Intelligence As Prediction:
Our Knowledge of Reality
How We Come to Know the Structure of Our World: When you are born your cortex essentially doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know your language, your culture, your home, your town, songs, the people you will grow up with, nothing. All this information, the structure of the world, has to be learned.
We experience the world as a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. And when we recall them, we match them up against reality. We’re making predictions all the time.
— Jeff Hawkins
The solution of great problems requires the giving up of great prejudices.
— Paul Dirac
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.
— John Dewey
Prediction Must Be Centralized—It Leads to Self
Given that prediction is the ultimate and most pervasive of all brain functions, one may ask how this function is grounded so that there evolved only one predictive organ. …. For optimum efficiency it would seem that prediction must function to provide an unwavering residency and functional connectedness: it must somehow be centralized to the myriad interplays of the brain’s strategies of interaction with the external world. We know this centralization of prediction as the abstraction we call the “self.”
— Rudolpho Llinás
We’re into some very important stuff here. We’re into how the brain works and what the self is. We can also add the idea of multiple selves or sub-selves. First, I’d like to comment on Hawkins’ ideas. Hawkins is both an engineer and the developer of a new theory of brain function. In his book, Hawkins has explained in great detail how the neocortex works. Basically, He explains, “Discovering causes is the pinnacle of what brains do.” Those causes constitute not just our ideas about reality, they are the stuff with which we create and experience our reality. Read more…
Core of the Method
Talk by Ron Kurtz,
Mexico, November 2006
I’d like to discuss some details about the method of assisted self discovery, ASD.
First, this major difference between this method and ordinary psychotherapy: assisted self discovery requires a commitment on the part of the person being assisted (still called the client), that he or she be capable of entering into a present-centered, self-focused, and vulnerable state of mind. The client must understand the process as experiments done in mindfulness. He or she must be willing to enter into that process even though painful emotions may arise. This commitment is also required of people doing an ASD training.
Being a practitioner of ASD requires some very specific personal developments on the part of the person assisting. Practitioners must be able to sustain a compassionate and aware state of mind called “loving presence”. I’ll discuss this in a minute.
The central unique feature of the original Hakomi method was doing experiments with the client in a mindful state. These experiments were specifically designed to evoke reactions that would help bring unconscious material such as foundational memories, underlying emotions and implicit beliefs into consciousness. This is still the central feature of the ASD version. What’s been added are some new elements and ideas that make the work simpler and fasted, easier to do and quite as effective. Much of the core curriculum will be about teaching these new elements and ideas.
The unique contribution of the Hakomi method is this: the method contains as a necessary element precise experiments done with a person in a mindful state, the purpose being to evoke emotions, memories and reactions that will reveal or help access those implicit beliefs influencing the client’s nonconscious habitual behavior.
When we work out of an ASD model, the work becomes very easy. Part of what makes it so is the explicit understanding of the client of how the process works. Maybe in these four days you will discover why this is so. I’m very sure that everyone in this room would be an excellent client for this method. But not everyone who comes to therapy would be. If the person is very anxious or easily distracted, or is someone whose image of psychotherapy is the one portrayed in popular movies and so does not understand what the process actually requires, then the work can be difficult or impossible without some prior preparation. Read more…