Your mind needs chaos

When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction?

I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind can provide insight into human well-being.

Prediction is clearly useful: Being able to anticipate the future helps us strategize in the present.

But too much predictive power is usually the stuff of dystopian sci-fi stories, where being creative and unpredictable are the hallmarks of humanity, while the power of prediction — like the trope of an all-knowing algorithm — is cast as the weapon of technology. 

And yet, one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe otherwise tending toward chaos.

Miller’s work starts with this big idea known as predictive processing, which says that your experience of the world is like a dream — a simulated model constructed by your brain. We’re not observing the world through open windows in our skulls. Rather, in our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. Those predictions are always uncertain, at least to a degree, which is why the goal of predictive processing is often described as minimizing that uncertainty.

But an optimal relationship with uncertainty calls for a balance. Through a predictive lens, Miller argues, uncertainty can help us snap out of harmful loops, like depression or addiction. And in general, it turns out that one of the best ways to become healthier, more adaptive creatures is to regularly expose ourselves to different kinds of uncertainty.

Miller’s work goes on to use this idea to explain the value of everything from art and horror movies to meditation and psychedelics. In each case, we’re brought to “the edge of informational chaos,” where our predictive models begin to break down. Surprisingly, he sees creativity and optimizing our predictive powers as complementary forces that help sustain life itself. 

So I invited Miller as the next guest for The Gray Area’s series on creativity to discuss the paradox of how we humans survive thanks to prediction but need chaos in order to thrive.

“All of life is this resistance to entropy,” Miller said. “As the universe expands and entropy is inevitable, life is that single force that’s defying that gradient.” 

The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full Gray Area interview here.

Oshan Jarow

Right now, I’m looking out my window and I see a particular scene and, naively, it seems to me like the light is coming in from the outside, into my body, reaching my brain, and that’s what I’m seeing. What you’re telling me is actually what I’m seeing is the model being predicted by my brain. What happens, though, when the light actually does get passed through my body? Am I experiencing that at any point, or when do we switch from experiencing our predictions of the world to raw sensory data?

Mark Miller

Probably never. That’s just not what you’re built to do. And actually you don’t need access to it. What you need is the driving signal from the world to be making sure that the models that you’re generating are elegant, sophisticated, and tracking real-world dynamics.

Oshan Jarow

This does get dizzying the more you think about it. But this is a huge claim: that my experience of the world is not a direct experience of objective reality. It is my brain’s best guess of the world outside of my skull. How early-stage is predictive processing as a theory?

Mark Miller

Well, not that early. I don’t think it’s irresponsible to say that it’s the preeminent theory today in all sorts of communities, computational psychiatry, computational psychology, neuroscience. I mean, if it’s not the foremost theory, it’s adjacent. So I guess it’s a mix. It’s younger than the other, it is the new kid on the block in a way, but it’s a very popular new kid and very exciting. 

Oshan Jarow

You wrote a paper about how this predictive framework can explain a lot about what makes us humans happy. So tell me about that. What is the predictive account of happiness?

Mark Miller 

The human system starts predicting for one reason or another that the world is some way. And then the trouble looks like when that prediction becomes strong enough and divergent enough from the way things actually are. So we call it sticky — it has a sticky quality to it. 

Just think about depression. You’ve installed the belief for whatever reason that you just can’t fit with the world, that either it’s because you are not good enough or the world isn’t good enough. But for some reason you can’t resolve this difference between the way that you want the world to be and the way the world actually is, either because of something on your side or something on the world’s side. One thing that marks depression is that that belief persists even if the conditions were to change. Even if you were to change the situation entirely, there’s a sticky quality to these pathologies.

Oshan Jarow

So let me ask you then about swinging back to the positive dimension, happiness in particular. That’s a picture of depression and psychopathology and mental illness. So what does this predictive framework say about the feeling of happiness itself?

