A New Science of Orientation with Inês Hipólito, PhD | Ep 9

Inês Hipólito, PhD is a researcher in the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy of mind and complexity. Her research focuses on exploring the complex and reciprocal interactions between psychological behavior and the nervous system, body, and environment. She is a lecturer at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Inês is an Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Talent Grant Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, where she is studying the emergence of artificial intelligence as Augmented Cognition.

Selected chapters found in this episode:

• From Turing Machines to Active Inference
• Boundaries are set by the Observer
• Perception: How We Sense the World
• Predictive Coding - Brains are Not Passive Processors
• Why Orientation is the Schwerpunkt According to Neuroscience
• Cristiano Ronaldo and Skillful Performance
• Flow: Emptiness of the Mind or Mushin is Key
• Flow: Being Attuned with the External Environment
• Adaptation: Niche Construction and The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
• Minimize Surprise: The Ultimate Goal 
• Counterfactuals, COAs, and The Free Energy Principle
• Stuck State: Unhealthy Patterns of Thinking
• Psychedelics, Destruction and Creation, Ego
• Organizational Change, Destruction and Creation, Ego
• The Problem with Closed Systems

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

Inês Hipólito, PhD
Twitter: @ineshipolito
REBUS
Entropic Brain Hypothesis
The Free Energy Principle
Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior 

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Transcript

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Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;03;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's Dr. Ippolito now, right? You got your Ph.D. a year ago, is that right?

00;00;03;28 - 00;00;08;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Are you coming to you two and a half or something? That's right.

00;00;08;00 - 00;00;29;12
Mark  McGrath
Congratulations. That's pretty awesome. You know, a while back, you and I connected, and the way I found you was online. You were doing some presentations on complex adaptive systems, free energy, psychedelic assisted therapy, and it really piqued my interest there. And then I noticed you did some work with Robin Carhart-Harris, is that correct?

00;00;29;25 - 00;00;29;29
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Right.

00;00;30;08 - 00;00;34;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Precisely, yeah. And then I think you're doing a little bit of work with Karl Friston, too. Is that right?

00;00;35;06 - 00;00;36;03
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

00;00;36;11 - 00;00;58;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. Yeah. Now, for our listeners, they may not know anything about Karl Friston or Robin Carhart-Harris, but in my view, these are the leading thinkers in, I might say, psychedelic assisted therapy, reduced beliefs under psychedelics, the entropic brain hypothesis, active inference, maybe even Bayesian inference. Is that correct?

00;00;59;29 - 00;01;15;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. Yeah. So, Karl, not so much as Robin in psychedelics, but very much in, of course, inferences are the main brain behind the whole act of inference, friendship, principle.

00;01;15;22 - 00;01;40;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So Mark was asking me, how much does Dr. Ippolito know about John Boyd's bootloop? And my response was, zero. Nothing. And at the same time, everything. You know, I introduced it to you a while back. But when you look at your profile and you know your area specializations and philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, complexity theory, I think it's complex adaptive systems, maybe even the anthro complexity.

00;01;40;10 - 00;02;01;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So human complexity and your background and a lot of research, you understand, I would say you would understand more about John Boyd's group than than most people. And it's not to bring you on the show and go, hey, here's what you need to know. It's we want your help in helping us understand what's evolved in the last 20 years.

00;02;01;24 - 00;02;18;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You know, things like Mark, how blankets, what does that mean? What does active inference mean? How do we actually perceive the world, these type of things, and maybe even look at entropy today. And also, I want to throw out to you what's what can we help you with today through our discussion?

00;02;18;04 - 00;02;52;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot that has been happening in in that field, which I'm very happy to talk about as a as an in a brief introduction to it, one could say that in neuroscience, neurobiology, things have changed a little bit in the sense that in the eighties we even starting in the in the fifties with the Turing machines, we started having these a knowledge analogy between the brain and the computer.

00;02;52;13 - 00;03;19;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So mostly you were seeing cognition or mind just coming down to the brain at work, so to speak, and doing everything on its own and cognition mind encapsulated in the brain at work because the mind is seen as a as a computer, as a machine, as a Turing machine. And then things change a little bit. And we still have a little bit of this computational paradigm going on and sending, and that's in the mind and cognitive behavior.

00;03;19;25 - 00;03;54;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
But what comes up with this framework that is actually inference is that it allows you to take a step further into broadening the definition of cognition or the mind into or such that the cognition or mind do not or are not seen as encapsulated in the brain. But the whole organism is seen as participating, contributing for whatever cognitive behavior or experiences one may have as one interacts with the environment.

00;03;54;22 - 00;04;47;09
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So what these active inference framework allows us is to have a broader perspective about how the environment and how the organism is situated in a specific way, in a certain environment, is going to are going to modulate one another. So are going to reciprocally influence one another. And this is very groundbreaking because if you start off with a premise that the mind or cognitive behavior reduces to the brain, then there is a whole missed opportunity to think about how the environment or how an environment that is extremely stressful, for example, is going to highly influence throughout the whole through and through the psychological experience and by psychological experience because you're not seducing mental life to

00;04;47;09 - 00;05;15;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
the brain. Then by psychological experience, of course, we are also including the body taking part of all of this sort of like organism in a way that you can almost, almost say that you are the history of all your past interactions with a certain environment and you sort of like carry on that with you, with yourself, wherever you go in your body, including so, so think about the example of trauma, for example.

00;05;15;12 - 00;05;18;16
Ines Hipolito, PhD
You carry it out with you if it is not treated, for example.

00;05;18;27 - 00;05;26;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right? Is it true that trauma can be carried from other generations is in our DNA? Is that what I'm hearing now? Is that possible?

00;05;26;18 - 00;05;53;06
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Well, I would not go there because it's not my field of expertize. Okay. I would not be surprised. Okay. This is exactly why this framework and in my particular work, combining it with complex system theory, it's so appealing or I find it so appealing is precisely because it allows us to look into these interactions between a whole organism, including the body and everything that comes with the body in a specific environment.

00;05;53;06 - 00;06;06;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. So when you talk about, you know, kind of putting a boundary on something, you put a boundary on the brain or the mind body or how does that work when you want to look at a at an organism or a system, how do you determine that?

00;06;07;09 - 00;06;31;24
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, that's a very good question. So that all depends on what is your level or scale of scientific interest. So let's say that you want to understand neural activity or neural connectivity, then you are going to set, so to speak. So you're going to set a boundary around the brain to look at how the brain is working or brain connectivity.

00;06;31;24 - 00;06;54;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
But then you're going to set up, for example, the brain as internal state, which is going to mean that you're not taking the brain as an isolated system on the contrary, you are taking the brain as highly situated in a multi scale organism, right? So the brain is going to be part and is going to be situated in its own environment and its own environment is going to be this organism that the brain is part of.

00;06;54;22 - 00;07;23;19
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And you can continue to do this up and down the scale. You can even now even zoom into the brain and apply your Markov linkage. For example, similar boundary. You can apply a boundary if your interest, if the scientific interest is, for example, to study a certain specific receptor. Right, you can place that boundary right there and try to explain the causal activity and reciprocal influences precisely by using this kind of formalism.

00;07;24;02 - 00;07;26;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So it depends on what you want to study.

00;07;26;28 - 00;07;31;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. So is it scale free? I mean, you can use it anywhere, right? Or at some point you can't.

00;07;32;29 - 00;07;34;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Ever scale free. Yeah. Okay.

00;07;35;05 - 00;07;44;29
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Wow. So I watch and Mark listening to you over the last few minutes I can see him makes some interesting connections in his mind. Mark what he. What's going on, man? I could see it all.

00;07;44;29 - 00;08;10;16
Mark  McGrath
My first reaction is I can't wait for the people that reduce John Boyd to just to live to hear this because he was hitting on so many of these topics. I admit it informs a lot of what he has just said, that, you know, you're your perception is the how did you say it's it's the compendium or that's the it's the complete experience of all era, the complete collection of all your past experiences of how you engage the world.

00;08;10;16 - 00;08;35;20
Mark  McGrath
And I can't think of a better definition of of one's orientation as they're shaping their observations, their decisions and their actions, which also shows and as I know, that you're also very multidisciplinary. So there's there's so much that connects to this that just kind of reinforces the work that we're doing and trying to develop. John Boyd in the neuroscience angle is, I think, brilliant.

