Baron,
  Just wanted to say how much I appreciated your stream of consciousness here. Our iQuad Coin perspectives clearly have much transjective alignment 😊!

Best,
Gregg

Gregg,
 
Thanks for your response. I will certainly check the blog :)
 
I’m going to borrow “Well, you are the expert on you.” As a patient, I would find this quite validating that I’m seen idiographically as having a unique expertise about me. Plus, you haven’t left out the value and context of reliable, generalizable knowledge that science and evidence based medicine affords. A place for both is explicitly noted from UTOK. Imagine that happening more often in medical care by both doctors and patients and the novel collaborations!
 
Regarding predictive processing/RR- I found the Experience machine a nice read that provokes a lot of thought, including medical considerations about perception, pain, and cognitive processing that goes awry. There’s a conceptual gap in general medical care about these functional disorders . “I can’t find anything wrong” but the patient has X,Y,Z symptoms. Clearly something is wrong and in part may be related to aberrant predictive processes. Can be applied clinically types of chronic pain, mood disorders, some psychotic symptoms, etc.
 
In my simple take about PP:
-The brain is not receiving any direct, unmediated messages from the ontic world.
-Rather it receives information that is processed, constructed, and implemented as predictive models of world, self, other. Ie. Photons reflected are converted to electrochemical messages that are converted into information organized and different layers of subcortical/cortical neural processing
-These models are composed of perceptual, emotive, and cognitive subsets (Buddhists would call aggregates) that build simpler perceptual models with overlays of the motivational and conceptual, metaconceptual models.
-Most of the time we are totally unaware we are “looking through” models. Only with examination can with “look at” these models (eye glass metaphor). 
-Different practices can work at different levels of a hierarchical self-model. Psychotherapy can help us look at implicit cognitive models we operate from- ie. Cognitive therapies, psychodynamic therapies (relational models we entrained from parents, etc)…((I know you got some great integrative stuff here. I want to own that but just mentioning a few elements). The therapy works at self-relational and processing emotion/behavioral predictive processes that may not be optimal (again oversimplification)
-Meditation can helps us go “lower down” the phenomenal self model. We can watch without resistance the steady stream of thoughts, images, feelings, perceptions. As attention (RR) strengthens we can start, initially at rest, to “slow down” the generative model and notice the ongoing stream and even how they “build” our ordinary models. (ie. Seeing/hearing help generate a perceptual world and interception/seeing/feeling generate a sense of body/animal-like self). We loosen the hold of our default overthinking.
-Going further down the stack we can lose the differentiation of subject/object—one type of nonduality. We can move aggregates into the background and attention attending to itself as awareness in the foreground and a palpable sense of naturalistic, formless awareness feels like the ground of experience from which aggregates of perception, feeling, thinking can spin up a sense of world and self. Interestingly adding back the predictive models of self-world-other, now are experientially known epistemically as arising in consciousness. This taps into ancient wisdom from which epistemically all we know is known through this experience medium of consciousness. Importantly, this does not mean ontically all there is is consciousness. 
-Going up the stack to cognizing about PP/RR, self-world models, considering solid objects in the world are mostly space, hyperobjects of global climate change or evolution of cosmos all are in a sense this higher order of predictive processing applying metacogniton to inner/outer contents. In some sense, this can “loop” back on identity in a metacogntive, transjective self. As mentioned in the other mail, we can come to understand we are consciousness emerging through a living organism with a nervous system generating a predictive hierarchy of models layering self-world-other and it’s only known through the medium of consciousness. This self model is a bit like an avatar and is modifiable. This model is inter-related with other people/their models but ontically through the deep continuity of the TOK planes of existence. It’s a little bit of a mind twister conceptually but can make sense as we learn to own our identity stack. 
 
I realize this is a little much/compressed for some conceptual considerations. The concepts are needed to communicate, but I also have come to find this can genuinely be known at least on the idiographic side of the coin. Much like we can own the exterior-objective onto-epistemic stack (TOK), we can experientially own the identity stack generated through PP and use RR effectively. This might mean the majority of the time working with people, I’m interacting at a person, but while meditating, running, or on the elevator hanging out higher/lower levels of the stack.( Dialogos can allow 2 or more people to rift together along their stacks :) Also that the higher metacognitions start to emanate into lower orders of the identity stack. Simultaneously lower levels of awareness and the perceiving-feeling-moving animal self emerge into the person and metacogntive transjective self to bring deep peace/freedom and embodiment so one (like me) is swirling less in the cosmos of thought 



Thanks for reading this stream of consciousness. Again I will check out the blog! 

Have a great day,

Baron

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