sadness or anxiety or whatever they are. I've given the example here of um Fatigue because it it comes up later, but it's also a good one, right?  They feel tired, lethargic, apathetic unmotivated, unenergetic but fatigue in an episode or sorry bodily de-energized bodily de-energization in a episode of Sadness is experienced differently to just fatigue That's the point, right? And why is that? Because in an episode of sadness The world and your prospects in it have been Appraised or evaluated or cognized choose your term That is because your your mind has basically determined that the world for you is a site of Irretrievable disconsolation, you know, there's losses in there that you can't recover or recapture and of course so um That produces the feelings of sadness, okay, so why does this so When we translate this into um self modeling you've got the kind of physical level of bodily functioning and the kind of homeostatic and signaling stuff But then in order to interpret the significance of all of those changes You need a model the mind needs a model Of your organism and how it's functioning in the world and what it should expect from the world and the kind of Effective consequences that it should get from the world. And so it makes um multi-level self model at the most basic level at the most basic level and at the mind models itself as um And as a unified entity in which all of these bodily signals cohere And then it can it can use that model to regulate the body Now you can go to sleep if you're tired at a higher level slightly the mind models itself as The entity that has these feelings these feelings of sand these effective feelings these feelings of sadness anxiety or These feelings of happiness pleasure or resentment, you know All these subtle feelings that are modulated by your actions as you go through the world So just as you need a model of the uh, the bodily functioning to model the body at a basic level To control ones to get through the world Well, we get through the world by acting to manipulate our feelings So we need a higher level model of ourself as the subject of effective states Okay, and here's the and at the high and it's still higher level still We report those feelings in the kind of verbal narrative way, you know I'm late for work, you know, I'm studying I'm studying gym, you know, I'm I'm practicing gymnastics, you know, I'm married, etc All these things. Well, this is just the kind of the high level narrative self model that we use to report Our feeling we use to report our states and communicate them and engage with other people And so we engage at this narrative level. There's a narrative level self model. That's kind of linguistic But the narrative level self model is supported by a effective or emotional level Because as we engage with other people and report our states, what we're doing is doing that to change our Change the way we feel to feel better And at a still lower level those affective feelings. What are they? They are transcribed bodily feelings That is to say they are emotionally interpreted bodily feelings So the um, the self model is a hierarchy is hierarchical At basic level, it's it's bodily at a slightly higher level It's bodily as interpreted for its emotional significance and at the highest level it's narrative Now here's your arm. Here's the hypothesis about all these disorders In a cathart delusion the self model just disintegrates from the bottom up, right? It just falls to bits. It falls to bits at the physical level, right? In other words, the the system becomes Unregulatable and unpredictable Right the the mind is sending is mind is sending signals control sleep control appetite control metabolism um control movement, you know get up to it, but They're not getting any traction. They're not getting any feedback They are the whole kind of modeling structure is disintegrated so that What the mind learns so that the mind actually can't make a model which predicts the functioning of the organism It still has this kind of sensations of organismic function, but they're not integrated unified and modeled as belonging to a continuing thing Because and that's precisely because that model is made for the purposes of regulation And when the mind and when the body becomes unregulatable the mind learns That there is no there is no model that's going to predict and regulate its behavior Okay, so in other words if you think of the self as a model that the Mind makes at the most basic level for regulatory purposes Then when it's when it's completely unregulable The mind learns that there is no model that can do the job Okay Yeah, so that's the that's my explanation cotard, okay Well, but in depersonization, it's not quite like that because in depersonization Basically the model is intact Okay, the model is intact. You've got kind of Uh controllable bodily functioning. You've got cognition perception and so on all working But the only thing is That the effective processes have been inhibited. So this kind of you're seeing the world feeling the world touching and engaging with the world but There's no effective responses to the world because they've been shut down For as a dissociative response So now you've got an intact self model But you can't annex Or incorporate effective states into it. So you that's why in depersonization people feel as though They feel as though their bodies the same their perceptual and sensory motor states are the same And their narrative ability to report that think about that, you know, the higher level metacognitive states and narrative reportage They are intact But affect is missing Effect has been if you like detached or taken out of this model that's otherwise intact and that feels as if They don't think they feel detached and on the outside of experience. That's why they say they report. They feel as if They don't exist But they don't say they don't exist because the model still the model is basically intact Just with this subtraction of its effective component good now pain and that is As a result of Unpredicted deactivation of the anterior insular because anterior insular is precisely the structure that it integrates all the processing That does this kind of evaluative emotional processes and produces effective responses Now in pain a symbolia Which is reported as a kind of restricted depersonalization that is actually a problem at the lower level Because pain a symbolia is a problem at the the lower level of the posterior insular cortex Which is more at the level of the sensory integration Not the emotional interpretation So in pain a symbolia no susceptible signals are not incorporated in the bodily self or incorporated in the bodily self model So that's a kind of early process. So once again in pain a symbol you've got an intact self model A bodily self model effective and narrative But somehow no susceptive signals aren't being incorporated into that model So and since they're not incorporated into the model at all Then they won't be transcribed at the effective levels of self modeling and then you'll and then the um The mind is left with well i'm experiencing no susceptive signals But i'm not they're not incorporated in the kind of bodily self model at the basic level So They're not mine. So to speak i'm anthropomorphizing on behalf of your brain here And then since they're not incorporated in the bodily self model, they're not going to be Effectively interpreted interpreted at higher levels of emotional self modeling And once again the subject is left at this kind of narrative level Just reporting on the subsequent experience. It feels like the pain is not happening to me Okay, and so is this self modeling theory. Well, this self modeling theory comes from of course Effective, I'm sorry active inference