Founder @fieldmeditation | Faculty @CUBoulder | Embodied Presence | Embrace Complexity |
Boulder, CO
Joined October 2009
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Peter McEwen retweeted
Many latches start as useful, then outlive this usefulness (cf @techgnostic's talk/discussion);
The body may respond to a strong prediction error by reflexively latching; under dangerous uncertainty the body locks a "known-safe" pattern into tissue. This is a very useful capacity because it's very quick & targeted, and can massively shift behavior/computation in a reliable way. Even after the acute danger passes, the body may keep the latch depending on how serious the danger was and whether there could be similar situations in the future.
Slowly, this pattern is consolidated into neural weights (LTP) and the latch is less needed to maintain safety. But the body may hang on to it regardless, because (1) memory is seen as default-valuable, and (2) it's easy to offer evidence of danger but hard to offer evidence of safety. Sort of like a bonsai tree that was tied into a specific shape, which then slowly grew to be that shape naturally, but still has its ties on.
After you build yourself (with tension), the work becomes relaxing into your creation (by releasing tension). They're each hard in a very different way.
Latches reduce nervous system dimensionality / degrees of freedom, and that can actually be good, because we start with extremely high dimensionality (similar to an unconfigured FPGA). Babies are very unlatched creatures and it's probably a fantastic thing to be a baby. But they're not very predictive or predictable. Latches are necessary to make nervous systems useful. It's just the epistemological & affordance structure of the situation often leads us to go overboard.
There are also pathological latches, like in Reynaud's syndrome. Strict malfunctions of this system. This can be e.g. a matter of energy production (it takes energy to relax muscle) or cellular stability (muscle spasms). One big hope of vasocomp is that many cognitive, emotional, & phenomenological problems can be grounded in muscle physiology and addressed directly. "What sorts of phenomenological unpleasantness are due to muscle microspasm?" -- hard to say at this point, but not zero.
In the future, we'll need a science of "latch interpretability" -- something like LLM mechanistic interpretability but for latches. Not only a map of where your latches are, but what each one is doing -- what patterns it's stabilizing vs blocking, what classes of events might have triggered it, which latches are (still) doing important things vs which are safe to open.
teapawt.net/johnsonmxe/status/1873…
Thinking about trauma & latches — I think there are several different kinds of ‘shapes’ that can get stuck (latched) in our nervous systems, but I think most of them at least rhyme with this:
You’re out on a walk in the jungle with your friends, and you step on a snake. It bites you; this really hurts. You roll around in pain, fade to black, and wake up in a hospital. The body vows: “that was really awful. I will never let that happen again.”
Your body’s response is to latch shards of snake-perception into your nervous system. Next time you’re walking in the jungle, you often mistake sticks, roots, & shadows for snakes. But you will be ready for the snake when it comes. By latching shards of snake-perception, you preload the context (set the Bayesian priors) so it loads much more readily
But due to the nature of perception, trauma-latching goes further: not only are you jumpy about *seeing* snakes, but your body will try to latch affordances for *dealing with* the snake. Perception is not impersonal; every perception includes affordances for interaction, i.e. ”what can I do to x” and “what can x do to me”? (Wilson et al; big thanks to my friend Warren for the pointer). So the trauma response latches both fragments of the feeling of the snake biting your leg, and (at least for many men) fragments of the feeling of kicking the snake.
Now if you trip over a snake *or* a stick, you are going to kick the living daylights out of it
Humans are social animals and many of our salient threats and accompanying traumas are social — we can extrapolate this basic “frozen shards of perception+affordances” pattern to e.g. all the conflicts and attachment trauma we had when we were too young to defend ourselves (physically, emotionally, socially). An added complication is that the logic of how to identify these bad situations, and how to deal with them, will be latched shards of how we perceived the world when we were small. Which are probably not ideal. To be human is to navigate the world with this system, and navigate the second-order effects of this system
A compelling aspect of this model (I think @jonnym1ller is calling this “latch theory”, which I really like) is that these latches are concrete physical things. They are discrete, localized, computationally significant, measurable, and openable
(See my “research context” note in this thread for papers/links)
Peter McEwen retweeted
Hey! I'm looking to join a high-velocity team in SF that works toward human flourishing and civilizational progress
Missions that excite me most: thoughtfully accelerating science with AI, making the transition to powerful AI go well, and scaling inner work
Short page on who I am and what I've done
In SF until Nov 6, grateful for any intros 🫶
thorge.xyz/next
Peter McEwen retweeted
Like Imperial's psychedelic research centre, through philanthropic support I'd love to be able to scale the Breathwork Lab into a Centre of Excellence @BSMSMedSchool (like the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science founded by @anilkseth). If this is you, give me a shout!
