Flowing with Karl Friston, Wrestling & Rick Rubin: As A Practice #13

This week's summary is about FLOW and Active Inference. Some thoughts about my conversation on the process of life with a brain scientist who models it.

Though this might be the first time Rick Rubin, pro wrestling, and Karl Friston have been mentioned in the same article, chances are you already know at least one of them. Still, here’s a quick recap:

Karl Friston has been ranked (by A.I.) as the most influential neuroscientist in the world, called a genius by WIRED magazine, and is one of the most cited of living scientists. He was also the guest on last week’s episode of Love and Philosophy.

Rick Rubin is a music producer and co-founder of Def Jam records. Some of you may have heard of him when he produced the American Recordings record for Johnny Cash, but he’s worked with many stars of the music business.

Professional wrestling is (to quote Wikipedia) a form of athletic theatre centered around mock combat and based on the premise that performers are competitive wrestlers. It is a form of fighting that is also staged, a delicate balance of soap opera-style physical combat.

What do all these have in common?

In two words: contradiction and flow.

The conversation I had with Karl that posted last week, and a conversation I heard with Rick Rubin where he discusses the metaphor of wrestling, illustrate the idea of ‘the flow that holds contradiction’—the role polarities play in our lives, and how they are part of a larger process that does not need that polarity.

We’re all doing our best, making our way. We each have our own unique path and those paths are part of a shared process. This process, one that cannot be measured but that we exist to share, comes to us in some lucky moments as an experience of flow, but often that flow is noticed or ‘relaxed into’ through what might at first seem like contradiction.

This pattern is what Karl and I discuss on different levels. Though he mostly comes at it on the level of mathematics and physics, it is a pattern we might notice in many places these days. More and more people are expressing this pattern (‘the flow that is an embrace of contradiction’) through their work and creativity. From our music to our physics, different paths might resonate and lead into a similar pattern, regardless where we end up. This might be called “a new way of thinking” but it is not actually ‘new’—it is part of some of our oldest philosophical concepts. Still, what might be different is how many of us are feeling it and patterning with it at once.

And what is this way of thinking?

It is basically the practice of holding what seem like mutually contradictory notions in mind at once and not only maintaining the ability to function, but finding it helps us function even better. This can come through many different practices, and this is also the thread that runs through the conversation Karl and I have about flow, energy and entropy. Or at least you can find it there, if you look for it.

❤️ An Unusual Example

Many people find the work Karl Friston is doing in neuroscience to be difficult and hard to grasp—not only people outside of neuroscience but also people within. I’ll offer a reference list below for those who want to go deeply into the beauty of that difficulty and I’ll also write here about some of the broader terms.

Still, since these very scientific and mathematical subjects can be hard to grasp and often require a large reading list, rather than try and explain them all through the usual jargon in this summary, I’d like to offer some more everyday examples.

This is where Rick Rubin and wrestling come in: The day after Episode 44 of Love and Philosophy posted, I happened to hear Rick Rubin talk with Krista Tippet on the On Being Podcast. It struck me as I was listening that they were discussing some of the same themes Karl and I had been discussing, though in a very different form.

Throughout the conversation, in numerous ways, Rubin expresses this overall idea of life as the ways we make and our ability to go with the flow of it without passivity. He and Krista discuss how this both connects us and sets us apart.

Just one example: Rubin discusses how some of the most famous producers in the business have often tried to give him advice, but that (no matter how good that advice is or how much he appreciates it), it will never apply totally to him, because he’s just had a different path in life. It helps to hear the advice, but to trust his own movement.

In another part of the conversation, Tippett brings up something Rubin writes about in his book—namely, how pro wrestling (which he loves) strikes him as a helpful metaphor and way of thinking about life.

“Wrestling is…,” he says,

“…a unique American art form where like ballet, there’s a physical performance going on and it’s often good versus evil in these stories. And unlike, let’s say, boxing, the two performers in the ring who are opposing each other are working together to put on the best show that they can. No one is trying to hurt anybody else. As a matter of fact, they’re trying to protect each other. That’s their job, is to protect the other person in the ring…

He goes on to say that wrestling is a ‘fake sport’ but that it is also “the closest thing to what reality is…more so than the news or a documentary or any of the things that we accept as this is what’s really happening” by which he means that because the sport is false on purpose, it is also giving us something true and authentic, not unlike what happens when we read a great novel or listen to a transformative piece of music.

