Tag Archives: Metacognition

Leading Neuroscientist Confirms Theory of Bio-AI

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog:  July 19, 2024

As I was growing up, I was constantly studying my own mind. This was natural to me and then it was accelerated by my experiencing Flow state, mostly during some stage performances starting at age four.

I didn’t have a name for it other than describing it as “perfect performance as if doing itself.” There were other attributes I didn’t talk about because I knew they were taboo, such as the feeling that these experiences were otherworldly and suggested “magic” or the “supernatural”, which I repressed as I had decided that science was everything and that religion was merely superstition. I eventually revised the latter decision based on experiencing the spiritual level of Flow state.

I wanted to regain the “perfect performance” state and maintain it all the time. This motivated me to pay even more attention to what was going on in my mind at all times, and to relate that activity to the external world experiences I was having at the same time. I sought to relate states of my mind to the positive or negative feedback I was getting from other people and things.

The first “validation” that this strange “perfect” state existed came when I confessed my experiences to my favorite comedian of the era, Jack Carter. He said, “Oh sure, Billy, everyone in show business has that sometimes, it’s called ‘being on’.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “Flow state” when he studied the phenomenon as head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago. His first published work on the subject came out in 1975.

My first published work was written in 1972 and its subject matter was what I had learned about the states of my mind. It came out as the book Mind Magic in 1976. Throughout the book I referred to a part of the mind as “the robot”. This was the part of the mind that generated some of my actions that yielded the most negative results in the external world. The robot I had deduced was keeping me out of the “perfect” state (Flow state).

I knew that this automatic part of myself was making predictions. The following passage appears on pages 48-49 of Mind Magic:

MIND MAGIC by Bill Harvey“When you are about to see something, your mind automatically searches your memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between you seeing something and your mind having already seen it). If your mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that you do not ever see the new object, but are merely dimly aware that there is a familiar type of object there… As a result of this, you mostly do not perceive your environment, instead perceiving mostly what you expect to perceive, i.e. you usually see your mind’s prediction.”

The term “artificial intelligence” and its abbreviation as “AI” appeared in 1955 in a project proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. I became aware of the term as an avid sci-fi reader and began using it in my own sci-fi writing in the late 70s. In 1979 I formed one of the first neuroscience companies in the marketing field (Psychophysiological Research Management, PRM), partnering with Dr. Richy Davidson and Dr. Dan Goleman. Sometime thereafter, I began to use the term “bio-AI” as synonymous with “the robot”.

In 2002, Dr. Karl Friston published his first work on “active inference” in which he proved the existence of the prediction engine in the brain which I had introspected in myself a half-century before it became scientifically recognized. Friston’s work with many other scientists has identified the prefrontal cortex as being involved in the automated calculations often occurring below the level of consciousness. That suggests we have only had the bio-AI for about 200,000 years, for that is when the prefrontal cortex appeared.

After William James, psychology had become disenchanted with the use of introspective evidence, because of the tendency to bias and inaccuracy. However, the fact that in modern times an individual was able to predict science decades in advance by the careful use of introspection, strongly suggests that introspective evidence be reconsidered as a tool of psychology.

A few pages later in Mind Magic on page 53 it says:

“…society communicates expectations to you which you then see in place of seeing the realities themselves.”

This theme recurs throughout the book, emphasizing that cultural biases are conditioned into the bio-AI. This explains why brainwashing by social media, media “news”, parents and peer pressure is so powerful: it slips into the bio-AI inference engine below the level of consciousness.

We as a species are at a crossroads. The pro-survival bio-AI which enabled us to evade superior predators 200,000 years ago today often functions as contra-survival, as I discovered as a child by allowing my automated reactions to play out in the real world, which often resulted in negative results. The chaos into which the entire world has fallen today, to me, points to the urgent need for rapid widespread education of a new kind, teaching people how to bring decision making into the sphere of the conscious mind, what I call metacognition (term coined by John H. Flavell) and my partner Dr. Gerald Zaltman calls open-mindedness.

My interests in introspection and in neuroscience are connected to one another. My life’s work is to make the connections between the discoveries of neuroscience and the subjective inner life of the individual that will enable science and education to work together to cause most human beings to be able to spend most of their time in states of metacognition/open-mindedness and Flow. If we as a species can accelerate this process of what I call “psychotechnology” or “microcosmology” we can deter the drift back into the self-administered Feudal slavery of inviting “strong men” to take over our governance and protection. It’s never too late.

