作者回顾了2010年代的智力成长，指出最重要的发现是大脑的预测编码理论。这一理论不仅影响了其对神秘主义和模式匹配的理解，还帮助他更深入地探索了迷幻药物的作用及其对视觉感知的影响。

🧠 预测编码理论：作者通过一系列文章，从对神秘主义和模式匹配的探索，到最终在《冲浪不确定性》一书中获得深入了解，揭示了大脑如何通过预测来处理信息。

🔍 理论联系实际：作者将预测编码理论应用于对迷幻药物的研究，特别是在理解HPPD（持久的知觉障碍）方面，提出了新的见解。

💡 迷幻药物的启示：作者最初怀疑迷幻药物带来的“洞察”，但最终相信它们可能是真实的，同时指出了对潜在风险的担忧。

🧪 知识的融合：作者通过与其他理性主义者的交流，将预测编码理论与行为控制感知理论联系起来，发现了两者基本相同。

🌈 视觉艺术的理解：通过对迷幻药物和预测编码理论的研究，作者对视觉艺术和视觉错觉有了更深入的认识。

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/08/what-intellectual-progress-did-i-make-in-the-2010s/

 

One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.

I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).

Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris’ Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn’t directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that “psychedelic insight” was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don’t feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.