00;08;35;20 - 00;08;47;15
Mark  McGrath
And I think, you know, for a guy with an undergraduate degree in history, two masters in economics, I still have a lot of learning to crunch. But but this is this is right on target to to what we suspect, you know.

00;08;47;25 - 00;09;15;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, it's a lot of overlap. So, Dr. Pulido, is there a chance you can just walk us through use Mark or me as an you put a blanket around us or Marco blanket and talk about how we perceive the world. Just kind of walk our listeners to, you know, how to our sensory signals work, how do our sensory organs work, how do we connect to the world and how does that gray matter that's in our brain housing unit, the space between our ears.

00;09;15;28 - 00;09;22;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How is that decoding, that information that's coming to it? Is there a way for you to do that with us here?

00;09;22;28 - 00;09;49;08
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So like I said, I think it's always important when we are talking about these topics that fall under the cognitive science scope that we define, what level or what scale are we questioning or we want to understand, right? So by perception we can think about if we can think about it, for example, in two ways we can think about perception as the psychological experience of a full agent like us perceiving the world.

00;09;50;07 - 00;10;15;20
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And here is where we start. Or we can talk or think about mental health and general mental health conditions. Or we can we can talk about perception as going down to, for example, the visual system and how the visual system works and how can we explain what are what, as you said, that is between our ears. How can we explain how that works?

00;10;15;29 - 00;10;43;08
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So these are two different explanations as even though they can be related, but it's important that we sort of do not reduce the psychological experience of perceiving something. And how does that feel? What that makes me feel and what that causes in me, what that might change in me as well, to what the brain is doing alone, because it is important not to reduce for many reasons.

00;10;43;08 - 00;11;14;19
Ines Hipolito, PhD
One of them is that if we do reduce things, our explanations of a personal level to the brain, then there is not much for us to work with for psychotherapeutic effects, for example. So if we talk, for example, about how perception works, so the current paradigm is predictive coding, which is it's very much relates to active inference. So I'll just connect to that term which relates to itinerant.

00;11;14;19 - 00;11;44;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
It came out in 99 and this is the idea of applying a model that uses Bayesian inference as a statistical tool in order to explain how in order to explain the causal processes in, for example, the visual system. So how is it that one neuron is activated by another neuron and all projections and pathways that are created with within that particular system say the visual system.

00;11;45;01 - 00;12;19;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So predictive coding is these theory is this model, this compositional model that allows us to understand the data that we for example, take from a scanner. So in very, very simple terms, what it says is that brains are not passive organs. These was the paradigm, the form that was coming with the modularity of mind. And before this was very the paradigm was very much that neural activity was bottom up.

00;12;19;22 - 00;12;48;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So was collecting information, going up and being processed. And then we predictive coding to provide of course changes and instead of bottom up, we have bottom up and top down processes continuously working. And the idea is that the brain, instead of processing information that comes from bottom up, the brain is actively making predictions about what is the most likely case of what it is perceiving in the world.

00;12;48;21 - 00;13;25;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Right? So it's making a prediction. So it's almost like it's sending out a model of, oh, I think this is the case and then what comes? So the causes so the causes of what is perceived are going to inform that model about I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll correct the models. So that's the prediction. And in that case, then what's going to happen is and here is what Bayesian inference becomes very important is that Bayesian inference is is very simple equation that that tells you how to integrate new information in a model that you already have.

00;13;25;07 - 00;13;52;06
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So in what you already know. So it tells you how to integrate that new information. So then by applying this compositional model to explain perception in these predictive terms, then what happens is that whatever prediction or whatever prediction error is coming up is going to inform the model that is sent down in order to improve the model. To update the model so that the model is the case of the seat of office.

00;13;52;25 - 00;13;53;03
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Okay.

00;13;53;13 - 00;14;11;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So here it does. And I want to slow down some more and unpack. So we're getting into Bayesian in, for instance, in equations and things like that. So most of our listeners know how to balance checkbooks and, you know, can, can put money in the stock market. Let's get more into this. So I'm going to throw something at Mark and see if it resonates with him.

00;14;11;20 - 00;14;40;00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
What I just heard is that our orientation, there's a predicted process somewhere in our mind and body. It determines how we sense side that is that is that we. Mark okay. So it's not bottom outside and bottom up. So we're not sensing everything like that way. We're actually making predictions. And I believe, I mean, if there is out there duck, then that is we're doing this because it reduces it's a lower energy requirement to do it that way.

00;14;40;11 - 00;14;40;28
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Is that correct?

00;14;41;12 - 00;15;13;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, absolutely. So in that case, it means that the system doesn't have to be processing all the information all the time. So it is in a way, it is much more effective because it requires less energy. So let's say that there are these examples. Let's say you have these two different cases of perception. Let's say that you're driving in in a cliff, in a very dangerous mountain cliff, and you're driving and it is foggy.

00;15;13;00 - 00;15;39;06
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So you have this particular situation and then you have another situation which is, for example, you are driving home, right? So what happens is that you can drive home almost with your will, your eyes closed, right? Because what you're doing according to this theory is what you're doing is you are relying on your background knowledge. So you do not need to be processing all the information that comes as you drive on the way home.

00;15;39;14 - 00;16;06;19
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So you are relying as the theory goes, you are relying on your priors, on your prior knowledge to get the dust done. On the other case, the very dangerous cliff roads is foggy. You are using a lot more energy because you have no models. So you have no prior knowledge. So then you have to be processing all the sensory stimuli all the time in order to get the task done and preferably not die.

00;16;06;19 - 00;16;24;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that's the idea one sees. The more you interact with the world, the more you gather information that allows you to have better models about the state of affairs. And all the world is such that then you start navigating the world with less uncertainty and more knowledge.

00;16;24;23 - 00;16;40;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
When you're a child or a baby and your brain is doesn't have these mental models or schema or experience, the sensory is you got to be sensory overload, right? Is that where they get tired so fast? Is it I mean, I don't know. I'm just going that there's an observation.

00;16;40;26 - 00;17;09;15
Ines Hipolito, PhD
That is a very good observation actually. Yeah. So I think that makes perfect sense unless you are a nativist, right? Of some people, not many people anymore, but they used to be and still is a little bit. This debate in psychology, the nature nurture debate and the nature of debate is that we come already very much equipped to it with all of these conceptual tools and toolkit to make sense of the world.

00;17;09;17 - 00;17;34;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
That's the the nature side. The nurture side is precisely the one that you said, which is like, well, wait a minute, but then we are born. We don't have any of these we don't have these knowledge capacities. That's why we get so overloaded. It can very much be precisely it can very much be the case, because then the idea is that the more you interact with the environment, the more you gather this information that will inform how the world is.

00;17;35;06 - 00;17;35;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay.

00;17;35;26 - 00;17;54;21
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So yeah, you are listening to No Way Out, sponsored by Atlas. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00;17;54;21 - 00;18;24;00
Mark  McGrath
So I started to think of like a relatable example as you're speaking, is it safe to bet that you know who Cristiano Ronaldo is? Yes, it's a good kid. Okay. So I'm thinking, you know, he's let's just say he's the best soccer player in the world and he's in a game and he's in a pressure situation. And the things you're talking about is predictive coding and construction of mental models and things like that.

00;18;24;12 - 00;18;49;20
Mark  McGrath
Is it? And he's he's clearly stands out from those that he's competing against. Is is it that he's able to cycle through things faster than his peers and opponents? And is it can achieve a state of flow where others don't have that that cognitive capability? Is that part of it that kind of compounds his his physical prowess, too?

00;18;51;15 - 00;19;23;05
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Okay. Now he's resetting and entering a very, very interesting topic, which is skillful performance. And of course, here we are talking about the highest cognitive level of a human being. A skillful performance is is, of course, a very extreme performance of some kind of of very trained practical skill. Okay. So then there's a lot here to to unpack because I do not want to convey because I don't think that's the case.

00;19;23;05 - 00;20;06;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I do not want to convey that it's all the skillful performance is skill or is well executed because it depends only on what is happening in the brain. Right. The brain is one part of that performance. The performance is being done by an agent that is fully secure. It's in a specific kind of environment. So in that particular case, of course, it is important that many that there is a well, I don't even know how to say, well, functioning of the brain such that, you know, visual perception is what's really well, I mean, I'm talking I'm thinking about Christine O'Donnell.

00;20;06;24 - 00;20;36;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that's are all of that that is required to perform very in a very high league in soccer. So all of those things in the brain are in place. But there is also a very human side of it, which is the skill, the more the inside of it. Right. And in this particular one, it's even more evident. Of course, there is the embodied side of it, which is the body, though the way that it performs is got to do.