We all know how difficult it is to control the mind, to master oneself. Socrates said, “Know Thyself,” and Plato said, “I still do not know myself, so why would I spend time studying anything else?” (Phaedra) The only control panel or dashboard life gives us for achieving this task is the user interface (UI) we call the mind. The conscious mind experiences “qualia”, subjective experiences within consciousness, including words, images, snatches of memories, and especially feelings. We have control over certain things through this UI. We can choose to slow down our breathing, engage in positive imagination, question our attachment to certain outcomes, use reasoning and evidence, and these and many other tactics are within the sphere of our control. In this introspective world, we have the only chance we will ever get to solve our problems or to see that they are opportunities. Therefore, we cannot Behavioristically study only structure and function of the brain, we need to relate events at the physical level to the qualia at the mind level, or else we lose the value of having that control panel inside.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Superfluous Superstructure of the Self

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June 7, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

We all pay some attention to our inner lives. But for some of us this means sustained micro-observation and for most of us it is occasional flashes in between slavish addiction to the endless rushes of information coming in through our five fascinating physical senses.

This tsunami of infobits roaring in has itself escalated over time, causing even more outward focus.

But even 2500 years ago, Aristotle made the same observation, commenting that the unobserved life is not worth living. He was trying to get more people to turn inward. His teacher’s teacher Socrates had started the whole thing by his exhortation “Know Thyself”. (Socrates had inspired Plato with whom Aristotle studied.)

The greatest philosophers and psychologists of all time were all practiced at inner micro-observation. This was especially true in ancient India, and for example, metacognition is at the core of Buddha’s teachings. In the modern era this includes William James, perhaps the best of them all at concentrated introspection, as well as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow. Freud however was more of a rationalist, deducing things logically, whereas Jung was more of an intuitionist, taking the original feelings arising in his cognition without embellishing them with rational overlays as much as Freud did.

A long time ago by introspection I realized that thoughts do not arise as thoughts but as feelings, and then the cognitive affective processes embellish those feelings with attributed meanings, interpretations, often involving images, metaphors, and words, at which point they are truly what we all call thoughts.

This has recently been discovered by science, decades and millennia after the same insight was available to each of us by micro-inner-observation.

It will help you attain metacognition to imagine that your inner space has a map. At the pure core of your being imagine that you have a center, something like an energy or a gas, that you can sense. In higher states of consciousness such as the spiritual level of Flow state you can see this self of yours as light, often bluish. Most of the time you can only feel it.

Imagine now in this map that there is another part of yourself that you yourself have built over time, a superstructure that is overlaid on top of the central sphere of your selfness. Suspend disbelief for the sake of argument, and for the moment consider my theory that this part of you is akin to an artificial intelligence (AI) that has a physical underpinning of neurons and their interconnections in your brain and nervous system, specific neurons and interconnections which were caused by your experiences, especially where there were degrees of emotion and assimilated “learning”. The word “learning” is in quotes because much of this was mis-learning.

The entire superstructure taken together corresponds to what Freud termed the Ego.

This superstructure uses a substantial part of your mental energy but the return on that energy investment tends to be negative. The expenditure of this incremental cognitive load tends to do you a lot more harm than good.

Freud said that this appurtenance was called into being when the baby first experiences frustration at not getting what it wants or needs. It functions as the security officer (Worf in Star Trek) and press agent, business manager, negotiation agent, sales rep for what Freud called the Id, and I refer to above as your core beingness.

The reason I say Freud was more of a rationalist is that when I introspect into my Id or core essence self I do not find the animal selfishness and limitation to hardwired instinct that Freud said I would find there. Instead I find a happy lightness of being that is not needy but is caring and fascinated.

Try this experiment and I feel that you will totally get what I’m saying and can add it to your personal strength arsenal.

  • Take your place in your core, the pure witness, the observer.
  • From that vantage point, simply observe the feelings that arise in your superstructure.
  • You will sense the apparent duality in you at that point, probably a realization of your own indifference and yet interest in these ego feelings.
  • This higher feeling is the most important key to metacognition.

You may have experienced this many times in your life, and it may have come about by temporarily hitting bottom. When you have been pushed around by life and have not seen the lesson the universe intended, you may in your frustration, resentment and rage just say to yourself that you give up, you just don’t care anymore.

