Priors are the Lifeblood of Stuckness
Opening the possibility spaces for Self, Other, & World is imperative to envision, then create, something different.
Below is all an excerpt from Ivo J. Mensch and Perspectiva post: Our Prior Literacy (1/3)
What are Priors?
Priors, in neuroscience, are the brain’s expectations or assumptions about the world, shaped by past experience. They help the brain interpret new sensory information by predicting what is likely to happen. Priors exist for a good reason, they afford us to live energy efficient from the assumption that the future will be like the past. In this view, our memories exist not to remember the past, but to make sense of the present moment.
Technically speaking, priors are probability distributions - the educated guesses about what is likely to happen next based on past experiences…your brain is running constant simulations about the self and the world, including your body and the social landscape…all before you are consciously aware of any of it. Leading researchers such as Andy Clark, Thomas Metzinger, Jakob Hohwy, and Anil Seth have therefor converged on a sophisticated view of consciousness as a ‘controlled hallucination.
This process of parsing sense data into information and exformation happens according to relevance realisation6: the most important information, like urgent threats to our survival or social status, jumps the information queue and makes it into our consciousness first. The maintenance of our sense of self, complete with a stable identity and experience of persistence through time are foundational priors and are equally unconscious for most people.
‘In case after case, the predictions that sculpt and inform human experience have been shown to be invisible or shrouded from the conscious mind.’ -Andy Clark
Our priors are not only hidden; they are so fundamental that we often mistake them for reality itself.
Depth View: the stack of priors
Priors are stacked to form a hierarchy, as some are more important and foundational than others. The deepest level of the predictive hierarchy encompasses what researchers call existential priors: fundamental assumptions about being, embodiment and agency that form the bedrock of conscious experience.
Information is structured hierarchically, with the upper levels interpreting bottom-up sensory data by drawing on the database of stored memories. This architecture means that new information taken in consciously must first compete with existing priors, cognitive biases and interpretive mechanisms.
Unlearning and belief updating is energy-expensive and is felt as resistance, fumbling and uncertainty - sometimes as losing one's very identity when self-priors are involved. No wonder we resist. Anyone with psychological literacy and therapy experience knows of the hard-to-change basic priors formed in early childhood that constitute the self-image: fundamental beliefs about the self. Upon introspection, we may encounter these: 'I am weak', 'I am unlovable', 'I don't belong'. These beliefs shape not just how we know ourselves, but how we interpret every interaction and experience whenever the self-experience arises, usually in social interactions.
These priors, presented here as explicit ideas, are not like sentences that pop up in our heads as part of autobiographical memory. That memory only came online around age 4 to 5. These priors were installed long before that as part of our procedural memory. So whenever the self-experience arises, we also draw from that database of earlier procedural memory which operates deeper in the background, outside conscious awareness.
Other deep priors include those of self-agency: 'I am the author of my actions'; 'I can influence outcomes through intention'; 'My thoughts and decisions have consequences'; 'I have free will.' Again, these are not explicit beliefs but deeply ingrained assumptions built on top of those of being an entity.
Physiological Priors
Priors are also physical and thus stubborn: embodied and phylogenetically shaped through millions of years of evolution.
Overlaying and interconnected with these ancient systems are the limbic networks. Whilst not a purely emotional brain as once thought, these regions are crucial for memory formation, threat detection, reward processing, and social bonding.
To access these deeper systems, we need to develop felt awareness of emotions, bodily sensations and the internal states that shape memory formation and prior updating. This is where we can establish new vectors and attractors through which our life energy flows.
Jaak Panksepp, a pivotal researcher in affective neuroscience, found that the ancient subcortical regions of our mammalian brains contain at least seven basic affective systems: Seeking, Fear, Rage, Lust, Care, Panic/Grief and Play.
When activated by real-world events, they generate rich cognitive associations and memories that shape an individual's interpretation of their experiences. Having emotional literacy and awareness of when these systems are active allows for switching between them and rerouting life energy.
Changing the Vectors of Unfolding
Making what is implicit and transparent explicit and observable allows for a momentary time window in which the integrity of encoded memories is compromised and default processing is suspended. This is called memory reconsolidation: the process by which previously consolidated memories become reactivated and can be modified or updated.