Peter McEwen retweeted
Exciting! Tara at AoA is underrated. I had a surprisingly great coaching session with her in Jan 2025. Helped on a few levels: the content (early relationship fears), an emotional blindspot (how much I blocked joy), and her approach (more teachable than Joe's imo)
I’ll be talking with Tara Howley, co-founder of @artofaccomp, for a free live event.
We’ll discuss the interplay between temporary relief, insight, and integration.
Curious: what subjects and questions would intrigue you? I’d appreciate your help!
@FU_joehudson
Peter McEwen retweeted
Join @jonnym1ller, @OortCloudAtlas, and me for an exploration and discussion of Jonny’s hit essay “How to Unclench.”
Expect perspectives from nervous system practice, nondual meditation, Tibetan yoga, and developmental psychology.
Nov 6 @ 2pm PT
Links in 🧵
Peter McEwen retweeted
“I know that this really helps me. I’m just going to do something different.”
“I found that this works best for me, but I’m really looking forward to doing this other thing instead.”
Instead of doing the slow patient work that actually does the trick, I’m going to pursue a dopamine hit.
I want to avoid actual change and growth, while appearing to work on change and growth.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Join the Unclenching Round Table ~ with myself @techgnostic & @OortCloudAtlas next Friday
→ luma.com/kykeqv9n
Join @jonnym1ller, @OortCloudAtlas, and me for an exploration and discussion of Jonny’s hit essay “How to Unclench.”
Expect perspectives from nervous system practice, nondual meditation, Tibetan yoga, and developmental psychology.
Nov 6 @ 2pm PT
Links in 🧵
Peter McEwen retweeted
Many of us think we want to get away from tension.
But without tension, life doesn’t exist.
Literally. If you take the tension out of your body, you and all your cells will die.
Learning to dance with tension unlocks your vitality.
Peter McEwen retweeted
Precognitive dreamers, check out the new AMC+ series Archive X. I MAY make an appearance in Episode 3, "Dark Visions."
Host Jeffrey Kripal, producer Harris Fishman, and the team at October Films did an excellent job!
Peter McEwen retweeted
Full endorsement. Already Free by Bruce Tift becomes more profound with each read
okay so bruce tift's book is one of my favorite books ever and is lowkey lifechanging. here are some things I'm appreciating about it:
- attention is all you need...on your body sensations. it's funny how long we might spend meditating and still just refuse to go down into what the actual body sensations are like, without commentary, without trying to change them, without trying to bliss out, just being with them as they are
- "enlightenment", whatever it is, is not going to fundamentally change your humanity. an enlightened human is still a human, and humans have the following tendencies: they experience all the emotions (including the "bad" emotions like sadness anxiety fear anger envy), they feel physical pain, they get disappointed by life, and they are forever capable of hurting people or behaving unethically
- the book kind of feels like a spaced repetition exercise for embodied immediacy. on a surface level, he's kind of saying the exact same thing over and over again like a hundred times. but somehow, if you actually pay attention to it, you start to go, oh wow this is really doing something and it's hitting deeper and deeper every time
- he asks you to approach the contradictions of life "without hope of resolution," without hope of "solving" your experience of being a human, because your experience is not something to solve but rather is an endless, ongoing, often-challenging process. life will continue to be challenging at times, forever
- "without hope of resolution" to me also means, stop meditating with the hope of achieving something, with the expectation that it's supposed to make you feel good or you're supposed to be different in some important way on the other side of it. if you're meditating with the hope that you feel better, you are completely missing the point and are just playing an ego game [^1]. the point is to continue to build a tolerance for your experience as it is. "enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment"
- whatever we may believe about "enlightenment", you will continue to undergo further development as a human for the rest of your life, if you choose to
[^1] hold this view lightly, different people need different views at different times
Peter McEwen retweeted
okay so bruce tift's book is one of my favorite books ever and is lowkey lifechanging. here are some things I'm appreciating about it:
- attention is all you need...on your body sensations. it's funny how long we might spend meditating and still just refuse to go down into what the actual body sensations are like, without commentary, without trying to change them, without trying to bliss out, just being with them as they are
- "enlightenment", whatever it is, is not going to fundamentally change your humanity. an enlightened human is still a human, and humans have the following tendencies: they experience all the emotions (including the "bad" emotions like sadness anxiety fear anger envy), they feel physical pain, they get disappointed by life, and they are forever capable of hurting people or behaving unethically
- the book kind of feels like a spaced repetition exercise for embodied immediacy. on a surface level, he's kind of saying the exact same thing over and over again like a hundred times. but somehow, if you actually pay attention to it, you start to go, oh wow this is really doing something and it's hitting deeper and deeper every time
- he asks you to approach the contradictions of life "without hope of resolution," without hope of "solving" your experience of being a human, because your experience is not something to solve but rather is an endless, ongoing, often-challenging process. life will continue to be challenging at times, forever
- "without hope of resolution" to me also means, stop meditating with the hope of achieving something, with the expectation that it's supposed to make you feel good or you're supposed to be different in some important way on the other side of it. if you're meditating with the hope that you feel better, you are completely missing the point and are just playing an ego game [^1]. the point is to continue to build a tolerance for your experience as it is. "enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment"
- whatever we may believe about "enlightenment", you will continue to undergo further development as a human for the rest of your life, if you choose to
[^1] hold this view lightly, different people need different views at different times
Peter McEwen retweeted
Sharing my latest podcast with Dr. Gena Gorlin (@Gena_I_Gorlin) on why Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection, self-authorship, how to actually update beliefs, and her upcoming book on "Builder's Mindset"!