00;20;36;00 - 00;20;56;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Also, weeds is body and the way that he uses his body to perform so well so it doesn't reduce to the brain at work, but also to all of the practices of the of all of the training that he has done. And it does not reduce also also to mental models. I don't think because you need to be in here can be words.

00;20;56;26 - 00;21;22;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
You need to be attuned with the environment. So that's where you are adjusted and aligned with the environment almost as you said, on a set of flow. And there's so much research, especially coming from Japanese and Eastern culture, there's so much research that precisely tells us that it is these actually this emptiness of the mind that is a key condition for a good performance.

00;21;22;10 - 00;21;51;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
For example, Japanese philosophy calls it the machine. The machine is the no mind. And these these are states that have been reported by by people performing extreme sports that they enter in this flow where there is no thinking. So in a way, this there's a lot to unpack in in a way that is, of course, the very bodily physical practice that you actually need to do in order to perform really well.

00;21;51;18 - 00;22;33;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Some kind of like very physical activity. That is an extreme activity. So you need that very bodily in. On the other hand, you also learn so much by exercising precisely models, representations that you could do people people will teach you how to do this or that. So there is that very intellectual part of it as well. But there's a very embodied and it seems like when you are in that particular circumstance of very expert kind of performance, that the best is that you have learned all that you needed to learn from an intellectual perspective, almost as if like you were climbing a ladder that now you can just throw out and just rely on your

00;22;33;22 - 00;22;36;10
Ines Hipolito, PhD
body for that expert performance.

00;22;38;06 - 00;22;40;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's a lot surprising.

00;22;40;04 - 00;23;03;26
Mark  McGrath
Well, it may be a meet when we brought in the Eastern philosophy and emptying out the mind, it it made me think of Bruce Lee and the Dow of the Dow in Indo, where it tells you that like to empty out your mind so that you can flow and you can be water and achieve any state. You know, it also made me think of Formula One drivers when I was growing up.

00;23;03;26 - 00;23;30;27
Mark  McGrath
My favorite was Ayrton Senna and and he they would interview him afterwards and he would achieve these states of consciousness that was different from every other driver where he could feel his way around the course. And then when he would finish the race, he would basically pass out from exhaustion because he was just able to see and be in a state where everything was just so narrow and focused and flowing.

00;23;31;09 - 00;23;51;09
Mark  McGrath
But it seems to me the way you're describing things like predictive coding and free energy and active inference, things like that, it seems like at some point there is an ability to master this or there is that ability to be able to accelerate this or or or have a maybe a more better grasp of it than than others you might be competing against.

00;23;52;19 - 00;24;19;17
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes. And what the conditions are is hard to tell. But I would say that the body plays a crucial role. How well or not you are attuned, how well you are attuned or this attuned. And now I'm I'm using a concept that is very, very famous and constructed within phenomenology on, for example, a very good book on that is The Phenomenology of Perception by Michael Aponte.

00;24;19;17 - 00;24;40;13
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And here I think that one of the conditions for the performance is precisely whether or how you are attuned to your environment, right? So how much in flow you are our just in the tuned you are with your environment is going to increase or make your performance better.

00;24;40;13 - 00;25;05;22
Mark  McGrath
So so then with the physical domain then to to tie in with the, with the cognitive power of the brain. Is that as simple as diet and fitness? Is that, you know, having having structured diet regimens of fitness programs that may be optimized or work in concert with what the brain's doing to have a better to better have a better handle on things and others.

00;25;06;26 - 00;25;42;20
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Definitely practice one to another. Thing that is quite, quite relevant is that we, we talk so much and we hear so much about physical fitness, but we not really. We all have this apple watches and monitor for the physical fitness. But we talk suddenly about mental fitness. Right, which is as important. And you can practice these hyperfocus, you can practice this motivation as well to all of it is very connected, which is why it is really hard to talk.

00;25;42;20 - 00;26;11;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
For example, in skillful, skillful performance is one of the most difficult ones to study and to talk about, because it's almost everything is connected. It is. You have the mental and physical side completely overlapping with each other such that you perform in a certain in a certain way. So it's not just about the physical the physical training or being physically skilled that will get you there to that very expert performance.

00;26;11;18 - 00;26;46;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
It's going to be also the mental fitness as well as when you are performing that moment and the time when you are performing, how much you are in that moment adjusted to your environment, in that particular moment. So it's like I started by saying, is all the history of interactions that you have had with the environment, all the practices, all the training that got you there in bodily embodied in you, in what you are, what you bring there as well as the present moment as you are now interacting with the environment.

00;26;47;28 - 00;27;09;11
Mark  McGrath
It makes me think of we were talking about some athletic examples or sports examples, but it also really makes me think of artists like ballet ballerinas or ballet dancers. I think it was Twyla Tharp. I think she's a famous ballet choreographer. She wrote that when she's performing, she's thinking about practice. And when she's practicing, she's thinking about performing.

00;27;09;11 - 00;27;21;08
Mark  McGrath
But it seems a discipline like that would also be an area where there's there's mastery of this or there's pursuit of pursuit of mastery of that kind of unity between the moral, the mental and the physical domains.

00;27;22;23 - 00;27;57;23
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. For sure. All of these are are examples are very good examples of the highest performance that we can achieve when we are training and practicing and getting skilled into us for a specific activity. They are very much very good indicators of what we can do or they are almost touching the boundaries of what we can do from the body that we have, which is a human being right?

00;27;57;23 - 00;28;15;02
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So this is very important. I can do the things that I can or we can do the things that I can, the possibilities, the the state piece, as we would say, is limited. It's not like we can now. I can just set my mind up and just think, Oh, I'm just going to fly now know my body doesn't allow me to do that, right?

00;28;15;02 - 00;28;37;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So there are boundaries and our limits to what I can do. And this extreme performance is extraordinary because what you see is almost, almost touch those boundaries of what is possible for us from a human in culture, incorporated and embodied point of view to do in terms of performance.

00;28;37;01 - 00;28;56;07
Mark  McGrath
To speak to me in terms of adaptation, like how do I learn to adapt in order to to get better, whether it's business, whether it's sports or whatever, speak to me in terms of adaptation. Like it seems to me that I have to keep this process moving because if I stop or become static, I'm not going to be able to to function anymore.

00;28;56;07 - 00;29;00;26
Mark  McGrath
And I become either irrelevant or I'm not able to survive on my own terms. Am I hearing that right?

00;29;01;07 - 00;29;25;25
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes. So here for the patient, all that are two important concepts that are very, very important. One is from biology and construction, which lets us understand what we as species and other species are doing from an evolutionary perspective, which means we are changing each other's environments. And that, of course, is going to have consequences from an evolutionary perspective.

00;29;25;25 - 00;29;57;23
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So you see, for example, beavers building dams for what reason? We don't even know. They just decided one day that they have to build dams or you see other species engaging in some form of community behavior. So you see all of that for the purpose of species adaptation, right? From a more individual perspective then it's it we can think of it.

00;29;59;03 - 00;30;37;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
One way to think of it is through the free energy principle, which is the view that it seems almost as if we open systems, systems that are interacting and exchanging matter or energy or information with the environment. It seems almost as if we are defying the second law of thermodynamics. So the second law of thermodynamics says that all open systems should tend to dissipation, should tend to chaos, should tend to entropy, but aren't, which means dissipation as a phase boundary of eventually disappearing.

00;30;37;22 - 00;31;07;20
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that doesn't happen. Why is it that doesn't happen? Well, because we interact with the environment precisely to exchange matter energy and information so that we avoid dissipation. So we are almost it seems like we are almost defying the second law of thermodynamics because we remain alive, quite resilient to do that. So in that sense, this is a form of an imitation, right?

00;31;07;20 - 00;31;45;12
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So what what makes us so extraordinary as opposed to other objects in the natural world, is that we are able to interact with the environment and all of us, as human living systems are able to do that from some more sophisticated so and others more rudimentary, such as, say, bacteria. But this idea of the free energy principle of this or thermodynamics as an idea that living systems adjust and adapt to the environment precisely to to avoid their dissipation through the lives of the free energy principle.

00;31;45;12 - 00;32;21;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Then it means that they do that to minimize surprise. So the more surprise there is about the environment, the less safe it is. And the closer the organism is going to be to it to achieve or to attain or to reach a phase boundary of dissipation. So the ultimate goal of organisms is to reduce or minimize uncertainty. And that means they want to be in a state that is that is that that has, we call it to local minima.

