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| Explaining Friston's work |
Julien Pineau: You have to see the papers. If people want to see, there is one for example in 2007 called "Free Energy and the Brain" about finality versus causality. This is the most innovative stuff that I've ever read since Schrödinger's "What is Life?" It's a direct continuation of Schrödinger's work.
Tyler Stone: The first few times you had mentioned the subject I could understand little pieces, you know, there's a concept which is the prediction error thing. So, where do we want to dive in first?
Julien: Well, okay, so Karl Friston is a neuroscientist, right? But I think we have to start very quickly with Schrödinger's "What is life?" People don't understand Schrödinger. He was the guy with the cat. But he came up with a wave function, which is the probability of an electron to be in a certain place. Everything is based on probability. Welcome to quantum mechanics. This changed the world as we know it. So he is one of the "Einsteins" of civilization. And he wrote a book in 1944 called "What is Life?" In that book he talks about causality versus finality. Basically, the idea was that you have two types of things. You have life and non-life. Non-life obeys the laws of causality, which is entropy always increases. Everything is going from order to disorder.
Tyler: Essentially just constant decomposition.
Julien: Basically, you start in an orderly state and you move toward disorderly. Everything decomposes and at the end we are all dead. People like that because it works. All of physics today is based on that because it's not alive and it's a linear progression from order to disorder and that's Newton's laws of motion. People love that because it's a linear world without surprises. You know where the Earth was six months ago and where it's going to be six months from now. There is no time element in that linear system. Two plus two equals four. There's no complication. The world is simple. Everything is safe. And that's basically the late 1800's, even up to 1920. This was the world we lived in. When Isaac Newton came up with the laws of motion we thought physics was figured out. Then here comes Einstein who came up with E = mc2 and then we go into quantum mechanics. And quantum mechanics introduces the idea of probability.
"Life does everything it can to not let entropy increase, because maximum entropy is the death of a system."Tyler: And that's when we kind of come to this realization. We had just left this phase in which we had discovered all that there is to discover, and now it's like "Oh, we don't actually know anything".
Julien: What Einstein didn't like about quantum mechanics is the probability aspect, and that's why he famously said "God does not play dice", because everything had a probability to it. Anyway, so quantum mechanics comes and basically changes physics. We had a very linear view of the universe, everything is chemical and Newton's laws of motion are mostly right. But quantum mechanics basically changes everything. So Schrödinger, after coming up with a wave function and probabilities, applies this to biology and it basically separates things into two groups: non-life basically obeys Newton's laws of motion (still, on the quantum mechanical level it is probability based), but life obeys different rules. So everything goes from order to disorder, that's causality. But it seems life obeys finality, which is trying to fight the disorder. Life does everything it can to not let entropy increase, because maximum entropy is the death of a system. Anything that goes to maximum entropy has no interaction. Everything is dead. It doesn't move. There's no interaction. It's done. Which is where the universe, if we are right, will end up one day, right? So basically life fights that, does everything it can to not develop too much entropy. It's also called free energy. And that's where the work of Friston comes in handy. Basically he said he could quantify free energy, and that's his 2007 paper. He explained that life, not just us, but life in general, is trying to limit the creation of entropy (free energy). How does it do that? By minimizing surprises. A surprise creates entropy, creates disorder, creates free energy. So the human nervous system is a learning machine that has one job: to minimize surprises. Because if you minimize surprises then you minimize the creation of disorder, entropy, free energy, and you can stay alive longer.
Tyler: So we're gonna get into how we're gonna make these predictions, and the reduction of free energy for humans for the way we think, the way we act, and the way we learn. But even though that's something that life seeks, can we completely eliminate free energy?
Julien: No, you cannot do it. The problem is, here was Isaac Newton describing very linear movement, and then quantum mechanics comes and just changes physics, right? Medicine did not have that. The medical world is still doing the same thing. Everything is chemical. Just like physics had Newton's laws, in which everything is linear "You do A, you get B". Medical science was like that with the empirical double-blind study. You have causality, everything follows a linear pattern, even though it's not true. That's basically what they wanted to get to because it allows you to have a world that is simple to understand. That's humans for you. And the universe has no responsibility toward you to make sense.
Tyler: Now this isn't seeking like a reduction in variables, as though we're like crawling back into a cave?
Julien: No. So basically what Friston did is he introduced the idea of probability. Just like quantum mechanics said "Well, everything is a probability. We don't know where the electron is going to be, but if I have enough of them I can tell you the probability of it being here versus there, right? That's what Einstein hated, that it can be anywhere. We don't know until we look. So that was the same thing with Friston. So the belief was that your neurons are basically at rest until being awakened by a stimulus from the outside. That creates a chemical and electrical reaction among the neurons in your brain, and your body carries on. In other words we passively react to whatever happens in the world, and the neurons don't do shit. They're being stimulated by light, or whatever, then you react to it. And then you carry on with the reaction to what happened in the world, which is my total understanding of the way that things work, right? This is the Newtonian equivalent, the general laws of motion equivalent, for the medical world. That's how the brain works, "A causes B". It's a linear world that can go forward or backwards. That is simple to understand and, where A causes B, like Newton's laws, the apple falls because of gravity. So that's where we are in the medical world, right?
