They wish not just for things to be good again, but also that they’d never been bad.

It’s a sort of ploy to deceive oneself that the bad can be erased by pretending it never happened.

The arrow of time is, of course, irreversible. Things can become good again but not in same ways as before. Only in new ways learned from how the old ways went wrong.

As much as we might want to, there is no way around trauma. It can be repressed, but it can’t be erased. Only by embracing how things have irreversibly changed can we really move on.

Golden fractures

This idea of growing from our wounds, our brokenness is poetically expressed in the Japanese mending practice "kintsugi".

Literally meaning golden (kint) joinery (sugi), kintsugi is the art of glueing broken pottery back together with a wax of dusted gold. The broken is not discarded, but transformed into something more beautiful.

Kintsugi embodies the Japanese aesthetic ideal of wabi-sabi.

Wabi-sabi finds beauty not in perfection, symmetry and eternity as we do in the West, but in Buddhist ideas of impermanence and imperfection.

Fractures don’t mark the end of the object’s life, but defining moments in its unique history. They are not hidden or disguised, but adorned with golden significance.

(Im)perfect illusions

Buddhism roots impermanence and imperfection at the heart of human experience.

Impermanence means the only constant is change. Things are always changing, and so they are always "imperfect." Perfection exists only in the mind.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” — Heraclitus

As humans, we suffer trying to control impermanence.

Because we don’t know what comes next (future), we cling onto what we do know — what has been (past). In a futile attempt to defy future uncertainty, our minds sculpt an illusion of permanence out of past certainties: the self.

"One is never afraid of the unknown. One is afraid of the known coming to an end." — Jiddu Krishnamurti

You feel like you are not simply what you are doing right now, but more so everything you have done. Because what you are is so fleeting and intangible, while what you were is fixed and final; a solid foundation for predictions of what you will be in the future. So **you come to more closely identify with what no longer exists than with what actually is.**‍

From an infinitude of experiences, the mind handpicks, ranks and values memories to construct an identity. A bulletproof origin story about itself through which it habitually interprets (distorts) everything else.

"You are a story you tell yourself." — Naval Ravikant

The self is what you experience when thinking.

You may think you are a thinker authoring thoughts, using them. But the thinker itself is a product of thought. Thinking, in fact, creates the deception that there's a thinker. The self is the automatic experience of identifying with that illusion, as it chains from thought to thought. While thoughts come and go, the self has a false sense of continuity throughout — permanence.

You're not producing thoughts; thoughts are producing you. Our relationships, careers, concerns about past and future — even pain itself; all are mediated by thought. We don't so much experience reality as it is, but through the stories we tell ourselves about it  — what has been (memory) and what is to be (expectation).

As such, the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between weight of the past and pull of the future.

Pain is sensation. Suffering is narrative.

Pain is objective. Suffering is subjective.

Pain is biology. Suffering is literature.

— gillesdc (@gillesdc) January 13, 2023

The self wants to hold its past certainties together. It wants to stay solid moving through change. It desires more of what was (past) — and fears what may change.

“Expectation is the root of all heartache.” — William Shakespeare

Alas, longing and resistance only make it suffer imperfection more. Fluid inevitably comes down on fixed. Everything wears, tears, changes, breaks, and dies. So our pots, so our bodies. But while the atoms at once move on into new configurations, our minds struggle to let go of its stories about them.

We remain upset, angry, sad, depressed long after the change happened. The friction between perfect self and imperfect nature makes us suffer.

It's not impermanence/imperfection itself that makes us suffer. It's wanting things to be permanent/perfect when they're not.

Life is suffering

Thus the genesis teaching of the Buddha: life is suffering* *or dukkha.

• ‍‍We suffer because we fear an uncertain future and because we desire more of what we have/know.

• Fear and desire express from the self — a fixed idea of who we are built from memory — as it clashes with the inherent impermanence of life.

• Paradoxically, it's in trying to uphold the illusion of permanence in a sea of change that we really suffer.

"The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless." — Alan Watts

Case in point: mindfulness is about letting go of the self-illusion through awareness.

When we recognise a thought as just a thought, it dissolves — like feeling or sound that passes— and we cease to be its captive.

We can then simply *be *in the present moment. There, in the middle of fear and desire, the stories dissolve and we cease to suffer.

"Do no dwell in the past, do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment." — Buddha

Life is trauma

Still, we spend most of our lives somewhere in the complex dance between fear and desire.

In this sense, suffering is just a part of life: we all suffer in our own ways. Whether rich or poor, looking this way or that way, coming from here of there, praying to this God, that God or no God at all.

