Neural networks

Your mind is a collection of neural networks.

Your neural networks are made to predict the world in a way that improves goal directed action.

Negative emotions are failures in the predictions, fear is mostly computational error (because all you have to fear is fear itself) and positive emotions are when your predictions of the world match objective reality.

The problem is that your mind has to compute everything, so a negative stimuli can’t simply be discarded. If you experience something negative your mind has to make sense of it and it will change the weights within your neural networks to compute the world in a new light (I’m worthless, the world is a terrible place, no one loves me).

Your mind does this because it wants the world to make sense and it tries changing the weights and biases within the mind to see if this new configuration makes more sense.

The entire object of the world and everything in it is computed with these new weight to see if we need to update any values. Hopefully some networks will be filled with stimuli that contradicts the negative emotion (the memory of a loved one, the encouraging words from a friend, a personal accomplishment) and this new stimuli makes the network backpropagate and changes the weights back to default so we go back to feeling normal.

Your minds primarily goal is to make sense of reality and everything else is secondary. Feeling okay is less important than living in a world you can predict.

If you are feeling shitty, just remember this.

You are feeling bad because you lack stimuli that makes you feel good. The easiest way to feel better is to create that stimuli for yourself.

Sing, dance, draw, paint, write, listen, hug, love, read, run, talk, think.

Do whatever you need to do gain the information you need to make your neural networks return to their default values. Once your network is updated you will feel good again.

Depression part 2

I like to work on hard problems because they are challenging The problem with working on hard problems is that they are really hard to solve.
 
Last year I spend a lot of time working on ways to build treatments for combatting depression. I figured it would be an interesting challenge.
 
I think finding better ways to treat depression is one of the greatest things we can do to improve mental health worldwide.
 
Here is what I think I’ve learned in the progress.
 
1. Mood is determined by everything you do but nothing else. Everything matters for your mood but I don’t think there exists anything else. The problem is that you aren’t fully in control of your environment so you might feel terrible and have limited control of what to do about it. When I spoke to a depressed LGBT youth in a arab country facing discrimination it was hard for me to find ways of helping the person combat depression because frankly, life sucked for them.
 
2. Mood seems to be related to information processing within your mind. Depression changes the lens you view the world so stimuli is more likely to be interpreted as negative. At the same time information processing can be used to overcome depression. Behavioural activation and physical activation is likely effective at combatting depression partly because a lot of new information makes your mind adapt a more positive view of the world by releasing neurotransmitters that improve mood. This in turn makes the lens we view the world become more positive so we get a positive feedback loop that helps us get activated.
 
3. There is limited information in negative stimuli. It might feel great to listen to a song that is sad when we are feeling sad or wear black clothing to reflect our mood. At the same these actions makes our mind accept that this is how things are which might not be helpful in the long term for combatting depression.
 
4. Technically everything that happens in your mind is only a reflection of the homeostasis within your body. If everything in our life is ok chances are we will feel happy. Most of the time sadness is caused by something being wrong. The problem is that there are so many factors that it’s easy to get something wrong. This means that if you write a beautiful sad poem when you are sad this isn’t a reflection of how the world actually is, it’s just a way of viewing it and the poems is your minds way of making sense of the stimuli you are feeling. This is the thing that I think trips most people up. Because a beautiful sad story is very compelling especially if you tell it to yourself. However you must understand that it isn’t the truth if you want to improve your mood.
 
5. Long term mood and short term mood seems to be connected. It is likely that sleep plays a huge part in this because we adapt our mind in our sleep based on our experiences during the day. So it is therefore good to limit negative stimuli before bed because it might effect your mood otherwise.
 
6. Many things that effect our mood might be unconscious processes. We might not often reflect on how our home, the media we consume or the people we interact with affect our mood, but the fact is that these are really important factors. This becomes tricky because how do you know how something unconscious affects you? I don’t think there is any easy answer to this question but I think being humble to the fact this is likely how things are might make you more open to noticing how things affect you.
 
7. When you are happy you are lying to yourself about the world. You are telling yourself that things will work out in the future. Of course this isn’t actually how the world works because technically we can’t predict the future. At the same time being positive gives us increased momentum that makes us able to shape the future for the better. When we are sad we are more capable of seeing the world as it truly is, but this isn’t helpful because we often lack the necessary motivation to be productive and move forward.
 
8. Genetics and the environment plays a part in how likely it is for you to experience sadness and depression. It is likely that you can think of the genetic components of depression as your mind having pre-formed roads that it is more likely that you will travel. These roads are what has been beneficial for you reaching this point because your ancestors survived everything to get here, perhaps by having a not so cheerful view of life. At the same time neural plasticity is a real thing. You can change for the better. However it is hard work. At the same time I believe it is productive for almost everything to keep trying because life is more fun if you’re feeling okay and there’s plenty of rollercoaster left for most of us.
 
9. Life is hard so I personally don’t see the point in inviting more negativity into it. I’ve worked with hard problems within psychology and once you work on things that are naturally hard you realise that the idea of celebrating darkness is juvenile because there is so much real darkness in the world you can spend your spend combatting. There is no information in darkness.
 
10. Teamwork makes the dream work. The great thing about other people is that they can help us keep our mood. It is much easier to stay happy with people around us who are supportive. It is much harder on your own partly because we are social animals. We need to interact with others. The tragedy is that sometimes we might have no one to interact with that makes us feel good. So then we are caught in a bad spot. Another bad thing is that in society we are forced to interact with a lot of people that might that makes us feel bad. This is just how things are.
 