Quantum mechanics comes about and says none of this is true with Newton's laws. It's far more complex. It's mostly true - Newton's laws in most of what we do is true - but the second you start to go to the very small it's not true anymore. So Friston says the same thing. It's all about probabilities. Your neurons are not waiting for anything. They are constantly trying to predict the probability of an event. So what does he mean by that? It's not based on the outcome, your system is not trying to predict if the apple is going to fall. Your system is constantly trying to predict how it's going to feel when the apple falls. How you're going to feel about that, whenever you see the apple falling, and so you're gonna try to make a prediction based on the probability of this versus that. Like, "There's a 60% chance I won't like this when it happens", and then after that you're going to match that prediction versus the actual sensation of the stuff, and if everything goes according to plan it's great. If it doesn't you have a prediction error, and then there are corrections that need to be made. And that's what we're going to talk about. But basically he introduced the idea of probability. Your system is never passive. It doesn't wait for shit to happen and reacts. On the contrary it's very proactive and calculates the probability of something happening constantly. Not outcome based, but how it's gonna feel.
"Your system is not trying to predict if the apple is going to fall. Your system is constantly trying to predict how it's going to feel when the apple falls."Tyler: And that's the important thing, and that's where I had to get past the fact that, I thought in the beginning that the prediction was about things like survival. It really is only trying to match a feeling. I suppose it's how you become in tune with reality.
Julien: You become in tune with reality through your peripheral nervous system, which is the only way we have to connect with the outside. Perception is reality, that's basically what's being show with this. To life, perception is reality. We can feel and therefore we have our own quantum mechanical system based on the probability of how something is going to feel. And you are constantly anticipating the shit to happen next, as a learning mechanism.
Tyler: One of the examples that I've come across was like how did they word it? They said the fear of pain is actually far greater than the feeling.
Julien: Because that's your probability.
Tyler: Especially once you've experienced it. If I put my hand on something that just burns the shit out of it, that sucks. But then if I were to go back again a week later, and I get close, I would almost need somebody to push my hand on it, because it's an intense experience. Though at that moment there's no fucking input.
Julien: No, but the probability of pain is so high your system is going into overdrive.
Tyler: Because it's what you know from experience.
Julien: Yes, so you always learn, you always make a probability of what's going to happen, and then you learn from what actually happens. So there's two phases. There's a prediction, then there's the expression. You predict something, you make a hypothesis. And you're gonna confirm that hypothesis with the sensory input you get from the world outside. If they don't match there's a problem, there's a correction. If they match then you know for sure, and then you move on with that feeling.
Tyler: When it matches, that is what we would define as a reduction of free energy, right?
Julien: Yes. It's about matching.
Tyler: It's not good or bad, it's not about the things beyond your control.
Julien: It's "Did it match what I thought it was going to match?" So, I put my hand on the stove and I burn myself. The next time, even if the stove is not on, you can't get my hand close to it because I know it's gonna hurt.
Tyler: That's why I can't get my dog in the fucking bath. Fuck it up one time...
Julien: Fuck it up one time, and then he won't want to get in again because he's incapable of changing his prediction. So that's what we're going to talk about. So when there is a prediction error, then there are different ways of dealing with it. But you have to understand that once you're sure of a prediction, that's what your system has learned, and it's moving forward with that. It's so hard to break because it matched. So if something hurts, you know for a fact it always hurts. If you don't like the taste of something, it takes a lot to break that.
Tyler: I think this was some old military interrogation thing, but they had actually said that electrocution was the thing that they had used because it's such a massively intense sort of pain. I've had a few moments working as a technician where I got real bad, and one of them where I almost didn't crawl out of the fucking situation, so I know what that feels like. And it feels really really bad. Obviously. But they said when they would test it to torture people, one of the reasons they would use electrocution is because it sucks so much. But they actually barely have to use it on you. Meaning they hit you a couple times and then all they have to do is threaten you because you're like "No, no, no, no." It's massive. The urge to be away from it.
Julien: This is important because that's the nature of chronic pain. Where you don't need the stuff anymore. You already hurt. You see that with people "I can't get away from pain anymore". That's the problem, that prediction is true now and constantly active... There's been many studies on this where 80 to 90 percent of people out there with no back pain have bulging discs. Everybody does. You have bulging discs. But we cannot understand where the pain comes from. We used to. In a linear world there is a visible cause for everything. So I'm at B. There's an A. I take an MRI. I see bulging discs. There's my A. It's bad science, but it happens all the time. It's bad science because we did not have our quantum mechanics moment, where a guy like Friston comes about and says "But that's not what's happening."
Tyler: So that's how we can turn something like chronic pain into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Julien: Because that's the point of life. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The point of life is to limit, is to mitigate surprises. So literally this is my prediction and you're gonna do everything you can to make the prediction right. Because if it's not right you have a surprise. Surprise creates free energy, entropy, and that leads you to death eventually. So the body doesn't care about right and wrong. It doesn't care about good and bad. It cares about having no surprises.
Tyler: It seems separate from a survival or evolution thing. It really is a life versus non-life thing. I mean, this is literally how life behaves.
Julien: That's the depth of what Schrödinger was saying. This is the most important concept I've ever read about, the most mind-boggling thing I've ever read in my life. He's saying that life has its own way, it fights entropy. Any single life will do everything it can to mitigate surprises. That's how we move forward. That's what life is, a way to mitigate surprise. The purpose of life is to fight death.
Tyler: So we addressed in the chronic pain example where you have a negative reaction to something, right? It's a prediction. It's whatever. What's gonna happen if you get into that position the next day? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What's an example you can think of?
