How do you test a partial explanation of Tourette's?

Date: 2020-08-04

In the early hours of the morning (12am - 1am) I had an idea about Tourette’s (Tourette’s Syndrome / TS) and wanted to figure out if it was useful. If I could come up with a way it would help patients or related fields of research, i thought that’d be a good start.

i decided to record myself talking about the idea (b/c i was a bit intoxicated and so didn’t think i’d have the patience to write it down). if i could record something coherent then it’d mean the idea was clear enough to me, at least, that it might be good or useful.

since then I’ve learnt a bit more about some of the treatment mechanisms which might impact the thoughts on how/why it happens and what things might help w/ symptoms.

i think the exercise was useful, and i came up with a few ways you could test the explanation and maybe different approaches to treatment (I didn’t find any existing research on this sort of thing, but didn’t look hard, either).

the core idea is that the cycles of conjecture and criticism in the brain responsible for picking what we do/say/express/whatever are failing in some particular way, like misinterpretations of feedback signals for making neuronal connections / circuits stronger or weaker. i think there are other possible explanatory-mechanisms that would provide different things we could test (and different implications for TS patients).

one idea for treatment i came up with was based on the idea that feedback signals were inverted (something more complex might be going wrong but this is easier to test for). the test is to encourage tics - particularly in a way that translates to a “good” feedback signal in the brain. I don’t know how well behavioural feedback (like normal positive/negative reinforcement) translates to that deeper sort of feedback.

FI Post (it’s better expressed in this section and the ‘idea’ subsection than anywhere else)

i’m making this post because

i used some epistemic ideas i’d learnt recently to help figure out the explanation and the experiment
- i actually came up with an experiment. if you listen to the audio that’s my goal when i start recording, so i consider this experience a success regardless of how good the idea is (provided the experiment makes sense, ofc)
the idea uses other ideas from BoI and ET about how learning and ideas in the brain work
- FYI it also uses some preexisting knowledge i have about psychology / neurology
i think it’s an idea most psychologists would reject
it doesn’t seem to be contradicted by some cursory research
i think this is interesting and might be a good example of how to use philosophy practically. i mean particularly if this has any element of truth to it, that would be like a legit breakthrough AFAIK in TS research (i couldn’t find anything close to an explanation for it besides “chemical imbalance” which AFICT is just academese for NFI).
i couldn’t find any info on whether this had been thought of or tried before (it’s a bit hard to search for, though)
maybe it (the post) leads to something ¯_(ツ)_/¯

i am interested in feedback on this idea (and anything/everything else in this post), but i don’t expect it. this is definitely something where i don’t have much preexisting knowledge so errors are likely but EC might be hard (for this topic). i’m mostly posting this because it can be useful even if i’m wrong (like i think i did a decent job of exploring the idea; i knew there was a tree, i descended various branches and tried to cycle through them, i successfully figured out a way to test the idea without a null hypothesis or a competing explanation (yay!), etc)

(actually, I am always interested in feedback re: the quality / style / form / purpose / etc of my posts to FI, so that’s like a general background thing i do want. that said, i also don’t expect it)

as a general comment: i can’t really take it too much further and i’m not interested in doing so (like, that would likely mean becoming a full time researcher or something), so i probably won’t work on it much more unless something important occurs to me.

nomenclature: tourette’s = tourette’s syndrome = TS

the rest of this post is the idea itself, any other notes i wanted to add, and a link to the post on my fi site

i recorded about 45 min of audio of me talking through this idea the other night; audio and transcript available: https://xertrov.github.io/fi/pub-drafts/how-do-you-test-a-partial-explanation-of-tourettes/

