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We Each Have a GPT4 Within Us

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Powerful Mind Part 39

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created December 8, 2023. Updated April 4, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 38             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

No computer system before the current Large Language Models (LLMs) has been able to fool humans into thinking that the computer is human or the intellectual equal – which is the Turing test, proposed by one of the pioneers of modern computers, Alan Turing, in March 1946. What is amazing about the LLMs is how human their texts sound.

What is even more amazing is that all they are doing is a version of autocompletes – when your computer or smartphone fills in the next word or words you are going to key in. GPT4 and the other LLMs are gigantic versions of the same algorithm. The vast amount of training data is what makes them sound like us and be right so much of the time.

Unbeknownst to us, we have always had a similar function in our own brains. The reason it remained unknown to us for so long is that it passed the Turing test. We took it as our own words to ourself.

This function predicts what we will say next, based on what we have said in the past (which are the training data), and on what we just said to ourselves a moment ago (which is the prompt to be autocompleted).

On occasion, the robot (as I call the inner biological AI) might escalate what you just said to yourself (the prompt), using terms you had used in the past (training data) in association with that word you just used. “Escalate” means taking your prompt and making a more extreme statement as a follow-up. In this way, the inner AI may contribute to our recognized collective leanings into extremism throughout recorded history and never more so than today.

The problem is we take all of our thoughts at equal value. The ones we ourselves say to ourselves, and to the ones that are predictions by our robot. We didn’t know about this robot thing, so we presumed that any thought in our mind was propelled solely by our own free will. However, we find this to not be the case. There is another word source which accesses memory systems and – like today’s LLM chatbots – predicts/suggests what to say next.

Why is there such a system? Apparently pro-survival, it reminds the self how to promptly respond to incoming signals of each specific type. However, it will tend to self-past-consistency and so it will potentially underestimate where the self has evolved to at the current moment.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), otherwise known as the default network, these snuck-in inputs will be taken as the self’s own.

In Observer state, otherwise known as the executive control network, the self senses that it is now going off a bridge too far and pulls itself back.

However, even in Observer state, for the past few millennia we have not known that the human brain has these predictive abilities, and they are right now being discovered by science. Using introspection, I discovered the robot and wrote about it in my 1976 book Mind Magic.

From my own direct experience, I link the robot with Freud’s concept of the Ego. In Civilization and its Discontents he writes that the ego first arises when the baby feels needy and frustrated. It acts as the self, but it is actually a self-protective layer of mind on top of the id, the original self. In childhood I was able to understand my own actions through this lens of distinguishing the different voices in my mind.

Science is now confirming that the robot, as I wrote about it in Mind Magic, is a real thing, not just a metaphor. It’s as if a cosmic chunnel is being built from two ends, science and introspection, and they are actually connecting.

The verification for these psychotechnologies – the 12 Keys among others – by science is coming at just the right time. The upcoming generations feel handed a raw deal and fearful about their future, and they spend most of their time in EOP like the majority of us, ill-equipped for the likely challenges. Psychotechnology can achieve maturity of thought processes relatively quickly.

When Observer state is achieved it enables objective formal operational and systems thinking. One starts from understood and believed-in goals, then proceeds ethically and thoughtfully to achieve those goals. Each individual in this converted state is on a Mission with a known purpose. Having a Mission makes the individual less willing to give in to useless inner negativity and more self-disciplined about taking prompt but unhurried action aimed at carrying out the Mission.

The individual achieves meaning without the same constant dependency on media diversions. Moving toward of a future of one’s own shaping, life is exciting enough on its own. In Observer state, each challenge is a learning experience on the way to the goal.

Further psychotechnology balances this drive with resilient nonattachment to outcomes. Yerkes and Dodson proved that optimal arousal causes superior performance vs. maximal arousal. Czikszentmihalyi proved that there is a state above Observer state which he famously called Flow state. Yale’s Neuroscience Master Chun notes that the random chatter between lobes disappears in Flow state.