Julien: For example sexual behavior. You're sure you don't like something because you saw a movie, a porn movie or whatever. You thought "Oh, I would not like that" because you judged it from a belief perspective, not having done the stuff. But you've been told by parents, friends, or whatever "This is disgusting, I don't do that". So you know going into it that you don't like it. You happen to do the stuff or whatever, and suddenly what you feel does not match what you knew for sure you were going to feel. That happens to everything. It's like "That's not how I thought I would feel" and now you're like "Wait, what?" That's a surprise. Now basically your system has to go against the surprise, it has to marry the two back together. So now you have a prediction error. "This is how I'm going to feel?" Well, that's not how I felt. Whether you like it or not it's basically the other way. "I'm gonna love this? Huh." If you think "I'm in love with that guy so sex is gonna be awesome". Not always, right? Or the opposite. Anyway, now you have a prediction error.
There are three ways to correct that. There's a balance between the three and usually dysfunction happens when it's one over the other. Anyway, we'll get into that later. The first thing is you have to change your prediction. There's certain parts of the body that are designed for these three ways, to marry the prediction and then the expression. And making the prediction is the role of the brain. We thought the job of the brain was the neurons are just passive and they react to stimulus, order of the body to do stuff. No, that's not what the brain is for. The brain is to make a prediction. It is to decide the environment you're going to be in. That's also where your sense of self is. So basically you're gonna make a prediction based on who you are or who you think you are, based on your personality. So to change your prediction you need to change who you are. What do I mean by that? You're gonna have to change your sense of self because your sense of self is the one deciding the prediction. This is why addicts, in order to get away, need to change who they are. John does drugs when John is with his friends. John has an environment. In order to take John away from drugs, if he's addicted enough, John has to die and become Mike because Mike won't do drugs. But every time I go back to being John, in that environment, I'll go back to drugs. It's environment, behavior, identity. Identity is based on prediction, prediction is identity. The brain is where your sense of self is. That's why making the wrong prediction can be so damaging to you because it directly links to your sense of self, from a neurological perspective.
Tyler: Because your identity is tied up in the prediction, because that's how you see everything.
Julien: Because that's the way it works. Look, I am not about to judge evolution. Three hundred thousand years to become human. The nervous system has been around for five hundred million years. That's how it works. That's the reason we are on top of the food chain. We build things in society. Basically the one thing we have as humans over every other animal is we are better at changing our environment. We are better at making predictions. So our sense of self is superior to every other animal because we can change our environment better than other animals. It's environment, behavior, identity. So there's a problem with addiction and pain. If you know for a fact that your prediction is "weight lifting equals back pain", then whenever it equals back pain it raises your sense of self. Every time you hurt yourself lifting weights your sense of self goes up, because you were right in your prediction. That's how fucked up it can be. It can work both ways.
"The body doesn't care about right and wrong. It doesn't care about good and bad. It cares about having no surprises... So if you make the wrong prediction, whether the future is good or bad doesn't matter. That's the problem."Tyler: Yeah, and then they become even more certain.
Julien: But then it goes the other way. "If weight lifting doesn't hurt my back, then who am I?" Because I'm wrong in the prediction. That's a surprise, what you're trying to fight against. So that's the power of the prediction and what happens when there's a prediction error. To life it literally means death. So if you make the wrong prediction, whether the future is good or bad doesn't matter. That's the problem. As long as you make a prediction that is right, your body's like "Awesome".
Tyler: So we're trying to constantly, basically just address everything with certainty, because certainty is order.
Julien: Certainty is life.
Tyler: Then as soon as there's something that's a surprise, like, that's fucking chaos. And that's why there has to be a correction.
Julien: There has to be a correction. So that's the key. There are three corrections. If you're stuck on one, like changing your prediction, your sense of self is attached to that, that means that any surprise that you have in your life, for better or worse, diminishes your sense of self. Any surprise, even if it's a good surprise it's bad. If it's a bad surprise it's bad. Any surprise is bad. There are three ways to correct. The first one is changing the prediction. If that's your way to correct errors, then any surprise is bad. Even if the surprise has a good outcome outside, you will still see it as bad. And it gets worse. No matter what, or how good that surprise is, it lessens you as a human being. It makes you feel worse about yourself. That's why in some people that are fucked up happiness hurts. Because when they're happy that's a surprise, that surprise makes them feel lesser as a human being. It just destroyed their sense of self because it is a surprise. That is the only way they can deal with a prediction error. That's the problem. And that's when you see a lot of issues with ego and stuff like that because if you don't have the other ways to deal with prediction error, then everything is a challenge to your sense of self, any surprise. So anything that feels good when you're sure it doesn't lessens your sense of self. Imagine the hell that you live in. Imagine how scared you would be to walk around knowing that everything that feels good will make you feel like shit as a human being. That is Hell. That is literally Hell on Earth.
Tyler: Were you raised Catholic, or no?
Julien: My grandfather was. My grandfather thinks he raised me Catholic I can tell you that!
Tyler: So changing the prediction is the big one, and that's a big problem, right? What are your other options?
