Reclaiming the Miraculous — Part 2 of 3

The World as an Inference Loop

In a previous essay, I described what happens when you really notice that you don’t know what reality is—and how that noticing, sustained, opens into something the contemplative traditions have always pointed at: a sense of reality as radically present, undeniable, and somehow greater than any model of it.

This essay asks the natural follow-up question: if the world isn’t what we think it is, then what is it really? And why does it appear so reliably to be what we think it is?

The Problem of Induction

Why do the laws that govern reality seem to be so consistent? Does the fact that they’ve been so provide good evidence that they will continue to be? In other words, does the past provide good evidence for the future?

On the face of it, the question seems absurd. Of course it does. But there’s one small problem.

When you try to justify this principle (known as induction), you’ll find yourself making a move like this: well, induction has been reliable in the past—and so it will continue to be in the future, because… the past provides good evidence for the future.

In other words, justifying the principle requires assuming it. That’s circular, and totally invalid. There is no justification. This is the idea behind the oft-misunderstood1 Problem of Induction, and it has no agreed-upon solution.

To put it more bluntly: there is no reason to believe you have any idea what will happen next. Can you feel how strange that is? And if you find yourself thinking “okay that’s weird, but it’s fine, because it’s been working,” realize you’re just repeating the mistake. It’s a defense mechanism, and nothing more.

It’s so bizarre that we’ve basically stuffed it under a rug and pretended we can’t hear it.

But what if the solution has been under our noses the whole time? What if it’s not justifiable because it’s not true?

What if the reason the future keeps resembling the past is because we keep expecting it to?

That would cleanly resolve the problem: it’s not a fact about reality, but about something we’re doing. This also makes it testable: it predicts that interrupting that expectation process should lead to a change.

That’s the bizarre hypothesis we’ll be exploring. And far from being idiosyncratic, we’ll find it has roots both in ancient traditions and in modern math and physics.

A lovely way to put it—“is the big bang here?” I can imagine that we will someday have to answer your question with a “yes.” […] Have we had the mechanism of creation before our eyes all this time without recognizing the truth? That is the larger question implicit in your comment. Of all the deep questions of our time, I do not know one that is deeper, more exciting, more clearly pregnant with a great advance in our understanding.

—John Wheeler (acclaimed physicist, who coined “black hole” and was Feynman’s doctoral advisor)

To make this claim coherent, the “we” supposedly shaping reality obviously can’t be the usual “we.” But—taking a page from non-dual wisdom traditions—what if the real “me” is something far more vast and primordial? What if you ultimately are the very ground of reality itself?

It also dovetails neatly with ideas from a modern branch of math known as Algorithmic Information Theory. And as we’ll see, this connection is more than mildly suggestive.

In what follows, I’ll show how a simple model of inference can generate a stable reality, why that stability would look indistinguishable from “physical truth,” and how certain practices might loosen the assumptions that make the world seem real. The essay moves through three registers—mythic, mathematical, contemplative—and the reader is invited to engage at whatever depth feels useful.

The Generative Loop

First let’s describe the general idea.

There you are—Primordial Consciousness—floating in the great Void, prior to the dawn of creation. As a Being of literally infinite potential, you naturally and spontaneously produce a luminous emission from yourself.

However, failing to recognize it as your own nature, you perceive it as having come from outside yourself. So a natural question arises: from whence did this come? What is likely to have caused it? And crucially: if that process continues, what is likely to come next? You want to be prepared, after all.

To answer this, you list out every possible process that could have generated the emission. Some of those processes are complicated; others are simple. You give more credence to the simpler ones.

Because the processes are deterministic (but have access to a random number generator[^rng]), you are able to calculate what each would likely produce next. Finally, you take the weighted average of those expectations (by simplicity) and use that as your prediction.

However, unbeknownst to you, your guess doesn’t remain a guess. It is actually used to generate the next emission.

Suppose you again fail to recognize it as your own. Now you have two data points. So you repeat the process: search for explanations, project them forward, and form a new prediction.