Spiritual psychotechnology opens up the individual to the possibility of cosmic connection, and how to recognize and work with it.

Worry and Fix

Two little words. And yet a philosophy can be built on them.

A 50,000-foot view of what goes on in our minds is a mix of these two things. We’re always either worrying or fixing.

A great many people worry almost constantly. This appears to leave them little time for fixing.

A few of us have learned to minimize time spent worrying and maximize time spent fixing.

The two strategies are poles apart in terms of success rates. And inversely poles apart in terms of popular adoption.

But why would people choose to waste time worrying when they could be fixing?

People generally do not believe they have the power to make a difference in their own lives, let alone to change the world. They feel swept along by forces much stronger than themselves, some coming from the outside and some coming from the inside.

The traitorous thoughts coming from the inside are the ego, the aspect of self which resists community mindmeld; it is always in a cold war against the others perceived to be separate beings, essentially competitors, rivals. Everyone else is the potential rival.

Everyone else is also the threat vector coming at the ego from the outside. Inside and outside sources appear to agree on the dangerous nature of the others. Everyone else.

In higher states of consciousness – specifically Observer state and Flow state – these paranoid delusional biases are identified instantly by a person. In Observer state one is conscious of one’s own judgment swings and even fine-tuning adjustments taking place from moment to moment.

In the higher states, there is no worry because every challenge is accepted with valor and all time is spent on fixing, building, creating. Worries streak in, and last only fleeting minutes, while the focused mind dissects them, and establishes new rules of engagement (fixing).

The present environment is geared toward producing hyper-over-stimulation/distraction. This is the result of Acceleritis over the past six millennia. We became stimulation junkies and invented technodrugs to feed that addiction.

At one time not so very long ago, in the West, we felt very confident and competent. In the East and South, where most of current growth has come from, there was great hope.

Now uncontrolled thoughts and feelings have stampeded the herd. This is all utterly unnecessary.

We have the skills and resources to fix everything, even at the advanced state of ruin we have already made of the planet and its species.

But not without working together.

If we continue to wallow in delusional hate fantasies while Rome burns, well. You know how that ends.

Can we all please wake up from the nonsense and get to cooperating to fix the mess we made?

Further methods of attaining inner clarity (Key #10) in Part 40.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

My best to all,
Bill

Ride the Psychic Foam

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Powerful Mind Part 38

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created December 1, 2023. Updated March 28, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 37             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Key #10 is about how to ride the bucking bronco that is your mind. Your mind, which is constantly throwing up inner words, feelings and impulses that – if allowed – can enslave your mood.

When my late partner Len Matthews, a wonderful human being, read my book Mind Magic, he initially disagreed with the idea that he should “dis-identify with the thought senate” (paraphrasing the title of Chapter 9). He said, “I’m proud of my ideas, I want to call them my own.”

I pointed out the subtitle of that chapter “Not Throwing Your Authority Behind Untested Head Spewings”. This, I explained, allowed for cases in which a person can take pride and ownership of ideas after having tested those ideas thoroughly enough, with which he agreed.

Therefore, Key #10 is about how to test one’s inner drafts before adopting them as one’s own official policy.

Not viewing the situation that way, the vast majority of the human race throughout history, and perhaps more so today due to the Distraction Culture produced by Acceleritis, tend to assume that the inner soundtrack is one’s very own self expressing positions that have been fully ratified by all sides of oneself.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the pandemic coping condition for information overload, most of the time the mind is operating in what neuroscientists call the Default Network. This is an idle stream of consciousness that keeps switching tracks based on associations, and includes daydreaming as well as commentary on what one is doing in the external world of consensual reality sometimes involving other people.

In the Observer state, neuroscientists say that the brain is operating from the Executive Control Network, and the mind is in a state of metacognition, able to observe with a degree of detachment what the inner wordstream is saying. It is that degree of detachment which Mind Magic Chapter 9 (read an excerpt) aimed to achieve in readers. By having that degree of detachment, one can inspect what one’s mind just said, to see if it is consistent with one’s general viewpoint, or if it appears to be an outlier, perhaps a remnant of who you used to be. Or just a first reflexive reaction of anger at someone in language you might have used as a child or as a teenager but would not normally use aloud today.