Julien: So the second one is you're going to create movement to basically make the world fit the prediction. That's the one where "lifting weights hurts my back, so I'm gonna fuck up the form". Let's say I lift weights and it feels good. But I don't want that. So I can either change the prediction to "maybe lifting weights once a day doesn't fuck me up" or, because I don't like it, I'm gonna change my form until I hurt myself. That's self sabotage. That's you all the time. But again self sabotage in itself isn't bad. It's just trying to limit the surprise. So you could basically change the movement into one where you hurt yourself, and then the prediction came true and that's okay. You're gonna act on the prediction to make the world fit it. When the prediction doesn't come true you can either change your prediction or you can make the world fit the prediction. I can create movement that will make me feel the way I thought I should. You can go the other way. You can change your position until it feels good.
So you have a choice. You can quit or you can do it until you feel that movement, and you know what you did. That's why we talk about technique, about anecdotal evidence, about learning skill, because that's what learning skill is. It's number two. It's learning to make something feel the way it should. So that's where mastery of movement comes in. The action should feel a certain way. Then you start to go through repetition again and again because every single repetition gets you a little bit closer to what you think that action should feel like. Then eventually you have very precise control. Masters of anything can be so precise in what they do, to almost perfection. How can the guy who makes the soup make it so slightly different, but every time it's great? He has mastered the movements necessary to duplicate exactly that. That's why you see the great Olympic weightlifter do a movement that to the untrained eye always looks the same. You can tell the mastery of movement. Why? Because they can duplicate and replicate the movement almost to the same level every time. That's number two. Every time there's a prediction error where they didn't feel right, they have learned to adjust to make the body do what they want.
Tyler: You know it's the same thing with like the sport of basketball. You see the three-point shooter. I'm not one of those, but when I'm shooting, you know, I would say within eighty percent of the time the ball leaves my hand, I would know for sure if it's going in.
Julien: Right. Mastery is Kobe Bryant knew 98% of the time. That's why the greatest shooters turn around. They know. He knows that when he feels a certain way, he makes it. That's mastery of movement. That's because every single prediction error, he physically changed the world to fit what he wanted. That's mastery right there. That's the power of anecdotal evidence. That's why I fight for anecdotal evidence so much, because that's where mastery is. You cannot learn a skill without anecdotal evidence. They have a whole thing about anecdotal evidence being useless and that's completely wrong in the sense of you cannot learn any skill without anecdotal evidence. You can't use any anecdotal evidence to convince others, but that's not the point. The point is you need to convince yourself first.
Tyler: Yeah. I mean I could read all of these studies specifically on how a basketball shot is supposed to look. But until I get in there and go, and I know what that feels like, then it applies to me. Anecdotally, but that's what matters to me. That's the only way I'm gonna learn the shot.
Julien: Exactly, and from a Friston perspective that is extremely important, because it's one of the three. So you have to make the right prediction. That's where memorization comes in, in the sense of what a shot is. It takes a fucking million shots, which is anecdotal evidence of you basically going through prediction errors physically. And many times you are like "I'm going to quit" because you don't want to go through that second way of fixing prediction error. Quitting is "I made a wrong prediction". I thought I could shoot, I wanted to play basketball. So now you're gonna change your prediction to "I don't wanna play basketball anymore" because you're tired of going through the second solution, which is changing the world every single time until it fits what you want.
Tyler: If I have to change, the prediction was wrong. Is this choice based? Is this a decision to choose which of these?
Julien: It's a balance. The question is who makes a choice, right? You have learned from previous behavior which one is more effective. If you quit enough times it's obviously effective. Change the prediction every time and it becomes your behavior. Environment to behavior to identity. If you have decided to change your prediction, if you create an environment where if anything gets hard you quit, that's your environment. If that's how you fix the prediction error, by changing the prediction every time, then that will be your behavior. Every time something gets hard, every time there is a surprise, I change the prediction. That becomes your personality. If you create an environment where if things get hard (a surprise) you would much rather quit, then you become a quitter. So it's environment, behavior, identity. What you get to choose is the environment.
At that stage you get to decide "If this is surprise, I will deal with it and not get away from it". That will affect your behavior and you're not a quitter anymore. But you can't control the behavior. You can't control your identity. The only thing you can decide, you can choose, is your environment. That's where your brain comes in, or consciousness, or whatever the fuck it is we have that all other animals don't have. We get to create an environment. Lions are stuck. They're not going to go migrate 300 miles. Basically they have a territory and they are stuck. If there's no food they might move a little bit but basically they're fucked. They're not going to build air conditioning because it's too hot. They're not going to be able to dig a well. Humans are very good with the prediction thing. We can create an environment better than anybody else. So that's where I think people need to understand where the success in life is. They get to choose the environment. They don't get to choose their behavior, they don't get to choose their identity, because that is based on the environment. Environment, behavior, identity.
