Jun 30, 2025
There’s a concept that I’ve started seeing everywhere and have found very useful, and which I have not seen many others discuss. I will try to explain this concept here. As usual for this blog, to make the most of this post first read this excellent introduction to the theory of predictive coding.
I’d call this concept something like “the stories we tell ourselves”. It’s related to the idea of narrative self, and it rhymes nicely with the predictive coding theory of human perception. The idea is that we tell ourselves stories about how the world is or what kind of person we are, and then these stories become true in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way. So for example:
In predictive coding predictions/beliefs in general are kind of like self-fulfilling prophecies, in that we act by making a prediction and then letting our prediction-error-minimization machinery naturally do its thing. A Story in the sense I care about in this post is a belief which is ???? explicitly stated
it’s not “lying”, because self fulfilling prophecy`
it might be quite important to be protective/careful about the stories you tell yourself.
need good examples
usually explicit