00;32;21;18 - 00;32;26;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
That has a minimal number of surprise, so to speak.

00;32;26;21 - 00;32;50;05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So there are some tactics that humans use to minimize surprise. And I think you and I talked about before, you can get in this dark state. You can I believe you called it an oxbow lake. There are other ways to think about this. If we talk about scale, free the scales from how we deal with surprise, as are going up in our brains and our mind body and then how we deal with surprise in an environment that's changing and evolving so quickly.

00;32;50;05 - 00;33;14;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So think about social media here and things on there. I think it's going back to the energy requirement, in my view would take it takes less energy. I'm going to throw this out to you and see if it makes sense. It takes less energy to suppress, surprise and it does to adapt to that surprise or change and adapt that correct.

00;33;14;23 - 00;33;51;08
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So the idea is that you act upon the world in order to minimize that surprise. So let's say that you predict that the world is a certain state of affairs that is convenient to you and realize that it is not. Then you are going to act upon the world to change that, to change the world, in order for it to come for the world itself, to conform to your prediction, which is basically you can just think about it as you see your living experience being about always looking for the states that are preferable for your own existence perspective.

00;33;52;13 - 00;33;53;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
This is powerful.

00;33;53;08 - 00;34;16;18
Mark  McGrath
That's beautiful. That's a beautiful description of entrepreneurial theory, what you just said. That's that that's now I'm an economist and that's what you just said is exactly what I'd say. Ludwig von Mises would say that we we act to address uncertainty, to overcome it, and to bring certainty that was that the connections are pretty, pretty stark.

00;34;18;06 - 00;34;26;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, that's right. This is interesting because you can apply this kind of reasoning and also the mathematics of it to any scale.

00;34;26;25 - 00;34;31;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fractal. Oh, it is fractal. Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

00;34;31;23 - 00;34;53;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, you can apply to a society, you can apply to social media networks, you can apply these sort of explanation to, for example, societies of, let's say, conspiracy theories. We get timber and then they don't they are not really affected by information that comes from the outside. There's a whole other different phenomenon, which is also very interesting.

00;34;54;28 - 00;34;59;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There's a connection to machine learning and artificial intelligence in here as well. Right. That's that's a piece you're looking at.

00;35;00;10 - 00;35;10;16
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I'm actually not working entirely in machine learning, but machine learning techniques can be also are very close and they can be very, very useful.

00;35;11;02 - 00;35;32;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. Okay. I want to go back to the active part, active inference again and take a look at counterfactuals. What if scenarios? And can you help us understand that where I'm going with is, you know, I love to talk more about love to talk about PTSD, stress, anxiety, TBI here in a moment. I think there's a few concepts we need to walk through so we can have that discussion.

00;35;33;06 - 00;35;43;23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Can you take us back and help us what? That counterfactual? I think you're called counterfactuals. What if scenarios, conditional predictions, I think are called how that helps us see the world.

00;35;45;06 - 00;36;20;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. So you can think about that under this framework of the French principle, you can think about that in terms of policies, which is the idea would be fair put it very, very basic terms would be when you are deliberating or reasoning about possible scenarios, possible courses of action. So a decision that you need to make so deliberation so that the form of it is if would act in the world like this, what would happen so that.

00;36;20;06 - 00;36;49;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You could you call that a mental simulation as well, like you said, okay. And this is important. We're we're going to talk to some cognitive neuroscientists here in the future about this from the actually psychologist on this. And I think there's an overlap there that from what we're learning in not just from the free energy principle, but from even the construct a law constructor theory and these other things out there, there's a lot of overlap and language might be different from field to film.

00;36;50;12 - 00;37;12;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We kind of see them as being the same. So these counterfactuals, if I understand them correctly, when you are dealing with stress or trauma in your life and you use a modality such as yoga or meditation or even psychedelics, just the therapies, what's happening is we're getting the people who are going through these modalities are getting access to those counterfactuals.

00;37;12;17 - 00;37;15;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Is that correct? Or what's what's going on in me?

00;37;15;20 - 00;37;44;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I see. I see. Okay. That can be put like that. Okay. So I. Exactly. Okay, so let me get there by go by. Now, introducing here a slightly different framework that I find is extremely helpful in psychotherapy and explains where guides or fleshes out what psychotherapy should be about regardless of the content of the means of the psychotherapy.

00;37;44;22 - 00;38;15;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And we can also talk about that in a moment. But the idea is that when when someone is struggling with a certain sudden onset of symptoms that we usually deem as something, let's say depression or let's say PTSD, the system or the person as evolved as interacting with the environment, right. As evolved or as developed into a develops themselves into what we can call a stuck state.

00;38;15;26 - 00;38;43;19
Ines Hipolito, PhD
This is a state it's called stuck. Why? Because it is not a healthy patterns of thinking. It is not healthy for the person to be in that state for some reasons that are very I just think to the case obviously. But once we have diagnosed that the person is struggling with a certain set of symptoms and it's in a textbook, then psychotherapy should aim for change.

00;38;44;05 - 00;39;14;08
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Change of what should should aim to kick the person out of that stuck state. And these means that what happened was that the person started slowly evolving and developing by losing what he had before, which was it's called mood instability, which is in a way, let's just put it as it's it's a it's a very diverse kind of like activity kind of life.

00;39;15;04 - 00;39;45;05
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And then all of a sudden with the depression, let's say that the person started seeing much more at home, not leaving the room, not having energy. So it starts losing all of those activities that once used to the South going into these stuck state. And then psychotherapy should aim at kicking the person out. Watch what we call disturb that stuck state so disturbed the person kicking the person out of out of that stuck state and in that sense, there are different methods.

00;39;46;01 - 00;40;10;09
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Now, one method that now goes goes pick out exactly what Brian says about the counterfactuals is really important. It's really interesting that one of the one of the methods that does that very in the most brilliant form and the reason that it does that in the most brilliant form is because it is highly individualized. So we're not just applying a recipe that is going to serve everybody.

00;40;10;26 - 00;40;46;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Right. It's highly individualized, which is psychedelics. So psychedelic is going to offer the person that individualized experience. That therapist alone cannot. And I'm not advocating that. It's that psychedelics alone should be the case. We should complement various methods. But one thing that psychedelics does is precisely offer that unique possibility that you cannot get from anything else, which is to place the person into a different sort of like perspective, looking at things from a different angle and seeing these other counterfactuals.

00;40;46;04 - 00;41;06;29
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Well, I don't necessarily have to think about these things like that. There are other ways of the perspectives that I can take to see these things in life, or it can also disturb in a way that it's going to disturb the pyramid of values. So things that you are very used to, because these are all to do with patterns of thinking.

00;41;06;29 - 00;41;37;14
Ines Hipolito, PhD
You've been thinking like that for a long time without being disturbed. The world is not disturbing. These beliefs that you have, these ways of thinking is in culture gated ways of thinking. So what psychedelics offer even on a non psycho pathological situation. So even not even someone that is not diagnosed with anything but just wants to work on self-growth, for example, is precisely to allow these other perspectives that you can take almost like an overview effect that astronauts have when they are out in space.

00;41;38;03 - 00;42;06;03
Ines Hipolito, PhD
They get these off of you, in fact, which is like these are a unique opportunity to see things from a different angle and from a different emotional and psychological place, which is, for example, highly rated in the mystical scale in studies as a much more compassionate place where you're looking at the world and a much more accepting. So it gives you that different perspective in a very personalized way.

00;42;06;16 - 00;42;11;12
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And that's what makes it so powerful in in the counterfactual thinking.

00;42;11;23 - 00;42;19;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay, this dark state that you talk about, could it also be known as your ego and default mode? Is that what is?

00;42;19;16 - 00;42;43;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, you can totally think about it. There's a folk mode, actually, that is the very principle behind the rebus model of the brain. Is that so to say that the brain is is very patterned in working in a certain way because of and again, it's always related in something that is unfolding in time, patterns are unfolding in time, and they are strengthening or weakening in certain places.

00;42;43;15 - 00;43;12;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And then that becomes sort of like a default mode. And the REBUS model is saying that, well, psychedelics fact is precisely by disturbing these default modes of of the brain working. And then we can also say the same for the more experiential psychology vehicle agent, personal level of the experience that this psychedelic experience is a necessary condition for therapeutic change so so for positive therapeutic effect.

