OC-ACX-LW Meetup: Reality Tunnels, Creative Agnosticism & Predictive Processing – Saturday, August 30, 2025 Meeting #103
OC-ACX-LW Meetup: Reality Tunnels, Creative Agnosticism & Predictive Processing – Saturday, August 30, 2025 Meeting #103
Date & time: 2:00 p.m. (wrap ~5–6)
Place: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik — michaelmichalchik@gmail.com — (949) 375-2045
Snacks: Welcome but not required
Readings:
Recommended audio overview (covers all three):
NotebookLM overview — https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b89a6b5e-b8a0-47c8-9fd1-90d0f1bdd000?artifactId=6f2de7c4-fcb8-4468-9772-b3d1b5db81c8
1) Introduction to Reality Tunnels (Bilokonsky).
Via Robert Anton Wilson’s notion of “reality tunnels,” Bilokonsky argues that human perception and judgment are always filtered. We reduce overwhelming sensory input to manageable signals, constructing a working “reality” from what our filters let through. The skill is editable: we can consciously shift filters—attending to different cues (emotions, diet, marginalized voices)—to inhabit alternative “tunnels.” Power brokers (ideology, religion, advertising) sell “off-the-shelf” tunnels that claim sole access to Truth and discourage exploration; awareness of filter-construction is therefore both liberating and a defense against manipulation. The headline takeaway: intentionally re-tuning attention changes the reality you experience, for better or worse.
2) Creative Agnosticism (Robert Anton Wilson).
Wilson contrasts “modeltheism” (being hypnotized by one Model of the ‘Real’ Universe) with “creative agnosticism” (treating models as bets about experience). On this view, cruelty, fanaticism, and “Right Man” righteousness arise when people mistake their model for reality and edit away disconfirming experience. Perception is active model-making; intelligent living means meta-programming—switching models, widening attention, seeking anomalies, and updating. The essay riffs through Nietzsche, phenomenology, and brain hemispheres to argue that multiple “reality tunnels” are legitimate tools; responsibility lies in choosing and revising them rather than enforcing one totalizing map.
3) Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty (predictive processing) (Scott Alexander on Andy Clark).
Predictive Processing (PP) is a unifying framework where the brain constantly generates top-down predictions that meet bottom-up sensory data; mismatches produce “surprisal” and updates. Attention behaves like precision-weighting: tighten it and sensation constrains perception; loosen it and priors fill in (inattentional blindness, illusions). PP explains imagination/dreaming (top-down simulation with weak constraints), learning (keep models that best predict incoming signals), and even action (minimize prediction error by moving to make predictions come true). The memorable gloss: perception is “controlled hallucination”—and PP supplies the machinery behind our “reality tunnels.”
Crossover note.
Bilokonsky and Wilson give the vocabulary (tunnels/models; meta-programming/agnosticism); Alexander’s PP review supplies the mechanism (precision-weighted prediction). Together they ask: if perception is model-laden and tunable, what are the epistemic guardrails and the social ethics of choosing our tunnels?
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