The Mind’s OS: How Beliefs Shape Everything

Now, before release, want to make sure that our contribution guidelines are in good working order so that folks have a good path to figure out how to contribute. On the backend side, doing a bit of refactoring so that we can get the system to work beyond the dialectic interaction. So prototyping some concepts of a generalized epistemology that will work with predictive processing and some other, some other new forms of investigating and working with the beliefs that might work better for the perspective taker. So one of the examples of that that I was prototyping yesterday was a way to examine the assumptions in any given belief. So I, I, I took an example of, took an example of general relativity and I kind of like explored all of the underlying assumptions behind that. It was a really cool experience. And I think that's something I'd like to build out with the perspective taker, where you can fractalize any belief into its underlying assumptions and then take a perspective and investigate how perspective might work with those assumptions. So that's something I might try to prototype on the front end. I don't know if that's going to be ready for release. Maybe we'll have a mock in JSON, but the backend work for that is looking pretty good.

Cool. Well, just for the audience, could you talk a little bit more about Perspective Taker for anybody that you know is new, obviously new to our podcast, maybe doesn't understand the data model we haven't launched yet. Once we do, we'll have a video to explain that. But like real quick, just on the pod, if you can give a quick take on perspective Taker, I think that would be helpful.

Yeah, the basic idea is that there's tons of content creators in the world who are trying to help folks. They're producing content and all of those have an underlying perspective that they're trying to get to the world. I know, Robert, you're one of those content creators with your ABCs for Growth podcast. The idea would be how do we take perspectives that someone has in their writing or their form of media, and how can we inject that into epistemic me so that someone else could use their perspective to better understand any other given topic? And I think that pairs well with epistemic me, because epistemic me is one about figuring out how to explore beliefs or update beliefs and then maybe even make predictions off of those beliefs. But we also have an opportunity to say, as I'm doing that investigation, as I'm changing my beliefs, how can I take in other perspectives and Modify the path that and epistemology might take to put it in more philosophical terms. But the basic idea is how do I take. How do I take an influencer's perspective and have that change the way in which I update my own beliefs?

Very cool. Yeah, this podcast is all about building in the open. So we're very open about where we're at with generally everything, like where things are in the ideation phase, design phase, brainstorming phase, or actual implementation. So during the initial parts of the podcast, and maybe the format might evolve in the future, we will be giving regular updates of growing our beloved open source project and Denver Epistemic Me. So this was a quick taste of that. As, you know, the show goes on, we'll probably be adding the show notes, different resources and stuff like that, so got to figure that out. We're in the early stages, but this has been good to get that update. We have so many things that are in flight and I'm really stoked to get the launch across the finish line and get that propagated throughout our networks so that we could get more contributors to the project and get more use cases going. So I'm pretty stoked for all the hard work that the team has put in and we're very excited to launch. So getting to know the founders. So we have Jonathan here, Dean here, Robert, that's me. I'm the one blabbing right now. I know we talked a little bit about our backgrounds last time. Like Dean talked about how he's a lead engineer at Stripe. Jonathan's a serial entrepreneur. I'm like a product leader. I've also been an entrepreneur. This is my second venture. But one of the big things about growing Epistemic Me to our team is about growing community around this. Like a community of like minded individuals that want to bring in the ideas around. You know, how do we acquire knowledge? How do we change our perception of the world based on things happening in reality? How do we take unstructured data about how a human views the world through their content like Dean was just talking about, or through a chat interface and then structure that into a belief system? Those are the things that we seek to solve. And you know, we feel very strongly about that. And obviously the strength of those feelings come a lot from, I think like nature and nurture at the end of the day. So it's like our backgrounds. Right. So this section is really to get to know us. So I'm going to be facilitating a little bit around Jonathan and Dean and then I'll like answer some questions as, as I facilitate too from my perspective. So first question, because this is all about beliefs, epistemic me, all belief systems and we believe like all of reality comes from our beliefs. What is one belief you held strongly five years ago? Maybe I'll even expand it 10 years ago, 18 years ago, that has completely shifted today like a very cornerstone change of thinking for you. And then what caused that change? Anybody feel strongly top of mind Dean or Jonathan more start.

I'm happy to go first.

Go ahead Jonathan.

Yeah, I believe the change of the last five years, I think seeing what OpenAI did in terms of taking transformers and adding a whole lot of data and a whole lot of compute and then creating a large language model that was actually useful really shifted my beliefs. In terms of how. Well, I've used a philosophical background on how I view technology evolution and I think the direction that analytic philosophy took as it influenced technology throughout the ages, in particular with computation. There was a debate in AI about the connectionists versus the symbolicist and who, what kind of approach of modeling the world would yield the best results. And this, this idea with the connectionist, you know, manifests itself in the transformer as this idea that you can just cluster the words on a piece of paper, you know, in the patterns on a word of a piece of paper to describe the world. And I'd always thought of language being more helpfully described in terms of like how it's used in a cultural context and how it's sort of like used in a phenomenological context. And I thought surely that was sort of like the next big innovation that we would see. But I think that was, that assumption was proven wrong in that the transformer based systems at scale just did things and gave us a level of functioning, utility and predictability that I didn't see coming in this sort of timeframe. And I think like I'm happy to be wrong and happy to update my beliefs and to see this kind of progress and then to build on it. But I'm still kind of like waiting for this where we can evolve the language through phenomenological sort of like constructs and this next wave too. And I think that's a bit of what epistemic means about.