00;43;12;13 - 00;43;43;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I'm hearing that we're going through a cycle of destruction and creation on the start state. We got to sometimes things that need to be broken down and it doesn't have to be through psychedelics, it can be through meditation, mindfulness, yoga, exercise, it can be studying and it can be a habit, right? So if I'm hearing you if I'm hearing you correctly, those those mental models of the world that we have that put us in a stuck state, we have to go through a cycle of destruction and creation to be able to adapt to a changing environment.

00;43;43;20 - 00;43;46;19
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. Otherwise, we get we're still living in the past. Is that sound?

00;43;47;17 - 00;44;14;27
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, absolutely. And exactly like I said in the beginning, it is it is not necessarily the case that you say, well, one therapy or one therapeutic matters is better than the other. No, it's just a principle of it. Once you look at psychopathology and mental health as this stuck state is evolution in time and all of these like coupling between the environment and the person and how the person is reacting or adjusting to stressors that come from the environment.

00;44;15;04 - 00;44;49;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Is the person bouncing back then? So it's sort of like, okay if it's not bouncing back, then it's going to eventually fall into a stuck state. And the idea is that in psychopathology, it's got to be this getting the person out of this saying how by disturbing. So this can be, for example, as you say, meditation practices can be talk therapy as well, can be finding ways of getting the person to start doing some kinds of activities that, of course, are going to be out of the comfort zone or another one is backpacking.

00;44;49;19 - 00;45;03;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
You can also be backpacking. Anything that gets the person out of that comfort zone, of that very set environment, that is not going to bring any novelty, anything new that is going to be disruptive, it's got to be disruptive in some way.

00;45;03;25 - 00;45;19;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I'm going to throw another zinger at you. Maybe so if this is a scale free, potentially we could use this type of thinking for an organism or organization, right? They have a default mode of an ego, a stuck state. They actually have to find a way to break to go through a cycle of disruption creation. They have to do different things right.

00;45;19;11 - 00;45;29;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You can't do the same thing and give it a different name and call it as we're doing something different. Is that right? Can I use this type of thinking on a on a, you know, on a business, on organization, on a on a political system?

00;45;30;04 - 00;45;55;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, absolutely. There's tons of research applying this kind of complex system theory to economics, to social environments, to organizations. There's tons of research on it. You can do that. That's precisely if you want to change something, then you need to apply disturbance. Otherwise, the system is not going to change. Because rule of thumb, when you think about everything is a complex system.

00;45;55;18 - 00;46;17;12
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Everything that is be hard to predict is a complex system. So you can't predict where the organization is going to be in a month time. We would like, but you can't predict that because the organization is a complex system. A complex system is something that is highly, very difficult to predict. That's what makes it a complex system. So you can apply this theory or this framework, anything that is a complex system.

00;46;18;05 - 00;46;38;13
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that means that for the rule of thumb in complex system theory, the more a system visits an instructor, so the model system is in a certain state, the more tendency it is to go back to that state. So if you so you always have to know, like how much disturbance do you need to apply? And now much is going to need to kick out the sucks stage.

00;46;38;13 - 00;46;47;16
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So if you apply very little disturbance, it is very likely that the system is going to go back to the patterns that it usually is at.

00;46;47;28 - 00;46;52;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. Your pattern breaking paper, is that out yet? Is it still under review?

00;46;53;22 - 00;47;02;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
You are. I've got the reviews back now, but I have not been able to go there yet. But it will be in print very, very soon.

00;47;02;01 - 00;47;04;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, I have a copy here. Yeah.

00;47;04;18 - 00;47;30;02
Mark  McGrath
Yeah. It kind of reminds me of a mentor of mine from the Marine Corps. He would say that are our orientation is disrupted by one of three D's. The first one is is not disrupted. Our orientation is changed by one of three D's. And the first one is drift, meaning that my 46 year old self, I just see the world differently than my six year old self, you know, just by the drifting of time.

00;47;30;21 - 00;47;53;19
Mark  McGrath
The other to tie in to what you and Ponch were just talking about, he says how orientation changes just through disruption and design, that our orientation gets disrupted on one hand. And if we just allow it to be disrupted, we're going to we're going to fade into irrelevance because we're not going to be able to function that that disruption has to be met with design.

00;47;53;19 - 00;48;23;06
Mark  McGrath
And the easiest example that we would use is when a young person comes at age 17 or 18 into the basic military training for the US Marine Corps, they're disrupted immediately, but it's followed with a very exacting design that transitions their their perception of the way the world was in their past life into a new transformation that those two are balanced to the point of saying that, you know, on one hand there's creation, in one hand there's destruction and vice versa.

00;48;24;20 - 00;48;43;03
Mark  McGrath
It seems to me that that's what you're that's what we're hitting on. Right? If we're trying to get people out of that stuck state, we're trying to get them to shatter their correspondence to previous models so that they can synthesize something new or they can transform into something new that's going to maintain its relevance and ability to survive on their own terms.

00;48;44;11 - 00;49;16;28
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Absolutely. Because another thing that we can describe all of this by going back to thermodynamics and what some of that omics non nonlinearity says, is that you can never go back to a certain state that's not possible. So that's why this is so relevant, is that you are today, right now here with me, you are the sum or the history of your your biography of what brings you here today with all of the multi scales interacting with each other from the brain to the lived experience or the embodied experience, you are the sum of that.

00;49;18;01 - 00;49;38;29
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that makes your existence very ideal syncretic, which means that one thing is that cycle cycle psychotherapy can never aim to bring a subject back to a place that it has that he or she has been, that it can't be the goal because you can't go back in time. And that's the one rule in thermodynamics you want an open system.

00;49;39;07 - 00;50;00;15
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Non-linear two is that you cannot go back. So you are always going to be continuously changing towards a certain place, depending on the stressors and the impact that the environment has. Right. So psychotherapy must be to keep the person out of that sucks it. And what's going to happen is that a new cycle is going to start. Right.

00;50;00;24 - 00;50;17;13
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And these is called a bifurcation. So it's when you have options, you start having options and you go into a certain you take one path. For example, and you start a new cycle. So this idea of like a developing system towards something.

00;50;18;13 - 00;50;41;26
Mark  McGrath
It makes me think when, you know, people wanting to go back, it makes me think of nostalgia, which is, I think, widespread here in the United States. You know, everywhere you go, people are always talking about the way it was or the good old days or, boy, we could go back to to whatever. But I'm guessing, too, at some point with nostalgia, there's also some some cognitive bias, right?

00;50;41;26 - 00;50;56;04
Mark  McGrath
Or there's some kind of there's some kind of an interference that's that's preventing you from dealing with the world as it is, what you're too centered on, focusing on what's something was and trying to create that. And in that process, maybe you're doing more harm than good.

00;50;57;02 - 00;51;19;20
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, absolutely. Because you can also see that if if it becomes pathological. So if if it becomes diagnosable and so that it becomes some somewhat harmful to the self or other people, then that can be conceptualized as also succeeds as in being living in the past, desiring something that is not the case and will never be the case.

00;51;20;17 - 00;51;47;19
Mark  McGrath
That's like what like fun. Like Steven Westfield, the author, talks about the like the dangers of fundamentalism. Like people always think, well, I'll just go back to the basics, the fundamentals, like the way you you know, that's a dangerous way of thinking because it doesn't necessarily address the changes unfolding in the the environment or that's how certain certain movements can gain a lot of power because they tap into that emotion, those cognitive biases towards the way something was or the way something was perceived to be.

00;51;47;19 - 00;51;55;19
Mark  McGrath
Because I hear oftentimes if people are nostalgic for something that never really existed, it only existed in the perception and never existed in reality.

00;51;56;15 - 00;52;30;12
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, absolutely. I'm I'm very glad that you bring that up, because, yeah, those are so within this kind of framework. Then something else that I've been working on is the idea of a sort of a psychosis that happens or that you could describe a group that is fundamentalist. So the idea is that when I was referring to the Bayesian inference being that little Bayes theorem that gives you the rule of how to incorporate new information to in the information that you already have, you can think about it like that in these groups.

00;52;30;21 - 00;52;47;17
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So imagine that we are this group that has this certain information about a certain topic go into fundamentals. Let's say a fundamentalist theory that we believe in. And no matter the amount of information that is thrown at us, we will not change our minds right?

00;52;47;22 - 00;52;48;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Because of.

00;52;48;18 - 00;52;49;11
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Our minds.