and predictive processing theories, right? Uh, and this is from seth and frist and you know, they say that on this theory of interoceptive My slide here we go in the right way On this theory of that they say things are generated at the bottom level by this kind of successive Interpretation in terms of models, which are ultimately top down and within this framework And so as I said the anterior insular cortex is specialized To allow us to integrate information about body state to feel its significance And the point about the self modeling theory is Those feelings of significance or effective feelings are attributed to a unified and persisting entity the self And just the self model. I'm just rehearsing repeating here what i've said Okay And as they say There's another way to put it what i've just said emotion and embodied self would are grounded in active inference of those signals most likely to be me In other words as you go through the world Your mind needs to model the consequences of your actions and the consequences of those actions Are going to be you know interceptive internal bodily And also they're going to be emotional and affect And so at any given time we have a self model, which is predicting How our actions with the world will make us feel And what the kind of sensory consequences of those actions will be at all levels from home home status Body integrity body integrity and so forth and as they say The metacognitive and narrative eye or as I've put it to simplify You've got kind of basic bodily self You've got and that gets in transcribed and interpreted as a Effective or emotional self and then at the top level we report and communicate that of the narrative self Basically the self is there to serve as to to represent the source of endogenous signals arising from inside And to be the target of internal regulation And this this goes back in a craig's papers in the early 2000s You know put it this way that you know within the posterior insular that does the basic bodily stuff, you know heartbeat oxygenation energy depletion And then those representations of basic body state get progressively and progressively remapped at higher levels Exploding more more higher and a modal cognitive processes until we get to the anterior insular The anterior insular has to communicate with these other systems of perception memory inference imagination to tell you the experience to tell you what to tell you sorry what the The meaning or the significance of all these bodily changes is and should these bodily changes are they adaptive in this situation? I'm riding my bike uphill high heartbeat fine My heart's racing when I'm when I'm having a conversation with my wife. This is bad. This is kind of anxiety and so forth Okay, I can skip that. This is just you know to say that The anterior and posterior insular You know They are hubs. They are not a place where there's they are not the kind of there's not like a self module a bodily self module and a Effective self module. It's more that they are kind of integrative hubs That basically direct traffic is a good way to put on or another way to think of it Is there like the read right head on a um on a Turing machine right there coordinating and doing stuff They're integrating stuff across them across the brain to this particular task All right, and and they communicate with other hubs Prefrontal and amygdala which are very important for collecting information for the evaluation, you know The prefrontal cortex more about collecting information for at their kind of conceptual level, you know thinking about You know is my have I have I offended someone? Is that why they are you know, is that why they're angry or ignoring with me? Is that because of that kind of thing? Whereas the amygdala is more like coordinating information about basic perceptually driven stuff You know someone raises their voice or puts on an angry expression and within a couple hundred milliseconds I feel a response to that so all right So so where are we? To summarize right these are just a couple of quotations about the the insular from various things The convert let's just read one right the convergence of multimodal sensory information and ability to read out subjective states Explains what the insular is intimately involved in effective processing correct Okay, it's functionally important for for detecting salient information and interfacing between Physiology and higher order cognitive systems and that's why it's so functionally ubiquitous And connected with so many things to form a salience detection network. It allows us to feel how things matter Okay, but don't within the predictive processing and active inference. It's not just that you feel salience salience means salient to me Relevant to the organism and its prospects I just something can't be salient Unless it's relevant to a goal Relient relevant to a goal of survival or salient to a goal of you know maintaining social relationships or achieving some ambition So salience is not something in itself salience is relative to particular goals of organismic survival or organismic prospering at various levels And in order to do that the mind needs to model itself as the bearer of the goals as the thing who's Prospering or not is affected by its actions Now here's the thought that Is affect if you have just like you have bodily states like interoception You have affective states like anxiety or depression And what they what those states do is They tell you how you how you're prospering They tell you how you're prospering bodily and they tell you how you're prospering Emotionally, which is great and and the good thing about that is Then you can act like you can perform your active inference of Forging in the world for solutions of moving around and sampling sensations and trying out activities and so forth All these kind of ways of engaging with the world That is going to optimize, you know your ability to build a model of yourself as a functioning system But you don't actually have to um fine tune All the kind of the mechanisms and low-level systems In that's good because we can't right if you think about fatigue I cannot go in and change the metabolism of all my cells I can't go in and um, you know change adenosine levels and I can't change the balance of serotonin and acetylcholine across my brain But I can go to sleep So I manage the feeling of exhaustion and then I wake up feeling better having optimized my um optimized my organism I optimize my organism by managing my feelings And similarly at a sort of higher level of the emotional functioning. I optimize my organism By managing effective or emotional feelings. So, you know, if I feel sad I withdraw from life and and Avoid the context that make me sad If I feel happy, then I'll keep doing what I'm doing You know, if I feel that I'm used or interested or engaged Then that'll lead me to kind of pursue and keep performing the actions that are rewarding And so on and so on And so life then becomes a matter of acting to regulate affect by active inference as a proxy Or minimize and predictive error or in other words optimizing organism function cost the functioning of the organism so In other words and the self here is the thing if the self is modeled as the thing which sustains these feelings And the thing whose feelings can be changed by active inference or action Then that's the role of the self. The role of the self is to be the entity. Okay that we can manipulate Okay, so in this sense um active inference Is like a proxy for overall organismic regulation okay, so The self the feeling of being the feeling of being a unified persisting self Allows us to get through the world by manipulating our feelings So the self model is like the aeroplane icon on a control panel