By targeting these specific priors or clusters of them we change the vectors and imaginal constraints to arrive at different ways of seeing and meaning making.
One framework that labels-organizes self-priors more pragmatic and actionable is Dan Siegel's A-B-C model8, which proposes that humans develop three main temperamental vectors in the first 3 to 4 years of life, before autobiographical memory kicks in. His three core motivational vectors, or dispositions, as I prefer to call these stances to the present moment are:
Agency
Core drive: need for autonomy, control and self-efficacy
Adaptive function: ensures physiological needs are met through goal-directed actions
When thwarted: manifests as frustration/anger; risk of rigid perfectionism or controlling behaviours
Anatomical focus: gut/somatic awareness (interoceptive predictions)
Bonding
Core drive: need for attachment, belonging and mutual recognition
Adaptive function: maintains social cohesion and caregiving bonds
When thwarted: triggers sadness/loneliness; risk of excessive people-pleasing
Anatomical focus: heart/emotional awareness (social prediction systems)
Certainty
Core drive: need for stability, pattern recognition and future prediction
Adaptive function: creates cognitive maps to navigate uncertainty
When thwarted: generates anxiety; risk of obsessive rumination or avoidance
Anatomical focus: head/cognitive schemas (exteroceptive predictions)
The term vector is important to grasp because it shows that priors have directionality, they are teleological and route life energy through an infrastructure of nested systems of gut, heart and head towards something. They shape our disposition, form an attentional infrastructure and drive our movements and behaviour.
This is the reason why spiritual teachers like Gurdjieff and Cynthia Bourgeault stress the development of three-centered awareness and why vertical coherence and clarification of the three centers of head, heart and belly is required. This frees our perception from the hold of the dominant priors of the current structure of consciousness, allowing a seeing beyond the narrow perspective of the ego-self and even the boundary of spacetime9. This will be unpacked further in part 3 of this series where we’ll explore metaphysical priors.
Working at Different Depths
An understanding of the nested, hierarchical ordering of the nested priors reveals that different transformational approaches work at particular depths. Talk therapy, which often relies on linguistic, analytic or cognitive behavioral interventions aimed at the surface priors of the stack, remains therefore relatively superficial. Similarly, mentalization approaches like parts work in Internal Family Systems also operate at this depth, but touch on the imaginal.
Deeper, direct work on the predictive and motivational and executive functioning of the self-model is the domain of intimate embodied and emotional work. These approaches target priors deeper in the stack, changing the processes of construction of the body-schema.
Even deeper we enter the terrain of nondual spirituality, where the boundaries and differentiation through the modelling of Self, Other and World fall away and the sense of identity can radically shift to give the experience of being one with everything, flowing with the unfolding of reality or a sense of being a timeless pure process in which temporal objects like birth and death no longer apply. The early imprint of the symbiosis with mother, including in utero, a form of nonduality without ego, is arguably the deepest prior, one we may encounter in deep meditative states.
It is time to rewild the brain and free and consciously divest some of that energy held in priors and invest it in building a different attentional infrastructure built on a set of different priors. Over the past two and a half millennia enormous amounts of psychic energy went to the gradual development of the self-construct in the West, the resulting collective obsession now known as individualism -an oppressive social hyperprior.
I believe the balance of power has shifted to external technological systems while that of the individual agent has shrunk as the social fabric has also frayed for decades, resulting in a loneliness epidemic. The systems behind Siegel’s Bonding vector are targeted by social media to fill the hole of connection and hence our attentional landscape is increasingly shaped by our technology and the priors encoded in the algorithms.
Deepening our understanding of social priors and their nested, historically extended nature is where I argue enormous potential for innovation, insight and change can be found. There is a case and foundation for a spiritually-informed depth sociology, furthering the lines of inquiry of critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar and sociologist Margaret Archer, but with a stronger emphasis on first-person embodied experience.
We can apply the same first-person scrutiny to our social reality, its structures and mechanisms, with equal curiosity, discernment and intensity as spiritual practice has directed in towards the self. We can expand and direct our inquiry to include the models of Other and World and their boundaries and relationships -particularly social reality and the priors inherent in our social agreements and structures and assumptions about reality in general to open up new possibility spaces.