People who criticize introspection are often in a confusion; they conflate repetitive, ruminative self-analysis with the reflection people need to make important decisions, spot blindspots, and grow
It's obvious one has to work *with* their psychology, especially as they encounter blocks. Anything worth doing at our edge will induce fear, and however we move through that will involve some level of introspection.
Introspection is a skill, and there are methods and frameworks available to develop that skil!
Of course, there are ways that we can stuck. Even valuable frameworks like IFS (Internal Family Systems) can leave us, at times, *more* stuck and in the same loops.
We discuss useful introspection, identifying rumination, more wholesome ambition, and how people actually can change.
Podcast links in bio! This is the first episode for the newly rebranded Attention Copilot podcast
Timestamps:
00:00 — Andreessen, Senra, and the case for introspection
04:29 — What is the builder’s mindset?
11:31 — Why we procrastinate on things we want
17:54 — The drill sergeant and Zen guru’s shared assumption
21:43 — Who chose the ladder you’re climbing?
38:22 — Are builders born or made?
45:16 — “Death is the default”, but default isn’t destiny
53:14 — Repairing problems and building a life
57:38 — Gena’s critique of Internal Family Systems
1:01:49 — How people change their mindsets through practice
1:06:47 — Why we fluctuate between our best and worst selves
1:16:01 — Relationships through the builder’s mindset
1:20:36 — Gena’s writing and forthcoming book
Peter McEwen retweeted
👀
All you creative spiritual types, this one looks good.
Sasha Chapin and I are getting together on October 7 at 1 PM MT for an hour-long conversation about creativity, spiritual practice, craft, and personal mythmaking. A thread running through the conversation is the oscillation between openness and choice in creative work.
🔗 in 🧵 👇🏼
There is the receptive side: curiosity, play, aesthetic arrest, the suspension of what we already know. And then there is making something, which requires judgment, technique, and revision. A writer chooses this sentence instead of another, abandoning countless alternatives.
It's online and open to anyone who would like to join us.
Peter McEwen retweeted
🧵 Distorting teachings:
Every week someone on social is warning that you're doing it wrong, that you're not practicing authentic dharma, that you'd better get serious or forfeit the whole thing. I get the concern underneath it, but the tone seems directed at people who don't yet know what's being pointed at, and threatening someone toward a recognition they haven't had yet breeds more confusion than sanity. They may end up substituting fantasy for immediate experience, which generates confusion, anxiety, disembodiment, and things like that.
Peter McEwen retweeted
It's probably more accurate to say we are guaranteed to distort the teachings, all of us. Highly realized people still make short-sighted, human choices and misread the moment. That isn't a lapse. It's an ornament to the trial. We all live a messy human life, and mistakes and confusion are a medium the whole thing unravels within.
Peter McEwen retweeted
All you can ever do is say, look, I'm presenting my understanding of some very complex teachings, and I've basically scratched the surface, and anybody who has a different intuition about this should respect that and go pursue it. You're going to hear my best understanding based on however many years of study, but please don't take anything I say as if it's something to be believed. That's it. You just tell people what's true for you and you stop entertaining yourself with "am I distorting it?" Because of course we are.
Peter McEwen retweeted
I suspect we're approaching a time where if you want to protect creative work, it has to be something that can't be digitized. AI has made is so that creative works speed run through the lifecycle from cool to cliche in a matter of months. This contributes to our cultural stagnation, making it hard for real creators to produce something with meaningful, lasting effects on other real creators. Everything becomes a meme, which is to say meaningless and trite.