By helping children to learn these ways, they shall more quickly become able to be in control of their own impulses.

When I was a child, like all other children, I had a very hard time guessing which of my impulses to act upon and which ones to just let drift away. Perhaps I had more trouble with it than most children. Because on stage and in other rare moments I had experienced the Flow state, in which simply letting myself flow with all of my impulses seemed to work fantastically well. At the time this is what I muddily thought. It was only much later on that I realized that in Flow one does not always act on every impulse, in fact, in making that assumption I had caused myself to be taken out of Flow after very short periods of it. This took years to discover. In the meantime, I had absurd experiences of following impulses which turned out to be ridiculously wrong and impossible to defend afterward.

In that chapter of Mind Magic, one of the metaphors used is to consider the mind to be a vast senate of viewpoints, installed based on people you have met who may have impressed you in one way or another, which set up a robot simulating that person within one’s own mind, presumably mediated by a specific pattern of electrochemical flow among specific neurons. In a lifetime one may meet, or hear, speak, or read the words of, tens of thousands of people, including in media. Thousands of them may leave permanent impressions as biological “AI” outposts within one’s mind. This, then, is the senate.

The Executive Control Network may be viewed as the inner True Self, trying to sort through what may be conflicting impulses arising simultaneously like virtual particles in the quantum foam, within one’s own microcosm. The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler postulated that in nothingness before the Big Bang, there had always existed quantum foam, with virtual particles arising and disappearing. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” I posited that the quantum foam itself is consciousness, the original substrate of the universe. Whether or not this is true we might not as a species know for millennia, although as individuals some of us may decide to adopt it as a working hypothesis for life, as I do.

By installing Key #10 in one’s own mind, one gives oneself the psychic distance to edit one’s own headstream.

More than that, one can take the time to teach errant senators how to behave properly. For example, one day recently, I heard myself think something mean about a person I love. With Key #10, it’s not enough to just correct oneself and move on: you are advised to carry on an inner dialog with the senator who said that, and to find out how that part of you thinks and feels. Does the part of you who just said that mean thing not love this other person? Or was that just an old reflex from your childhood when you first started to use mean words like that? If the latter turns out to be the case, as it did, that senator (or neuron grouping) can learn that it’s no longer appropriate to use such language even to oneself, it’s no longer fitting within the person you have become. In this way the mind is eventually cleansed and impurities have been removed from it.

One of the inner signals that one learns to pay attention to is any trace of negativity. By now, using the other Keys 1-9, we have already changed our mental habits enough to realize that we prefer to be happy and to know how to quickly tune out of anything that makes us unhappy.

Negativity is what makes us unhappy, therefore we have already started to learn how to tune away from negativity to positivity, to find one’s creativity interested and challenged by the “dare” of negativity to find creative solutions to remove all causes of negativity from one’s life as quickly as possible in each case.

More methods for riding one’s psychic froth in the next installment.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

My best to all,
Bill

Bringing on the Observer State by Observation

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Powerful Mind Part 31
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created October 6, 2023. Updated March 21, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 30             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“How observant of you!” We have all heard people say this from time to time, to us or to someone else. There is wisdom in everything that is said, often much deeper wisdom than even the person who says it is aware of. Old sayings especially.

The Observer state is more than being an observant person, although that is one aspect of the state.

We are embarking here on explaining Key #7, which is about the perceptions, the five senses, and the internal sense, the mind with its thoughts and feelings. Feelings include more than emotions; emotions are the bodily manifestations of our feelings. Thoughts are more than us talking to ourselves in our minds; thoughts include images, memories, hunches, and ideas we understand without using words in our mind.

These sensory systems bring us information about the world outside and inside.

Key #7 is about how to use these tools to further your Mission, and take care of yourself and other people better, by getting into the Observer state. Key #7 focused on how to do that using more powerful methods of observation. Other Keys aim to get you there by other strategies.