"You cannot learn any skill without anecdotal evidence. You can't use any anecdotal evidence to convince others, but that's not the point. The point is you need to convince yourself first."But you get to say "This is where I want to be". You think you're fat, you're out of shape, you're unhappy. You decide to go to the gym. Now once you're in the gym, you don't get to decide the rest. That's a problem too. You go to the gym and you think it's gonna feel good. You won't. And so now basically from that you say "Oh, I'm a loser". You're not, it's supposed to feel like shit. You're just wrong in your prediction about how a workout is supposed to be. It's not supposed to feel good. It's supposed to make you better, but after that it's out of your control. But being in that gym, being in a correct gym, will make you train harder, and then eventually you'll become a winner. But you don't get to control that part. All you get to do is choose a gym. So what do I mean by that? You join a gym, but you don't like the mood. The vibe doesn't fit you. You don't like the people there. They're not supportive to you or whatever. What do you think the best program in the world will do to you in that environment? Absolutely zero. So now you went into that gym, you chose that gym. At least you chose to go to a gym. That's the gym you're in. Now what you would like is to change the coaching there. You would like for people to be more supportive and everything. But it's not that gym. You don't get to choose that and so thereafter that starts to attack your identity because you're like "people should be like this". So now you bitch about the facts, you're making predictions based on these beliefs, and you say "I can't do this". You're right. Because you're trying to control what is not controllable. What is controllable is your ability to try a different gym, until you find one that fits what you want. Once you find a gym that fits what you want your behavior will be of someone who trains harder, because you feed on everything, and from there you can become a winner. The wrong regime will make you a loser. You don't get to control that. Once you become a loser, then that's a prediction you make. So now it's a feedback loop, right? And the prediction is "I lose" and now you lose. Now you're in a bad place because you tried to control too far down the line. The only thing you can control is the gym. If your gym makes you a loser, change the gym. The only thing you can control is your environment. If you change your environment then you change your behavior, if you change your behavior then you change your identity. Choose an environment that will create the right behavior. That will create the right identity.
Tyler: So our third option. This is actually the one that I went over seven or eight times and completely misunderstood. I'm gonna ask a lot of questions because I don't fully understand this one. In order to change or correct a prediction error, we have to change the way the brain samples input.
Julien: Yes. The third way you could change the prediction error is you could change how you feel about something. That's the source of most dysfunction. Again, the point is to mitigate surprises. If a surprise happens, it's not good. The fact that a surprise happens is always bad. So I need to either change the prediction, move until I get what I want, or change the way I feel about it. That could be, for example, the result of a life changing event like a near-death experience, where basically they used to have a certain personality. But then the things that used to be important to them no longer are because they changed the way they perceive the world. So that would be the source of dysfunction. This will be like the source of schizophrenia. Something happens, and basically you're the son of Jesus Christ. It was proven that no, you're not, but that doesn't matter. You're not going to change your prediction. Now, you can't make the world get on board with all that. And you can't walk on water. You can't change the world in a way that proves your prediction. So the only thing you can do is change how you feel about things. That's where you can see schizophrenia coming in. You have changed the expression. That would be the source of most dysfunction.
And that would be psychosomatic events. For example, "lifting weights is gonna hurt my back". I lift, but it didn't hurt. My form hasn't changed, so I did not physically hurt myself. Nothing yet. But I wake up the next morning and I'm in pain. Why? I made the world fit my prediction. That's one example, but there are many. That's where psychosomatic events will apply. You have made yourself feel a certain way about that. So there's a positive as well. Let's go back to our sexual behavior example. There is that action that I thought I would hate. It can be because I never wanted to do this, or because this is morally bad. But then there is a surprise that tells me this was not bad. And the men I love, or the women I love, like that action in bed. Alright, so I have two choices. I can not do it, or the next time I do it I can make myself like it. I can change the way I feel about that. That's why the psychosomatic stuff happens so much. We see it with placebo stuff all the time. We see it all the time. But that's also unfortunately the source of many dysfunctions.
Tyler: I'm trying to come up with some other examples for this third one because this is the one that needs clarification. The easiest way to do this is the thing we fall into a lot with food you had mentioned.
Julien: Yes. I enter a situation where I know I need to move. I'm bored. I'm sitting here. I'm at my desk and I'm feeling bored. I need a change of behavior. I need to do something. And I'm angry. So I need to fucking express the anger, right? So not changing the prediction, because in this case you're bored, you feel you need to do something. So either you start enjoying what you're doing. You want to work but you don't want to do that. Basically you need option number three, which is I need to feel sympathetic. So instead of acting, I could go grab nuts, any food, honey, sugar, that will create a sympathetic reaction. Because now I'm at work and instead of changing my prediction, instead of changing my work into something I would like, all I need to do now is to create a sympathetic feeling. The easiest way to do that is to have sugar, because sugar triggers a sympathetic reaction. So now imagine how fucked up that would be if anytime I need to have a sympathetic reaction I could just feel sympathetic. That means that anytime I need to take action I could instead rely on something that makes me feel sympathetic. That would basically be the third way to deal with a prediction error.
Imagine if I put all my energy into option number three, everything I have. So it's a triangle, but I'm going to just use number three, which means any time there's a prediction error I'm gonna use something that makes me feel a certain way. So imagine if you could do that with food. Any time I need to go sympathetic, anytime I need to make the world fit what I want, instead I'm gonna grab sugar. That makes me feel sympathetic and therefore allows me to fix the prediction error. Imagine the power that would have. That's our relationship with food. We are using food as a third option to basically not have to do shit. That means that we are using food to avoid changing a prediction, even when we're wrong, and to avoid doing anything about it. That is how bad our relationship with food is. Unfortunately, neurologically speaking, it allows us to not do shit!
"If you change your environment then you change your behavior, if you change your behavior then you change your identity. Choose an environment that will create the right behavior. That will create the right identity."Tyler: I had a note here from what I had read earlier. Friston said that your perception is completely bound to action. There's no way around it. If I want to change my perception of the world, there really has to be action. I have to breathe different, I have to move around, my eyes need to move so I can see something different. I have to breathe in order to smell something, there has to be an actual action in order to perceive something.