On a plane All right, so the pilot flies the Boeing 737 or 747 or whatever But manipulating the controls and you can see on his panel Now the little model of the plane Banking or going up and down Well, that's great because the pilot has no access to the electronics the software the hydraulics, you know all the mechanisms, right? Pilot can't the pilot's not going to go back down to the tail And try and you know change the ailerons or anything like that and the pilot's not going to go in there and You know mess around with the software that of the computer that controls the system. That's all delegated, right? That's all way down All the pilot has to do is manipulate the icon and that's all we have to do We have to just act to make ourself feel better And the self is just the target of that regulatory actions Let's get this now help because I think I must be And I'll finish I'm really running out of time so To sum up for our case of the the cotard delusion and these other things Well in the cotard delusion what happens is you have a version of what these theorists step on and I'll call catastrophic dysregulation So in the case of Ndmr and encephalitis, right, you know Cellular metabolic function the whole thing is kind of out of whack because of this pervasive inflammation across the brain And so there can't be any kind of low level signaling that's working and at the high more representational levels You're not getting any kind of consistent on accurate representations when it's kind of converted into computational language so The the brain is dysregulable and the body is dysregulable So the system learns the system learns that As a regulatory sister as as a target of regulation, it doesn't exist Of course, it's that is that's just to say the self model disappears But you can still feel your body. It's just that those bodily feelings aren't integrated as into a model of something that you can change And regulate and predict and anticipate. Okay, so that's kind of got it dysregulation so About that my final slide has got a typo on it. So I'll change that after this but Just to remind you and I'll close off now because we've been going for too long But Descartes famously said that states like hunger and thirst they teach us that we're not present in our bodies as a sailor in his ship But we are closely joined and intermingled with it So I compose a single thing with it, you know with my body. I am my body. I feel like I am my body We might say within predictive processing that the experience of being the subject of interceptive and effective experiences Produces the feeling The inference that those experiences belong to a simple unified thing And the more that I succeed in controlling myself by regulating my experiences my interoceptive and effective experiences The more I learn that I am that thing, you know, when I eat I'm satiated when I achieve a goal I'm happy and I'm worried and I I resolve my worries But states of intractable dyshomia stasis teaches the reverse In severe cases like NDMR and cephalitis the mind Has to end up learns that there's no viable regulatory target Because experience is chaotic and unpredictable. So if you can't keep entropy at bay We're back now I keep entropy at bay at the man's basic level By having a kind of model that works then your biological functioning is Messed up and you've got no physiological control All the signaling goes to pieces you can't minimize variational free energy And that is at the representational level the self model disintegrates. There's no kind of Self model that predictably Enables you to regulate yourself And you're just left with this kind of chaotic experience in the cotard delusion, which you report with the kind of the shadow That's all you've got left is you know linguistic functioning um You've just got linguistic functioning. Whoops Okay, we've just got the reporting talking um So that one cotard patient famously said Uh, I'm just a voice and if that goes I won't be anything If my voice goes I'll be lost and I won't know where I've gone. So The patients this is the patient's only response to this intractable Sense of bodily and effective entropy the linguistic shadow the narrative eye Completely disconnected from the structure of bodily and effective experiences that normally anchor it because the soft model has fallen to pieces and I should stop there because I've been going for a long time Thank you I'll share the screen and we can talk a little bit. It's just as long as you'd like Yeah, sure same button as to share and then you can cool I wrote down a ton of stuff. There were some questions in the chat. So thanks for the awesome talk I'll start with one of Dave's questions. So Dave had written Does your evolutionary and neurological exploration of delusion especially of the pathologies of the prefrontal cortex functional connectivity preclude the validity of psychological approaches or How do psychological and psychosocial approaches benefit from a corporate incorporating these kinds of methods and findings? Okay, well, that's a very good question. I don't think they preclude at all, right? I think they're I think they're vital to the psychological approach. I mean, I did I did write a It's a chapter in a book. I wrote a while about this but I don't there's a bad tendency in psychiatry in the world to think okay You've got psychological approaches. You got people's thoughts their experiences and feelings and then you have The kind of things that biological psychiatry does, you know molecular level interventions with receptors and serotonin and that they never they never talk to each other, right? And so you have a disease model of mental illness And you have a psychosocial model of mental illness You know this there But clearly that's wrong, right? And it's got to be wrong because if you think of think of a just an example like astigmatism Or, you know, macular degeneration That's something that you experience at a personal and experiential level as you know loss of part of your visual field If you've got a black spot in your visual field that affects how you experience the world How you get around it how you interact with other people And there's a mechanical explanation there which is in terms of you know, um the visual visual cortex or the retina or whatever and the capillaries and all that in the Okay. Well, why why would it be the case? And if someone said to you, oh, well, look, you know We could only have Like a personal level and experiential phenomenal logical account of of visual experience You'd say that was mad It's I want to go to the eye specialist and he knows all about, you know How diabetes produces this thing because we have a mechanical thing, but not only that the mechanical explanation depends on a computational explanation of how vision works These cells in the retina get bombarded by photons they progress in the mind progressively reconstructs Um an image of the image of the causes of that bombardment and that's our visual experience So I can tell you why macular degeneration, you know at at any level at the level of the retina or why visual cortex Is going to affect your experience And we think that's all in order and we think that's exactly the way to do it Why wouldn't we think of that for the cotard delusion or for Or for uh, you know any psychiatric disorder anxiety or whatever it's not that you've got this kind of autonomous level of Autonomous level of uh, you know molecular level interventions And then you've got some phenomenal logical level of experience and thinking I mean one depends on the one depends on the other I just think that's like Yeah, so so in my view you're the right what we're trying to do is Is try and understand what's happening in the intervening level and that's