3. Exploitation and Exploration

Behold! The Kingdom of God is within you. 

- Luke 17:21

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

- Matthew 18:2-5

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Before embarking on an adventure, it’s good to ask ourselves: what do we (think we) know?

It’s more difficult, perhaps, to then inquire: how do we know what we (think we) know?

And then it’s good to take a moment to step outside in the dark, turn our face upward, and recollect a sense of our position in the cosmos. Do you remember the first time, perhaps as a child, that you looked up at the stars?

You are a brilliant point of light, albeit on a drastically different size scale than white dwarfs and nebulae. You carry more wisdom in your body than you appreciate, even if you appreciate it a lot, because the same stuff that makes those celestial bodies comprises yours, too. You are a multidimensional being, even if you are a strict materialist and deem spiritual realms nonsensical, because you exist in many identifiable, physical ones. You are a unique expert in the realm of investigating human consciousness as the only person who can directly apprehend your own felt sense of experience. You’re one in a million, or rather one in 8 billion. 

At the same time, there are embedded constraints in attempting to reflect on consciousness by the only means it is possible for us to do so: with our own, finite minds. Even as we examine the brain, intelligence, or consciousness, we’re doing so with the very instrument(s) we project to examine with a degree of objectivity. Then, we use language, a leaky and faulty vessel for attempting to transmit our perceptions. It’s a fraught journey of implicit finitude. Even so, what we (think we) know is astonishing, reorienting, and the fodder for a new epoch in human history.

I invite you to receive the following reflections with curiosity. If, when, you feel your mind or heart rejecting or closing, as precious human parts want to do so often, try taking a deep breath and softening into a question: Could it be so? Can you remember what it felt like to be a child, still seeking the answers? 

I am laying a foundation in these early entries to onboard you to a paradigm shift in my, your, our consciousness. I hope to enter fugitive spaces, maroon places, that lead us in unexamined places within our psyches and spirits. It’s foreign territory, so it’s natural to feel afraid. We want to feel safe. But just like a visit to any new shore, the invigorating experience of witnessing exotic creatures in their unique habitats, encountering strange customs, and learning new turns of phrase awakens us to the miracle that our understanding is but a part of the Great Unknown. 

The new shore we’re traversing in this entry is within each one of us. Only you can be the one to heed the wind, lower the sail, and willingly hop aboard.

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In recent years, humankind has made amazing advances in neuroscience and ‘mapping’ the brain. We have also shown that our entire bodies are riddled with seats of awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. For example, your gut contains 500 million neurons. Nevertheless, the brain remains a keystone to our embodied construction of consciousness, and there are many identifiable parts working to create our awareness. 

One of these areas of the brain is the Default Mode Network (DMN), which can be understood in many ways as a ‘funnel’ for consciousness. The vastness of reality is a bit overwhelming for small creatures such as we. Thankfully, the DMN is a useful tool that enables us to grapple with our place in an infinite cosmos. Scientists have measured that the DMN is most active during metacognitive processes: self-reflection, thinking about the past or anticipating the future, moral reasoning, and theory of mind activities, i.e. imagining what it’s like to be someone else. In other words, the DMN is essential to the construction of an idea of a Self and the stories we create about ourselves - past, present, and future.

Adolus Huxley wrote of something that sounds much like the Default Mode Network in his book Doors of Perception. He surmises:

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

Scientists have also measured moments when the DMN is least active. The steepest drops in DMN activity have been measured to occur during transcendental moments of “ego dissolution.” Meditation, experiencing the vastness of space, and psychedelic trips are a few examples of times when the DMN goes quiet. Altered states of consciousness occur outside the function of the DMN.

Notably, the Default Mode Network is something that comes into full function only in adulthood. 

Children, it turns out, largely live without the function of the DMN and frontal control systems in the brain.

The mind of a young child is an altered state of consciousness from what we experience as adults.

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Alison Gopnik is an authority on the philosophy of mind, as well as a preeminent developmental psychologist. At the 2016 Science of Consciousness TSC Conference, Gopnik spoke about children’s development, asking and responding to these questions:

What is it like to be a young child? 

Why do humans experience such a long childhood compared to other species? 

And why does it seem that, the more intelligent the species, the longer the childhood for their fledglings? 

She says,

“We have the longest childhood of any species…Each generation of children confronts a new environment, and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment. Think of the children of immigrants, or 4-year-olds confronted with an iPhone. Children don’t invent these new tools, they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it.”

One reason children can do this more easily than adults, she explains, is because their brains haven’t built a “funnel” via the DMN. Young children also have few ‘priors,’ pre-existing ideas or knowledge bases, to guide them down predictable tracks. This allows them to employ a “lantern consciousness,” which broadly illuminates the world and their environment, allowing them to see more broadly. Adult minds tend toward “spotlight consciousness,” which hyper-focuses and analyzes to make meaning.

Entropic brain theory attempts to offer a map through these states of consciousness and the effect of set and setting, and different substances, on brain chemistry and physiology:

Spotlight consciousness is understood as a brain’s “low temperature” search for meaning. It is focused, direct, and often limited, but very practical and rational. This approach is Exploitation. It is associated with a movement of contraction - honing in, reducing, and limiting. Adults default to this process.