Julien: And so eating becomes the easiest way to fix a prediction error. Why? Because five thousand years ago you did not have access to all those different foods. You had one type of carb, three types of protein, and that was it. So because there was so little choice in food, there had to be so much more behavior change. Which means changing your prediction or making the world fit it. So now that we have the quantity of food we desire, and choices of food we never had before, it's basically eliminating completely the need for a change of behavior or a need for movement. All choices of food literally determine how much movement and prediction we're going to do in life.
Tyler: When we have at our disposal such a wide variety of foods...
Julien: ...which is the worst thing we can do to human beings.
Tyler: ...and an extremely wide variety of things that taste really fucking good...
Julien: ...and quantity...
Tyler: ...and so it's always new and novel if you want it.
Julien: So you're bored.
Tyler: ...I can go have myself a new experience...
Julien: ...or the food that created that feeling that one time.
Tyler: And so that's the thing. I think in most cases you could just replace a lot of necessary things, and there is still enough variety so you're not stuck in this.
Julien: No, but look, that means that I make the wrong prediction. Which means I like assholes. You know, like that girl who's always dating that asshole.
Tyler: Like "Oh, I thought he was good. He's a dick."
Julien: Yeah, or like guys "Oh, you dating that bitch?" Yeah, well guess what? The other ten, they were exactly the same way, right? It works just as well for women or men by the way. Instead of changing the prediction, instead of realizing that you're wrong and your personality is in the wrong place, instead of realizing you're dating people that are destructive to you and actually trying to date a good guy, instead of changing that, all you gotta do is eat a specific type of food, and you will have mitigated the prediction error.
Tyler: And, because in the grand scheme of things food is a very short-term solution, that becomes a constant behavior.
Julien: So you want a cheese, and you need a different kind, and we have both.
Tyler: And then we get into the patterning as a result of this.
Julien: Basically you can see the connection between food and mental illness. You can see food as a mental illness, and I do believe that's what it is now. Because of the quantities and the choices we have, food is what's stopping you from moving forward in life. There is a link between the gut flora, through the afferent nervous system and the enteric nervous system. There's a link between the gut flora and depression because those choices in food will have direct impact on your behavior, whether it is making the world fit what you want or changing your prediction. So imagine how bad our relationship in the Western world is with food. I know a few people that are stuck in life because they can't change their behavior and they can't do shit. They can't exercise the way they want, they can't find intensity because they cannot move to make the world fit what they want, or they can't change the prediction, which is they're stuck in life, because to change the prediction error they go to what? Food. This is the biggest drug and the most dangerous one of all because this is the one that will ruin your life.
Tyler: It's interesting, and back to kind of the first way to correct the prediction, a lot of those people aren't willing to change their sense of self either. You come up with another good option, but they're still in the middle of this self-destructive thing.
Julien: That's basically what drugs are, by the way. Drugs make you feel a certain way, right? That's the source of dysfunction. That's option number three. It's the same thing with drugs. "My life is bad. I don't do shit about it, but I feel good." I mitigate the error.
Tyler: And often in the case with drugs, even if you don't feel good it's still familiar. You know what I mean? Even in the midst of all this mess I know what I'm getting.
Julien: It's the right prediction. No surprises. When you're on drugs everything feels a certain way. That's why drugs are so powerful. But people have to understand, food is exactly the same. The difference is you don't have to snort cocaine, but you have to eat. ...The more choices of food you have, the fewer behavioral changes you will have. There's a direct correlation. You will either choose new food or your new behavior. So if you want to do stuff in life, if you want to change your prediction, you're gonna have to lower the quantity and choices of food that you have. If you want to be able to behave the way you want, train the way you want, be who you want to be, then that means that the more boring, in that sense, your diet is, the better your life will be. It will allow you to make better predictions and have better actions in your life. You are using food to avoid better decision-making and better actions. That's literally how we use food. It is that fucked up.
Tyler: I think that's a great conclusion.
Julien: That's the conclusion. That's the direct conclusion of Karl Friston's work. That's why I created the the StrongFit nutrition protocol, to fit Karl Friston's and Schrödinger's work. That's causality versus finality. But people have to understand the deep relationship between food and behavior, from a neurological perspective. Then we go into the gut flora, which is another one on top of that. Food and behavior are linked far more than people understand, and it is I believe, in the Western world, the most destructive force. You do not understand what that "cheat day" on the weekend does to you on a neurological level. I'm not saying to go cold turkey, but you have to understand that what you eat will change your behavior and decision-making in life, and not from a chemical perspective, but from a Friston perspective. The problem is that most people look at it from a chemical perspective.
"Now that we have the quantity of food we desire, and choices of food we never had before, it's basically eliminating completely the need for a change of behavior or a need for movement."Tyler: We only look at food via chemistry anymore.
Julien: Exactly. So they go like "Well, who's to say that protein does that?" That's not the point.
Tyler: That's even how I see eating dysfunctions addressed. It's brought as "Well you see, so you eat this because then you get this feeling of happiness, and that's this chemical and...
Julien: Chemical... sugar... and insulin does this and that and everything. That's Newton's way of looking at the world. It's a linear way of looking at the world. Well, it doesn't work like that. The world is quantum mechanical first. Neurologically speaking, you will follow the Friston model.
Tyler: All those other things fall in line just to make sure that correcting prediction errors happens.
Julien: Yeah. That's option number two. Making the world fit your prediction is where the chemistry comes in. But that's a "what"; it's not a "why". It's a "how"; not a "why". What matters is the why, and why is the Friston model. That's why many times your diet fucks you up, or a different diet creates certain results, because fundamentally it's the same principle every time, it's the Friston environment. That's what matters.
