Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

i.e., we don't become who we want to be, we believe that we already are that person and then act to reduce error, with the failure mode of externalizing the difference between inferred and phenomenal self.

End quote.

And Snav brought up this series of papers, links in post, trying to link Lacan to free energy.

I can't really understand it.

I don't know what I was expecting from a paper trying to link one famously incomprehensible thing to another famously incomprehensible thing, link in post.

Parts of it seem to almost make sense.

Lacan often says that various quantities in his system are what is left after other quantities have been interpreted through the logical symbolic order, which sounds suspiciously like prediction error.

The papers try to argue that Fristonian free energy equals Lacanian jouissance, a word usually thought of as equivalent to libido, or pleasure, or excessive pleasure, or painful pleasure, or something like that.

I don't feel able to have an opinion at this point.

Another thing I got out of this book?

I grudgingly think there might be something in this psychoanalytic story of sexual repression.

A thought experiment.

Imagine a heterosexual man.

A hot girl blindfolds him, then gives him oral sex.

It feels very pleasurable.

Then the blindfold slips, and he sees that actually the hot girl left the room and now he's getting oral sex from an ugly girl slash a man slash a chimpanzee.

Upon learning this, he is no longer as interested in continuing the oral sex.

If he did continue, it wouldn't feel as good.

He might even be repulsed by it.

Why?