That prediction becomes the third emission. And so on.

All of this is happening at a blistering pace, so the “incoming” data feels seamless, increasingly feeling like it’s coming from a singular external reality.

The question is: after many iterations of this process, what will that “reality” look like?

Will it be bizarre and irregular? After all, on each pass you are considering all possible processes that could be producing it. There’s no obvious reason to believe it should converge on anything stable at all—let alone something resembling a coherent world—right?

As it turns out, this intuition is wrong in a very specific and surprising way.

It is very likely to converge on a simple process, in a precise mathematical sense. You will eventually appear to reside in a stable, coherent environment with relatively simple “physical laws”—such as our own—even though there are no actual laws; just your increasingly-precise predictions based on the assumption that there are.

All the above (minus the “primordial consciousness” framing) comes from physicist Markus Müller in his preprint Algorithmic Idealism. It extends a result known as Universal Induction (or Solomonoff Induction) from the field of Algorithmic Information Theory.

So far we’ve established that if you did this—produce random emissions and guess what’s causing them, leading to new emissions—you would almost certainly end up in what appeared to be a stable “external” reality. But does this bear any relationship to our experience?

Interrupting the Loop

Recall from Reclaiming the Miraculous that we each have a visceral sense that we know what reality is, despite this belief being provably unjustified. If you inspect that sense carefully, you’ll find that you’re also using it to predict (or project) what will happen in the future. So the prediction half of our loop happens almost automatically, at a level below our usual conscious awareness.

We also saw that it’s possible to suspend this belief. When you do that, the projection process temporarily ceases too (without interfering with your ability to make conventional “as-if” predictions). It becomes viscerally, intuitively obvious that your past doesn’t dictate your future as cleanly as you normally assume.

For example, a person who was certain that the world was out to get them may suddenly realize that it was only their own imagination. Framed in the language of the Bayesian Brain hypothesis (BB), this could be thought of as loosening one’s priors.

(Psychedelics, incidentally, are known to be a powerful way to induce such “loosening.”)

There are also tantalizing anecdotal accounts that the deeper this release, the more profound the changes to one’s “external reality”:

When this happens in your life, seemingly miraculous things start happening around you. The power of your own surrender, your own gratitude, actually changes the things around you. —David Godman, biographer of Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi

Changes happened that went way beyond mere positive thinking. Actual, physical things, unexpected money and all the right people were appearing out of nowhere. These were things over which I had no obvious direct control. It was all quite mysterious. —Author Genevieve Davis

My body started healing faster. My state of mind grew lighter. But the thing I never expected or imagined, life got better. But not just better, things happened that were fantastically out of my reach, things I couldn’t have dreamt of. … Amazing people were coming into my life, situations were naturally resolving themselves. —Kamal Ravikant, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It

What this framework does not yet supply is a precise account of how human loosening—meditation, contemplative practice, psychedelic release—maps onto the mathematical update. That’s a bridge still being built.

Now, what do the non-dual traditions have to say about this process?

Dzogchen (the “highest” Tibetan Buddhist teaching) and A Course in Miracles (ACIM, a modern mystical teaching) both describe a similar mechanism: a mind that creates reality by projecting interpretations onto raw experience. Both also describe how to stop—and what happens when you do.

Dzogchen

Consider the following quotes from Dzogchen masters and texts:

I, the supreme source, the ultimate nature of mind, am the fundamental substance of all phenomena … When my nature is not understood and the phenomena that manifest from me become the object of judgement, desire and attachment give rise to the creation of concrete vision that is impermanent and destined to vanish like a magical apparition, and one becomes like a blind man who does not know what is happening. — Künjé Gyalpo (The All-Creating King, ~9th century text)

As this habitual tendency is then reinforced, Samsāra unfolds in its regular progression. —The prayer of Kuntuzangpo