idea

our bodies doing meaningful stuff in the world requires an idea (particularly using implicit knowledge, and it can be unconscious)
observation: ppl with tourette’s have meaningful and complete tics. verbal tics are a good example (sometimes a single tic can be both physical and verbal, too).
- verbal tics as an example: ppl with TS will say complete ideas, even if they’re short or fragmented.
- how can an idea be complete and fragmented? you know how you’ll pause in speech, and you think for a second then say another bunch of words? each instance of speech - even if it’s a partial sentence - is a complete idea in your brain. the difference is the speech is communicating explicit knowledge, but the idea that causes to make physical movements is based on implicit knowledge. those two types of knowledge don’t need to be the same thing, so you can have complete implicit ideas which correspond to partial explicit ideas. note: it makes sense for these two types to often almost fully overlap b/c they’re more efficient, particularly when you take stuff like neuroplasticity into account.
there’s also like complete ideas from other things (like repeating lines from a video game character) that can be picked up from environmental sources
here’s sweet anita (a streamer with TS) answering ‘yes’ w/ details to the q “do the words ever speak the truth?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfHJUPrahkY&feature=youtu.be&t=110
- one example she gives is being in a public bathroom and saying aloud “I can hear you shitting” – It’s a complete idea
there’s a process of conjecture and criticism / evolution used in the brain for idea generation
idea generation using C&C/evolution means there must be an elimination process involved somewhere which filters out all but one idea. ‘all but one’ b/c you can’t move your arm in two directions at once, etc.
- i go into some details about queues/locks in the audio/transcript but i’m not sure it’s relevant here
if there’s an elimination process there must be signals and feedback mechanism involved
- one thing that I’m not sure about is whether the C&C process needs to happen in each thought-generation-instance. like feedback and refinement of neuronal networks can happen over many ideas (well, the networks definitely are modified over many ideas), but there’s no requirement any iteration happens generating each idea. from a systems point of view i’m not sure if the benefits would outweigh the cost
both filters and feedback could be going wrong and both could independently explain (at least some things about) TS
- the reason i think these two things particularly are potential causes is b/c they can work at the level of emergence of complete ideas. granted, we don’t know how ideas are encoded in the brain, but it seems reasonable that individual neurons can play a role in both cases (and in idea generation) which means we can’t rule out that a corruption at these points could let unintended behaviours through, which, if they win the competition for the idea that is eventually expressed, would explain at least some tics. (note: i don’t know of an exhaustive list of tics but that could be used to sanity-check this)
- more detail about this in the audio/transcript
i focus on feedback in the audio/transcript (note: filters acting up can explain it too):
- feedback signals could be complex but i don’t think too much about those cases b/c they’re harder to test for
- a simpler case is feedback signals that are on a spectrum like -1,0,1; bad feedback and good feedback are mutually exclusive (gets complex otherwise)
feedback / filter stuff could be going wrong on a neuron by neuron basis
- a curious feature of TS that doesn’t criticise this is the idea of like themes in ppl’s tics; particularly: the same neurons are affected over many tics, so it seems reasonable to look for explanations that operate on a compatible basis.

so, i think that’s all we need to suggest: (the following paragraph is copy pasted from my post to my fi site)

audio recording

anyway, two bits of audio and a transcript are below; the original recording and a cut down version where longer silences are shortened and repeated/filler words are cut out. there are two versions because i was experimenting with descript.com and there are some features to cut stuff out.

cut down version:

original:

transcript

Okay. So thinking about Tourette’s, there’s an idea that might explain it and I’m wondering, how can we come up with a way to experiment? Can’t an experiment about this, given that we don’t know all the details. so the idea is basically that, okay. first let’s talk about traits. So Tourette’s is this condition where there are uncontrolled behavior and verbalizations that people make and they’re involuntary. It seems like they can last reasonable periods of time. almost as though someone is like changing personality for a little bit or something for a complete thought. And then once that’s over. Even though the thought might be like, not what we’d lump as a thought, but it seems like it’s a, it’s one sort of expression continuously.

so I’m not exactly sure what will, what that is expressing. But it seems like there could be something happening in the brain where like it’s a complete idea. There’s a continuity to it. It’s like a complete expression of something. So the idea that I had that sort of explains it is that a , like learning and things like that idea generation is a cycle of conjecture and criticism.

it’s an evolutionary process, like bad ideas that thrown out and good ideas kept around this possibly some sort of iterative process, but at the very least, there’s an elimination process. And so if I guess we do this all the time, we will. like anytime we think about stuff, like whether what to say, like what I’m, when I’m trying to come up with what I say next, my brain is coming up with a whole bunch.

It’s just stuff. And it’s letting me know about the good stuff. And that’s when it becomes conscious and I speak it. It’s worth reflecting a bit here. I think about the idea that we don’t really like. When, before we do something, we’ve only got like a really implicit idea of what it is that we’re going to do.

Like it’s a really innate idea. It’s not it’s hard to put into words before you act it out sort of thing. you almost a bit of your mind finds out about it after it happens. I don’t think that’s particularly surprising because, if like reaction time and things are important than, it’s reasonable that like evolution would have selected for.

I like doing both at once or prioritizing the one that like saves your life and being conscious about stuff doesn’t typically save your life. if it does, then it’s likely that it wasn’t under time pressure. you had a long time to think about it, in which case prioritizing the action doesn’t matter and prioritizing the thought doesn’t matter or the conscious experience of it.

so that can just happen whenever, but it seems likely that evolution would select for acting out beforehand. While, I think it’s possible to influence this cycle by doing things like trying to like, be more mindful of things or whatever else. or thinking about like morality and having some moral realizations that then change, like deep ideas within you. There’s like a relationship there. It’s not necessarily immediate, but, I think this is one of the reasons that we feel bad is so we can have that feedback cycle about stuff there. which is also why you shouldn’t feel bad for stuff that you did.