what Theories of visual processing do you know are you got artificial theories and you've got neurological theories and they come together And that's what the active inference self modeling theory is supposed to do in these cases of Pathologies of self-awareness you have a kind of experience of yourself has changed And we know that that's because something is happening in your body and brain How are we supposed to explain that we're not just correlate the change in experience with the low level cause We want to say that's because these changes in your body and brain Are organized to do this information processing kind of computational representational functions And when you get these low level changes They compromise this functioning This computational level working With the result that you have these experiences and goes the other way, you know when someone you get information from the world It has to filter all the way down By being represented process somehow and you know, we have to take a Stand on the nature of the comp of the nature of the computation whether it's wide narrow symbolic Neural network, whatever, you know, that's ongoing project. So that's my it's my thoughts on that topic Thank you. So the next question is from dean who wrote Does this does the disassociation of feelings Leave the person not able to make a plan because in some way their predictive model has been compromised So how do these people, you know, do they grasp objects appropriately? Could they get across town on the bus? What level or in what ways is their action prediction changed? But yeah, well, I think, you know, I think people who are very affectively flattened right and depersonalized I think planning is an issue planning is an issue for them um precisely because you know Of the of the idea that you know, if you're trying to decide where to go for for holidays or whether to get married or whether to quit your job It's not just a sort of cold cognitive process of weighing the costs and benefits Those things have to be felt Right, you know, if you decide do am I going to go to Hawaii where it's warm and pleasant or am I going to go to Alaska and go Well, how those You you mentally rehearse those options And how that makes you feel determines the decision, you know, and if you decide to get divorced or get married Um, it's not just oh, yeah, you know, if I get married this and this and this will happen And if I get divorced the likelihood of this it's more like that makes you feel a certain way So your life becomes effectively flattened so that uh perception and cognition of all the various options for action Now effectively neutral It does make it very hard to uh to plan and engage and and in the end I think what you find in depersonization is People just kind of go through the motions with their habitual actions You know, so if you're a bus driver or a university lecturer or a husband and parent Then that you feel depersonalized then You just you keep doing what you're doing But you feel like uh, just the empty shell going through the motions, but those people have a lot of difficulty coming up with a coherent Alternative plan. It's like, why don't you do something else? Why don't you, you know, but but we see this actually, you know, even in um In everyday cases of life, you know, you might know that it would be good if you took up exercise Or it would be, you know, as a objective piece of knowledge It would be great if I took up, you know, bike riding or or if I went on a diet or if I, you know, whatever if I moved cities, but But you just know that as a kind of, you know, a piece of information It won't make you do it Unless that somehow can click into your affective self model. It's like, yeah, it's me Uh, I can kind of imagine myself as, you know, whatever it is riding up a hill walking up a You know, having some future that I can actually inhabit Not just intellectually but also emotionally and personally Well, just one thought on that and then I'll read a question from Dave is like in a way society Is a big top down like in active inference We talk a lot about nest and systems and you focused on sort of the level of bodily integrity And the brain body but in a sense the social Structure our niche Scaffolds our behavior whether it's hey, it doesn't matter if you don't like broccoli You're gonna put that fork in your mouth Or whether it's some other type of decision They're top down priors that actually structure our decision-making and planning in the absence of precision or of A good way to plan So just really interesting there I think that's exactly right and you know, um I think this is a really your point exactly applies really really well to addiction Right, there's a woman called hannah pick out who writes extensively on addiction and what she points out is that An addict can know that if they stop taking drugs it would be better for them But so what no what they need to be able to do is project themselves into the non-addicted future Where they're living engaging in the world and they're getting positive feedback from the world But she says To pick up your point That's very hard to have a model of yourself like that without social scaffolding without social structure without a kind of um positive or without a kind of positive feedback And structure from a world around you so the thought is the self that you are Is is as you say your priors your predictions They're not just about internal modeling. They're also about the priors expectations And plans and plans and reinforcement that you get from being immersed In a sort of social milieu and for addicts. That's not there They can't imagine they have no model of themselves as functioning in an alternative social milieu So when they get out of jail or get out of rehab Unfortunately, they get back in their old social milieu The familiar triggering situations and the familiar social environment And that kind of activates their self model as someone who Who does this does that? And there's an and and she says when you ask them to reflect on What it's like as a non addict imagine they can't So there's a kind she said it induces in them a kind of existential terror because um, they really Can't imagine themself As a non non-addicted life. It's kind of it's an empty future for them Partly because she says there's no viable social scaffolding to support there They're like in that world. So your point is I think plays really well into that that literature And what you said there, um, what is it like to be, you know, in that case not addicted to a substance or a behavior? It's kind of a subtle illusion to the famous philosophical tradition of what is it like to be a bat to be an ant colony Etc. And when you brought up I think even at the beginning you said what is it like to feel you don't exist but This idea of negative space And of negation came up in such interesting ways in the talk like if you ask somebody what does it feel like to exist It's like that's 99 of the discourse or you know, that's the mystery But then by drawing our attention, well, what would it feel like counterfactual? Important for active inference. What would it feel like to not exist as like I know I'm not feeling that So what is that one? And then what's the other side of the coin of feeling like I don't exist It's like it's like feeling like I am in control like I am steering the ship So that was so such a cool connection That's the yeah, I think that's the point I wanted I wanted to get at you know the what why I like the active inference framework for this is because The feeling of being me You know, a lot of people tell you oh, well if you have a perceptual experience, then someone's having it, you know Any experience has to have an experience or something like