Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

another way to put this and we're going to go there in a moment um is that we could say that we're tempted just overwhelmingly 00:05:09 tempted to believe that to believe that when we have perceptual experience including introspective experience of our own minds we think that we know that content immediately the idea that to be in a 00:05:22 cognitive state is to know that state and the idea that our inner states present themselves to introspection even trained introspection just as they are

buddhism is first and foremost a solution to a problem the problem is the 00:02:47 ubiquity of suffering in samsara and buddhism is all about trying to solve that problem and famously there's a diagnosis of that problem where the immediate conditions 00:02:59 of suffering are attraction and aversion but where the root cause the thing that gives rise to that attraction and aversion to those pathologies is a profound confusion about the nature of reality and it's that confusion that 00:03:13 leads us to the attraction and aversion that takes us into samsara and since it's an illusion we should pay attention to the classical indian understanding of what illusion is and 00:03:25 that is something that appears in one way but exists in another that is an illusion isn't something that's completely non-existent it's something his mode of existence and his mode of appearance are discordant from one 00:03:37 another and we're going to be focusing on that a great deal in this talk but the idea is that because this primal confusion this illusion lies at the root of suffering the only way to end the 00:03:50 problem of suffering is to extinguish the illusion and what i want to talk about today is how that illusion manifests in the case of our own minds and what i'm going to argue is is this 00:04:03 that that confusion manifests as a conviction that we have an immediate knowledge of our own minds that we can be indubitably aware of the contents of our own minds and the second aspect of that delusion equally pernicious is that 00:04:16 it involves the sub the superimposition of a subject object duality on experience that is uh primordially non-dual um so that primal confusion can be 00:04:28 thought of this way um it's taking that which is impermanent to be permanent that which is a source of suffering to be a source of happiness that which is only conventionally real to be ultimately real that which is 00:04:42 interdependent to be independent and the important point for our purposes is that the thesis that our own experience is permeated with illusion applies to our experience of our own minds as well 00:04:55 that's what i want to emphasize here