That was bad. if you know that it was bad and you understand that and whatever else like that snow problem that has been sold provided that you don’t do that again. And so you don’t need to feel bad for things of that nature, because you’re not going to repeat that mistake. I don’t know how this interacts with crime, but that doesn’t matter right now.

If we’re going through an evolutionary cycle of generating ideas or some kind of elimination cycle where we come up with many possibilities, eliminate bad ones, and then the ones that are good, get acted out. This is happening for a lot more than what we’re going to be thinking about thing.

it’s for me right now, it’s happening for I don’t know if breathing is involved, that’s a automatic sort of thing. autonomic, I think it’s called, but I’m walking around. I’m holding a gloss. I’m I actually like focusing on when to breathe a little bit in terms of the speech. I’m casting my eyes around.

So I’m deciding what to look at. At some level. When I started recording, I was getting a thing out of the microwave. so all of this sort of there’s lots and lots of ways that we must be thinking about what to do and then controlling things without being conscious of it. So it’s not that it’s a conscious intent, but it’s somehow lines up with our goals anyway.

and I think that’s the sort of differences that we have, like this implicit knowledge, which may be another thing to call that as like subconscious. I’m not sure. and then we have like explicit knowledge, which is the stuff that we can actually reason about and talk. I’m moving ideas from implicit to explicit knowledge as I’m describing this and in doing so, like I have an implicit idea about what to do in terms of moving my mouth and, all of that sort of jazz, these ideas that I’m expressing must be fairly consistent.

They must be, the, they have a consistency. Do you have a many independent actions? There’s lots of signals going out and yet there is a consistency. So the brain must have some, mechanism for preventing like conflicting signals. I think this mechanism in the case of Tourette’s has maintained by the way.

so the conflicting signals, they, I know I’m not sure how they’re structured, but it’s definitely possible like given the structure of the brain. I don’t think there’s a good reason to leave. That’s not possible. that, lots of things are happening in terms of different parts of the brain and deciding what we do, things for moving legs and things for turning words into sounds and, things for, figuring out where one’s breathing fits into the sentence.

You could, that last one you could have with a system that’s just got a really high cadence so that when I stop saying something and there’s no more instructions queued up for my larynx. then the like breathing thing kicks in and it’s I’m taking priority now. So you don’t need any particular metric for that.

it doesn’t have to be part of the same idea set as the words, you just have to have a queuing system. it’s natural that you’d have a queuing system by the way. and there’s a lot of there’s many things that might not be compatible to do at the same time. and we it’s demonstrable that people have trouble with doing two things at once.

rubbing your tummy and patting your head. if you practice it’s easy. but, it’s not easy to do intuitively and I think that’s, people tend to swap between them sort of thing. Like multitasking when you’re swapping between lots of different stuff, you’re not doing much, you’re not really paralyzing things.

that fits with this sort of queuing idea or the, the consistent lump of ideas idea. it makes sense as well with something like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. you don’t, your brain doesn’t have a way to express one consistent idea about doing both at the same time. maybe if you concentrate really hard, you could do it, but, in general, people have a lot of trouble with that, but practice makes it easy, right?

So from a neuroplasticity point of view, your like, there are sorry, guts that connect, these things that happen at the same time, and those circuits are pretty weak if you don’t practice, but once you start practicing, you start firing those circuits. And they get stronger. they’re the like thresholds get lower, that sort of thing so that the neurons fire more easily, or don’t depending on what they do, who knows, but, the thresholds change to allow the behavior that we’re trying to like express, like patting a head and rubbing your tummy, the neurons change to increase the likelihood of that connection succeeding.

that’s one way to look at it or they are lower the threshold for that. A circuit sort of being dominant in a network. so that if there’s like multiple ideas that can come out and there’s these signals coming into one neuron say that decides how your arms are gonna move. there’s like a new sort of like input there, or, collection of inputs across a big sort of collection of neurons.

I don’t know how they would work. but whatever it is, this like different inputs to. this bit that, ultimately it’s going to play a role in doing that, that works both to coordinate and there’s a locking mechanism for accusing stuff. also we don’t, that’s one of the things we don’t need a queue, we only need a lock.

