Our Prior Legacy
Detailed academic overview of Priors, including a suggestion of how to change deep ones (embodied, emotional, using metaphor and art) are unconscious beliefs that shape how we see ourselves and the world. They influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions without us realizing it. To change deeply, we must become aware of and update these hidden priors.
One way to see this is that if our work stems from our ten premises and is about ‘deactivating the h2-minus vortex’ by developing ‘an H2plus curriculum’, that work needs to be informed by third horizon vision; and what that means is shifting fundamental assumptions about who we are and how we know the world, including the language and practices that reaffirm and reconstitute normal life.
Ivo, a former Zen Monk, has for the last few years been doing deep philosophical work on the frontiers of spiritual practice, not all of which is easy to follow.
inquiry from someone working as a leading civil society voice on values, frames and narratives, who said they were keen to get a deeper understanding of what is meant by the term.
One way to look at it is that if you have heard of ‘the paradigm’ or ‘the social imaginary’, or other terms that seek to capture the widest grasp of our whole predicament, ‘priors’ are their constitutive elements that we can potentially work with. If the problem is that we are fundamentally stuck, understanding priors and working with them is a way to begin to become unstuck.
Priors, intuitively analogous to unconscious beliefs, afford rapid sense and meaning-making of our present moment experience, but also form imaginal constraints and determine our sense of possibility whenever we seek change and transformation.
The aim of developing prior literacy is threefold: to change the energy vectors of unfolding towards unwanted futures, the design of practices and frameworks that enable the restructuring of our metaphysical operating system, and the emergence of teleogenic consciousness. This first post lays the groundwork and might seem a little dry, but it is necessary preparation for the next two posts which are much juicier, and more metaphysical in nature.
The term originates from the ascendant discipline of computational neuroscience, based on Bayesian statistics that underpins what is known as the field of active inference in which the brain is seen as a predictive organ.
Priors represent pre-existing beliefs or expectations encoded in neural circuits that shape perception, decision-making, and motor control
priors are best thought of as unconscious pre-existing beliefs, ones that influence how we process incoming sensory information and assign meaning to our experience
Priors, in neuroscience, are the brain’s expectations or assumptions about the world, shaped by past experience.
Technically speaking, priors are probability distributions - the educated guesses about what is likely to happen next based on past experiences.
our conscious experience comprises approximately 10 bits per second, whilst sensory input amounts to roughly 11 million bits per second
We can think of what makes it into our conscious experience as Information, while all that gets left out as Exformation.
As Andy Clark states: ‘In case after case, the predictions that sculpt and inform human experience have been shown to be invisible or shrouded from the conscious mind.’
Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger suggests the sense of being a unified self is itself a prior - what he calls the phenomenal self-model.
Priors are stacked to form a hierarchy, as some are more important and foundational than others. The deepest level of the predictive hierarchy encompasses what researchers call existential priors: fundamental assumptions about being, embodiment and agency that form the bedrock of conscious experience.
Information is structured hierarchically, with the upper levels interpreting bottom-up sensory data by drawing on the database of stored memories. This architecture means that new information taken in consciously must first compete with existing priors, cognitive biases and interpretive mechanisms.
Anyone with psychological literacy and therapy experience knows of the hard-to-change basic priors formed in early childhood that constitute the self-image: fundamental beliefs about the self.
these are not explicit beliefs but deeply ingrained assumptions built on top of those of being an entity.
Priors are also physical and thus stubborn: embodied and phylogenetically shaped through millions of years of evolution.
This hierarchical stacking, with different systems operating at different timescales and levels of awareness, is one reason why accessing the imagination and emotional priors are important sites for intervention when we seek to change our attentional infrastructure.
Imagery and imagination engage older, faster systems that can update priors sitting deeper in the machinery of relevance realisation.
To access these deeper systems, we need to develop felt awareness of emotions, bodily sensations and the internal states that shape memory formation and prior updating. This is where we can establish new vectors and attractors through which our life energy flows.
seven basic affective systems: Seeking, Fear, Rage, Lust, Care, Panic/Grief and Play
Stimulation of these systems consistently evokes intense emotional experiences. When activated by real-world events, they generate rich cognitive associations and memories that shape an individual’s interpretation of their experiences.
Making what is implicit and transparent explicit and observable allows for a momentary time window in which the integrity of encoded memories is compromised and default processing is suspended. This is called memory reconsolidation: the process by which previously consolidated memories become reactivated and can be modified or updated.
Dan Siegel’s A-B-C model 8 , which proposes that humans develop three main temperamental vectors in the first 3 to 4 years of life, before autobiographical memory kicks in.
Agency
Bonding
Certainty
The term vector is important to grasp because it shows that priors have directionality, they are teleological and route life energy through an infrastructure of nested systems of gut, heart and head towards something. They shape our disposition, form an attentional infrastructure and drive our movements and behaviour.
An understanding of the nested, hierarchical ordering of the nested priors reveals that different transformational approaches work at particular depths.
Deeper, direct work on the predictive and motivational and executive functioning of the self-model is the domain of intimate embodied and emotional work.
Language needs to be that of metaphor and the poetic.
It is time to rewild the brain and free and consciously divest some of that energy held in priors and invest it in building a different attentional infrastructure built on a set of different priors.
Over the past two and a half millennia enormous amounts of psychic energy went to the gradual development of the self-construct in the West, the resulting collective obsession now known as individualism - an oppressive social hyperprior.
There is a case and foundation for a spiritually-informed depth sociology, furthering the lines of inquiry of critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar and sociologist Margaret Archer, but with a stronger emphasis on first-person embodied experience.