This isn't good or bad in itself. It just means we all have different joys and struggles in life — as they converge from the infinite dance of the unique experiences and perspectives that make us.

"To live is to suffer, and to survive is to find meaning in the suffering." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Life shatters our self-illusions over and over again. Because its only constant is change, it constantly proves what we believe about ourselves untrue. The mind doesn't like uncertainty and so by default we choose to act as if nothing changed.

To others, we choose to hide the broken image — present it as still whole. The longer we keep this lie up, the more we ourselves identify with it, while, behind the mask, the wound is still there festering. We feel the pain, but forget where it comes from.

Going against the tide only makes it harder to endure. Rather, our psyche's well-being depends on how we pick up the broken pieces and put them back together in new ways.

Loved ones (and psychologists) help us make sense of the shatterings, to find meaning in the suffering. So we can make peace with trauma, accept it as part of who we are, and move onwards — reintegrated.

Each time we are able to do that, we invent a new version of ourselves. Better, stronger, more resilient and more beautiful than before. The cracks are not hidden away, but worn glowingly as the uniquely defining features of the whole.

"He who has a why can bear almost any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche

In that spirit, psychology rhymes "life is suffering" with "life is trauma".

We all have egos until life punches us in the face. It's not the going down but the getting back up.

This is the essential meaning behind Nietzsche's famous "what doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger." Only by making habit out of facing your wounds do you become invulnerable. For the self to be strong, it cannot identify with a fixed ideal but must dance with the unwavering wave of change.

"Life confided to me this secret: I am that which must always overcome itself." — Friedrich Nietzsche

"We must be traitors, practice faithlessness, and always relinquish our ideals. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Many have made many things out of Nietzsche's Übermensch — some more grotesquely so than others.

His philosophy of what makes a human superior however did not point at genetics but at courage. The courage to push through hardship, move on and re-invent yourself in the journey — time and time again.

To over-come (überkommen) the self; the perfection illusion of who you are you are so invested in.

Yes, Nietzsche was a buddhist much more than a nazi.

Traumatic neuro-science

I came to particularly appreciate the philosophy of life as trauma upon learning the neuro-scientific mechanics of how the mind actually constructs its self-illusion.

What follows is an essential sketch inspired by the popular work of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett.

When we are born, we have no sense of self — no I.

‍A new-born's experience is pure sensation. They get overwhelmed by sense data (sights, smell, sounds, touches) they don't know how to deal with because they have no memory to interpret from. Their world is uncertain and chaotic — even if it's just a crib or sofa at this point.

But as the baby crawls, grabs and plays around, its brain maps sensations to the environment and, through trial and error, learns what it should and shouldn't do. Through sensory feedback, it learns that the couch is soft, the floor hard and the dog kind. I can relax in the couch, should be careful not to fall on the floor and can feel safe with the dog.

When sensation doesn't resolve uncertainty and the baby doesn't know what to do, it turns to mom and dad. When my mom is calm, I calm too — thus learning to be calm in similar situations. Vice-versa, if my mom is anxious, I internalise that anxiety and am likely to re-project it in the future.

Nervous synchronicity

Such psychological syncing is called limbic resonance. Parents regulate their baby's nervous system and thereby help it contextualise reality. They help the baby form its first mental maps to interpret reality around them from — making the uncertain navigable so the baby gains control and agency.

As we develop faculties for language, we come to conceptualise our bodily sensations as emotions. Emotions — like joy and sadness and peacefulness and anger — are names we give to specific configurations of feeling. They signal how to act in specific contexts as it relates to health and survival. If something made you happy in the past, you’re more likely to seek it again. If something scared you in the past, you’re more likely to avoid it this time.

"An emotion is your brain's conceptual construction of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world." — Lisa Feldman Barrett

From the neuro-scientific perspective, life is trauma because there is always fundamental uncertainty as to what my sensations mean — especially when I'm young.

In every particular context, there are only a few "right" ways to feel+act — and many wrong ones (in both biological and social terms). Learning through trial-and-error and helped by people close to me — family, friends, community — my self learns to contextualise emotions for well-being.

Individually, I’m always facing uncertainty — trauma — but when someone else helps me contextualise my sensations, I gain more agency. In this sense, human connection is the antidote to trauma: it releases the pressure of not knowing.

The (un)certain self

Growing up, emotions solidify in a foundation of memory through which we come to actively filter reality (rather than sensing it): perception.

Projecting present from past experience, patterns of interpretation self-reinforce and become habitual over time.

From those self-referential loops emerges the experience of self — a concept that clarifies the distinction between body environment. The self is how the brain experiences itself through the network of mental models it learned from the past. It's a prism through which we perceive and interact with everything else.