Tyler: Now to go forward, this is not the format for us to give out any good follow-up reading information for Friston's work, but I will add actually I have one. There's one really good concise, I won't say good for laymen, but it's a good description of who he is, has background and a good overview of some of the work. I'll add that into our link on our Instagram stuff.
Julien: And add the 2007 pdf "Free Energy and the Brain" please. If they want more I can always...
Tyler: I can put together a couple of those on the link tree. So if you guys want to take a little bit of a dive into it you can.
Julien: But just to finish all this, this is why I believe what we do is so important. People have no idea how arrogant I am. If you think I'm just confident about which diet is going to help sleep or get me leaner, you have no idea how far I can actually go. I'm so much more arrogant than that. I believe that through movement and nutrition we can have control of two and three. I believe we can address mental illness. I believe we can address addiction. I believe that, through this, we can control so much. Most of the field of psychoneurobiology goes into the Friston model, even though they're not talking about it for whatever reason. Maybe they don't want to quote him, but it's obviously...
Tyler: It seems to be the foundational basis for all of it.
Julien: Just Google psychoneurobiology. It's obviously part of the Friston model. But anyway, they're going at it through psychotherapy, the Freud way. That's changing the prediction. That's option number one. They are not going into two or three, which is very strange to me, and I think with Strong Fitness that's what we can do.
Tyler: That's interesting. It was really interesting how you had kind of gone through some of this stuff even without having this framework in front of you. You know, the first thing was going to be to change the prediction, which was going to be intensity.
Julien: Yeah. Oh, yeah. So in in a way I've been doing this forever. This is why the more I delve into this the more I was amazed how right I was. I was amazed at the power of all this. For example, if you look at changing the prediction that's, as I was saying, changing who you are, your personality, right? It's, "You think it's going to do that? Well, we're going to go past that, we're going to change your prediction. To do that I'm gonna burn your sense of self. I'm gonna give you a new personality." That was exactly that, it was changing the prediction. That's exactly what "burn the question" was.
Tyler: That's the thing we've talked about many times. You need to become the person who can do this.
Julien: That is the choice, you get to choose the environment. I choose the environment in which to change myself.
Tyler: And the second is then...
Julien: It's movement, its mastery of movement.
Tyler: Movement quality, being deliberate, all of that stuff.
Julien: And number three is nutrition. We are developing mental illness with the food thing. I truly believe that, and all the stuff I've read about the gut flora shows me the same. I think that's where the anxiety and depression comes from. We are creating the wrong behavior in the Western world and food is a major part of that. So in a weird way, that's what StrongFit has always been about, to basically give control of option one, two, and three. To give you the capacity to do all of it, the capacity to not create free energy, the capacity to be alive.
Tyler: Now for you, having had these as principles, maybe not worded in this way or framed within these concepts... I just want to know what it's like when you read something from, you know, a pretty brilliant guy, and all of a sudden it lines up, and you're like "Oh fuck. Yeah, that's basically what I've been doing."
Julien: Yeah, that is what it's like. Well, you know, because I read his stuff and I'm like, "Hey, that's my life. So I am NOT crazy". It's the vindication of every thing I've ever worked on. I never felt that I had to be vindicated, but here was the proof of my life's work, goal, dreams, whatever you want to call it. There's a guy who quantified it in a scientific way, showing everything you always worked on is quantifiable in that sense. He has the math. All the stuff you've been working on has a neurological basis. You just felt it. And to read that on paper in front of you. It's like the guy talks to you directly. It's like when you read those books and you feel like the author is talking to you. Reading Friston's stuff I was like, thank you.
"I believe we can address mental illness. I believe we can address addiction. I believe that, through this, we can control so much."Tyler: And you were never chasing the math either, you just wanted to understand it.
Julien: I didn't know there was the math. When I read Schrödinger, I was like, "Oh my god, this is mind-blowing". I knew this, and here the guy's telling me, quantum-mechanically speaking, that that's what happens. I was like "I knew it" and then I read Friston and I'm like "Oh my god." They are giving me a road map on how to do it now. I felt the stuff, and I knew a lot of it, but I had to do it on my own. Those were things I could feel, except I was like, I don't know how to do it. And now there's a road map to everything. There's how we save mankind. It's there.
Tyler: And I think it's important because you still think differently, and operate differently than most of us. You know what I mean? You never gave a fuck either way if there was a thousand research papers published on this subject. It didn't matter to you at all.
Julien: No, because I knew sooner or later...
Tyler: But it is good to see, like even for me going through the new notes we had today on the Friston stuff, my understanding is much broader simply because I found different words to attach it to.
Julien: Otherwise, you're not getting it.
Tyler: And so all this time you were trying to communicate your feeling on it. And now, that's the important part of having discovered that this work has been going on. Now there's an easier way to teach this to people.
Julien: Yeah, because I thought my only recourse for the longest time was philosophy. Logical evidence. That's the only way I could ever explain what I was feeling, like "Guys, I know I'm right, but let me take you to philosophy to prove it". If I'm good at something I can see patterns, so I saw patterns. I read everything, you know, from paleontology to philosophy to history to stuff like that. So I saw the problems. But I used Plato and Socrates to help me explain it to people. No, no. This dude is that smart. He actually figured out, as a neuroscientist, he figured out how this shit works. This is... he's mankind's... don't hate me, but screw Jesus Christ, he's the savior.