that Or how can you not feel like you're me if you have a body you can see your body touch your body and feel it But that's not what we're talking about the feeling of being me Is the feeling of being in charge The feeling of being the thing that I can manipulate in order to bring about all these experiences Right and you can still have experiences All right, there's not plenty of experiences But if you lose the feeling that those experiences are things that you can change and manipulate dependent on your intentions Then you lose the experience of being you and that's at a high level But the same thing imagine the thing going right down, you know, really low Your your hypothalamus is sending signals to raise your heartbeat and not getting any feedback Your heartbeat stays low it stays obstinately low Or obstinately high. It's the same thing I'm not I'm not getting any traction here. Obviously a hypothalamus doesn't think that but you know Or you know imagine a bacterium that's trying to contract its membranes to to turn Left to pursue a sugar gradient and nothing's happening It's getting keeping getting this kind of obstinate feeling that I'm not in charge anymore And I've got no model that I've got no model on myself. That's working to To to give me the feeling of being me and that that's In such a case the system still has sensory experience So it activity at its receptors and stuff is happening, but it's just not A regulatory target anymore And and that makes me think about When you talked about the people who are suffering from pain, but they're Disassociated from it. It feels like it's not their pain It's a little word play. So it's not a philosophical argument, but gnosis And no deception. It's like there's the knowledge of pain But actually it's almost separable from the suffering And so this is an extreme case where the the gnosis of no deception Has been entirely separated from the narrative of the self. It's like, yeah, there is pain in the arm But that's not me or it's not part of my narrative. And so it doesn't bother the person psychologically That's that's exactly right There's damage. There's damage to the body that I inhabit Is this basically what the brain is saying But this body that I live in is damaged But it's not my damage No, did they ever ask who's is it or does it just not seem to be like, oh, it's just like, oh Someone's car someone's parked outside or is it like I'm trying to solve No, no, um The really interesting thing. I mean the early cases the really interesting thing about um painosymbolics is that, you know They don't take any Action to avoid pain You know, so that in in that sense, you know, that's really bad And so but it's it's not quite the same as um congenital insensitivity to pain Which is a problem with the receptor level, right? Those people don't detect pain and so, um You know, they're in a bad way. They put their hand on a burning stove They break their legs and I mean, they don't they just don't feel I don't even have the bodily sensation But pain asymbolics they have the bodily sensation But they don't And exit to themself Well, it points to different um roles for different receptors. So I want to ask about the nmda Receptor which you kind of brought up in the beginning. What does the nmda receptor do? Neurologically or why is it associated with that phenotype? Right. Well, now you're um, now you're now, you know, now I'm out of my now I'm out of my league But uh It I think that that kind of encephalitis is a inflammatory thing Right. It's an inflammatory response. And so When it hits those receptors, I think it's just because our ndma is like it's so widespread throughout the pain I think it's like I'm talking out of turn here, right? And so it's not it's not my my field. So cancel this but I think it's like like a like a catalyst or modulator for so many metabolic functions Right, it's involved in everything as a kind of very fundamental thing. So when you mess with it You pretty much That's why you get this kind of catastrophic This regulation across the brain Yeah, that's that's the thought it's one of these it's it's like um The dean is seen or something like that, you know that these are meta metabolism depends on that and if you mess that up or What's another one? the ketones You know, if you if you get a build-up of uh fennel ketone in the brain You know, it's this tiny chemical, but if you tiny levels of this chemical can just destroy everything produce mental retardation mutism motor disorders, it's a catastrophe an absolute catastrophe because No The cellular level functioning is so dependent on these nano nano level adjustments of these basic things That Speaks to two two dimensions of the challenge, which is the multi-scale systems There's little things like molecules and there's big things like people and then also the trans disciplinarity And it's like we shouldn't have one story for one level from one discipline And then a separate discipline and a separate story We need something a great approach. What's that going to be? That's exactly right. And so where I suppose where I came into this when I was you know When I got into philosophy was in people thought well, then what's the integrative story going to be?  That's one way. It's a kind of broad brush Approach then you have neural network stories And then you have you know deep learning stories and all these different architectures And now you know now have active inference And it depends what you think Uh active inference is going to um how it's going to play out. I mean if you think of active inferences You know at the biophysical level it sounds right, but it's very abstract Right, it treats like a the human organism as like a physical system in space And it's just like a self-organizing asteroid or something like that is this really The same the same laws of physics apply And then you have the kind of Bayesian implementations of Active inference It's an interesting question, you know, whether you think the brain is actually um Bayesian You know because a lot of psychologists will tell you that The brain departs from Bayesian optimal reasoning almost everywhere and almost and almost always, you know so, yeah Very interesting and welcome back Dave So, um one of the questions from Dave, um was have you looked at functional delusions? Socialized as in mobs or depth psychological No, I'm just I'm still on the um, I'm still on the uh standard curriculum of um Delusions of misidentification cotard delusions schizophrenic schizophrenic delusions I haven't talked about math psychology and depth psychology. I've had some thoughts, but I mean clearly like self modeling applies, right? Uh, if you're talking about Our ideas propagate in populations Then I guess you could say those those ideas which are most consistent with a self model they're going to be more easily absorbed and um Stabilized, you know within the individual So it's going to be very hard to get traction for an idea or an ideology that doesn't fit with a self model and probably self models are since they're constructed to um regulate affective states That tells you that the ideas which propagate and stabilize are going to be those which Get traction with people's um effective Self model, you know what that make them feel a certain way rather rather than a kind of abstract intellectual Argument, you're not going to persuade an anti-vaxxer by giving them statistics And you're not going to get a kind of propagation of a wave of um something across social media on the basis of You know an rational inference But but that's I don't have anything super much to say about that Very true that we see sharing and activation patterns in the sort of global brain based upon Affect not veracity or accuracy or any other feature