But the development of that self-concept is messy and the patterns it develops inevitably imperfect.

No matter how great your parents and childhood, you inevitably pick up some "stuff" on the bumpy way through life. That is, some traumas — collisions of your preconceptions with reality — remain unresolved. Needless to say, this gets worse as a function of how “bad” your parents were — let alone if they were absent altogether.

From within the self, this stuff then propagates into misguided cycles of interpretation and habit that consistently lead you astray. As long as not interpreted and accepted as part of who you are, the "stuff" typically leads to more stuff — compounding on top of it.

“Trauma is not just a past experience. It is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. It has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganisation of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.” — Bessel Van Der Kolk

The body has an incredible memory. Every wrongly contextualised sensation gets stored until it is adequately processed. The longer it sits repressed, the more problematic it becomes. Psychologically, but also biologically: pent up trauma stresses the body, even manifesting as chronic pain.

It’s estimated that ~30% of American adults (18+) suffer from chronic back pain. Surely, part of the explanation is that aging wears out the body. But evidence also points at unprocessed trauma continually causing psychological distress, manifesting as back pain.

Shrink away or lean in

Between 20 and 40, most people start to pick up on this baggage stored behind their sense of self.

In one of two ways: they either shrink away or lean in.

• Shrinking away leads to addiction — Addiction is the habit of seeking short-term escape from trauma — and only feeds the destructive loops. Instead of dealing with trauma, we seek release in substances, consumption, relationships and/or cycles of resentment, anger and self-pity. Whatever it is, the object of addiction becomes a crutch, bound to eventually break under pressure.‍

• Leaning in leads to personal growth and interestingness — Leaning in is to accept there is no way around trauma. If life itself is trauma, if our being is constantly negotiating with uncertainty, we have to deal with it in one way or the other. Every time we do that in a way that affirms life, we create a piece of ourselves that wasn't there before.

Because each leads to release — albeit in opposite directions — both addiction and growth become habits through self-perpetuating feedback loops.

Nassim Taleb would call one state fragile (harmed by disorder) and the other antifragile (gains from disorder). In psychological literature, the distinction post-traumatic stress versus post-traumatic growth.

There is no escape from trauma.

It’s a continuous source of stress, a sort of cancer that sits there doing harm for as long as it is not accepted and parsed within our selves. We have to face it,‍ interpret it, find meaning in it, make sense of it. We have to act, and we have to change. Every time we do that in a way that affirms life, we create a piece of ourselves that wasn’t there before.

To face your trauma head-on takes self-love and self-responsibility.

Self-love without self-responsibility leads to self-pity: it leaves you feeling sorry for yourself. Through self-responsibility, you can muster the courage to accept that you are not perfect nor free of vulnerabilities.

This courage helps you lean in, to approach trauma (and any sort of fundamental uncertainty) not with fear but with curiosity; a loving wanting to understand.

Curiosity as such is the antidote of fear. Dare to look closer at the unknown thing and you effectively disarm it, make it yours. To love (yourself) is to want to understand (yourself), and to understand (yourself) is to be free of fear.

Easier said than done, of course. Traumas can cut so deep we don't dare look at our selves anymore. It's in these moments where we need others to make us feel safe and loved — unconditionally of cracks and wounds, like mother and child — and to do this in a way that hints at their confidence in us. To get up and keep going.

Authenticity

In this sense, trauma is a process of differentiation.

Everyone faces their own trauma. Some compound over decades, others much faster. Denying its pain only makes it grow bigger and leads to addiction, because the body needs a way to express what it feels. It becomes hardened, numb. Lifeless.

**Channelling trauma as a part of who you are is what makes life art. **A particular expression of the unique mosaic of lived experiences and felt emotions that have sculpted someone’s character. It’s what makes a person different and unique — interesting in a way that can’t be replicated by anyone else, because they haven’t lived the same life.

This is what people mean when they speak of authenticity. Honestly, confidently and glowingly expressing who you are in all you do. Be it in creation (writing, painting, music) or simply connection with others; nobody could do it like you do. Authenticity is a vibe, hard to describe but unquestionably felt.

Sensing something human

Our sense of self paints itself as a kaleidoscope of all of our experiences.

In the beginning, the canvas is blank and the painting playful and spontaneous. As we grow up, clear patterns and concepts defining who we are emerge out of the chaos. We start brushing aside new experiences that don't fit the image we've come to deeply identify with.