00;52;49;11 - 00;52;59;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But you're calling this a psychosis, right? So there's a I brought this up a while ago. It's good to get the name. We took a virus. It's a mind virus. It's a I think it's same same type of thinking.

00;52;59;08 - 00;53;23;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, it could be it could be thought of as a as a as a mind virus. But the idea is that you will not it's a system that is not open to exchange information with the environment is a system that is, so to speak, psychotic, because it's coming up, which is with its own ideas. And it's close in its own boundary in his own circle and does not exchange information.

00;53;23;04 - 00;53;44;17
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So it's like almost like a very closed community that does not change information, does not operate information. So you can throw information at the group and the group will not change their mind no matter how much information you throw at the group. These in biology or in neurobiology would be the definition of a cell that is dying.

00;53;44;26 - 00;53;46;11
Mark  McGrath
That's the science, right?

00;53;46;19 - 00;53;49;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's a closed system. And it's, you know, implode on itself.

00;53;49;16 - 00;54;01;15
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Right, exactly. So these groups that do not exchange information are completely encapsulated. No matter how much information you throw at them, you can think about them as as is a sort of a echo.

00;54;01;16 - 00;54;02;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
CHAMBERS Yeah.

00;54;03;12 - 00;54;30;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
They believe and then they reinforce. So you can think about them as being in a sex state, for example. So all with a huge amount of, of, of disturbance because we already said no matter how much information you throw at these groups, they will not change. So in the huge amount of disturbance, it is possible to for for this system to kick this system out of that stuck state.

00;54;30;12 - 00;54;34;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, but the good news is none of that's happening around the world right now, so we don't have to worry about it. Right.

00;54;35;01 - 00;54;38;28
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Oh, know.

00;54;38;28 - 00;54;39;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
This is fascinating.

00;54;39;26 - 00;55;07;20
Mark  McGrath
I think when you when you say those things, it makes me think of some of the things that I mean, this this current epoch is nothing new because these things do happen throughout history where people that don't think like me and people that don't agree with me, they don't deserve to live. They don't deserve a voice. They don't deserve to, you know, like I think back to say when not Galileo, but Kepler, whoever said that, I think the sun is the center of the solar system and they all want to burn them at the stake.

00;55;07;20 - 00;55;26;05
Mark  McGrath
You know, I mean, that kind of dangerous thinking where we, as you say, we close our system and we shut off ourselves to information and even the things that we might think we don't agree with or whatever. If we don't weigh those things out, how do we get to how do we synthesize that to get to a point that's aligned with reality?

00;55;26;05 - 00;55;49;13
Mark  McGrath
You know, how do we get to it if we're shutting out something and we say it doesn't exist? And if you don't think like me, then you don't. We don't want to hear from you or we're going to throw you down the memory hole. That seems to me kind of counter to what you're suggesting is more optimal. Like we should we should have a flow of information where I can decipher for myself or find myself in an open system.

00;55;49;28 - 00;56;19;14
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Absolutely. And that's why I call this psychotic, because, as you say, it is not a line. It has is it has lost touch with reality. Right. So then it becomes almost this product, this product elucidation, this collective hallucination with without a touch with the reality and no capability of doing a reality check. It is so close, the system is so close that there's no exchange and it's just reinforcing wrong predictions.

00;56;19;24 - 00;56;42;21
Mark  McGrath
We talked about a couple of episodes, the book Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell and one of the books that he brings up was by Leon Fasting. And it was called When Prophecy Fails Investing or Got to Observe a Cult in Chicago in the early fifties and this woman was saying that the spaceship's going to come and get us said on the solstice and then they all show up on the winter solstice and the spaceship doesn't come.

00;56;42;21 - 00;56;58;23
Mark  McGrath
And she says, I had the day wrong. It's going to be new Year's Eve. And then they go New Year's Eve. And, you know, he's observing all this. And what he also observes is that no matter how wrong she is and how everything she's saying is completely disconnected, that they've been disproven, they still can't let go of their biases.

00;56;58;23 - 00;57;11;14
Mark  McGrath
They still can't let go of their of their beliefs. And what I think what he observed is that they doubled down. They they tripled down. And it degrades even further. The entropy, I think, sets in further.

00;57;12;08 - 00;57;43;24
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, that's it's incredible because we find this phenomenon in biology. So when cells start dying because what happens is the cell becomes to be insulated so it cannot exchange change with cell tissue. So it doesn't really understand what the cell tissue wants the cell to do. So let's say that the cell needs to grow now, but because the cell has become encapsulated and does not exchange with its environment, doesn't know what's the state of affairs outside of it, it starts decreasing so it doesn't grow anymore and starts dying.

00;57;43;24 - 00;58;08;01
Ines Hipolito, PhD
And no matter what happens around it, because the cell is insulated, it will start collapsing on itself. So you go, Oh, you can apply this all the way from cell neurobiology, all the way up to these particular groups, like like the cult groups that no matter what happens, it doesn't seem to change what is going on inside that boundary.

00;58;09;05 - 00;58;37;22
Mark  McGrath
So so it seems like, I guess when, when belief systems become obsolete or things fail or things go away and they vanish, you may it seems that the entropy has set in. And so they weren't able to open the system to to bring in the new ideas, to bring in the new information or or maybe, say, an organization or a sports team just always in there, always wanting, you know, they're never really good because they can't get over themselves they can't get over the that stuck state they can adapt.

00;58;38;05 - 00;59;07;16
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So so yeah so basically the best according to these frameworks and the only hope or the only option is to apply disturbance is to diagnose where there is these stuck states, where there are these stuck states and apply disturbance. So the service, for example, for a closed group that's there, is of course closed in itself reinforcing that certain patterns of thinking that that are very delusional, that are very not in touch with the reality.

00;59;07;16 - 00;59;18;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So they need to be disturbed. But then very much so, of course in in in relation to how much close they are to to to a specific environment where they are situated.

00;59;19;01 - 00;59;49;01
Mark  McGrath
What gets people to the point where they move forward, you know, like so there's certain things where, you know, say, for example, we now know that the sun is or the earth is not the center of the universe or that the sun is not the center of the universe. I mean, what is it that eventually that that gets people to that to let go of those biases or to let go of those closely held beliefs that eventually, maybe societally or whatever, they can start to accept the new reality or explore new realities.

00;59;50;20 - 01;00;19;18
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So I think that one thing is that is quite that comes immediately to mind is critical thinking is a very powerful tool. And of course, our educational systems do not invest as much as one would like in creating critical thinkers, because creative, creative thinkers are created critical thinkers. They are less prone to be caught up in a sort of like a closed system.

01;00;20;03 - 01;00;51;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Right? Because they ask questions are much more critical to the information that is thrown at them. So this is a fundamental tool that we as human beings should be educated, we should be equipped with and some for for precisely to deal with our environments in the best possible way. Then what else? Yeah, I, it's, it's hard to say because it really depends on the particular kind of environment, society, culture that one is part of.

01;00;51;12 - 01;01;15;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So when I was mentioning that, well, you need to apply disturbance, one important side of it is that disturbance in itself. It's not objectively good or objectively bad. It depends on under the circumstance. So, for example, for a closed system or for instance, say, disturbance is very positive because, the idea or the goal is to trigger change that it's going to be positive change.

01;01;15;10 - 01;01;43;22
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, but as I mentioned before and I didn't have a chance to comment on the the perturbation or disturbance can also have a negative effect. So think about, for example, older adults that have to all of a sudden navigate an environment that is becoming ever more technological or ever more air permeated. So that comes to disturb the environment or disturb their lives in ways that the environment is much more difficult to navigate.

01;01;43;22 - 01;01;54;24
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that's a disturbance that is going to have a negative effect that we need to, you know, help or think about in that particular regard. So it is very odd, just encroaching.

01;01;56;19 - 01;02;20;14
Mark  McGrath
What makes me. Yeah, I guess the other thing, you know, what's the tipping point? Because at some point, like there's the quote about it, I think Gandhi said first a mock you, then they fight you, then they then they join you. I mean, at some point there's a there's a tip. Is it just that the disruption is so aligned with reality that people have accept it?

01;02;20;14 - 01;02;34;17
Mark  McGrath
Like you don't think a thing of a lot of inventions, right? People say, oh, that'll never work or know we've got to stop the we can't have Netflix if we're blockbuster because that would hurt our business. How do people become so resistance to that?