And then if you have a behavior that is like in the queue, but high priority, then that’s like just having a lock, but checking really often, and trying to get it all the time. And then if you have a thing that’s low priority, like the words that I’m going to speak to, competitive breathing, they’re checking less frequently, because they don’t want to take priority.

and so it’s rare and particularly the more you practice, the better, the sort of things either fall into synchronization or, how to extend, the ability of your like lung checking algorithm or like lung and voice checking algorithm to Extend that further into the future. So it’s better able to predict when to do it or that, there’s some, these two networks are firing and, now you’re making connections between them then synchronize the two algorithms.

that’s one of the things is you don’t actually need a synchronization mechanism. You don’t need a centralized point. If all the things that will like conflict, if they can talk to each other, like they don’t need to have a universal lock if they can. Talk to all of the other algorithms that are likely to happen around that time.

if you have a really high success rate for that, like 99.9%, then you’re going to one, like it’s only one in a thousand times that you’re going to have some kind of issue. Most of the time, that’s not even going to be noticeable because the ideas aren’t going to matter too much when there’s some sort of issue.

But, some of the time you might have this, particularly in like stressful and your circumstances are things where different circuits are connecting for the first time. you might notice like something like freezing, it would be one reaction. So that sort of like consistent with one of the things we see, like a dissidence, like where you’re unable to act, or you need to think on it or things like that.

that seems logical. So the idea is that there’s this elimination cycle, this cycle of conjection criticism, when we’re deciding everything, we’re going to do ideas, our units, they are. Consistent packets, with like innocence, beginnings, and ends and stuff like that. they could be made up of sub ideas.

Like obviously the idea that I’m going to say particular words is, like something that can include multiple breathing actions, for example. But I might not feel like I finished the idea until I’ve stopped saying the words. I think this might have some kind of resemblance to speech in the different pauses that we take, where I figured out the next words that I’m going to say, but only up to a point, and then I can stop thinking about the next words and come to something inclusion.

And then I talk fast until they’re done. and I don’t want to stop until they’re done. I’m much more happy to stop in the natural pauses that I’m taking. I think because my brain is ready to be distracted then, but when I’m doing something, it’s important to me to finish that. So my brain doesn’t want to be distracted.

It dislikes that sort of thing. so yeah. yeah. Another thing to occur to me just now is remembering back to the times that like Jordan Peterson has talked about, like the shadow self or whatever it’s called in like uni union psychology. we all have these like negative or dark thoughts or whatever else that most of the time we disregard many, most of the time we don’t notice them.

They’re just like away. But sometimes we have like moments where we think about those things. it could even not even be like a, a desire at all. Just like a realization that if you’re like chopping wood with someone that like, you have an accent, if you just like, swung 90 degrees in the other direction, you could kill them or something like that.

like that would be that sort of thing where it’s not anything that you’re going to act on now. I don’t think these are the thoughts that people with Tourette’s are acting on. I suspect that, they would seem more malevolent if that were the case. but there are also ideas that are so they’re still consistent, but there’s stuff that we’re very, yeah.

You strongly opposed her. So if we think about the idea of Tourette’s, one of the features of it is that it can degrade, like the condition, like people with the condition can get. Yeah. That means that presumably there’s like a filter that’s allowing other things through that is becoming increasingly wide, like with physical ticks, that means that, they go from more named things that have little consequence, to like increasingly violent or hitting themselves or lashing out at like physical objects and whatever else.

in the case of verbal ticks, like your. Speech becomes like less controlled. it comes about topics that you wouldn’t normally say. often, the swearing is one thing like with Tourettes that are probably requires a bit of thought, as to why that’s a particular feature. Does it have anything to do with this?

because one thing that I don’t have an explanation for yet, I think is the, themes of, it seems like things that people say have themes. They can be of like particular natures or particular subjects. I guess one thing that could be there is that we have as a way to organize ideas so that I can use different filters for talking about different things.

naturally subjects have different dependencies and things anyway. but this makes a lot of sense for. cultural stuff where someone can be rational in an area of study, but irrational in the rest of their life. like I think that, yeah, people are bad at generalizing critical thought, but often they’re not too bad in one area.

Like they can be quite skilled at knowing about a thing, but their general thinking patterns. Aren’t great. if we have these sorts of the, if the brain has this ability. To innately, like categorize stuff in a bit of an arbitrary way where it’s not, necessarily the categories we would choose, like subjects like biology and physics and whatever else.

but can be anything the brain wants, like a neural network could, if the brain can do that, then it’s feasible or it’s it seems like some filters could be better than others. That sort of makes sense. And if we were to say that like particular, I’m not sure how it work, like the particular type of filters or, just randomly different filters.