When you start to dream (N.B.: at night), the dream begins as a thought, like one you would have in the daytime. But you’re asleep, so the thought intensifies and becomes something like talk or gossip, and then the gossip intensifies or solidifies into images, and then you really think that you’re seeing people, seeing places, going places, and so on. **And that is how it works with conventional (N.B.: “real-world”) appearances as well.** — Thrangu Rinpoche (contemporary Dzogchen / Mahamudra master)

They’re describing a mind that creates a world by projecting an interpretation onto raw sensation—exactly the mechanism our inference-loop hypothesis proposes. They also describe what happens if this loop is interrupted:

If, at the moment the energy of the base manifests, one does not consider it something other than oneself and one recognizes one’s own state as the indivisibility of essence, nature, and potentiality of energy, the movement of energy self-liberates. —Künjé Gyalpo

And what happens if you continue to allow the energy to “self-liberate?”

Memories, aspects of your conditioning, arise and are viewed from the perspective of awakening. Once seen in this way, they are drained of their causal powers. —Paul Litvak

A Course in Miracles

Let us be still an instant, and forget all things we ever learned, all thoughts we had, and every preconception that we hold of what things mean and what their purpose is. Let us remember not our own ideas of what the world is for. —ACIM, Chapter 31

I will be still an instant and go home.

And what happens when you do?

You catch a glimpse of a reality that transcends everything you thought was real until then. —Allen Watson

This is known as a “holy instant.”

The holy instant is an experience of grace, an instant in which we set aside some or all of our identification with the ego and our belief in the reality of the world it has projected, and allow the reality of our true Identity to shine through.

“It is a picture of timelessness, set in a frame of time” (T-17.IV.11:5). It is what happens when, for a moment, our mind peels away the layers of illusion we have superimposed on reality, and we see the reality that has always been there.

A Deeper Release

We’ve left an important question unaddressed: if we are each the “primordial consciousness,” then what (if any) impact does my “loosening” have on you?

If it only produced ordinary changes (such as better moods), then this question wouldn’t matter. And the framework would also be doing no work; BB would suffice. But what if the changes go further?

The framework predicts that with deep enough loosening, my lived reality should appear less law-like. Note that this probably wouldn’t happen immediately, as the process (which is running in something like “cognitive time,” as “physical time” is of its outputs) must have been running for a great many iterations to converge to the stable world around me.

But should you be expected to see this? In fact, is the version of you I see the “real you” in the first place? And if “other people” have claimed to succeed (as they have), then why don’t you see any concrete evidence for it?

These are deep philosophical questions for which I don’t have solid answers, but here’s what I’m holding tentatively: the more I “loosen,” the more I appear to live in a world where “other people” can, too—because they are, of course, part of “my” loosening reality. Which means that if I don’t yet live in such a world, there may still be a way to access it.

I should also note that this does not seem to be a monotonic process (a one-way street): even following a deep release, “normalcy” can powerfully reassert itself. (This is another place where psychedelics—especially in very large doses—may ofter a tantalizing glimpse.) I do not know how to model this.

Read the following quotes with all this in mind.

With continuing practice, we see less and less difference between the waking and the dream state. Our experiences in waking life become more vivid and varied, the result of a lighter and more refined awareness. We are no longer bound by conventional conceptions of time, space, [form], and energy. Within this vaster perspective we may also find that the so-called supernatural feats and legends of the great yogis and masters are not myths or miracles. When the consciousness unites the various poles of experience and moves beyond the limits of conventional thought, psychic powers or abilities are actually natural. —Tarthang Tulku

And at deeper levels still, it’s not only particular “physical laws” that should be violated, but the logical consistency that allows for lawfulness in the first place.

When Rechungpa, a student of the eminent Tibetan yogi Milarepa, was returning home from his studies in India, his master went out to meet him. Along the way it started to rain, and Rechungpa lost sight of his guru in the wind and fog. He could hear the master singing through the storm but couldn’t see him. When Rechungpa finally caught sight of Milarepa, he was sheltering from the rain inside a yak horn, singing and laughing. As mystifying as that feat was, the part that really blew Rechungpa’s mind was that Milarepa fit within the yak horn without making his body smaller or the yak horn bigger. To us, as well, the baffling thing about this story is not the possibility of magic—which is a given in so many stories—but the logical dissonance of it. We can’t picture this in our mind’s eye. We may try again and again to envision it, but it breaks the boundaries of our conceptual framework.

