Cultural as prediction - Piotr

Maybe just restarted screen. Yeah. Okay, I'll not touch any cables anymore. Yeah, so I'll quickly talk about culture from, well, a little bit of philosophical perspective, but mostly from psychology and neuroscience side, which is maybe not very common yet, but we can see, we'll see why it can be useful. All right, so we can think of culture as basically like all the habits of individuals in a society.

So what do you actually do every day, every week, every month, and so on? And ultimately, like, apart from all of our organizational approaches, like how do we organize ourselves, those behaviors ultimately come down to the body, the memes in the mind, and the external space. So the world that surrounds us, the world that's our body, and the world that's in our mind. And then we connect with others on those levels, and also potentially the divine. And yeah, so we form collective minds with others and some kind of abstract more or less entities.

And in culture, psychology of people matters. There is a small overview of different cultures. You can look in some of those books, which are quite interesting, about differences of all those cultures. By the way, there is also in this 10,000 year explosion book, there is an interesting thing about a Jewish community in Europe, which could be relevant to the network state as well. But going back in time, we can see that people were living and thinking very differently.

Going back to classical age, we have gods, we have rigid rules, we don't have yet a very developed individual psychology. And then going farther back in time, we have possible bicameral psychology which is described in his book The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, which is talking about that people potentially had kind of like a separation in the mind of the gods who are giving commands and themselves who are just executing the commands. So it's quite interesting. But then going back to the present time, there is a lot of research about how different psychology leads to different political views. So for example, how you open up to experience is quite related to being more liberal and high conscientiousness, so how do you think about doing the task maybe more perfectly or more by the book is related to being more conservative.

And, yeah, this is a a bit of a joke diagram, but could have some insight where in your life, your political views may change depending on what happens. So embrace change, right? Don't get too attached to your own mind. Okay, but we can think about what makes culture more widespread, more in detail. Well, it seems like culture has to appeal to many different personality types because otherwise it will just remain a subculture of some young people or just people living in a particular way but if it's very narrow, it will just lead to something temporary in a way and the culture should likely encompass many phases of a person's life to be stable.

Although there is a kind of exception in case of Japan's Shinto and Buddhism where Shinto is more present in the beginning of the life and has more value placed on tradition and ancestors and the Buddhism is more related to the wide world cosmology and ancestors and the Buddhism is more related to the wide world cosmology and afterlife and so on. So it can happen. But there is a curious thing about many cultures or religions about predictions about the wider societal change. So in Eastern philosophy it's kind of like a global awakening, maybe. In Western it's more like end times, messianic age.

And there is maybe a more modern thing about transhuman technology and how we can ourselves change the way it means to be human. And that prediction brings us to an interesting theory from neuroscience, predictive coding model of perception, which is also called Bayesian brain, which is maybe intimidating at first, but it's actually quite simple. So imagine that your brain is constantly making predictions and building a mental model of the environment. So the world you see before your eyes is actually not directly the actual world, but it's your internal mental model that you are updating, that you're building over your life. model that you are updating, that you're building over your life.

And then you have data incoming from perception, right? So if there is a mismatch between the perception and prediction, you get the prediction error, which means that something is wrong. Like either your model is wrong or maybe your perception is not correct fully. So there is a surprise, there is a stress there that you need to do something to... You need to either update your model or maybe you need to do some action that will update the world more in line of your model.

And this works on many levels. So it's hierarchical. There's predictions happening in your visual system, and then more to the top, you have predictions related to maybe emotions, maybe status in society, and so on. So this then merges with the interpersonal. It's kind of like the collective mind in a society in general is kind of making you follow certain ways of thinking.

And vice versa, you can also affect the collective mind. ways of thinking. And vice versa. You can also affect the collective mind. And interesting thing happened from all this research on predictive coding is that it's found that optimal learning is when you have about 20% of unpredicted information.

So if you have an error rate of 20%, it's like you're not completely correct, but that's what makes it kind of like updates the model more efficiently, so you're learning most efficiently. But if the error rate is higher, then it might lead to, you know, kind to too much error rate and you're becoming depressed or so on. Okay, so going back to cultures. Well, cultures frequently have in their collective mind an ideal state of the world they are shifting towards. state of the world they are shifting towards.

And then I mentioned those large societal change predictions, which kind of mean an additional stress mechanism, where they are increasing the urgency of action to follow the culture, to follow some collective thinking. But also they are fostering group identity and solidarity. So if there is some potentially difficult times coming or some change, it makes people more kind of like driven towards some common narrative. Well, but sometimes predictions fail. So that's the case with cargo cults, which maybe still are a phenomenon, mostly in the Pacific, I think.

After World War II, when people saw a lot of airplanes, military airplanes coming in and landing on those islands, they regarded them as gods, as something otherworldly, right? And after the war, they were hoping for the planes to come back. So they actually started building those wooden planes to kind of call the gods back. Yeah, which is really mind-blowing. Is there a culture-building recipe of some kind?

I think maybe there are some leads here. First, you need a vision of the future laid out by inspiring art and imagination. This is the prediction part. You want to imagine some state of the world that will happen when your culture takes full form. And you want to be optimistic.

You want to be inspiring for the people. You want to be... This is the way you want to live. This is what you want to be optimistic, you want to be inspiring for the people. This is the way you want to live, right?

This is what you want to do. But it needs to be grounded by realistic evidence and simulations. So this is where the prediction errors come in. You have to validate whether your predictions are correct. And some urgency to take action.

You need some level of stress for actually making an action. Because if you don't have stress, then why should people change the way they're living right now? It's not happening that way. And then you need group practices for creating a shared identity, because culture is not only for an individual, but it's something that's kind of transpersonal. And that brings us to more collective stories and narratives, which also kind of joins with the first point about inspiring future.