To review, the default network in the brain, what we call EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), is the most common state of most human beings. The mind wanders, impulses arise, and you choose which impulses to act upon based on the past. A prominent brain function which neuroscientist Karl Friston refers to as the inference engine acts like an AI to keep track of every event in your past and makes associations between event type, action taken, and result; and then sends you impulses to take specific action that would have been best, in that event type, in the past. I have called it the robot since the previous century and lately have been calling it the Bio-AI.

This is of course not a perfect way to make decisions. What if the event you are now embroiled in has never appeared in your life before, and the default events that are most similar and which the inference engine therefore uses as proxies for your current situation, are really not close enough? What if none of the actions you took in the past were really all that effective? As explained in the chapters relating to Key #2, consistency is not really the best policy.

The inference engine is part of the old brain, going back millions of years. 200,000 years ago our species evolved a frontal cortex specifically as an improvement on the earlier decision “optimization” system. This new part enables the executive control network in the brain, although all brain systems are distributed in many parts of the physical brain. This network is where you want to work from. The best way to shift gears to that network is though conscious metacognition, that is, by observing your own thinking and feeling. This will get you into the Observer state.

You can easily slip out of the Observer state into EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). The reason it is easy to slip out is distraction. The environment in what we call modern civilization is extremely distractive, unless you live alone in a cave. Another reason is long habit. Getting mad at yourself only makes things worse. Maintain your sense of humor, it’s another way of maintaining your sense of perspective. Perspective allows us to realize that minor slippages are usually unimportant in the greater scheme of things, and are valuable learning experiences if you use them that way. The old sayings that captured this include “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “no use crying over spilt milk”, and “practice makes perfect”. Key #4 also helps with this, reminding you not to keep score (because it trivializes you) but rather stay focused in the present.

Ego

Metacognition and the executive control network do not assure the onset of Observer state. Observer state is where you can identify impulses arising in you which come from ego. It’s not always obvious. And you’re in the Observer state when you can ignore such impulses, not act upon them.

Ego is a form of neediness, also known as attachment, where you experience negative feelings because something you have become needy of, is withheld.

If something you were born actually needing is withheld – like oxygen, food, water, certain temperature levels, health – it’s natural to have negative feelings, and would not fall into the category of ego.

Most of ego is related to esteem – the desire that other people esteem you. Such dependencies weaken you and get in the way of achieving a powerful mind.

One of the things you will be looking out for as you amp up the power of inner and outer observation is your own subtle neediness. Observer state is the powerful will that enables you to surmount those attachments. Renunciation of that neediness doesn’t mean stopping yourself from enjoying those things when they come your way, but you must have the will power to stop yourself from running after more of the same.

It will seem like the universe is testing your resolve (and that might be what is actually happening).

You make your will stronger by exercising it. Especially when you can discipline yourself. Be careful not to exercise your will by being domineering with other people.

As a first step toward internalizing Key #7, keep an eye out inside for signs of neediness and analyze what it exactly is. Imagine scenarios in which your ego gets the stroking you want and scenarios in which your ego is crushed and humiliated. You will sense progress when you realize you don’t care about that stuff so much anymore – the sting will have been taken out of such mortification incidents. You will have become a mensch.

Be vigilant from the start of each day to the end. It’s optional but very helpful to keep a journal noting when ego arose in you and what you felt and did about it.

After this useful preparation we shall begin to more directly address observation in the next post.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

Study Thyself

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Powerful Mind Part 17

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 21, 2025
Created June 30, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 16

“Know Thyself” goes back to the Delphic Oracle Temple in Sixth Century B.C. Greece then known as Hellas. The saying is attributed by legend to Apollo and by historians to a group of seven sages of whom the best known is Thales, who postulated that the universe itself contains a natural force that brought about all of existence, and was the first human on record to have predicted the exact timing of an eclipse. Socrates based much of his philosophy on these two words.