Gendun Chopel, an early twentieth-century monk and scholar, maintained that Milarepa wasn’t the one toying with reality. Rather, he said, we ordinary, confused people are the real magicians. The Buddha taught that the universe and its inhabitants are like appearances in a dream. If that’s true, then the habitual reification of our moment-to-moment experience is quite an accomplishment. Everything we experience is unreal, no more than illusions, as fleeting and insubstantial as the moon’s reflection on the surface of the water. Yet we make it real by continually transforming the spurious phenomena of our world into a concrete reality. By defying the laws of our perceived “real world,” Milarepa was revealing the true nature of reality.

—Visualizing a Pure and Perfect World, Lion’s Roar magazine

Conclusion

I’ve tried to articulate one consistent way to think about “what’s happening”—one that takes the contemplative traditions seriously as reports rather than as poetry, takes Hume seriously as a puzzle whose insolubility was a clue, and takes the math seriously as an echo of what the traditions have been saying.

I haven’t tried to prove any of this, because it’s not the kind of thing that can be “objectively” proven. That’s not a drawback of the framework, but an implication of it. We’ve also hinted at instructions on what you would need to do to see evidence of it yourself—and why waiting for others isn’t going to work.

What I can say is this: when the looking goes deep, something that wasn’t visible becomes visible. Reality stops being an inert backdrop against which my life takes place and starts being something created. From inside that recognition, the framework I’ve described stops sounding strange and starts sounding like an accurate description of experience—what I call “the world.”

I can’t transmit that recognition. I can only point at it, at the traditions that have been pointing at it for thousands of years, and at the math that—unexpectedly, recently—suggests what they’ve been pointing at has a structure that can almost be named.

The rest is yours.

Appendix A: Other people?

We might ask ourselves: if this hypothesis is true, then why does the world appear to contain other people in the first place?

I believe that a brief answer is the following. Consider these two possible worlds:

  • Universe A: The laws of this universe are designed to produce only one observer. Its program contains a huge, specific, and ad-hoc set of instructions to “brute-force” the creation of a single, complex mind.

  • Universe B: The laws of this universe are based on simple, scalable, and iterative rules (like evolution, the laws of chemistry, etc.) that are simple to state, but when they are allowed to run, generate immense, structured complexity as an emergent property. This universe doesn’t specify how to build an observer; it specifies a simple process that naturally leads to the evolution of many interacting observers.

Universe B is algorithmically simpler—and therefore, by universal induction, far more likely to arise.

Appendix B: But doesn’t this explain too much?

A reasonable worry: a framework that can accommodate anything explains nothing. It’s worth being precise about what’s being claimed.

In the converged regime—the regime most people reading this are in—this framework predicts exactly the stable, lawful world materialism predicts, and for related reasons. That’s what the inference loop produces once it has run long enough. So in day-to-day life, the two frames give you the same answers. They diverge only on what they predict for sufficiently loosened states.

Materialism predicts no asymmetry there: meditation, psychedelic release, contemplative practice change how the observer interprets stable inputs, but the inputs themselves remain untouched. This framework predicts something different—that deep enough loosening should make the inputs themselves available for change.

The prediction is asymmetric, falsifiable in principle, and (by the framework’s own logic) only verifiable from inside the experience. That last bit is why intersubjective evidence is hard to come by. It’s not that the prediction is unfalsifiable; it’s that the evidence has to be collected in exactly the place the framework says it would be.