01;02;36;03 - 01;03;05;23
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, so that is really interesting that you bring out tipping points because tipping points are actually very much part of some of these framework and tipping points are a point of no return. So we can calculate by using dynamical systems theory, we can calculate tipping points. So for many different areas we can calculate the point of no return, the point at which no matter how much disturbance you are going to apply to that particular system, nothing's going to change.

01;03;05;23 - 01;03;25;00
Ines Hipolito, PhD
It's not possible to bring that system to change, to any other path. So that's the tipping point. And and these I think it's it's it's quite relevant for for, for example, for for mental health, but also for if we think about it in terms of the societies or groups or that kind of thing.

01;03;26;03 - 01;03;38;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I want to switch over to three things or dove a little bit deeper into entropy, consciousness and reality, right? So reality and consciousness are not the same thing. Is that true?

01;03;38;16 - 01;03;51;25
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. Okay. So that all depends on what kind of theory one holds about consciousness. There are many available, so that depends. But yeah, I would say so.

01;03;52;07 - 01;03;52;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay.

01;03;52;24 - 01;03;53;23
Ines Hipolito, PhD
It's pretty safe to say.

01;03;54;03 - 01;04;10;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And then then as far as you know, there's a lot of folks talking about consciousness now in reality. And I think a lot of it has to do with Dr. Seuss book Being You, which is a great book, by the way. And that's where I made the connection between all of us in Tropic Brain Hypothesis, or at least free energy that came across through there.

01;04;10;24 - 01;04;21;20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I'm like, Oh, I know what that is from cross-referencing. So reality and I think he just tweeted out something from Carl Rovelli. He's a physicist, right? So. Correct.

01;04;22;10 - 01;04;22;27
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes.

01;04;23;01 - 01;04;41;17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So reality is not a collection of things. It's a network of processes. So a lot of information that we're looking at or disciplines that we're looking at include physics, right? So we just had Adrian Bejan on the show, in fact. Are you familiar with his work at all? With the construct? All construct, a lot model.

01;04;42;21 - 01;04;43;05
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I think.

01;04;43;05 - 01;05;08;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I am, yeah. He I mentioned that we're going to be speaking with you here soon and he's like, Well, that's great. But anyway, there's, there's so much overlap in physics and biology and neuroscience, it's just simply amazing. The entropy piece. This is pretty interesting here in the U.S. We understand that you seem to lab is going to write a book and it's going to be titled Entropy, having different discussions with different folks.

01;05;09;14 - 01;05;21;02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You know, the definition of entropy changes from discipline to discipline. So what what what's a good definition of entropy for the space that you're in? What is it about disorder? What exactly is it?

01;05;21;19 - 01;05;53;27
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes, yes, precisely. So the reason that living systems seem to the final, the law of thermodynamics is because what they are avoiding is the ultimate disorder. It's because living systems self-organize. And by living systems are talking. I'm talking about agents like us, but also cells. So they self-organize in a way that they are doing and adjust and in the dance to their environments by self-organizing, by working in a certain way that contributes to the overall system right.

01;05;53;27 - 01;06;17;02
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So this is in, in all the way up and down the scale in a living be so entropy would be defined as the the, the, the point of chaos or the amount of chaos that means the dissipation of the organism. So it's the maximization of chaos that the organism is going to dissipate or die.

01;06;18;00 - 01;06;28;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay, that's good. And I have your your slides here as well when you share that out. A few months ago, a couple of strange questions for you. What do you read? Like what do you enjoy reading on the side?

01;06;29;05 - 01;06;54;28
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Oh, my goodness. Well, I have not been able I would I wish I have not been able to read as much as I would like because I already spend my whole day reading or writing or so. Then when I do want to spend some quality time, I like to engage more with bodily activities, so such as meditation or yoga or the gym or going to nature.

01;06;54;28 - 01;07;13;20
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that's where I find it much more relaxing. But yeah, but then of course there are all of these are great altars that I always grammar book when I go on holidays and I read or reread like Virginia Woolf or or Jane Austen or that's those are my kind of altars.

01;07;14;02 - 01;07;18;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And you say you're going on a holiday here soon. Is that is that work or holiday?

01;07;18;18 - 01;07;40;04
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes. This is going to be a big one. And I'm very much looking forward to it because as I was saying, I like to take time every once in a while to just do a little bit of self-care and work on my mental health. And as we've been saying, it's for me since that's the things that I work on, that's what I do.

01;07;40;12 - 01;08;16;16
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I remove myself from my environment and I go to a very different kind of environment that works really well for me, almost as a spiritual kind of like experience. So this time I'm going to jump on a ferry and I'm going to do the Norway, the Norwegian Fjords. So I'm going to go from the south to all the way to the North Pole on a ferry, and then I'll just stay there for the Northern Lights for a few days, and then I'll jump on a train and I'll do the whole Sweden until one hour train, which is a 24 hour train all the way to Stockholm.

01;08;16;16 - 01;08;43;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Nice. You got it. I got a thank you for coming on our show. And before I do, we're not going to sign off any time soon. I do want to frame something for you. Before our conversations a few months ago and today, I was somewhat confident that I could use John Boyd to the loop to explain business agility, teamwork and and a little bit about mental health today that that's gone up exponentially.

01;08;43;06 - 01;09;05;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And the reason this is important to me is because we know there's so much going on in the world, so many theories out there, and they're good theories, by the way, and they're competing theories. And people draw different diagrams and they talk about this or talk about if there's one way to bring folks together in our world. And that includes maneuver warfare, fight generation warfare, information warfare.

01;09;06;23 - 01;09;32;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You know how we perceive reality. What you shared with us today reinforces my view that I can no doubt show folks how we sense reality, how counterfactuals work, how mental simulation works, how we create agility in organizations, how teams function, and how we get into a state of flow. Yeah. As an athlete from John Boy, do a loop and market.

01;09;32;07 - 01;09;34;21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Are you thinking the same thing now or where are you on this?

01;09;34;22 - 01;09;58;04
Mark  McGrath
No, no question. Yeah. I mean, unity of the theories is uncanny. When I start to think about Boyd, I start to think about neuroscience. I started to think about the entrepreneurial economics that we've talked about with Hunter Hastings and others and also to the the learning in as we're talking about critical thinking, I think of our recent conversation with Michael Strong was was right in line with that, too.

01;09;58;25 - 01;10;11;16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Now, this is just fascinating. And, you know, my mind's a spinning, you know, thousand miles a minute at the moment, trying to figure out what are the gaps that we need to fill. But let me ask you this. Is there anything we can answer for you or help you out with?

01;10;13;00 - 01;10;37;02
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Well, I would be very curious to know a little bit of what what you're working on at the moment and how do you see this connecting? Because, of course, I find these complex systems theory extremely fascinating, precisely because it connects allows us to connect things in a way that it makes sense and brings it all together. Oh, sure, I will.

01;10;37;02 - 01;10;42;10
Ines Hipolito, PhD
I'm very curious to know what you making of it as an out. Do you bridge it to your particular work?

01;10;42;16 - 01;11;07;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We do. So we use the connection framework. We a lot of work with Dave Snowden. I'm not sure if it's familiar with his connection framework. Basically, you know, the ontologies of order system, complex systems and chaotic systems. So with that, we're able to help organizations and people understand what does complexity mean, what's a complex adaptive system, what's the chaotic system, what's in ordered system?

01;11;08;02 - 01;11;29;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And through that framework, we've actually been able to bring a lot of work that John Boyd, who created the Loop and has a lot of briefs out there, not necessarily make a connection, but show that, hey, in this domain where you have a relationship between cause and effect, this is the dominant or points of John boy do a loop that we need years or they're being used.

01;11;30;17 - 01;11;51;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Similarly, we're going to have more discussions on this real soon. Naturalistic decision making recognition, prime decision making. We're going to have some of those folks on. And we've had Gary Klein on already to talk a little bit about it. But now we're pulling from psychology or psychology team science and helping people understand what understand their context so they can apply the right method.

01;11;52;19 - 01;12;13;24
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Something I saw when my friends who are all veterans were were charged with PTSD, who are doing psychedelic assisted therapy. And I started reading the books on, you know, from I got several books around here. Can you tell you what they are? It got me into quantum physics and made some other connections, but I think there's a process in there that we can use.

01;12;14;20 - 01;12;34;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
John Boyd's little loop to help people understand what trauma is, right? So trauma in my mind comes from maybe three places genetics, our culture, and then our experiences, right? So you get into that and the interplay of that matters and that determines how you sense the world and that gets you in a stuck state. State, it gets your ego stuck in a certain way.