Mark Miller

Well, I’m going to say two things. There’s a difference between momentary subjective happiness and well-being, like having a good life. Just in case anybody doesn’t know what these are, the momentary subjective being well-being is like hedonic well-being. That’s just the feeling good stuff.

Oshan Jarow  

Is that like pleasure?

Mark Miller

Exactly. Overall well-being doesn’t look like it’s exactly identical with that because to have a really rich, meaningful, good life may mean you’re in pain quite a lot. Momentary subjective well-being is a reflection, at least in part, of predicting better than expected. So we have this idea that valence is that good or bad feeling that comes as part of your embodied system telling you how it’s going. So when you feel good, that’s your body and nervous system and brain telling you, “I’ve got it. Whatever’s happening right now, I’m on top of it. I’m predicting it for us. I’m predicting it well. I’m managing uncertainty really well.” And when you feel bad, that’s an indicator: “I don’t understand something here.”

Oshan Jarow

How does creativity fit into this story?

Mark Miller 

I think a starting point for thinking about creativity using this model is to start by maybe showing a puzzle. Why would a predictive system that looks like it’s trying to reduce uncertainty be attracted to situations and indeed make those situations where it’s bumping into uncertainty? Like why do we build roller coasters? Why do we go to horror movies? 

Part of the answer is that too much certainty is a problem for us, especially when that certainty drifts from real-world dynamics. So in order to protect our prediction engine, our brain and nervous system, from getting into what we’ve called the bad bootstrap, that is from getting very, very certain about something that’s wrong, it really behooves us to occasionally inject ourselves with enough uncertainty, with enough intellectual humility to be uncertain about your model enough that you can check to see whether or not you’ve been stuck in one of these bad bootstraps. 

If you’re with me to there, then we have a wonderful first-principles approach to thinking about the benefit of creativity and art, especially provocative art that calls you to rethink who you are. Because as far as we’ve seen, the research just keeps pointing in this direction, anything that gets you out of your ordinary mode of interacting with the world so that you can check to see how good it is or how poor it is, is gonna be a benefit for us. It’s gonna protect us from those bad siloed opportunities. I think art does that, right? 

You can go somewhere, see something grand, see something beautiful, see something ugly and horrible. If you let yourself be impressed by it, it can be an opportunity for you to be jostled out of your ordinary way of seeing the world, which would let the system check to see whether or not it’s running optimal models or not.

Oshan Jarow

So it sounds like you’re likening creativity to this injection of the right kind of uncertainty into our experience of the world. And in your paper on horror movies, you used a term that I think captures a lot of this. It’s a thread that seems to run through everything so far: art, creativity, horror movies, even meditation and psychedelics. You wrote that the brain evolved to seek out the “edge of informational chaos” — a place where our predictive models begin to break down, and in those uncertain zones, we actually have much to learn.

It sounds to me like this edge of chaos actually explains at least one perspective on why art, why creativity, why play, why all these things benefit us. Because that edge is a really healthy place to be. So I wanted to ask you about this framing of the edge of informational chaos and why that’s a place that our brains would want to go.

Mark Miller 

Where are we gonna learn the most? If you are a learning system, and this is amazing, right from the lab, we see that animals and us, we get rewarded, not only when we get fed and watered and sexed, we get rewarded when we get better information. Isn’t that amazing to acknowledge?

If you get better information, my system is treating it like I’ve been fed. That’s how important good information is for us. And in fact, in lots of situations, it’s more rewarding for us than the food itself because one bit of food is one thing. Information about how to get food over time, that could be much, much more important. So where do we learn the most? 

Well, we don’t learn where our predictive models are so refined that everything is just being done by rote. And we’re not learning the most way out in deep volatility, unexpected uncertainty environments. That’s like where not only do you not know what’s going on, but you don’t know how to get to knowing what’s going on. That’s why we sometimes have culture shock if we move somewhere else.

So where do we learn the most? We learn at this Goldilocks zone, which is that healthy boundary between order and chaos, right at the edge where our predictive models necessarily break down. And the hope there is that in breaking down, new, better models are possible.