As we momentarily loosen our grip on the ego, our minds are allowed to shift into a new way of seeing things. And since our thinking is the foundation for our entire experience, as our thinking shifts, so does everything else. Our whole experience of life is allowed to brighten from the bottom up, making this kind of healing more deeply liberating than being healed of even the most insidious and destructive physical disease. —Circle of Atonement

The word “miracle” implies two things. First, that you experience a healing change, a change for the better. Second, this change seems to be outside of the normal causal laws of the world. For instance, a sick person might spontaneously and instantly become well, rather than slowly becoming well over a period of time while taking medications. There is no “natural” explanation for the occurrence, if “natural” means “following the known scientific laws of cause and effect in the material world.”

If you (choose to) believe that perfect love is the only power, however, then you will think of a miracle as completely “natural.” A miracle is simply the shift of perception that occurs when you stop restricting your own awareness. From this perspective, it is the perception of sin and suffering and fear that is “unnatural,” because that indicates you are blocking your awareness of the presence of love. And only love is truly present at all.

There is never any way to “prove” that a miracle has occurred, that a perceived change in the world was not either a random coincidence or merely an effect of a scientific law of causality. Did the cancer miraculously disappear, or was the initial diagnosis simply wrong? Or was it the effect of the chemotherapy interacting with the patient’s particular genetic make-up in a way that we don’t yet understand? There is no way to prove that a miracle occurred. But there is also no way to prove that a miracle did not occur.

There is, however, always an element of inner certainty involved in a “miracle experience”—an inner knowing that something miraculous has occurred. Again, there’s no way to “prove” that a miracle occurred, no way to “prove” that you’re not just fooling yourself. But there is a sense of inner knowing that is very different from mere thinking or speculation—you simply know that you know.

—The Happy Mind Book, William Yoder

I thought a lot about this because I realized its truth once on LSD.

But then I came back and spent a lot of time trying to get back to this… state? (No it’s not a state, it’s something that is orthogonal to all possible states. Perhaps depth. A depth - of the present moment - that opens up and finally makes you understand.)

There was a particular week when I was actually offered the possibility to open up to this depth, to make the shift, and this happened without any drugs in my system, my reality began to communicate with me in signs and synchronicities and pressed me gently to make this step, but I simply couldn’t do it…

I clearly saw that I have the choice of believing either this or that, and whichever I choose, it will become reality …

But it was simply too much. There is a gap to be bridged there and I found that I have an incredible, massive FEAR of the open state which I feel on an almost cellular level. This may have the same root as the fear of becoming crazy while tripping on psychedelics.

And I couldn’t do it ever since, and I think the use of psychedelics may be problematic for this reason: if you once attach the attainment of this to the use of psychedelics, then you may convince yourself that this is only attainable through psychedelics, and then you will use these drugs as a permission for yourself to experience the ego-less state, and if this belief system solidifies then you will not be able to do the same thing without them - the two worlds will move lightyears apart, creating a very strong form of duality.

The essence of [Buddhism] can be reduced to a single point: The mind is the source of all experience, and by changing the direction of the mind, we can change the quality of everything we experience. When you transform your mind, everything you experience is transformed. … There are truly no limits to the creativity of your mind. … To the extent that you can acknowledge the true power of your mind, you can begin to exercise more control over your experience. … If our perceptions really are mental constructs conditioned by past experiences and present expectations, then what we focus on and how we focus become important factors in determining our experience. And the more deeply we believe something is true, the more likely it will become true in terms of our experience. … What happens when you begin to recognize your experiences as your own projections? What happens when you begin to lose your fear of the people around you and conditions you used to dread? Well, from one point of view — nothing. From another point of view — everything. … From a Buddhist perspective, the description of reality provided by quantum mechanics offers a degree of freedom to which most people are not accustomed, and that may at first seem strange and even a little frightening. … It is a state that literally includes all possibilities, beyond space and time. … While doing so may open up possibilities we might never before have imagined, it’s still hard to give up the familiar habit of being a victim.

—Mingyur Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist master, in The Joy of Living

Footnotes

  1. Stephen Law, professor of philosophy at Oxford, writes:

    It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) … [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. …

    [T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume’s argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so).

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