Tyler: This was a really interesting thing. He had said basically if he was to define his work, he's trying to organize the principles of all life and intelligence.
Julien: He's not kidding.
Tyler: And the quote that is left here is "If you are alive, what sorts of behaviors must you show?" and that's where all of this is coming in.
Julien: The guy has mapped out life. That's literally what he's done. He's telling us there is a way to live. As it is now, everybody has an opinion, "Life does..." No, it seems that life has guidelines just like physics has the wave equation. Schrödinger used the wave equation to define the behavior of particles. Friston defined the behavior of life, and he's telling us in order to have more life, this is how you behave. So it's not a matter of opinion anymore, in the sense that "I live my life the way I want". No, you live your death the way you want, in most cases.
...Art is the foundation of who humans are. Art is life because art is all three. Art is a way to minimize surprises. That's why we know what beautiful music is, because it is literally an expression of life. ...We can go into anecdotal versus logical versus empirical evidence. Trainers all try to learn through empirical evidence, which means they want to read something that makes them change the prediction, but without having to make the world fit the prediction, without having to do anything with how they feel about it. So it's the laziest way to learn. You can't learn just through empirical evidence. You won't learn shit. It's thinking that you're going to do scrambled eggs the Gordon Ramsay way because you read the...
Tyler: That's learning how other people do things.
Julien: Yeah, but you still haven't learned how he did it. Just because you read about Gordon Ramsay's life and you read his recipe doesn't mean you can do scrambled eggs the way he did it. That's the problem. That's what they want "Oh, but just tell me how you did it". It doesn't matter because that's not how you're going to do it. That's not how this works. So you think changing the position gives you control of life? You are so mistaken. It is only one way, and it is a dysfunction. Anytime you don't use all three you are being dysfunctional. So whenever you think empirical evidence will give you truth, all you are doing is being morally superior to everybody else. You're in your ivory tower where you think you can bring the truth to everybody. Like you're Moses on Mount Sinai because you want an easy way to mitigate surprises. When actually you need to go put yourself through the other two.
You'll see that most dysfunction occurs in people relying on one way to change, to mitigate surprises. Either they change their prediction, which means either they quit on everything or they want everything without actually having to work. Or they just use movement, but then keep the same behavior going, that fucked up behavior, but just keep trying to fix it without even realizing where they fucked up in the first place. Or they basically have a dysfunction of trying to change the way they feel: drugs, food, mental illness, anxiety, all that stuff. That's what dysfunction is, when you do just one option in preference to the others.
"I read Friston and I'm like "Oh my god." ...Now there's a road map to everything. There's how we save mankind. It's there."Tyler: I think we just summed up all of Karl Friston's work.
Julien: Well, you wish, but yeah, I hope so.
Tyler: By "all" I mean the two paragraphs of his stuff that I had to reference today.
Julien: But we talk about it in the online nervous system workshop that we're going to release in a week or two. ...This is the base of everything I do, but now I have the neurological understanding of it. So this is where StrongFit is going. It's going into behavior modification. It's going to work hard to be... alive, I guess. Understand where your dysfunctions were before. That's what OCD is; OCD is option two. Make the world fit, right? So you're like "I need my hand here, and my other hand there" because you think the only way to mitigate surprises is to do something physical about it. That's OCD for you.
Tyler: You mean when I'm not sure whether or not I started the cameras, and while I went up and looked them right in the face, five minutes later I still have to go look?
Julien: Yeah, because you know why? You don't want a surprise. So you need a little bit of option number three, which would be like "Dude, relax."
Tyler: ...you've only done it once. It was only one camera, and I don't think anyone even complained on YouTube."
Julien: And you need to change your prediction in order to not make the same mistake again, right?
So you see, it's that three constantly in balance. That's where you make progress.
Editorial comments: This is essentially a narrative of personal empowerment. The fundamental political question among historically oppressed populations is "How do we take back control of our lives, and our futures, from those who seek to exploit and oppress us?" Yet as Foucault and others have shown, even our environment, our habits, and our mental models control us, and in far more subtle, but equally powerful ways. Will we allow ourselves to be controlled? Or will we seek to take back control, seek personal freedom, and live in balance? In the field of architecture, Christopher Alexander's concept of a "feel for the whole" captured how the act of designing the structure of our ecosystem also shapes the quality of social interactions and the mental health of society itself. In a similar way, here fitness expert Julien Pineau reflects on the application of Karl Friston's ideas for a much larger view of health, extending outward to all of life and society. The results are certainly interesting. He criticized the Newtonian perspective within the life sciences, the notion of linear causality versus finality, and based on his experience and an insightful understanding of Schrödinger and Friston, proposed a trichotomy for behavioral modification that appears somewhat analogous to C.S. Peirce's categories. To paraphrase Pineau: "Most dysfunction occurs in people relying on one way to change, to mitigate surprises. Either they change their prediction (object), or actions (sign), or how they feel (interpretant). That's what dysfunction is, when you do just one option in preference to the others. It's a balance." This brings together Friston (free energy, active inference, Markov blankets) and Peirce (biosemiotics). Friston in turn can be related to work done by Robert Rosen (modeling, anticipatory systems), Terrence Deacon (autogen model), John Deely (semiotics), and Alfred North Whitehead, who believed that causal connection takes place, not in virtue of the cause, but of the effect, in other words that causality pulls us ever towards the future.