In general use at the time, the phrase was interpreted as knowing one’s own capabilities and limits. Plato altered the meaning to knowing one’s own soul. Judeo-Christian philosophers added the meaning of knowing one’s own relationship with The Creator.

In the context of metacognition, in my view, to know oneself means to have undergone the strenuous and time-consuming process of studying oneself as if “one is an observer from the outside, with a means of seeing, feeling and hearing what is going on within oneself,” including what lies below the conscious mind. And with the help of this objective pseudo-outside view, one has successfully edited one’s own thoughts, feelings, and automatic reactions, and thus achieved an inner integrity, a oneness, a simplification, and an autonomous focus. When these conditions have been met, I would call such a person, one who knows themself.

Note the mention of “what lies below the conscious mind.” This has become a hairy subject in psychology. The heavy emphasis placed on hewing to the a priori assumption of materialism within the social structures of academic scientists, while any a priori assumption is anathema to the concept of objective science, has caused psychologists as well as all other types of scientists to veer away from language which undermines their social standing within their fields. The words “unconscious” and “subconscious” – which had been the core of the Freudian/Jungian revolution in psychology – are now taboo. Words such as “preconscious” are preferred, but the safest way to discuss the subject is to use the lengthier construction “events that do not reach the threshold of conscious awareness.”

This latter workaround actually has some value in my estimation. It calls attention to the fact that qualia (subjective experiences within the psyche) can succeed or fail to leap over the line into conscious awareness. This is important to the inner explorer because it is a cue to strive to pay sufficient inner attention to become conscious of more of the arising qualia: thus making more of the subconscious, conscious.

One who achieves this degree of self-knowledge will experience moments of inner clarity when a fear or anger reaction starts to subtly arise and one catches and squelches it within less than a second.

In Parts 14, 15, and 16 of Powerful Mind, we have reviewed how each of us became substantially unfree, subtly enslaved to imposed views, and we covered the method of close self-analysis, and resolute perseverance in disciplining the mind and becoming an original person.

We leaned heavily on the metaphor of “the robot” to help your inner senses grasp the true relationship between the parts of yourself which have become automatic (the robot) and the essence of who you really are (the real you). One exercise we recommended is to check your level – are you trapped in the robot right now, or are you in the Observer state?

As we look back at the last few posts we see an opportunity to add one further recommendation as to how to know where you are.

If you sense some dilemma you seek to resolve, the likelihood is that you are in the robot. When you are in the Observer state, you are solving problems as they arise and there is no feeling of any dilemma.

One of the main objectives of Powerful Mind is to reduce all of the vast complexity of purifying and mastering one’s mind, to a set of a dozen principles, each of which can be stated in a few words.

The first of these principles, or Keys as we call them, was described in Powerful Mind Parts 10-13, and is:

Doubt your own last thought/feeling.

This is the method that most directly confronts the robot. As we specified in that section, this Key must be applied with balance and perspective to avoid sinking into a robotic Hamlet information analysis paralysis. If you find yourself having lost all confidence in your own intuitions, you will know then that the robot has judoed you and is still running the show. The doubt is meant as a momentary wipe – the “arc” we have spoken of earlier – a distance between the arising of an impulse to believe something specific, and your confirmation of your approval or the denial of your approval of that impulse. If too much time goes by without reaching closure you are being indecisive and need to shut out the world for 20 minutes or so in order to really study the situation and reach your best judgment as to an action plan which can later be improved as you learn more.

The second Key which we have been working on in Powerful Mind Parts 14-17 is:

Study, edit, and reset your automatic reactions.
This is radical new mental strategy #2,
The second simple key to the doorway
Of the upper mind.

Whereas the first Key is a permanent one, useful at all times, when applied correctly with balance, this second Key is one that is most important for the first year or so of the rest of one’s life, after making the decision to clear out the debris of other people’s influence, and re-evaluating everything from one’s own autonomous, empirically-driven, pragmatic and aesthetic intuitions. After the first year or so, you may see yourself needing to use this Key a bit less often, and that, if it happens, will be a good sign.

Love to all,
Bill