Sort of end up getting lowered artificially, like the brain is not able to throw out those ideas. And so they come to the fore and then only once the idea is expressed, does the conscious mind really have a chance to, grab that lock back to express the next idea? And the more if someone was like swearing, for example, the more heinous things they said, the more alarm might be generated in a different area brain that like triggers, an algorithm that really wants to take that back.

that locked back. It really wants to finish off the idea. and that’s when people, do something like covering their mouth with their hand or whatever in shock at what they’ve just said. so things like that, I think this is all consistent. so if these, if this is the case, Then how could we build an experiment such that we could determine if this is true or not?

okay. So we need a, an ultimate theory. there’s no, what’s the alternative hypothesis? what are our goals? it’s hard to know what our goals are without comparison to something, because. we obviously have the goal. If we’re doing this, we have the goal of figuring out what, figuring out, whether our idea is, does it have any explanatory power, I guess is the question?

because I was going to say, is it true? But. everything’s a misconception, what’s the break, the point that we choose or what’s the threshold that makes this idea okay. Or good enough to work with or whatever else. and it really, if we’re talking about a condition that afflicts people, then we want to further something either.

We want to further the ability of these people to control things that they can’t, because that’s bad. so it’s good to. increase their control or, we want to contribute to, like a related field or like a dependency or something like that. So one of the things here is that this is, like what I’ve just described, I think is, not a bad representation of some peoples or like maybe the, the consequences of some people’s ideas about, the mind, Obviously stuff like conjection criticism is heavily influenced by AFI.

does this make any contributions to the like other people’s ideas? Is this useful for them in some way? what it does do is it describes the structure or like it describes various structures or constraints on structures in the brain. and it talks about how ideas work. So what this might do is under the right conditions, Tourette’s could play a constraining role on theories of consciousness, or theories of mind, thing, AI, stuff like that, this, or at least, constraints on one way of doing it.

the way that it works in people, I need to take a. A second quench my throat.

Okay. So it can constrain other ideas. It’s an explanation that’s compatible with some kind of fundamental description that, would maybe not be compatible with other fundamental descriptions. In terms of helping people Tourette’s. so I don’t think it does directly because these are things that we don’t know how to control.

We don’t have a theory of what these structures are or how the idea generation algorithm works or how the idea elimination algorithm works, or whether there’s a cycle there or whether the cycle is between ideas, not in the generation of each idea. like I could see a thing where You have increasingly high, eroticism in ideas sort of thing, as you get more specific.

So you get like these weird fragments of ideas, And neurons represent these weird fragments of ideas. I don’t know how they’re encoded, but we can leave that for the minute. Let’s say that we have these fragments of ideas and certain combinations come together to make a coherent idea. this might imply that the encoding of.

Symbols or explanations and ideas and things in the brain has some kind of universality to them that there is something special about the way that ideas are encoded. Like ideas are encoded in words in English, but, analyzing that is like the computers, having a particular advantage, doing that. In fact, I’d say they have a strong disadvantage analyzing words.

People are much better at the computers. So information and X, Y like explanation, or explanatory information is encoded in a way that we don’t really know how it works, but we might be able to determine some of its properties. So if we have these neurons that are representing like ideas, then when there’s a request for ideas, how does an idea like generate to begin with.

it can’t be just random sparks. I once thought that might be the case. Like just if you have random static happening in the background, that could be run through filters and stuff to essentially produce something meaningful. And that might still be the case, but I’m not sure that’s really what’s happening here.

I’ve been talking about this idea now for some time in a consistent manner, or I hope it’s consistent at least. and, that And miss doesn’t really let that happen very easily. it means that I would have to have some sort of active control over a lifetime filters and stuff to make the randomness go where I wanted it to, that could happen over a longer cycle than, than a request for an idea though.

if we say that ideas are generated because they’re like pinged for there’s a request that’s sent for give me a next idea about, the way that ideas might be encoded in the brain. Like where does it go? I guess you could, follow the reverse of the fragments. if the fragments were like lenses or prisons or stuff, prisons is maybe better because they take in a different wavelengths and then combine them into some weird, somewhat unpredictable output, wave length or weight instead of wavelengths that then correspond to, which particular signups is triggered and stuff like that.

so a request could be. The inverse of a, if you triggered these neurons, then the path back up the other way, like in the other direction would lead you to the idea of the idea, something like that. that’s what a request is, whereas the output is different. So why wouldn’t you just have everything in like synchronization?

Where the request is made and it goes through a whole bunch of neurons that then combine it to the output, which sort of makes sense. So our ideas based on request, it must be some request method because we respond to the environment. like when a thing happens, we see a thing then, my brain is figuring out that it’s a gorilla running towards me or something, or a lion, then that’s going to.

