Transcendent Experience and The Bayesian Brain
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake
In our everyday life, we inhabit a low-resolution version of the world. Cognition is expensive, and so when we live in familiar surroundings, our brains go into energy-saving mode. We operate on the level of what Buzsáki calls the good-enough brain, and which can be roughly equated to Kahneman’s system one: a level of brain activity that is not particularily concerned with getting to the bottom of the truth, but rather optimized for a cognitive activity that lets us survive with the minimal energy cost.
But as William Blake says, alluding to Plato’s allegory of the cave: this makes us spend our daily lives closed off at the base of a cavern, out of touch with the light of Plato’s transcendental realm of ideas, with what Blake calls the Infinite.
The Bayesian brain hypothesis details how cognition lends itself to a statistical interpretation, grounded in Bayes’ law: every perceptual act consists of the integration of sensory data into a prior framework, defined by Bayesian priors, via posterior inference. The confidence in these priors is in technical terms given by their precision.