Oshan Jarow

We’ve talked about how art and creativity can bring us to that edge of chaos, but you’ve also said elsewhere that meditation can do a similar kind of thing. Which is confusing at first because meditation looks pretty different from watching a horror movie. In meditation, I’m sitting there very quietly, in what looks like the opposite of chaos. So how do you understand what meditation is doing in this predictive framework, and how does that relate to creativity and these beneficial kinds of uncertainty?

Mark Miller

This idea is common now, especially, in the West, that meditation might be more about relaxation, or maybe addressing stress. But that’s not the meat of the program. The center of that program is a deep, profound, and progressive investigation about the nature of who we are and how our own minds work. It’s a deep investigation about the way our emotional system is structured and the nature of our unconscious experience. What are we experiencing? Why are we experiencing it? What does that have to do with the world?

And then we can adjust, progressively and skillfully, the shape of who and what we are so that we fit the world better, so that we are as close as possible to what’s real and true, so that we can be as serviceable as possible.

Ultimately, you can do everything that we’ve been talking about, including all the stuff that psychedelics do for the predictive system, all the stuff that horror and violent video games do, you can do it all contemplatively, in a way that’s better for you.

Oshan Jarow

So you’re saying that one way to find that thread that puts meditation and horror movies in the same vein of practice is thinking about meditation and psychedelics as injecting uncertainty into our experience of the world. Is that the common currency there?

Mark Miller

You’ve got it. Absolutely.

Oshan Jarow

Let me ask you this. After this whole story we’ve unpacked, there’s still a tension that leaves me a little bit uncomfortable. It feels like we’re saying that creativity is just kind of an input or a means toward juicing the powers of prediction. And part of me pushes against that. It almost feels reductive, right? Is creativity really just this evolutionary strategy that makes us better predictive creatures? Does that make creativity feel less intrinsically valuable?

Because when I think about creativity, at least in part it doesn’t just feel like a tool for survival that evolution has honed. Sometimes it feels like it’s that which makes life worth living, that it has intrinsic value of its own. Not as a tool for the predictive powers in my brain or the algorithms or whatever. So I’m curious if you feel this tension at all, and how you think about creativity being framed in the service of prediction.

Mark Miller

So two things. One, even though we are excited by this new framework, I don’t think we need to be afraid of it being overly reductionistic. I mean, in a way, it’s radically reductionistic. We’re saying that everything that’s happening in the brain can be written on a T-shirt, basically. 

But the way that it actually gets implemented in super complex, beautiful systems like us, it shouldn’t make us feel like all of the wonderful human endeavors are simply explainable in a sort of overly simplified way. I don’t have any worry like that. I think if it turned out that life was operating over a simple principle of optimization — that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, first of all, that all of life is about optimization. All of life is this resistance to entropy. That’s just what it is to be alive, is just your optimal resistance to entropy. As the universe expands and entropy is inevitable, life is that single force that’s defying that gradient. That’s so beautiful.

Two, when it comes to art, I want to even be careful to say that art is only about finding this critical edge. I think that’s one really interesting way of thinking about it. It’s one way that we’ve been thinking about it, if you consider movies and video games as forms of art also.

Another central reason that this kind of system might benefit from artistic expression that we didn’t cover but that’s completely relevant for our discussion is that art creates this wonderful opportunity for endless uncertainty and uncertainty management. And not very many things do that.

And as you progressively create dancing, painting, singing, whatever, the enthusiasm of that literally being in the spirit of that creative endeavor, is you managing uncertainty in a new and remarkable way that it’s never been done before in all of existence through all time. Nobody has ever encountered and resolved that uncertainty in particular. So it should be endlessly rewarding, fascinating.

No wonder we find it so beautiful. It might be by its very nature the purest expression of uncertainty generation and management. That would make it intrinsically valuable for an uncertainty-minimizing system like us.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.