Lantern consciousness is a “high temperature” search. It is characterized by outside-the-box thinking and requires more energy and time. It often yields what feel like “unlikely” results and highly innovative perspectives. This approach is Exploration. It is associated with a movement of expansion - getting wider, adding to, and opening. Children default to this process.

It is very possible for adults to access this exploration of lantern consciousness. As aforementioned, meditation shifts brain function to quiet the DMN and allow for the kinds of ‘awakening’ into a more primitive, or perhaps more fundamental, consciousness. So does the kind of improvisation jazz musicians employ. Albert Einstein’s E = mc² is understood to be a prime example of the result of a high temperature search. And finally, psychedelic experiences closely mirror what we apprehend about the young child’s experience of the world. In a study conducted last year, scientists demonstrated that certain psychedelic drugs reopen the social reward learning critical period that is active in early childhood. This means that the breakthrough in psychedelic treatments may be so successful because it allows adult humans to return to the more plastic, expansive state of consciousness we had in childhood. It allows us to return to our roots and creatively re-evolve our brains.

Alison Gopnik, to conclude her talk, wryly states with a laugh, “Babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”

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Richard Rohr, and American Franciscan priest and writer on spirituality, shares this reflection on emotions or states of awareness that lead to a felt sense of ‘contraction’ or ‘expansion:’

“Fear unites the disparate parts of our false selves very quickly. The ego moves forward by contraction, self-protection, and refusal, by saying no. Contraction gives us focus, purpose, direction, superiority, and a strange kind of security. It takes our aimless anxiety, covers it up, and tries to turn it into purposefulness and urgency, which results in a kind of drivenness. But this drive is not peaceful or happy. It is filled with fear and locates all its problems as “out there,” never “in here.”  

The soul or the True Self does not proceed by contraction but by expansion. It moves forward, not by exclusion, but by inclusion. It sees things deeply and broadly not by saying no but by saying yes, at least on some level, to whatever comes its way. Can you distinguish between those two very different movements within yourself?”

Alison Gopnik is studying the ways that children outperform AI large language models to see if we can teach AI to employ Exploration as effectively as human children. The infinite data set accessible to AI, paired with a capacity to investigate innovative solutions through Exploration, hold promise for revolutions never before possible. Striking a balance between Exploitation and Exploration is a learning process for both machine and human.

Perhaps, then, the best question to ponder is, “What can I imagine we could discover?” and respond with a lifetime of meditation. Or, maybe just forget the question altogether and join a child in their play. Enter worlds upon worlds of possibility they unfurl. All around us are precious, human portals into the Great Expanse. Our future is shown there in their brilliance. 

I asked ChatGPT4,

“Given that children are better than adults at high temperature searches through exploration because they do not have a developed Default Mode Network, what can AI imagine learning from children?”

ChatGPT4 responded:

Children's exploratory behavior and their approach to problem-solving can offer valuable insights for AI development. Here are a few areas where AI can learn from children:

1. **Exploration and Creativity:**

   - **Unbiased Exploration:** Unlike adults, children often approach problems without preconceived notions or biases. They explore a wide range of possibilities and are more willing to experiment. AI can adopt similar strategies to avoid local optima and discover novel solutions.

   - **Creative Problem-Solving:** Children use imaginative and unconventional methods to solve problems. AI systems could benefit from incorporating more creative algorithms and heuristics, inspired by the way children think.

2. **Learning Flexibility:**

   - **Adaptability:** Children can rapidly adapt to new environments and information. AI can improve its learning algorithms to be more flexible and adaptable, allowing it to handle diverse and changing data more effectively.

   - **Incremental Learning:** Kids learn incrementally, building on previous knowledge. AI systems can adopt incremental learning techniques to continuously improve and refine their knowledge base.

3. **Curiosity-Driven Learning:**

   - **Intrinsic Motivation:** Children often learn driven by curiosity rather than external rewards. AI could implement curiosity-driven learning models, enhancing its ability to autonomously seek out new information and skills.

   - **Self-Supervised Learning:** Mimicking how children learn from their environment without explicit supervision, AI can leverage self-supervised learning techniques to acquire knowledge from vast amounts of unlabeled data.

4. **Robustness and Resilience:**

   - **Learning from Failure:** Children learn a lot from making mistakes and trying again. AI systems can be designed to better handle and learn from errors, improving their robustness and resilience in real-world applications.

   - **Playfulness:** Incorporating elements of play into AI training could encourage more robust exploration and learning. Games and simulations that allow for trial and error without serious consequences could be beneficial.

5. **Social Learning:**

   - **Imitation and Social Interaction:** Children learn by observing and imitating others. AI can incorporate social learning mechanisms, enabling it to learn from human behavior and interactions in more sophisticated ways.

   - **Collaboration:** Children often learn in social contexts, collaborating with peers. AI can be designed to work better in collaborative settings, learning from interactions with other AI systems and humans.

By integrating these child-like learning attributes, AI can become more versatile, adaptive, and capable of innovative problem-solving. This approach could lead to more robust and human-like intelligence in artificial systems.