Trigger particular thoughts in response. so those, those are not requests, particularly. I’m going to have some ability to do, to request because we make requests, like consciously it’s can you please think about a pink elephant and suddenly you think about pink elephants, you can also just think to think about the problems in your life or whatever else, how do I solve this legal problem or something?

so you must be able to request ideas, but maybe that’s just a emergent, on top of. what do you call it? Response? Like a request can look like a response. So I think we only need response. that makes sense. If we only need response, then Tourette’s, circuits that would not normally be activated, are being activated.

there must be a lack of a feedback mechanism in order to quell those activations. alternatively, their feedback mechanism is working fine. But it does not, end up something that goes wrong between the giving of the feedback and the adjustment. So it might be an adjustment problem. Adjustment sounds like a chemical operation in the brain though and chemical operations.

typically I imagine that they’re fairly consistent, unless certain neurons with there’s a genetic. Thing that means that they have different chemistry, like maybe there’s, maybe it flips a gene that, that, determines whether it gets stronger or weaker in response to, in response to a signal, like a feedback signal, that could possibly explain it.

That would explain the deterioration. have we need a bit of a spectrum because some people don’t seem to deteriorate or they, They don’t get worse. I don’t know if there are examples of people with unpredictable themes. if the themes are consistent, then it means the same neurons are affected.

in terms of what other networks we’re trying to think of or something like that. there’s a consistency there, but if the themes are not affected or sorry, if the themes are not consistent, then it can mean that this is happening sporadically between different neurons. Like it’s happening in different places.

Now, I think. The themes are consistent. Like it seems like violence is one, swearing is one, there’s rudeness, like talking about sex, making lewd comments about the other person, which I guess is a borderline, both. those seem like themes. I don’t know about other cases. so we could look into the other cases and find out if there’s anything there.

If they are thematic, then same neurons are affected. The same neurons are affected. It must be a localized cause or the explanation for why it’s happening has to identify the neurons for some reason. So a gene flipping seems possible if it’s at a neuronal level, because, it would mean a persistent change in that neuron.

I don’t think neurons replicate really or if they do, it’s like replacement, it’s not It’s not like massive tissue growth. it’s rather like neural atrophy is like one of the things I think that happens from babies to, I don’t know, young adults, like a lot of the early years of life are killing, connections between neurons not making them.

but that’s a refinement process. Like it makes sense that it’s easier to grow everything strong and then cut it down then to grow everything a week and then try and make it strong. it’s also possible possibly the case that, negative feedback to reduce neurons is much easier than positive feedback.

this would correspond with eliminating very harmful habits, more easily than, I’m not talking about like alcoholism. stabbing yourself in the foot or something. yeah, making actions stop happening is probably easier than making actions happen. you need more focus to try and make actions happen.

You don’t know what the circuits are in advance. So you’ve got a process of trying to find out what those are, through like practice and whatever else. so what’s happening is that there are some strong circuits where everything starts out strong. So we still need to talk about, degradation in this context, because that would suggest that.

Captions are getting stronger, not weaker. but if we start out strong and we get weaker and some things that we would expect people to control, they, the feedback mechanism doesn’t work. That means that they, they must, they don’t need to be reacting the opposite direction. they just need to not respond if they don’t respond, then, they.

Will not get weaker, they don’t get weaker. Then those actions will still happen even though, there’s like a feedback circuit that’s trying to make them not happen. in the case of deterioration, one thing that might be bad for people with Tourette’s is over active feedback. If someone with Tourette’s.

Is overly critical of themselves. They might have lots of strong networks that aren’t being like aren’t being made weaker, but then if they accidentally make the good circuits weaker, then it makes the negative behavior stronger, in like proportion. So particularly if there’s a way to combine ideas so that you can mix ideas in the brain, I don’t know how that would work.

it makes sense that there is some sort of aspect of this because we’ve got, Oh, we’ve got to be generalized. As opposed to running off scripts, scripts are good because they’re very, they’re binary, right? It’s, you’re doing a script or you’re not, behavioral scripts. but people don’t have that.

we do have like patents and things like that, but, there’s no like scripts, the whole like mirror neurons and whatever else. And. being able to like use tools without understanding them sort of thing. Like people are different like that. So maybe we do have scripts, but we also have this other stuff.

with the other stuff, if we can do the other stuff, we must be able to mix and match in a way that script’s can’t, I don’t know how that works, but if we can mix and match, then that means we should be able to like, do something like becoming increasingly violent is a reasonable, like potential outcome of that.

which matches at least one sort of. I don’t know a small number of Tourette’s cases type thing.

what that would suggest in terms of therapy is that, that when, if it’s, if there’s a, if there’s a way that these people suffering it are being made to feel worse about themselves or doing that themselves or other people are doing it, or there’s a cycle. If there’s a feedback loop, It’s overactive, then they need to cut that as soon as possible.

there’s no point applying more bad feedback if that’s the problem, like the feedback system is not working well enough to be a dominant system in this way. there’s a question about positive feedback systems. If they, if it’s the case that a. if it’s the case that a particular behavior, like if, sorry, if it’s the case that a neuron responds to feedback, in the, in, along a spectrum, like if you can send both positive and negative feedback at the same time, this might be problematic, but if it’s a spectrum, like the pH of something, or I dunno what it would be, at the atomic level, you’ve got to have some kind of I guess you’ve got voltage potentials, but that’s pretty high up, right?