What does this have to do with flow? Well, when pro wrestling (or a novel, or a film, or just about anything else we create) is really working, it is working because it has found the “sweet spot” of holding this seeming contradiction—it has taken us into a vibration that is honest and yet beyond our ideas of good and evil, real and unreal and is simply the process itself, which doesn’t require labels.

Weirdly, the same can be said about a good mathematical theory and indeed has to be said about it for it to be expressed in the form of an equation. As Karl and I discuss, that theory or even that equation might not be the only right path, however—as good as it is, it might be wrong to try and catergorize it as the only way, even if it is the right way at that moment, or from that particular point of assessment.

I might not like the same music or books as you, but we might both experience a similar pattern or flow state through those different experiences; we may have a similar feeling of presence and transformation and be able to understand that as shared. Could our rigorous scientific theories and models also have patterns like this? Could they be falsifiable and yet not a matter of either/or?

At another point in the conversation with Tippett, Rubins discusses how, for much of his life, he felt like he was hearing the stories being told around him and thinking “maybe that story’s not the right story.” But now something has shifted. Now he is starting to think more along the lines of “maybe all there is is stories. And to think about which is the right story is maybe a waste of time” because the real work is in finding or creating “the story that speaks to you.” You may connect with one story when you are 15 and another when you are 50. You may need one form of math and science to approach one problem, and another when you approach another, and these may not coincide.

On a very different level, a level that must include all the necessary checks and balances of science, this is what Karl and I discuss relative to scientific theory and the mathematics we find and use to represent something that is ultimately a bit (or a lot) different for each of us—the process of life, the flow. Representing that for each other in ways we can understand, creating ways to share that experience and meet in and expand its overlapping continuity—whether we do it in music, books, models or math—could be understood as the reason we are here, the reason we care, the reason we write these texts and have these conversations and do this science and work to solve these problems; the reason we create meaning and transformative experiences for one another as we move through life.

❤️ Flow states

Flow is a word that means different things in different contexts, and we are likely reading it a little differently now, depending on where and when we’ve encountered it.

For some of us, the word ‘flow’ might conjure the work on happiness from the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where he discusses it like that feeling of being ‘in the zone’. This might happen when you’re skiing or running or playing sports or writing or just enjoying a really good conversation.

For others, however, the word flow might make you think about mathematics. In math, flow is the word used to formalize the motion of particles in a fluid, for example, to represent that process with an equation.

Flow is also an important part of the Free Energy Principle—indeed, in this conversation, Karl tells us that the FEP basically starts with a flow equation.

Are these all the same sort of flow?

Well, no. But yes, too. A neuroscientist, a music producer, and the athletes/actors of pro wrestling do have patterns in common, but they also have many that diverge. So, too, this word flow does have some common patterns in the way it is used in these many different contexts, but there are also ways that the word cannot be considered as saying the same thing in those different contexts.

This is not unlike the pattern expressed above about the many different ways we make in life being both shared and unique. Flow is another nested example of how we can open the space to include numerous ‘right’ ways so long as we have a good grasp of the parameters in which they apply and can hold the nuance of having to always be sure we are not applying one from a previous set of parameters into a new one.

In other words, to echo a theme that comes through in this conversation with Karl: Flow is not the model but the model might help us understand the process we are pointing to, and what we share in common from different directions. This brings to mind a quote from Csikszentmihalyi (who by the way wrote a book called Flow):

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . .(but) usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

This quote is very close to what Karl says in our conversation about the point not being to find “the perfect state of being” but rather to find the best way to fit to the movement of life as you are living it—a way that aligns best with our ongoing encounter, where we are not passive but are also able to stay within the sweet spot of life. Lifelong learning can be a way to do this.

A flow state in the Csikszentmihalyi sense is a state of concentration, clarity and an ongoing feedback loop that can make both space and time feel immediate and immeasurable. There is a sense of ease, as if we are moving along with the current; we can easily deal with what comes without holding on to it for too long or stopping the flow of the larger pattern—we feel that pattern and dance with it as part of us. We are both highly present and seemingly no longer so conscious of ‘the self’—we are holding paradox.

Many of the conversations on Love and Philosophy have to do with experiences of being in this ‘sweet spot’ in our experience or work, but even more of them have to do with the patterns that connect this experience across time, space, disciplines, and ways of life. This conversation with Karl looks at this pattern literally and asks if science and math might be able to help us find a better way of understanding and modelling it. We can never fully model or represent the ongoing process, but in recognizing this as it is—the way pro wrestling, for example, recongize their work as a performance—we are closer to being able to model and understand moments of it.

