Thoughtforms Life Discussion: Richard Watson, Alexey Tolchinsky, Mark Solms, Michael Levin, and Karl Friston
Apr 9, 2026
Richard Watson, cognitive scientist who ponders collective and chimeric dreaming; Karl Friston, theoretical neuroscientist behind the free energy principle; Mark Solms, neuropsychologist focused on dreaming and affect. They tackle forgetting as model pruning, how dreams prevent overfitting, links between accuracy and complexity, REM versus consolidation, cellular forgetting in regeneration, and whether collective or tech-filled dreams could arise.
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Decision Is Symmetric With Forgetting Past Histories
- Choosing a future path is symmetric with forgetting a particular past: decisions collapse past possibilities.
- Richard Watson frames choice as decoupling current state from past causes, effectively selecting one prior history over another.
Draw Attention To Enacted Patterns In Therapy
- Use therapy to make patients attend to automatic enactments so they can lay down new predictions without erasing old ones.
- Mark Solms recommends highlighting enacted patterns to problematize and supplement entrenched non-declarative beliefs.
Regeneration Requires Rewriting Cellular Priors
- Regeneration can be seen as changing cells' priors about their past and future; cells may have 'frozen' models limiting new outcomes.
- Michael Levin frames interventions as somatic psychotherapy to soften cellular priors for new anatomical futures.
