Exploring Predictive Processing and the Science of Happiness with Mark Miller

Quick Overview

The course explores the cognitive science of happiness and well-being through the lens of predictive processing, revealing that perception is the brain's actively generated best guess of the world, not a passive decoding of external information, thereby making fidelity and honesty core virtues essential for adaptive functioning.

Key Points: The brain operates as a radically proactive organ, structuring experience from the top down by making good guesses about what happens next, overturning the old vision of the brain as a passive information processor. Perception is the brain's 'best guess about the world' based on installed belief networks and past evidence, explaining why individuals can feel like they are 'living in different worlds' with others. Doom scrolling is detrimental because it inundates the system with expectations, making the content consumed the 'matrix by which your reality gets created,' emphasizing the need for 'belief hygiene.' Key figures informing the predictive processing framework include Andy Clark, Carl Fristen, Neil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Eric Ryfeld, and Julian Kverstein. Honesty and fidelity are core virtues because the fundamental nature of being human is epistemic—the process of trying to know how the world works and who you are to make apt predictions. Lying or gaslighting is viewed as systematic violence that pulls a person's model away from real-world dynamics, leading to catastrophic model divergence, exhaustion, and sickness behaviors like depression. Effective well-being practices, like meditation, serve to garner counter-evidence over time to overturn deeply held, potentially divergent beliefs (e.g., the world is permanent) and align the internal model more closely with reality.

Context: This discussion features Mark Miller, a researcher at Monash University and the University of Toronto, in conversation with John about an upcoming 8-week course on The Lectern concerning predictive processing and the science of happiness and well-being, which Miller notes is the cognitive science of how to be well, built upon his research into cognitive architecture, pathology, and future technologies.