Like you need some chemic chemistry stuff at some point and that’s pretty that’s yes, no, it’s operational all the time. you can’t have half an Adam. so the signal thing, maybe there’s a way of communicating, where they’ve made like weather, there’s multiple, if there was a different type of group hanging off the end of an atom, and that could be a particular types of things, you could have, like alcohols have the, of a hydrocarbon type thing.

if you could have something like that, where you could have an Ohr, you could have I don’t know what a replacement function is. another sort of equivalent element. In there. maybe it has a slight different number of electrons and it’s like of a similar weight. or maybe it’s like upper down the periodic table, but you have something like that where there’s multiple options, then you really only need like stronger, neutral, weaker sort of thing.

Like it’s like neutral is a, I mean you could have, if you said I didn’t use the, this connection, so that was the feedback then that would probably be the week or right. otherwise but neutral seems reasonable. One thing that might happen is that, is a neuron might, reverse this thing.

reversing, it seems maybe difficult because, you need some kind of like spectrum or something like you want to be able to flip one thing and have it be reversed. And I’m not sure if you could do that, but you could definitely have it just respond the wrong way to one of them. so maybe there are different types of Tourette’s where.

they respond, they, the bad response to the signals is, like of a particular sort of nature. one of them might be that it misinterprets negative signals, and one of them might be misinterprets, positive signals or something like that. if you diminish all the positive circuits, then I think you’d see a worst case in the scheme of things.

like you’d have more chaotic behavior. whereas if you didn’t have bad feedback, in certain areas then particular like things connected to particular neurons would end up being fired more readily, or more often than they should. and you wouldn’t be able to turn it off. There might be, it might be something in that in terms of, the experience that, folk with turrets have, So we’ve talked about the bits of feedback, how that can work and not work. we’ve there was something that we didn’t talk about before, whether the feedback system doesn’t work or not. So we talked about whether the result of the feedback. Was interpreted either way, but not whether the feedback system worked or not.

is the feedback system not working just the same thing? is it just, are we just moving around where the misinterpret interpretation of a signal happens? I’m not sure.

One thing that has occurred to me is that we were asking about our goals earlier and we didn’t really. no, it was to aid the field. It was to make some advantage. And we were answering the question in the tree. what does it mean? What could it mean? What benefits could it have for people with threats?

One of the things, I don’t know if this has been tried, but a research Avenue that comes out of this line of reasoning is positively encouraging the behavior that is not designed. if the. condition is such that the feedback mechanism is flipped. Is it possible to encourage that behavior and have it be diminished?

I that’s a tricky thing. I don’t know if anyone’s done that because I imagine that it would be quite hard to actually convince someone to do that. Oh, Hey, I’m going to take your child. Who’s becoming increasingly violent and I’m going to encourage them when they’re violent. that seems like a dangerous thing.

I don’t know how you get past an ethics board with that, because if you’re wrong, you might like to help them deteriorate really quickly. Cause that’s got like a potentially really bad negative side effect. Though, of course you could just try it with something that’s, like something that’s easier, or something that’s less harmful.

So if someone had like a tick where they like blinked, like with one eye, like winked, sorry, that’s what it’s called. And you, gave them a thing. Every time they did that, like a physical reward, would that help if they tried to do it, would it help if they like, really actually tried to redo the tick consciously, that would be one way to maybe test it.

If they just tried to do the tick consciously, you don’t need a researcher to do it. the person who’s affected is obviously conscious too. They can make a decision on their own. If they try to do it, I don’t know how that works with vocal ticks, but with physical ticks, that might be okay.

the Twitch streamer who has Tourette’s, or at least why, I don’t know how many there are. but there’s a famous guy. I need Anita, Sweden here. she is reward somewhat for her condition. How would that play into it? Would, So she could still be really, she could still not like the behavior, like she, she physically shows like remorse or regret or something like that.

Hesitancy, she’s definitely not still encouraging the paper. So even though like her personality and I presume that she like makes a fair bit of money on Twitch. so it’s presumably her livelihood. that doesn’t mean that it’s encouraged though. Like she encourages it. She can still just, have a decent attitude about life.