Um, and and maybe that speaks to another one of Dave's questions, which was How does your work illuminate the notion of cognitive dissonance or consonance? Even in his technical work Leon Festinger seems not to succeed in building a credible dynamics of compatibility and incompatibility among psychic atoms Relevant passages of Gregory Bateson's essays in steps towards an ecology of mind seems similarly limited So whether or not you've read those specific texts like I haven't read those specific things I suppose one way of thinking of it is within the kind of active inference or within the um predictive processing framework is you know, if you get some discrepant information that Contradicts your contradicts a self model or contradicts a predictive model. You have you know some choices You can revise the model That's you know perceptual inference as they say Or you can explore the world and try and get some you get some further information to confirm your model you That that seems to be the active inference Approach and obviously life is a balance right life is a balance between the two Keep your model or get some more information But it seems like if you if we take the scientific analogy of you know hypothetical inference Often what people do with discrepant inference in sorry discrepant Um Information is just compartmentalize it You know, they just put it away You know scientists have science, you know, no one threw it. No one throws out a good scientific theory just because of some discrepant evidence Even if that can't be reconciled, you know right now no one's chucking out the theory of evolution because someone came up with a wacky Organism or a wacky function, you know, it's like, hmm.  Okay. This is my life In the hospital where I'm a you know neuroscientist or whatever And this is my life at home where I'm a preacher and a family patriarch of a religious community um Because complete consistency across all the levels and all the functions Is too much But I would say because it threatens a kind of self model. It's not because it um You know that kind of compartmentalization is not so much a matter of intellectual consistency so much as consistency with the self model And very importantly that the self model includes the sensory evidence and that meta model So even though my background is in evolutionary biology very early. I realized that People who believe in evolution people who believe in creation every other flavor look at a tree And see evidence for their world model So that's the starting point for the discussion not that you see the evidence But that everybody sees evidence confirming their worldview and that's a very different discussion than the dogmatists who might be on any side by the side, right And yeah, and no one is going to come no one's going to come to the top. No one's going to come to the topic with no model And it's going to say put aside your preconceptions. Well, there's no such thing, right? So Uh, yeah, yes, definitely. And that is relevant for the cognitive bias and AI bias Discussion in these future systems. Well, we'll have an unbiased system What is that even going to mean? Yeah, exactly. And that is the you know, the strength and weakness of the Bayesian thing, isn't it because The Bayesian idea is you know, you start Have an issue and then you get some evidence and you update your model and you get some more evidence And you update your model and you put some but you've got to start from somewhere And so much of the action in Bayesian theory is in the priors But there's no theory internal to Bayes Which will tell you where your prior assumptions about how much weight to give incoming evidence Is going to come from It's a little bit more like blockchain with the way that we can make our priors explicit You don't step around this issue by using frequentist statistics or by casting tea leaves So at least we can have a discussion. Hey, I use different priors I got a different answer versus We use radically different families of priors and hyper priors and we're converging on a similar action So maybe that speaks to at least this action being appropriate. If not it being the ultimate Yeah, that's a very good point. It's not as though. Um, yeah, it's not as though anyone else has a solution To uh, to where do we start from, you know, what what are our foundation? What are our foundational assumptions? Yeah, so it's a bit rude to criticize Uh basions for saying there's there has to be a lot of action in the priors Right, or there has to be a lot of information in the priors to get the project off the ground True, but you know, that's the same with anyone, you know chomskin chomskins or anyone they just Yeah, exactly So one other, um Praise or a piece that came to mind was almost like parametric hysteresis The idea that although most sensory evidence is sort of just sloughed off kind of like teflon on our mind You look away. It's just totally gone There are traumatic experiences and then on the other side there are um healing modalities Whether it's a healing experience or a biochemical intervention there are sort of like There's interventions that restructure Are models and we can think about that an active inference perspective So I just wondered like philosophically or from any view. How do we think about these kinds of? changing events whether kind of Changing in a negative way like a trauma or in a positive way like healing. Yeah, how do we scaffold for that? Well, that is actually a real a really good question because you know in this in the case of psychiatry it seems like, um Almost all therapies are equally good and equally bad Like like none of them really none of them really work in a way that we can kind of predict or explain There's only statistically, you know statistical correlations some people took Anti-depressants and you know certain proportion get better, but then they relapse Some people went to a therapist or cognitive CBT Some get better some relapse, you know, so what kind of what kind of interventions work? Is really interesting and they're kind of restructuring, you know, and that's the um That's part of the motivation. I think for psychedelic approaches to psychiatry where it's like, okay One form might be look I can't really we can't really have a successful intervention because that would require you to rebuild or remodel And you're yourself it's not just changing your perception and changing your experience It's the way you incorporate that in your whole kind of regulatory framework. How are we going to do that? Well, maybe with 10 years of therapy and you know lots of um patient Reconstruction or or sometimes a life-changing event People give up drugs because you know for some reason It's a life-changing event or they just grow out of it people say but it's hard to Hard to systematize that isn't it? It was psychedelics what people are saying is well, let's disrupt their self model Let's kind of for a while. Let's introduce maximum entropy into the system again You know so that they experience life briefly Hopefully safely With a lot of their self model um disintegrated Yep, and so they get to see life for once Unfiltered you know normally everything is filtered. How does this matter to me in relation to me in relation to my history my plans You know about the people that matter to me All of life is you know just being filtered at every level like that And that's very hard to to experience life without that filter And uh psychedelics give you a um A brief immersive very destabilizing experience of life unfiltered And maybe from that can be a starting point for something that's good Classic william blake doors of perception um idea and also the the rebus work by friston and and car harris as well as adam saffron And actually