When this happened to Bucky Fuller – heartbroken by unrequited love – he decided to commit suicide. Once he did that he was in his core self, looking at all of the superstructural self he had built, disillusioned in a good way by all that stuff, having just given it all up. He now discovered no reason to end his life, for a new better version of it was just beginning. He then became the Bucky Fuller genius we all remember.

You can practice this core self-perspective any time you want, for a few seconds or minutes or extended periods, even continuously for the rest of your life.

The essence of the feeling is that you are above all the nigglings in your superstructure. It’s only habit which has made you so vulnerable to those sudden feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, defeatism, hatred, envy, resentment, and so on which have become automatic and super powerful.

Habits reinforced by hundreds of thousands of repetitions in your life do not pack up and go away right away. They will sometimes come back and even overpower you sometimes. But once you have learned to identify with your core and not your superstructure you are on the high road to true freedom. Keep practicing this Observer state and you cannot lose.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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If You Are Normal Today, It Might Be Holding You Back

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Created May 17, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

With metacognition a child can become a mensch at an early age… And it’s never too late to begin practicing metacognition.

The norm today is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP: the condition that sets in when there is too much information resulting in desperate shortcutting such as rationalized guesswork), a way of using the mind that as little children we fall into as a result of being surrounded by people in that state.

It never occurs to us to question it because it’s totally automatic from the first moment of awareness.

A new paper reports that children who are taught to watch their minds starting at age 2.5 years, show advantages in memory over the control group by the time they are 4.5 years old.

There shall be many other such experiments; and I will be doing some of them with Dr. Jerry Zaltman, in our work of teaching metacognition (also known as self-awareness, mindfulness, Observer state, etc.) to students from Kindergarten through college.

Eventually this will lead to children’s books, animated content, and games (physical, mental, emotional; interactive video, Artificial Reality, etc.) which teach the youngest children to pay attention to their minds as well as everything else. Jerry and I are also planning to insert courseware for public schools and colleges, and, with Chaim Oren, workshops for C suites.

Metacognition does not just improve memory, it improves quality of life. As Aristotle said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

The more adept the individual is at metacognition, and the more constant is his or her use of metacognition, the more situational awareness they will have, the more they will comprehend the causes and effects they experience, the more they will be able to discriminate quickly between healthy and unhealthy impulses they have. The more rapidly they can understand the principles of ethical behavior. The more easily they can avoid ego-driven behavior.

With metacognition, a child can become a mensch at an early age.

A child can learn to pay attention to hunches and see if they come true. And can realize when they are having inspired thoughts. And can even precociously discover their purpose in life. But they can only do this if they are watching their own minds as much as they watch the events being reported by their senses.

The same applies to us at all ages.

And it’s never too late to begin practicing metacognition.

The norm is by definition =100 IQ. Today’s amazing AIs are crowdsourcing and parroting everyone, hence their advice is also coming from a 100 IQ. Aspire to something higher and better. Aim for supernormal.

It is said that Buddha taught his son metacognition using a mirror.

“There are actions which bring good to the people and actions which bring harm,” Buddha said, holding up a mirror so Rahula could look at himself. “Before you say anything or do anything, reflect on what good it can do and what harm it can do. If there is any harm, do not say it, do not do it. Do this reflecting continuously. Only take actions that are purely for the good.”
—The First Son, Episode Two of Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, by Bill Harvey

My Best to All,
Bill

 

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There Is a Better Way to Run Your Mind

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Created April 26, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The way you run your life has a lot to do with the way you run your mind.
The way you run both these things determines what kind of results you get.

You have surely noticed that not every idea you have is equally smart. We have all had experiences of being very sure of something then having it turn out to be wrong. We’ve all had experiences of ignoring our own hunches then having regretted that as they have been proven to be right.

It doesn’t have to be a crapshoot, guessing which way to go on something.

There are procedures you can learn which lead to inner clarity,
and therefore a degree of greater certainty about which way to go.

These inner procedures fall into a broad category labelled metacognition. Thinking about thinking, and more specifically observing the way you yourself think.

There are reasons why most of us do not learn metacognition naturally. One is that we take for granted things we have become accustomed to. By the time we are seven years old, the age at which Piaget postulates we enter the concrete operational stage, we have gotten so used to the automatic ways we have operated up until then, that it doesn’t occur to us that we have any choice in the matter of the way we think and feel and act. We are already firmly established in habit patterns which have been reinforced over and over again.