And, so she doesn’t need to be adding to those things because there’s, there might be this case, If, if her Tourette’s got better, then it might indicate, it could be in support if she was like, encouraging if there was like positive feedback within the brain, but I don’t know if that’s really the case.

That’s still a bit of a stretch. yeah, Filters. they’re not good. Or they’ve got like dials that are turned or something or other feedback’s not working or not taking effect somehow happens. I’m seeking the neurons. I think it definitely happens in particular neurons because of the theme stuff though. We’d need to do more research, maybe there’s things about treatment.

I think it’s unlikely that it particularly helps. The consciousness front, unless, it’s like, if this theory turns out to have a lot of explanatory power or leads to something that has a lot of explanatory power, it’s not like it does right now. I think, then it would, like potentially add, it might eliminate some possibilities of how minds work.

I don’t think it would do significant work in this regard. I don’t think I would like. Disprove Beijing ism is like a thing. and that seems like it’s, it’s a much deeper problem because Beijing ism sort of mimics, like analog neurons in some ways, like my, thresholds and probabilities and stuff like that, being, having some relationship there.

So I think that’s a, that’s my work, but. But I don’t know what the current theories of consciousness off, so that’s a different matter. okay. Anyway, I think I’m pretty much explore that idea. I was quite happy that I was able to talk in what I feel like is a fairly coherent way. I’m not sure how can I hear and it’ll be listening back, but it’s definitely, I feel like I was failing on topic and I didn’t, I explored avenues, but I didn’t go down every Avenue too far.

When it was like going to be irrelevant. I think I did a decent job of exploring the tree. So you still didn’t answer the question like we could, we came up with some things that might help testing it, but, we need more to know exactly how they would be implemented, testing. It is when we came up with some ways to.

To eliminate it, but, we can probably come up with better ways if we know more about other theories for how Tourette’s works or other theories of learning, consciousness, idea, generation, that sort of thing. Still no comparison, but we do know about one thing we could try and test an aspect of it. I guess that’s it is, we don’t have a null hypothesis, but we’ve come up with a way that this could be inconsistent with reality. So there is a way to count. We criticism for something in isolation.

It’s not the case that. it’s not the case that ideas are in isolation. They’re never in isolation. And, it’s not the case that we need a full alternate theory to know whether an idea is wrong. Now, of course that’s the case because hard to very sort of stuff. I don’t know a better way of referring to that by shorthand.

because I think hard to various describing the lack of the ability to do a certain technique. So that’s how I think about it is not as, an idea of support, like whether something is easy to, that some ideas are easier and more malleable than other sort of thing like clay, but rather, is there a downside to applying sorts of various techniques to idea generation, because if you can apply these techniques of idea generation, then it shows a sort of arbitrariness, I don’t know how that’s an interesting idea.

yes, my philosophy has stuff about gold generation and things, but what about like anti gold generation? or not is an anti goals or is it like an anti generation? No, it’s not an intergeneration. You’re generating things, but you’re generating bad things. So it’s Yeah, that’d be like auntie goals or something or other, like anti ideas, anti explanations, anti explanations doesn’t sound very like NTID anti goals can just be like bad stuff, but anti explanations are weird. It’s really explanations that conflict with one another, but a not testable is that maybe it.

No, because we can come up with like infinite regresses of testability, where they just have different ways of testing them or different requirements on the test.

definitely that covers the Pacific any stuff? No, but that is testable. It’s just not testable by the gods. If the thing you’re changing about the theory is not the object of the testing, then

that’s bad with the Pacific he missed what’s the object of the testing. The object of the testing is like in the first version, like the two hemispheres, right? You change Stephanie to take a walk. and now the old test. Is like a passes, but, we might have a new test. so when would, when we’re testing, we have to continually change the test because, it’s not, what would be the alternative?

the thing that’s being changed cannot be directly measured with the Pacific. Anything. I need more examples of bad ideas and bad ideas, generation, easy to vary stuff.

one of the things is nonsequitors are a common thing, right? because you can always just replace it with different nonsequitors. It was just that the thing being changed is obviously not the object of the testing because it’s a new thing every time. no. Then it is the object.

The testing potentially like the seasons are due to the fact that it’s like sun every 24 hours. And then I look outside and it’s not sun. so all the sums up every 24 hours. so I, I changed something, so the sun is different. but I’m not changing. My prediction about what goes on outside. No, I am changing.

What goes my prediction about what goes on that side. What’s the object of the testing objects. The testing is light. I’m not changing something about the light. I’m changing something about the explanation, more foundationally to have a flow and effect. So bad ideas have It’s a much harder problem. Alright. Anyway, I’m done exploring that. let’s go back to bar.

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