asking like maybe there's certain aspects that these neurochemical interventions they strengthen Maybe it's not just this across the board weakening of our world model But there are certain levels of analysis in which things might be strengthened and right right On this note though of the the treatment and the recovery one of the very early slides I think it was mr. A Was the patient and then um came in initially presenting some phenotypes and then there was plasma exchange And it said after a few plasma exchanges, you know, he had improved and then he said this other um thing and so I thought um Interesting treatments What does it say about the body and the brain or what made those doctors go for the plasma exchange? And was it with with the whole right matter? Right well because um because they had this idea that uh They had they had this they had this idea that inflammation You know was the core of a lot of these catastrophic the core of a lot of the symptoms in when you when you look at depression and you look at psychiatric disorders people often get wrapped up in the um sensory experience and the um And the cognitive experience, you know people say things that are so crazy You know and the thing is why would you say that? Why are they so irrational? You know and people start at that level and they talk to them and they say Try and understand their life experience and all this or whatever But the view of these guys in mexico was look, you know, look look at the other symptoms um Look what's happening. You know the the guy is pissing his pants The shitting himself hasn't been to sleep for three days and then he sleeps for two weeks And he doesn't want to eat anything hasn't eaten for a week You know, so this is like really basic You know, it's a really basic functioning is is out of control now. Um And that looks like it. Maybe that's a kind of and we know that our you know inflammation Does affect homeostasis really badly? So that was their thought, you know, let's um and then let's test them for all these, you know Antibodies for encephalitis and they find it. So plasma exchange is the um the treatment for that And then of course he might think oh, well, all right, but uh That's not something you're going to repair straight away, you know, when you when you've gone from homeostatic catastrophe To uh A bit of reintegration You know, you're still going to be left with a cognitive level has to get back in touch with If you're thinking of those kind of levels of organization and systematic functioning and interaction, well, okay You change the molecular level function.  So you brought their serotonin level across the brain back to now. Why don't why if so if that If the serotonin theory of antidepression is right, why don't they feel better? Why don't they change their pattern of thinking? It does affect It does affect some very kind of low level perceptual processing though. So they're patterns of gaze You know depressive people their saccades Are very avoidant, you know, if you show them emotional faces or something They don't look at the the nose the eyes the mouth They're the eyes automatically avert People with anxiety and so on so they're not getting any positive, uh, you know emotional feedback from their social world But if you give people antidepressants that pattern of saccades changes within a few hours So it's almost like you're giving them the ability now to um Do some active inference and reacquire some some some new information about about their world So if they go around the world luckily and they people smile at them and laugh and talk with them Then they're getting some new information, but that's not going to disrupt Straight away all the high level models that they've built To um, you know, you're not going to change there. That's not going to happen straight away and that um story about the serotonin story i've Personally felt is that disciplinary hierarchy. It's like well, we know how this drug works Look at my simulation of how it binds to the receptor You bring up but then if it did that and that's simply how it worked if it weren't just um, you know changing a complex biological system Then wouldn't the time course of action be very different? and it's a it's a um Looking where the light is because we can make these simulations with a docking of a molecule But as yet we lack some of these layers in between Absolutely the vibrating molecule and our own phenomenology, which is sort of that fog of uh experience that we're exploring together Yeah, no, I I absolutely a hundred percent agree and I think um You know, yeah, but most of my practicing with psychiatrists colleagues and you know collaborators they would agree to But there's a big uh pharmaceutical industrial complex you know that has That has an interest in thinking, you know persuading people otherwise and also people are desperate Yeah, yeah, can't wait till we have big prior and big precision Yeah, yeah, exactly You you brought up the um Australian philosopher Colin Klein who I was familiar with because of the collaboration with Andy baron Actually about basal experience in honeybees and in insects So just was an interesting connection with thinking about okay if we're going to take this sort of bottom-up computational approach then Where we take that in not just the clinical but in the evolutionary context Yeah, no, he's a great. He's a great uh philosopher for sure and he's really got his finger on the pulse of all the um I think cross disciplinary um Yeah material that you need to do that kind of thing. Well, he's really good like that Here's another just in these last few minutes a question from the chat CV wrote Any thoughts about the role of non-synaptic information transmission across the brain Especially a badic coupling. Thank you kindly um, honestly, uh I don't really know at um Yeah, I don't because uh Clearly it's gotta have There's no reason within say active inference framework or actually any computational framework to think that um You know that the the fundamental mechanism has to be synaptic Uh, although it could it could be anything, right? How the brain is organizing Uh, the body to get through the world to survive could be anything could help itself to any mechanism You know astrocytes, glial cells, whatever the hell, you know But we have got uh, we bought into this idea that it's uh synaptic Probably going back to head and people like that and a neural network theory is that it's a synaptic theory, right? You've got these units Uh interconnected units with weights which are supposed to model some abstract level synaptic functioning, right? We might be off when you might be off um off track there But so maybe this is a kind of a good advantage good advantage of active inference. It's like at the moment, uh computational theory is hung up on the synaptic model because that's what deep learning and neural networks are Right setting of setting of weights across the brain, but that's a very abstract idea of um Heavy and you know, it's a very abstract idea of what head was on head was on a bow And most neuroscientists like I had a guy talking my class the other day invited him to give a lecture He works on dragonfly vision And he was just talking about you know neurons in the in the eyes of dragonflies.  So Yeah, so maybe the uh synaptic model is um Once again, it's a case of looking where the light is, you know artificial neural networks They're great. They can do a lot of things um, but They are kind of high level abstraction Then again Bayesian models aren't even higher level abstraction If you want to put it that way because the bayesian model the bayesian models just say, okay You've got a system interacting with its environment and I've got a function A function that tells you how the system is going to interact with its environment And I can devolve that into a lot of if you like I can devolve that into a lot of subsidiary uh levels of Bayesian Bayesian inference all the way down, but How do they go? How do they go? How do they go on to? The actual molecular soup? Uh Don't know, but I mean that's that that's the job of it, isn't it?  