In the future, it will, I suspect and hope, become a well-known fact that children should be encouraged to reflect upon the ways they use their mind, starting from day one. In such a world, it might not take seven years to get to the concrete operational level, nor twelve years to get to the formal operational level, nor nearly a lifetime to become a mensch.

Acceleritis (the accelerating number of question-producing stimuli experienced by the average person in the average day) is, in my estimation, a major cause of what neuroscience calls the default network. This is a way of using our minds which the entire species now tends to over-use, due to a sense of how complex everything is, and a giving up on the possibility of figuring it all out. A half-century ago I noticed this behavior pattern and called it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). In this behavior pattern, most of our decisions are automatic and reflect habit without reconsideration. Daniel Kahneman famously gave this behavior pattern the name System 1. Neuroscience has not validated the existence of System 1 nor System 2, and also sees this more as a continuum than a dichotomy. In fact, EOP causes dichotomania, the inability to see anything other than black-and-white polarities.

Starting to become more in control of your own mental process begins with simple observation. Watching what your mind does. Withholding judgment as to whether it is good or bad, just watching and noting the way it proceeds from step to step, or leaps across associational patterns from thinking about one subject to another one that the mind has been reminded of by a happenstance linkage between the two domains.

Common Types of Inner Experiences

The Narrator: You will notice a tendency at times to tell yourself the story of what is going on at the moment. Talking to yourself but not out loud, except perhaps at times when you assume no one can hear what you are saying. Some of us talk to ourselves out loud even when others are around. The best way to look at this is as unused creativity looking for an outlet. If you have time perhaps when you find yourself narrating your life, you might sit down and start writing without thinking twice about it, just automatically writing whatever comes into your mind.

Another less positive way of looking at The Narrator is that it is wasting time, and that it is evidence of the ego, the part of you that feels inadequate and spends energy to cover that up and protect you against all the superior people around you.

The Negativity Merchant: This is a sense of negativity that some part of you is trying to sell the rest of you. It sucks you in without your being aware of exactly what is going on, all you can discern is that you are down. It all happens too fast, slips past your guard if you have one, and you are in the grip of fear, or anger, or despair before you know it.

It appears that at least nine out of ten people have virtually zero resistance capability to this inner mood merchant.

One who is practiced in metacognition is able to detect the merchant and neuter its automatic emotional reactions.

This is an especially useful talent to have when someone is trying to push your buttons on purpose in order to manipulate and control you. The person attempting that may not even be aware they are doing it, if they too are in EOP, which is the most common state of humanity today.

Holding the emotional reaction at bay is accomplished by asking yourself questions which you might realize are questions you could have started asking yourself a long time ago. Questions like “That hurt my feelings because I care so much about other people’s estimate of me. Why do I care so much about that?” It might help at first to pretend that there is a Dutch Uncle or psychoanalyst or beloved parent asking you that question.

Pettiness is an aspect of the ego’s concerns which you can use to rein in the ego. You are a noble being, above such things.

Old Tapes: Things you’ve heard yourself say before, many times, over a period of decades. Old rhetoric. You may love some of these stories, things that made a big impression on you in your youth. They are so old they pre-date the internet, and so the word “tapes” is apropos. If the Narrator or the Negativity Merchant is trying to sell you something, they might invoke these old sayings. Some of the Old Tapes could contain valuable gold, nevertheless, as a body of work they constitute a Bias Catalog that could be holding back your own growth. It’s up to your metacognition to separate the wheat from the chaff in a new, unbiased way as if you are being reborn and can decide what to keep and what to dump.

Inspiration: Ideas just start flowing in your mind. The obvious wisdom of the words in your head makes it seem as if someone else is saying them to you. Good idea to write these down, and to make sure that you write enough about the revelations so that you later recapture the entire meaning, which can otherwise slip away.

Seeing Goodness: This can occur at any time. Suddenly you see some aspect of a person or a thing which you realize is admirable, even touching, and you feel uplifted by the moment. It can be a realization of a good side to what is otherwise not so good. It might relate to how you feel about your own life at that point in time, which is one of the best feelings we can have.

It all starts and ends in the mind.

As dark as the present days have been, we might perceive that we are living through the time in which barbarism is on its own very slow way out. Naturally, anything on its way out is going to fight like the devil to not be expunged. With our amazing media technologies and well-developed techniques of deception, well-meaning masses of people can easily be led astray. It all starts and ends in the mind, and our naivete about metacognition is the most dangerous thing in the world today, and the thing that is most easily fixed.