The topics were relatively intellectual, but I hope the practical examples presented helped you in understanding the ideas.
This time we’re going to crank things up a couple of notches. Be warned, the stuff that’s coming in this post is very difficult - at least for me - as I venture into concepts and ideas developed by some of the smartest men ever to have walked the earth.
So what is this post about? Well, to put it simply it’s about how living things try to figure out how to survive in their environments.
But to really start figuring this stuff out, I’m going to introduce several concepts like Bayesian inference, the Free Energy Principle, the Markov Blanket and Boundary, anti-fragility and ruin.
On top of this conceptual hodge-podge, I’m going to try to stretch our everyday thinking to not only view humans, animals and plants as living things. Instead, the concept of “being alive” is expanded to cover many other phenomena, such as ideas, cultures and even mental disorders.
I promise I’ll write as clearly as possible, because I don’t want to make this stuff any more complex than it needs to be, and I don’t want to sound intellectual for the purpose of sounding intellectual - even though that is tempting.
You Might Read This - Bayesian Inference
Let’s start with Bayesian inference. Bayesian inference is an idea coming from the Bayesian interpretation of probability. For people trying to function in their everyday lives the main gist of Bayesian inference is that we don’t really know what’s going to happen. Instead, we make predictions.
These predictions are based on a model that our mental structures generate. (I’m saying mental structures because traditionally scientists talk about the “brain”, but interesting stuff about the gut, the heart and the nervous system is emerging now in relation to the development and functioning of the psyche, so I’ll keep on using that term).
The predictions are made based on a couple of things. There are the things you as a complete being are experiencing right now, both consciously and subconsciously. Then there’s the stuff you have experienced previously - this covers both the genetic information and your life-experiences you carry with you.
Your mental structures then compare if what is happening is similar to what should be happening based on previous experience.
Fair enough? Now, remember how we talked about the Model of Hierarchical Complexity before. You could look at the situation like this:
You have a mental representation of the environment that the MHC can organize pretty nicely. This mental representation is your MHC of the world, based on your current and previous experiences. Obviously, this representation is not the actual world, but it’s a map that is - hopefully - good enough for you to go about your life successfully.
To keep on going about your life successfully you need to constantly update your map. The reason for this is that the environment is changing constantly, sometimes even in unpredictable and catastrophic ways. If your map is out of date, you’ll more likely encounter a catastrophe, a so-called Black Swan that takes you out. This means that you are ruined - “ruin” being a term that’s used in statistics when talking about a system getting f*ucked up.
However, living things are pretty cool, as they avoid ruin by using Bayesian inference to both function in their environments and to update their previous model of the world. This makes living things anti-fragile. Simply put, living things are not in a constant, random process of change, they are not completely rigid and unchanging and they have boundaries they try to maintain. Living things can adapt to their environments, precisely because of the Bayesian inference going on constantly.
Here’s a practical example. Psychologists have found that there’s an optimal range of negative-to-positive experiences that keep romantic couples together. I believe it was between 5-11 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction.
Why would that be? Well, if we look at the idea of Bayesian inference, the answer could be this: First, if your environment is not pushing back against you - too much positive - then you risk making a huge prediction error in the long run. But, if your environment - in this case, your partner - is constantly pushing back, it means that your map is already out of date and you will wear yourself out.
So little errors frequently enough in a relationship - i.e. arguments - keep you both feeling more stable because your overall model of the world gets updated frequently enough. In fact, airplane pilots can keep on making tiny errors constantly to get readings from their monitoring devices. This way they are constantly sure that the system is working. If they never made a mistake, they could miss a malfunction in the system, that might crash the whole plane.
In the same way you are better positioned when you are constantly finding an amount of opposition that keeps you moving forward and solving problems, without wearing you down.
Are You Dead Yet? - What Is "Being Alive"
Alright, let’s get now to the next idea. We’ll define a bit more in-depth what “being alive” means. I borrowed this example from Karl Friston, who is the dude who came up with the Free Energy Principle and knows a lot about living things and the brain.
Imagine you have a glass of water. You drop a droplet of ink in to the water. The ink starts dispersing in the water. But then! To your surprise the ink starts gathering and returning into its droplet form. Then it starts repeating this cycle of dispersion and gathering in a rhythmical pattern. That would be peculiar, wouldn’t it? Could we say the droplet is alive?
Well, Friston thinks so, so let’s go with that. The ink is now, by definition, alive. What makes it alive? It’s separate from its environment. It has an internal structure. Instead of breaking down due to the basic laws of entropy, it actually resists this breakdown, because it is following a pattern that maintains its boundaries with its environment.
A key concept here is the Markov Blanket and the Markov Boundary. Markov Blanket is an idea that there’s a system that is made up of parts, and how the system is going to be in the future can be predicted if you understand how a single part is in relation to its surrounding parts.
All the parts that are connected to a central part form together the Markov Blanket. Then, the edges of this Blanket are the Markov Boundary. Anything outside of the boundary is irrelevant, when predicting the internal state of the system.
For example, your skin could be understood as a Markov Boundary, and the skin and the stuff inside could be understood as the Markov Blanket. Then, your mental structures are constantly monitoring what is going inside of you. Internal temperature, blood pressure, hormonal levels and other bodily phenomena are kept track of.
Then, surprise! You are hit on your shoulder by an angry halberd-wielding time-traveler. The Markov Boundary that is your skin is broken, the system is thrown into disarray and your mental structures are going crazy trying to figure out how the hell did this happen and can ruin - meaning death - be prevented.