So that's good. You know that that's good. It does seem to see we're in the ballpark Um, Matteo Colombo has a paper on the dopamine signaling about explanatory pluralism from a philosophical perspective about The way in which the dopaminergic signaling In in different ways can be seen as consistent with Precision account the reward account or other accounts and so it's like Maybe let's um, you know, wait a few decades Before we um, you know, give out the trophies. Let's yeah. Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. So I'll just very good. Yeah, because that's right. Why why can't? It doesn't frisk didn't have a paper on that even, you know, and actually there are a couple of good papers on that now Yeah, with the within the active inference framework, we can conceptualize the um the dopamine system as you know fine tuning fine tuning patterns of active inference Rather than backpropagating a reward signal exactly Exactly.  And the other side is um, how do you think for potentially non researchers? What you've spoken to today might Change the way that they think or act I think for researchers I think I think any researchers should still keep researching, you know, what they're interested in Like if you've got a fascination or an interest, there's a dragonfly vision dopaminergic signaling, whatever. I think you should just keep going for it and incorporate Active inference or any framework that that is is Is helping, you know, I don't think jumping on a bandwagon or any researcher is helpful although You've got to bear in mind that if you're trying to function in an institutional environment You're going to be on some bandwagon, right? You're going to be in some lab or some, you know, school of thought But I think you still should you still got to do what you're interested in rather than promote You know Someone else's program. So I don't have a kind of I would love to see I would love to see that um That you know kind of freestonian ideas and everything could um be put in a intuitive way That made them more accessible The people who were looking for a kind of a kind of recipe or something like that Because they're so technical and they're so formal and It's hard to extract How to extract the gold, you know, if you know what I mean, it's it and that's why yeah, so I think So a good suite of examples would be really helpful like, you know, standard cases that people use to explain it um What would be good, you know, just as you know, often these examples the examples are wrong, right? So You think of mars theory of vision? Okay, probably wrong But at least it kind of gave you a way to understand You know, what's going on in the visual system and then you can fine tune it and change it and argue with it and everything like that but he gave people A way of taking the understanding of perception out of this out of you know Out of a really kind of technical specialized Framework and now philosophers talk about it psychologists everyone It's probably become a little bit of a um an albatross around the neck of Because but no one's come up. No one's come up with a like a That one would be nice if someone could I mean because the my framework is so So so clear right and and and it works for active inference too. You can say well look The mind is in the business is what hoey says of um Reconstructing the causal structure of the world, you know inferring the causal structure of the world outside beyond its boundaries So it's very internalist view But that's a very plausible way of doing it.  It can't it can't engage with the world It can only ever do it by proxy indirectly And what does it have photons hitting sensory receptors? It's got to build the picture. Okay, and you know, that's what mar said and and how we put it in the predictive processing framework Something like that would be helpful if Get that idea across you can do it for other modalities, of course interception, you know, whatever I'm sorry. What was the the other question on the non research frontier is um just in the day to day How is this influence how we might think or act just in our day-to-day experiences I think it makes a big difference if you think of yourself as um, you think of your behavior As uh confirming a model You know, I think it makes a really really big difference, you know, if you're arguing like you're arguing with your partner or you know stuck in A way of life or ways of especially especially social interaction And think of social interactions, you know, I've got a thought I've got to try and get a point across or I've got a goal I want to achieve the goal All right, I want to make friends with this person. I want to do this. I want to do that um And then you can get pissed off or whatever if it's working or not but maybe the right way to think of it is, you know I've got a model of how I function in the world And uh, you know, my brain has built this picture of how I function in the world And I'm just now I'm bungling around the world trying to optimize it, you know, so what I think what I think of as this kind of, you know Autonomous engagements of this, um, you know individual who's above at all and choosing and whatever and you know making decisions and Not really maybe what I'm doing is bungling around the world trying to optimize my model and um, maybe I've got I can get stuck in a local minima Right, I can get stuck in a You know my models my model's not working. We had this discussion. Maybe I don't know if you then know this philosopher Dominic Murphy He's a fantastic philosopher of science science and psychology That we ever think of, you know, this notion model and you know A lot of the time what you're doing is our brand management, you know yourself Here you are Here's this model that you've made that works for you in your environment your family as you're growing up or high school or whatever like this And you've got this brand now and unfortunately Or fortunately that's how other people see Your actions are really about Getting a brand out there brand management and if you identify with your brand Great, you know But if the brand if your brand isn't working for you And if you and if you just see your actions as oh god I am just what i'm doing is kind of finessing and thought and reinforcing and fortifying This model of how I act in the world Does it have to be like that you know Very nice point that instead of um social interactions maximizing my reward your reward our shared reward zero sum We can actually think about well, what if we were both reducing our uncertainty about a positive social interaction What might be known as win-win in the reward paradigm, but here Yeah, that's a really good way to it's a really good way to think That's a really good way. Yeah exactly Thank you for this awesome visit. It was really uh fascinating talk and one of in the chat brilliant practical advice Thanks daniel and thanks for your guest So yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot from our lab and you and anyone else are always welcome to join anytime Thank you very much. It was a really great experience. Nice to try these ideas out in that this discussion was really helpful and informed You know, so thank you very much for the chance and I'll be propagating You know, I'll be spreading the news about the lab. So thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Bye. See you everyone. Bye Nice talk pretty cool