Our Prior Literacy (1/3)

Opening the possibility spaces for Self, Other, and World

Introduction by Jonathan Rowson, CEO of Perspectiva.

One of the many challenges of running a charity is that funders typically place a premium on inclusivity, accessibility, and intelligibility. While some trusts are more discerning than others, the general vibe is that you should be able to communicate what you are doing so that everyone understands it. A great deal is lost in the process.

I have felt over the years that Perspectiva is at its best when it resists the need to make sense to everyone and allows itself to venture into terrain where not everyone can follow. While we do care about reaching new audiences and being available to those who seek us out, ‘the work’ often necessitates forms of practice and use of terminology that cannot be shared widely without loss of meaning or value. Or rather, with a limited amount of time, energy and resources, the effort to bring everyone with you has a major opportunity cost in terms of what it stops you from discovering and creating. 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.

I share this now because my colleague 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. I speak to him about it regularly, but ‘getting it out’ into the world has not always been easy, not least due to other commitments, including his work for Emerge on the EU-funded Cohere Plus project, and on Ukraine, but also because of its technical nature. A good overview of Ivo’s outlook can be found in The Solipsistic Society and On Keeping Consciousness Relevant. He has taught and convened courses on ‘Temporics’, and at the end of last year, he taught a course for our paid subscribers on The Inner Science of World Making.

I recently asked Ivo to share three posts on his recent work on ‘priors’, prompted partly by an 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. It is crucial work, and core to Perspectiva’s mission, and though it’s difficult, it’s worth the effort. 🙏

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Our Prior Literacy (1/3) by Ivo Mensch

This is the first of a three-part series on our ‘priors’, what they are, how they shape the experience of personal, social and material world and what undoing their hold can offer us. 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.

Carl Jung once remarked, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ His warning is not merely a poetic musing but also a diagnostic observation. Beneath our everyday conscious experience lies a vast substrate of assumptions, imprints, memories, neural pathways and patterns shaped by both personal and evolutionary history and our culture’s memetic contents, among other things.

These are our priors: the invisible infrastructure and contents that shapes how we interpret, imagine futures and act in the world. When thinking of change, we generally focus on goals - reaching idealised (imagined) states of the self, of others and the world - but I believe it is better to focus on ways to expand possibility by the engaging the priors, processes and patterns that sit underneath our “conscious” perceptions, decisions and actions.

I seek to subvert, expand and liberate the concept from its academic confinement to include it in the vernacular of personal and social change, so we can grow awareness of what kinds of assumptions about reality, our language to describe it, theories of change and beloved models implicitly contain. I hope to show that with this awareness we can access hidden domains of causality and see with new eyes.

What are priors?

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.¹

Intuitively, 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. This results in perception of a conceptual and mediated reality, not how reality actually is. Our bodyminds and its cognition simply did not evolve to perceive reality objectively, but in order to help us survive most efficiently by offering up representations.²

Priors, in neuroscience, are the brain’s expectations or assumptions about the world, shaped by past experience. They help the brain interpret new sensory information by predicting what is likely to happen. Priors exist for a good reason, they afford us to live energy efficient from the assumption that the future will be like the past. In this view, our memories exist not to remember the past, but to make sense of the present moment.

Perception is not just passive but an active, ongoing process of comparing new inputs to these prior beliefs and updating them when the mismatch between what is actually happening and what we have in our database of fixed, ready-made meaning is too big. Here we see why becoming aware of them is instrumental in any transformative change effort and why we first must identify and loosen the hold of priors, or update them, before true change is possible. Design of our practices and theories of change should reflect that understanding.

Technically speaking, priors are probability distributions - the educated guesses about what is likely to happen next based on past experiences. To do this well, your brain is constantly running simulations about the self and the world, including your body and the social landscape - all before you are consciously aware of any of it. Leading researchers such as Andy Clark, Thomas Metzinger, Jakob Hohwy, and Anil Seth have therefor converged on a sophisticated view of consciousness as a ‘controlled hallucination.’³

Clark explains: ‘Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction—the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories.’⁴

In his book, The Experience Machine, Clark brings the above down to earth with the story that he often feels his smartphone vibrating in his pants pocket, only to find that his inferencing brain created the illusion of receiving a call or text message.