Could you, could you say more about that thing at the end, how this is connected to epistemic me and how this is a bit about what EM is about?

Yeah. At least in the, in the epistemology, epistemological context that I use, epistemic me is really about modeling beliefs that are phenomenological, meaning that they come back to our sensory perception, they come back to our experience and our, and they're not abstract. And I think that's important as we relate to humans because that's what we have in common are these kind of like common sensory apparatuses. And if we talk to each other about beliefs and only abstract language, it leaves room for ambiguity and we don't understand each other very well. I think it's like a flaw in language that we don't really have ironed out yet. So. But if we can bring our scientific observations, our human experiences back to phenomenological context, then we can replicate, we can reproduce, we can take one another's perspectives more effectively, and we can disambiguate language and sort of like a more meaningful way. So that's, you know, it's been an underlying theory of, like, how I see language, you know, from a philosophical point of view for a while. And I think it's embodying itself in epistemic me as like one instantiation of that belief.

Cool. Dean, I see your face and I feel like you got things to say. Do you want to add on to what Jonathan was saying?

Yeah, I think I'll, I'll probably go in a different direction maybe, and then what Jonathan was saying and probably talk more internal. As it relates to my meditation practice, which started around like three years ago. And I, I think the big change in beliefs is really what a lot of people talk about when they first get into these kind of practices. It's often communicated as like, you are not your thoughts or for something, something of that degree. I, I, I, I would say it's more so the ability to shift between the belief that reality is external to me. Sorry, it looks like a fire alarm is going off in the background versus the fact that I think it's just someone cooking, so should be put out soon, not to worry listeners. Versus that reality is purely internal to me. You know, I think Robert, you mentioned this early on, the fact that beliefs shape our reality. That as a statement, I don't believe necessarily to be wholly true, but it's something that we can kind of opt into when it best suits us. And I think this is a common theme in a lot of Eastern spirituality. It's also seems to be an idea that's communicated in ideas like predictive processing. That's kind of how Jonathan and I started talking about epistemic me. It's also an idea that is kind of featured heavily in reinforcement learning, that an agent can only make sense of its environment through the events that the environment is producing, not necessarily the environment itself. And this is also a very like Kantian idea from a philosophical perspective. But really it's that idea to say that to shift between the perspective that my beliefs are generating reality and that reality is external to me provides a much better way of navigating the world in terms of how much suffering you're experiencing and your ability to be connected to the rest of the world. So it's almost in a way, the belief in the ontological primitive, to put it in really philosophical terms, the ability to switch between that.

Could you say more about navigating life in the world with less suffering?

Yeah, I mean, I. I think to. Suffering is one of those really hard words to describe because it means so many things, different people. But if I were to define it, it would be not. Not equivalent to pain, because pain is a sensory emotion. But the way in which our thoughts react to pain and try and interpret that pain that oftentimes is a function of our beliefs about pain or our beliefs about the causes that we believe lead to that pain and can lead to these kind of thought loops or cycles in which we perpetuate more suffering or the interpretation of pain upon ourselves. So the Buddha famously said that the root cause of suffering is attachment. I see that as the creation of abstractions in the world that we create. So the mind's tendency to need to draw fine lines and boundaries between things often prevents us from seeing the true interconnectedness of things. And in the context of thoughts, it's oftentimes the fact that we draw abstractions around things like pain and then try and draw cause and effects based off those abstractions. If we see those things as inherently empty, oftentimes we can just exit the whole thought loop of suffering.

Yeah, it's really meta in that way. Right. On the. On the whole pain is different than suffering thing, I want to just add, like, something that I read from one of Thich Nhat Hanh's books. I forget which book, but he talked about an example story that showed the difference between pain and suffering. And he had somebody, I think, come to Plum Village, they had a cane, and they had, like, kind of a kink in their step. And it was, I think, a hip problem, if I remember correctly. And they would complain about it all day to anybody that would listen. They would just say how much it sucked and it took away from their life. And they just really focused on how much it took from their life and how much it handicapped them and didn't allow them to do things they used to do. And then one day they had some sort of enlightenment and they realized like them focusing on that made it worse. Like, it's like, yes, sure, I have this kink in my step, yes, it's kind of painful or whatever, but I let that pain go beyond the pain, the emotional pain in the moment, or even the neurological plane in the moment to like actually make the rest of my experiences and interactions with people painful. And that part is what he called suffering is like when you let it go beyond the neurological or just a feeling and you let it creep into your life like that. And so after he had this enlightenment, he just stopped complaining about it. And then all of a sudden he stopped walking with as much of a limp. And then all of a sudden he was a happier dude. It's, I think, and I, I think it, it's very apt that you bring up pain and suffering and the differences between and, and how beliefs are in between. That so makes a lot of sense. So I just want to make sure, like we're answering the question, so what is one belief you, you held strongly before that is now changed in relation to what you said?