01;12;34;13 - 01;12;57;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You experience life in a certain way. Those are type of things. I think we can explain clearly to leaders who are familiar with a little bit about John Boyd's work and around us, it's quite a few folks. So when we talk about scale free WI with John Boyd's loop, I can't take the framework or the orientation that's in there and apply it to teams, right?

01;12;57;26 - 01;13;23;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Because there's genetic heritage in there. So genetic heritage would mean to me like epigenetics, DNA, you know, the fact that our brain is burning 20% or energy waste 2% of our body weight, those type of things, right? Those things are inherent inside of that utility for an A a individual, but it's not the same for a team. So one of the things that Mark and I are working on is what does that orientation really look like?

01;13;23;10 - 01;13;46;22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And we have a good pathway because John Boyd gave it to us on what that looks like. So now through this, you talk about reducing the energy cost and trying to train people up on how things work in the world. I think that at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do, is how do we hate to say simplify, but how do we make it familiar to folks and go, okay, the brain works like this, maybe is going to work like that in the future.

01;13;46;22 - 01;13;59;15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
We're not really sure. But there's just so many connections here. And, you know, from from the physics side to the biology to the neuroscience, I don't know if I did a good job explaining what we're doing, but that's that's kind of what we're doing.

01;14;00;08 - 01;14;20;07
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Okay. You know, that sounds sounds really good. I can totally see where's all the advantages and why are the linking points. And I also think I got where you diagnosed the limitations of the framework framework and where you need to do a little bit of like theory development to expand the theory to apply. Also to a group level, right.

01;14;20;13 - 01;14;40;21
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah. So in this particular framework that I work on, you think about the preferred states as and they can, for example, they can contain genetics, preferred states can be encoded in genetics, for example, you know, for a system that is from a specific phenotype, right But you can also think about preferred states for a group level.

01;14;41;06 - 01;14;41;14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah.

01;14;42;25 - 01;14;43;25
Ines Hipolito, PhD
So that's interesting.

01;14;44;10 - 01;15;04;13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. So we're playing around with entropy too. So if you put a boundary on it around John Boy to the loop, which I believe it needs to have you split up, the observation and observation is just nothing more than how we interact with the outside environment. It could be our are knows, it could be our in receptive capabilities or even sensory substitution capabilities down the road.

01;15;04;13 - 01;15;42;07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So through this we can put a blanket around the OODA loop and it becomes scale free. Right. And it might, might, it may not scale everywhere close enough. So we'll call it scale free for now and then we can add a in tropic boundary on it. And then the higher in tropic states where we have things like, you know, higher disorder, flexible states, divergent thinking, creative, and we can help people understand that that's the state we need to get them into that where there's counterfactuals maybe to start thinking about what if scenarios and get away from this rigid state of how, you know, organizations generally work or individuals work.

01;15;42;17 - 01;15;59;08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And then we can also get into flow states. How can we explain flow? How do use that? Construct a law to explain a flow system using John Boy due to look, there's so much we can do with this and that's why we're exploring with folks like you. You know, people you know, have a deep understanding of their domains.

01;15;59;28 - 01;16;10;25
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
What are we getting wrong and what are we not seeing? Because we're generalists, right? We're not deep, deep, deep practitioners in anything or have a PhD in anything. We're just kind of cross things and go on. This is how we see it.

01;16;11;09 - 01;16;38;13
Mark  McGrath
I would add I would add to that. That's the mission of the podcast. But not only the mission. You know, the mission is to get thinkers from all disciplines to come together and have a conversation that advance the theories of John Boyd. That's the mission. But also the name is derived from a briefing that he was giving, saying that, you know, we live in this amazing universe with all sorts of things that are given to us for our own vitality and growth.

01;16;38;22 - 01;17;09;03
Mark  McGrath
Yet we it still remains uncertain, still remains ambiguous. There's features of this world, you know, mathematical imprecision, quantum uncertainty, entropy, etc.. And what he says and we're the name of the podcast comes from exactly was confirmed by everything that you shared with us saying as is that there's no way out of constantly reorienting and constantly updating your models to stay in line because you can't make entropy, uncertainty and imprecision.

01;17;09;03 - 01;17;35;25
Mark  McGrath
You can't make those things go away. So there's no way out of constantly reorienting and changing and updating your your your your cognition of the other, your perception of the world that you're in or else you're not. You're no longer going to have the capacity, freedom, independent action. And that's what we're anybody that listens to us that tunes in, that's ultimately the learning that we're trying to advance as we continue to learn because the learning never stops.

01;17;35;25 - 01;17;48;14
Mark  McGrath
And I think that you also confirm for us today that if you stop learning, if you stop thinking about these things, you become static, therefore irrelevant at some point or obsolete. And that's what we're trying to help people prevent, no matter what discipline they're in.

01;17;49;03 - 01;18;06;12
Ines Hipolito, PhD
That's wonderful. That is absolutely fascinating. And yeah, I agree 100%. And it's not only that there is no way out. There's also no way back. It's going to continue unfolding towards a certain path. Yeah, that's really, really wonderful. What's fascinating.

01;18;06;21 - 01;18;09;00
Mark  McGrath
John Boyd could not have said that better himself.

01;18;09;18 - 01;18;15;10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's great. Anything working on in the next couple months? Anything we need to be on the lookout for?

01;18;16;06 - 01;18;58;10
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Will Yeah. Well, I'm what I'm working on at the moment is more A.I. to I'm working on this paper, which is on what I call augmented cognition. So I explain how technology, A.I. environments are, how we navigate them from a body perspective, or how how those permeate the way that we understand the world. So A.I. development, A.I. design, how is that going to come now into the picture that I've been here building with you, which is an organism that is situated in a very social, cultural environment, but now A.I. comes in and becomes ever more permeating our lives.

01;18;58;10 - 01;19;38;06
Ines Hipolito, PhD
How does that look in this particular? So that's one of the papers that I have been working on. Another one is more on psychology. So looking at psychological experience, not at the brain on neuro cognitive science, but literally in psychological experience and explaining it through the toolkit of complex systems theory. So how all of these multi-scale networks interact with one another such that then in the end have these particular psychological experiences as opposed to a different one, that another person could have given the same state of affairs of the world?

01;19;38;06 - 01;20;00;06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Yeah. Our network on the cash side is pretty powerful. So happy to connect you with anybody in there. You know, again, we're not the deep experts in it. We just play one on television from time to time. But we do have these relationships. We're students, lifelong student. We're students. Yes, yeah, yeah. Right. Happy to connect you to you know, the podcast can feature Adrian Badger on soon.

01;20;00;13 - 01;20;19;11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Great, great, smart, smart thought leader there, if you will. Yeah, we had Dave Snowden on and we'll have some other leading theorists on complexity theory as well. How can our listeners find you if they want you to do a keynote or a presentation or how do they get in touch with you?

01;20;19;11 - 01;20;35;13
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yeah, so I am very active on Twitter, so always can always message me on Twitter or on my website, which is regularly updated. So I just double, double, double that. Initially, politics. So just my name and they can find all the information about my.

01;20;35;13 - 01;20;37;03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Papers on your website, too, right?

01;20;37;07 - 01;20;44;26
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Yes. So all my papers are the my talks are they are podcasts are there. So that's usually where I the one that I keep mostly updated.

01;20;45;13 - 01;20;48;18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay, great. Mark, do you have anything else for you?

01;20;48;18 - 01;20;56;11
Mark  McGrath
I look forward to adding our podcast to the Links podcast that you're on and we're glad that you shared this great conversation with us.

01;20;56;19 - 01;21;08;14
Ines Hipolito, PhD
Was So yeah, no thank you so much for for letting me the opportunity to rumble about all of these topics that I love so much. So was a wonderful was really, really a pleasure to brainstorm with you.

01;21;08;14 - 01;21;20;04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Now this is great. We love to have you back on in the future. You know, just anything we can do for you. Make some connections to some of the folks that are on the show. Happy to do that. I think there's a lot to learned from everybody and that's why we're doing the show. Right.

01;21;20;18 - 01;21;22;28
Ines Hipolito, PhD
That's wonderful. Really, really awesome work.

01;21;23;11 - 01;21;24;05
Mark  McGrath
Obrigado.

01;21;25;02 - 01;21;25;19
Ines Hipolito, PhD
It's another.