From https://www.gillesdc.com/brain/prediction

To get an idea of the scope and speed of the hidden processing behind this hallucinating, consider that our conscious experience comprises approximately 10 bits per second, whilst sensory input amounts to roughly 11 million bits per second.⁵ A tremendous amount of data is parsed and left out, all with the help of our priors. We can think of what makes it into our conscious experience as Information, while all that gets left out as Exformation.

This process of parsing sense data into information and exformation happens according to relevance realisation⁶: the most important information, like urgent threats to our survival or social status, jumps the information queue and makes it into our consciousness first. The maintenance of our sense of self, complete with a stable identity and experience of persistence through time are foundational priors and are equally unconscious for most people.

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.’

Our priors are not only hidden; they are so fundamental that we often mistake them for reality itself. Including being a Self. Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger suggests the sense of being a unified self is itself a prior - what he calls the phenomenal self-model. This model is so transparent that we can't recognise it as a construction, making it seem like reality - what we are. His favourite experiment, that of the rubber hand illusion, illustrates the constructed nature of the self and being a body.

A Depth View: the stack of priors

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.

Unlearning and belief updating is energy-expensive and is felt as resistance, fumbling and uncertainty - sometimes as losing one's very identity when self-priors are involved. No wonder we resist. 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. Upon introspection, we may encounter these: 'I am weak', 'I am unlovable', 'I don't belong'. These beliefs shape not just how we know ourselves, but how we interpret every interaction and experience whenever the self-experience arises, usually in social interactions.

These priors, presented here as explicit ideas, are not like sentences that pop up in our heads as part of autobiographical memory. That memory only came online around age 4 to 5. These priors were installed long before that as part of our procedural memory. So whenever the self-experience arises, we also draw from that database of earlier procedural memory which operates deeper in the background, outside conscious awareness.

Other deep priors include those of self-agency: 'I am the author of my actions'; 'I can influence outcomes through intention'; 'My thoughts and decisions have consequences'; 'I have free will.' Again, these are not explicit beliefs but deeply ingrained assumptions built on top of those of being an entity.

On the imaginal level, where the incoming sense data and the brain’s top-down interpretations meet, we may discern archetypes as priors that are already more backgrounded and transparent, yet assert their historical and mythical pressures. For example, the Hero and its journey may be a template through which people live out their lives - consciously or not - in their attempts to save others or even the world.

Physiological Priors

Priors are also physical and thus stubborn: embodied and phylogenetically shaped through millions of years of evolution. While the popular triune brain model has been largely discredited by modern neuroscience, we can think of the brain as a nested hierarchical system with different evolutionary histories and processing speeds.

The brainstem and subcortical structures handle fundamental survival functions: heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and basic survival responses including fight, flight, and freeze patterns. These systems evolved earliest and operate largely outside conscious awareness.

Overlaying and interconnected with these ancient systems are the limbic networks. Whilst not a purely emotional brain as once thought, these regions are crucial for memory formation, threat detection, reward processing, and social bonding.

The neocortex, particularly the prefrontal regions, provides our capacity for abstract reasoning, planning, language, and conscious reflection and is in constant dialogue with the other two structures. Emotion and cognition are fundamentally interdependent and there are no purely emotional or purely rational circuits.

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.

Jaak Panksepp, a pivotal researcher in affective neuroscience, found that the ancient subcortical regions of our mammalian brains contain at least seven basic affective systems: Seeking, Fear, Rage, Lust, Care, Panic/Grief and Play.⁷

These neural systems govern discrete behavioural domains and produce distinct forms of affective consciousness. 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. Having emotional literacy and awareness of when these systems are active allows for switching between them and rerouting life energy.

Changing the vectors of unfolding

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. This phenomenon allows for the alteration of emotional responses to past experiences. By targeting these specific priors or clusters of them we change the vectors and imaginal constraints to arrive at different ways of seeing and meaning making.

There are many ways to label, organise and make an understanding of priors of the self more pragmatic and actionable. One framework that easily connects theory with lived experience is Dan Siegel's A-B-C model⁸, which proposes that humans develop three main temperamental vectors in the first 3 to 4 years of life, before autobiographical memory kicks in. His three core motivational vectors, or dispositions, as I prefer to call these stances to the present moment are:

Agency

• Core drive: need for autonomy, control and self-efficacy

• Adaptive function: ensures physiological needs are met through goal-directed actions

• When thwarted: manifests as frustration/anger; risk of rigid perfectionism or controlling behaviours

• Anatomical focus: gut/somatic awareness (interoceptive predictions)