Yeah, I think it's, I, I, I would say it's really the idea that I am my physical body as opposed to my conscious experience. That's the one belief that changed. And that is a belief that connects to many other beliefs. And when that belief dropped away, led to many other beliefs dropping away as a result.

Like what? Like what?

Yeah, so if you look at this kind of goes back to what we were talking about with the perspective taker when we were talking about kind of the assumptions inherent in every conversation, in every sentence or belief that you make. You know, if you have a belief that says I am in pain, there's an assumption there that I is referring to the body. Right. But if you take the perspective that I is not the body, I is conscious experience, suddenly the assumption that made up the larger belief goes away and so does the higher level belief or it needs to be reformed around a new assumption. So, and this is, I think, very pertinent to epistemic me because the way Jonathan and, and I have been looking at beliefs is in the context of beliefs and belief systems, belief systems that are like the network of other beliefs. So oftentimes by pruning a single belief, you may end up changing the entire belief system as a whole. And that entire belief system, as you mentioned, can affect almost everything in your life.

That's so Interesting, as you said that I'm reminded of like other systems. Like I guess one question came to mind. Are there other systems like that where you take out one node or one element of the system and it changes drastically the entire other parts of the system? Like imagine a rainforest or some other sensitive ecosystem, a pond maybe with a certain amount of tadpoles and stuff. But it's interesting. Like, go ahead.

There's this really great book I recommend for folks at home. I'm just going to look up the author's name. I think it's Donna, Donna Meadows. It's called Thinking in Systems. So the entire book is really this. And it. She. She talks about how many different systems that you might see in the world. Like economies or.

Yeah.

Or like. Yeah, even like political systems.

Like.

Yeah, political systems, ecosystems can be decomposed into these series of inputs and outputs and then reinforcing loops as outputs go back into inputs. So oftentimes when trying to understand systems, you need to think about the relationships that are occurring. And oftentimes like a single input may lead to a certain delay that cascades into a huge reinforcing loop. So it's this taking this kind of interconnected look at systems. I'm not doing the book justice, but I recommend people go read it.

I'll add something to that book. It is such a great book and it's only like 150 pages or so. But what it gives you is information architecture and an ontology to talk about any system. A system could even be co founders on a startup. Right. It could be like, like that. Let's take that example. It's like, I'm sure other founders listening to this have had experiences where you probably have problems with your co founder, you have a disagreement, that is inflow of bad feelings. Right. And then you might have an inventory of resentment that. Or a stock of resentment that goes up over time. Yeah. So how do you decrease that? Well, you probably have a healthy, mature adult conversation about your feelings on the matter and get past that, make decisions, move forward. Like stuff like that. Right. So similar in like intimate relationship problems or similar in working in a political system or whatever. Like there's inflow, there's outflow, there's inputs, there's outputs. And so it's really interesting to read a book that is solely dedicated to systems and you could totally use it for even mental health use cases. Like one example is I might increase the amount of negative mental health points. Let's just say that that's a number that quantifies how Good. My mental health is. Let's say it's negative. It's at a threshold. That's bad. How do I accumulate positive health points? Like, go to therapy, meditate. Like, it's another way to increase the inventory or stock of good mental gain, almost, to put in simplistic terms. But I. I absolutely love that book. So, Dean, great, great. Shout out. So, okay. So. So, Dean, you were saying separating the physical self from the conscious self, that was like the big belief change that you had. Thanks for explaining.

Yeah. The identification of what I am. And yeah, that's not to say it happens all the time, but at times it does happen and it's helpful.

Yeah, yeah. When. When we're feeling enlightened. Exactly. So for me, I guess Jonathan went with, like, the technology entrepreneurship route. Dean went more like internal. I'll say internal too. One thing that I learned, I think eight years ago or so, I. My dog had just died. So I. I actually, weirdly enough, my dog, another dog of mine, just recently passed away. And at the time, eight years ago, I had just started therapy and I wasn't super skilled at explaining my emotions. And I was really good at just bottling it all up and repressing it. I was really bad at not doing that. And so a friend of mine changed my whole belief about it. So my belief on sharing my feelings at the time were probably of the very toxic masculinity, patriarchy, belief of, like, oh, I mean, who cares? Who cares about my feelings? My bad feelings or my bad feelings might be a burden to other people. Or I don't want to burden other people with my problems. Like, everybody's already got their own problems. Like. Or I should just be a man about it, or I should toughen up or whatever. Like, I shouldn't cry about this. Like, that kind of thing I had. I remember it was a tough year. I had gone through a pretty bad breakup. I went through. My dog died. And then my brother Re got schizophrenia that year. And then my aunt got breast cancer. That was a bad year. And then I was launching a product at the same time. So I. I finally had enough. Like, I was like, oh, my God, like, I'm losing it. I gotta, like, tell somebody. So my friend Sam had been seeing me struggle. This is at work.