11. It’s not your fault. Life is hard and unfair. There are so many ways that you can find yourself in a spot that sucks even though you are a good person trying your best.
 
12. Hold on. A lot of people from different directions are trying their best to try solve these problems.
 
 

Mental health

I believe that the way we look at mental health is simplistic.

The problem lies in the fact that in order to truly understand another human being we have to look at all the variables that has made a person who they are.

This include the persons upbringing, the culture they live in, their perceived status within that culture, their relative level of wealth or poverty, their current level of education and their own beliefs about themselves, people and how society does and should function.

This can be understood through the concept of comorbidity.

The fact that many who suffer mental health problems have a high chance of also suffering from another problem.

Many who suffer from social phobia also suffer from depression. This can be understood by the person fearing other people and not interacting with others and thus feeling sad.

But this can be understood in another ways.

I understand people who fear other humans. Because other humans might judge us for who we are and this hurts us even if the judging is non-verbal.

I have never met a patient who I couldn’t understand. I can retrace their steps and understand how they ended up  where they are.

The reason why people end up in different places, some are rich, some are poor, some are sad and some are happy are determined by many factors.

Two important factors are the following, privilege and trauma.

Privilege

The rich have the privilege to reject people and ideas they do not fully understand. Then they can spend their life thinking they are smarter then others. However I believe this rejection will always come at a high price. The lack of true happiness.

You will never be truly happy if you can’t understand that all people are equal and all struggle and where we end up is a result of both chance and hard work.

Yes you worked hard to achieve whatever it is you have achieved, but so did everyone else.

The fundamental unfairness of life is that some are born with a head start.

Trauma

Trauma is also important for understanding the world. Because the ones who suffer trauma might struggle to make something of their life because they can’t overcome whatever happened to them.

Most people are traumatised in some way, including you. The question is how this affects you.

Every person has the ability to be both good and evil.

It is this fundamental conscious choice that made humans the dominant species on the planet.

We can choose to self-destruct, to hurt others, or to be compassionate to ourself and others.

If we choice compassion towards others we feel good. This is also a way we can overcome trauma.

We can’t always help others but we can make them see that we do understand that the struggle is real. That life is unfair but we can help each other out to make it better.

These ideas are not new. They have been around forever. They have been the ideas of philosophers and people who govern societies.

To strike the balance between self interest and empathy is hard. Especially in a world driven by self-interest.

It is a dog eat dog world but we made it like that. So we can unmake it.

The value of noticing when you need a sandwich

Learn to understand that most negative thoughts come from the fact that our physical needs aren’t met. Your mind monitors your body to make sure that everything is ok.

When we feel sad or anxious it might often be because your body is trying to tell you that you need to fix a physical need. The problem is that it can only communicate through emotion so instead of telling you to get a sandwich you might experience sadness or being annoyed.

Before you start to worry, take a second and have this conscious thought.

Are all my physical needs met?

  • Would a glass of water help me feel better?
  • Would eating some food help me right now?
  • Am I too cold or too hot?
  • Am I breathing at a calm pace?
  • Do I need to spend time by myself to calm down?
  • Do I need to spend time with another human being?

Through practice and time it will become more natural for you to think about these needs and it will help you stay calm or happy.

Good luck!

Richard Feynman and human consciousness

Quote from 58:50 in the video.

Something that struck me that was very curious.

I suspect what goes on in every mans head might be very different, the actual imagery that comes when we are talking to each other. We think we are speaking very well when we are communicating but what we are really doing is having this big translation thing going on translating what this fellow said into our images, which are very different.

I fully believe that the reason that many people still look up to Richard Feynman is that at some point he figured things out to such a degree that most of the computations made inside his mind were correct.

This means that it is likely true that what Richard Feynman believes to be true about the universe and human nature is how things actually are. We can take his word for it and focus our energy on figuring out why.

The man invented the atom bomb and created the most numerically precise theory ever invented, Quantum Electrodynamics that explains the entire universe mathematically. It is likely that his theories of conciousness are also correct.

So his idea is that how we view reality is subjective but the very nature of languages makes it so that we hardly ever notice how differently we see the world.

I think one of the reasons we make art is to solve this problem. We make art to help give other people a glimpse of our view of the world.

Artists thinks it is really important to make art because they want people to see the world as they see it. Because they believe (perhaps rightfully) that if more people viewed the world closer to how they viewed it, the world would become a better place.

You can make an easy experiment that agrees with Feynman. Ask any person to make art.

What you will notice is that the art that every person makes (at least if they aren’t copying someone else and they can handle the use of the material) is unique. The art itself is likely a reflection of their lens of the world, their experience and their current state of mind.

The idea that the lens that we view reality is different for different people is strange to get your head around but it helps explain a lot of confusion in the world.

The only way that every person can believe themselves to be correct would be if our beliefs about the world shapes our perception of the world a lot. We look for stimuli that agrees with our worldview and it is likely that these stimuli are more likely to cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind.

When I started making art, I started seeing art supply stores more. It wasn’t that there weren’t there before, it was that my mind had filtered them out because they weren’t important to me.

So the big question would then be? Is there a right way to view the world?

Yes, I believe there is. When I speak to great scientists, great artists and great engineer they all seem to view the world in a similar way.

Here is how they view it.

They believe it is more important to do actions that are beneficial for the entire human race then actions that are self-serving.

Because when we do actions that help the entire human race (produce art, science or technology that benefit everyone) the benefits are greater than if we simply use our privilege to earn money or help our own tribe.

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” -Kurt Vonnegut