Bonding

• Core drive: need for attachment, belonging and mutual recognition

• Adaptive function: maintains social cohesion and caregiving bonds

• When thwarted: triggers sadness/loneliness; risk of excessive people-pleasing

• Anatomical focus: heart/emotional awareness (social prediction systems)

Certainty

• Core drive: need for stability, pattern recognition and future prediction

• Adaptive function: creates cognitive maps to navigate uncertainty

• When thwarted: generates anxiety; risk of obsessive rumination or avoidance

• Anatomical focus: head/cognitive schemas (exteroceptive predictions)

I think it is easy to recognise our dominant individual disposition, the default set of priors we revert to when under stress or simply living life. In efforts of personal transformation we can consciously choose to place less emphasis on this dominance in order to offer ourselves more behavioural options and increase our cognitive range.

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.

This is the reason why spiritual teachers like Gurdjieff and Cynthia Bourgeault stress the development of three-centered awareness and why vertical coherence and clarification of the three centers of head, heart and belly is required. This frees our perception from the hold of the dominant priors of the current structure of consciousness, allowing a seeing beyond the narrow perspective of the ego-self and even the boundary of spacetime⁹. This will be unpacked further in part 3 of this series where we’ll explore metaphysical priors.

Working at Different Depths

An understanding of the nested, hierarchical ordering of the nested priors reveals that different transformational approaches work at particular depths. Talk therapy, which often relies on linguistic, analytic or cognitive behavioural interventions aimed at the surface priors of the stack, remains therefore relatively superficial. Similarly, mentalisation approaches like parts work in Internal Family Systems also operate at this depth, but touch on the imaginal.

Deeper, direct work on the predictive and motivational and executive functioning of the self-model is the domain of intimate embodied and emotional work. These approaches target priors deeper in the stack, changing the processes of construction of the body-schema, for example. Here we see techniques like Eugene Gendlin's Focusing for example or reparenting techniques, modifying one’s attachment style using imagination and visualisations. Language needs to be that of metaphor and the poetic. Archetypes may be the relevant ordering patterns through which to make sense of experience.

Even deeper we enter the terrain of nondual spirituality, where the boundaries and differentiation through the modelling of Self, Other and World fall away and the sense of identity can radically shift to give the experience of being one with everything, flowing with the unfolding of reality or a sense of being a timeless pure process in which temporal objects like birth and death no longer apply. Energy normally invested in upholding the processes of modelling is now available for other, non-ordinary perceptions far outside the bounds of consensus reality. The early imprint of the symbiosis with mother, including in utero, a form of nonduality without ego, is arguably the deepest prior, one we may encounter in deep meditative states.

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. It spawned a whole field of theories of change based on versions of change-the-individual-to-change-the-system, assuming a rationally-driven, bounded sense of agency.

This itself is an unquestioned prior behind many well-intentioned change efforts, but fall short due to focus on only a part of a larger web of causal prior relations. I believe the balance of power has shifted to external technological systems while that of the individual agent has shrunk as the social fabric has also frayed for decades, resulting in a loneliness epidemic. The systems behind Siegel’s Bonding vector are targeted by social media to fill the hole of connection and hence our attentional landscape is increasingly shaped by our technology and the priors encoded in the algorithms.

Deepening our understanding of social priors and their nested, historically extended nature is where I argue enormous potential for innovation, insight and change can be found. 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.

We can apply the same first-person scrutiny to our social reality, its structures and mechanisms, with equal curiosity, discernment and intensity as spiritual practice has directed in towards the self. We can expand and direct our inquiry to include the models of Other and World and their boundaries and relationships - particularly social reality and the priors inherent in our social agreements and structures and assumptions about reality in general to open up new possibility spaces.

The priors and boundaries architectures that determine the exchange of information between agents, including technological ones, will be the topic of Part 2. See you soon.

1. A Drive to Survive: the free energy principle and the meaning of life, Kathryne Nave

2. See Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception for a deep dive.

3. This is consciousness with a small c, to simply mean our bounded first-person experience, not consciousness with a big C, the as-of-yet unexplained mystery.

4. The Experience Machine, Andy Clark

5. https://scienceblog.com/human-thought-runs-at-just-10-bits-per-second-despite-billions-of-neurons/

6. http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf

7. The Archeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp

8. Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, Daniel J. Siegel

9. https://www.cynthiabourgeault.org/blog/2022/01/04/three-centered-awareness