If Friston was looking at what was happening, he might say that the amount of Free Energy in your system was suddenly and sharply increased. What does he mean by this?
The Free Energy Principle says the living things try to maintain their structure - their Markov Blanket - in relation to their environment by minimising the difference between their model of the reality with reality itself. So, this is pretty much like the Bayesian inference we already talked about.
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| Don't take too much what this guy has to offer... |
When receiving signals from their environments that are not vibing with their model of reality, living things generally do one of three things. First, they can die, if something catastrophic happens. Second, they may adapt to their environment. Third, they may actively change their environment to suit their model.
But the point is, that the difference between the model of your reality and reality itself is Free Energy, and your mental structures don’t like it, because it shows that something is off.
In other words, you are constantly both trying to find support for your view of the world, because that shows that you are vibing well with the reality, and you are constantly trying to minimise big, unpleasant surprises which show you don’t know what is going on - and which can ruin you. (Or have you ever known a person who hates happy surprises? Well, that can be distressing to people, whose map of reality isn’t well organised.)
The World Is Way More Alive Than You Think
So now we’ve laid down quite a bit of theoretical framework. Let’s see what interesting things pop up, as we combine what we’ve gone through this far, and include one more ingredient.
Carl Jung has said, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” This is a powerful statement that can help one understand how people can get drawn into ideologies, group-think and intensely rigid and biased worldviews.
The way I look at it that people -me included - can often not realise that they are being hypocritical about their words and actions. So, a person might be advocating an idea verbally, while their actions are not commensurate with the idea. Or, the person might be acting as the idea or ideology tells them to do, without actually feeling truly like they are doing what they should do. I’m sure if you reflect for a moment, you can identify people around you who do this - and if you think a little bit more, you’ll remember situations where you have done this.
So, ideas can have people. In fact, to me it looks like some of the most awful things that have happened in the world have happened because ideas had people in their grips - you know, Hitler, Stalin and other lads.
Also, to me it looks like we are living in times where people are very prone to be gripped by ideas, as ideas spread faster than ever - faster than even physical viruses.
What if we started treating ideas, ideologies, groups of people, cultures and even physical and mental diseases as living things? What if we started approaching these topics as if we were contending with things that have their trademark patterns, their internal structures, and their boundaries they are trying to preserve - just like you and me?
I’m aware that this is not an argument. Instead, it is a question and an invitation to expand our thinking. My gut feeling tells me that this could be a fruitful way of looking at these things so we would approach them with the appropriate seriousness and maturity.
For example, I’ve been lately reading quite a bit about personality disorders, as I’ve been interested in personality psychology for quite a long time. What is interesting about personality disorders that they seem to function cross-culturally, with a recognizable pattern. So, just like a bacterial or viral infection, mental disorders have their own structures, and if I may speculate, their own Markov Boundaries and Blankets.
In fact, I believe that people have conceptualised this long before we’ve had anything resembling science. Think about the stories about demons possessing people, the vast and carefully produced pieces of human expression like paintings, books, plays, mythologies and more that wrestle with these topics.
I’m asking you, which do you believe more in your heart: that a mental disorder that repeats cross-culturally, grips people, ruins their lives systematically and keeps on propagating those environmental conditions that are beneficial for its survival is simply a mechanical, non-living thing, or that a mental disorder is more like a living creature, that tries to survive in the world, just like a virus tries to multiply itself to survive and expand in the world?
And the same can be asked of political ideologies, religious creeds, scientific dogma, local sub-cultures. To me it looks like these entities try to survive, just like human individuals or animal species.
But What Am I Supposed To Do?
Then the tough question is, how the hell should one choose what problems to try to solve. The world is full of people who try to solve problems that are way too difficult for them to solve (can an 18-year-old activist reorganise the global economic system successfully - I don’t think so). The world is also full of people who focus only on problems that are too easy for them, wasting their potential.
This brings us back to the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. The MHC is so powerful because with it you can conceptualise almost any phenomena in the human world. With it you can start mapping out, how complex a problem is.
By appreciating the phenomena around you as living, and applying the MHC as guiding principle for your map of the reality, you can start figuring out, what problems and where are those that you should be solving.
Alright, that’s it for now, this is a crap ton to digest. But if you got this far, you might be interested to know, that with this and the two previous posts we have a pretty good working framework to address real-life problems.
Soon I will get to more practical issues regarding social relationships, work and career, health, addiction and hobbies.
As always, I’d be happy to converse these topics, so don’t be afraid to contact me through social media.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. I just didn’t know where to fit this, so I’ll say it here. I talked above about how a mental disorder might be conceptualised as living entity, and how these conceptualisations may already be part of our tacit cultural understanding in the form of stories and images. It might interesting to think about these abstract representations as attempts to depict higher stage phenomena in the MHC as something more tangible. For example, the archetypal idea of a force that threatens the whole meta-cross-paradigmatic 16 stage structure shown in the MHC could be understood as the Adversary, the Devil or even as the Joker from the Dark Knight. This way art can be a window into how we perceive the higher stages of the MHC, before we can communicate these forms of thought rationally and logically.
P.P.S. This one was tough to write, it took me 1 hour of taking notes and 2.5 hours to write. And obviously a lot of thinking and pondering. And a night of sleep between taking notes and the writing.
P.P.S. If you want to know more about the concepts presented here, I suggest going on a Google-hunt for Karl Friston, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Carl Jung, for starters.
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