In Karl’s own life, abstracted from his work, flow can be understood as a state of being that encapsulates the natural progression of life and decisions without being overly preoccupied with specific choices. According to him, flow comes in making context-aware decisions while maintaining an overarching direction, essentially allowing existence to unfold naturally while also participating in it.

Another way Karl puts it is through the idea of “keeping your options open” while also “doing as you’re told”—we have to keep our minds open AND choose the best option for each moment as we go.

This is expressed in the yin and the yang of energy and entropy, and of how we want to be both maximimizing and minimizing those from different nested scales. This might be a way to help us understand the patterns that connect across theories and models—and it might give us some clue which of those are best in which moments. It also offers a unique lens into the dynamic interplay of cognitive processes and how they translate into lived experience. This is where we come to some of the main concepts in Karl’s work, like that of active inference.

❤️ Active Inference

Active inference, a critical component of Friston's work, is fundamentally about understanding how organisms interact with their environment to maintain homeostasis. This happens at various levels of awareness and participation by and with the system that is doing the studying and assessing. This posits that organisms act to minimize the surprise—or free energy—associated with their sensory experiences, and emphasizes the active role of organisms in shaping their sensory input through actions. We participate in the flow and its creation, we are not just passively being swept along, and yet we are ‘in a current’ that is often stronger than us and so we have to respect and live within its parameters. This is what Karl means when he says that he can ‘be himself’ in London and in Melbourne and in New York —in other words, in very different places—but that he can only be himself within a very particular temperature range. If our temperature goes too low or too high for too long, we cease to exist. And this nests into the various niches which sustain us and life on this planet.

(For those wanting more: I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the SAB (Scientific Advisory Board) of the Active Inference Institute this year, so let me suggest you have a look and join this community if you are interested in further exploring these ideas across the board, from the maths to the everyday applications.)

❤️ Unconscious Inference

Helmholtz's notion of unconscious inference is explored in our conversation relative to the above ideas. I push Friston on a bit in terms of the confusing way ‘inference’ is used in Bayesian statistics—it does not mean the same thing as it does everyday life, nor do terms like ‘value’ and ‘belief’, and yet, as discussed above, there are many ways it overlaps with the everyday and sometimes it does get confused even by those who know the difference.

We go into this in more detail as we go along and Karl highlights the importance of this process as a non-explicit, automatic mechanism that the brain employs to make sense of the world. This automatic process is not about reaching declarative conclusions but about a continuous flow of inference that helps us stay attuned to our environment. It underscores the circular causality present in perception-action cycles, where actions continue to refine perceptions, and vice versa.

❤️ How this relates to Neuroscience and Navigability

A significant theme in our discussion (per usual because it is one guiding theme of my research) is the dichotomies often present in science and philosophy, such as subjective versus objective and model versus reality. Friston's approach suggests that these dichotomies might be transcended by recognizing the multi-scale nature of these processes—understanding that patterns are self-similar across different scales ‘in the spirit of the fractal’.

In the realm of philosophy, our conversation touches on topics like the difference between the model and the process being modeled. This inquiry dovetails with scientific exploration in general towards encouraging a broader understanding of how personal and scientific models affect interactions with the world and how easily we confuse them. We also discuss affordances in connection to my last conversation with Harry Heft, and I bring up some crucial ideas here relative to my research. I use affordances there as a way of distinguishing between living and non-living systems: Living systems have a trajectory of affordances that sample the previous states of that same trajectory.

❤️ Listening as an Act of Love

One of my favourite parts of the conversation is the poetic turn Karl takes at the end where we learn that ‘doing as you are told’ is really about being a good listener. As our conversation ventures into the realm of love, we explore how listening and being present in relationships might mirror the scientific principles we’ve discussed up to this point. Friston suggests that genuine listening and adapting—key aspects of both love and cognitive processes—can foster deeper connections and understanding in both realms.

❤️ Our Future Flow

We mention the coming New Year—tonight we turn to 2025—and Friston humorously resolves not to make any new resolutions, focusing instead on ‘minimizing surprises’ (a key phrase of Active Inference) and maintaining a calm approach. His reflections remind us that navigating life's complexities, whether in neuroscience or personal relationships, involves a delicate balance of listening, adapting, and maintaining an open mind to the flow of experiences. Whether in love, philosophy, or neuroscience, understanding flow is one key to navigating the profound questions of existence that are part of all our lives on some scale.

Photo by Filipp Nekhaev on Unsplash

❤️ Further Resources

Active Inference, the book

The Active Inference Institute

Another good conversation with Karl