When life throws something at us we can't ignore but also can't integrate, it impacts and leaves a crack. Afraid of what might happen when others might see it, we paint over it: we develop defense mechanisms. The painting we present outwardly more and more becomes a mask, a phony layer covering the cracks. Expression of our selves becomes obstructed — no longer wholesome and genuine. With the cracks, we also shroud our inner light; the spontaneous human energy felt by others as authenticity.

Working with his patients, the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden would try to "sense something human." His focus was to bring out the inner light hiding behind the rigid self-concept; the mask built as a comfort zone from defense mechanisms against life's challenges.

In addiction, the light remains trapped because you believe you can rely on something external — a crutch — to fix you, without you doing real hard work yourself. It's a complete relinquishing of personal agency, a choice to stay in the safety of a cage at the expense of self-development.

So, how do you bring out the light? What really is the difference between shrinking away and leaning in, between escaping in addiction and shining authenticity?

Ogden's "sensing something human" is connection.

Not connection as a crutch, but connection as a sort of emotional regulation.

What we need is limbic resonance, akin to the way a child connects with its mother. To sync our nervous systems with someone or something that makes us feel safe enough to take off the mask and let our lights out — express ourselves wholesomely.

This can be a friend, a spouse, a community, or something more personal like a passion project — a canvas for unapologetic creativity. Someone or something that supports us but, more than that, something that actually asks something more of us, to be courageous.

This other becomes an attractor with which those repressed bodily sensations can safely sync themselves. Within that process, they are made sense of, and become something more as they are released.

The broken pieces are rejoined in new ways that let the light out — beautifully glowing like the golden wax of kintsugi.

What is possible?

Possibility is, by definition, open-ended. It excites precisely because we don't know where our imagination might take us.

Still, there are ends. I'm not sure I can swim across the English Channel, but I am sure I can't walk on water.

2. Physics

Creativity without constraints is just chaos. Imagination needs a canvas to materialise.

To answer the question "what is possible" is best done in reverse: what is not possible?

Here, the physicist David Deutsch offers a useful heuristic:

gilles

@gillesdc

“All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.” — David Deutsch

9

10:06 AM • Aug 10, 2023

Deutsch is speaking within the scope of his multiverse concept, where everything that can happen will likely happen at some point.

Here's our first limit: physics.

As long as within the mechanics of the Universe, anything you can imagine is possible.

3. Knowledge

To make imagination real, you need the right knowledge.

Knowledge can be:

• Theory — Explicitly expressed in language. What we know about the world encoded in words and symbols.

• Intuition — Implicitly em-bodied and automatically executed through behaviour.

Theory is structured and rigid, intuition is dynamic and fluid.

Consider how nobody can learn how to ride a bike from a step a step-by-step manual. Similarly, you can't learn design or piano by reading about it. This is "felt" knowledge your body learns with experience: in relation to an environment and iterated through trial and error.

Towards possibilities, what you know in language is only really as relevant as far as you can convert it into effective behaviour — skill you know to apply dynamically in specific contexts.

4. History

Imagination is boundless. Physics is the hard limit. Knowledge is the soft limit.

Within knowledge, there's another limit: historical configuration.

Knowledge you lack can be acquired, but only to the point it has been uncovered so far. Total available knowledge is stored in the network of bodies and objects that make up civilisation. At every point in time, that network is configured in a way that enables some possibilities but not others.

For example, it took the Manhattan Project three years to successfully make an atomic bomb. Not because the knowledge wasn't already available: all contributing physicists were around and competent before. What took three years was the process of combining their knowledge into something new.

Similarly, cars can't exist without inventing the wheel first. But, once we have cars and planes, the only thing that keeps us from making flying cars is channeled synergy of knowledge that already exists.

5. Desire

Reaching down to the individual, the next limit is desire.

If the required knowledge is available and it only needs focused combination, you just have to want it enough. If you want it enough, you'll go for it, you'll learn and do what is required. You'll take the beating and turn setbacks into progress. Whatever it takes.

Desire, though, comes with two traps — both through self-delusion.

Intrinsic vs. mimetic

The first trap is that your desire is not intrinsic, but mimetic.

Humans are imitative creatures. Just like we learn to speak the same language and play by the same cultural values, we come to want the same things as those around us.

Because borrowed from others, mimetic desire is bound to fall apart in the face of challenges bound to arise. You simply don't want it enough to weather the inevitable storms and do what is necessary.

"He who cannot obey himself will be commanded." — Friedrich Nietzsche

In contrast, desire grounded in your genuine self fuels you to weather whatever storm head-on. Because doing so expresses who you are. You keep playing the game for it's own sake, not for the rewards to show off at the end.

Getting in your own way

The second trap is to not accept feedback; to deny what reality is telling you as you move through the journey. It's you valuing the comfort of your ego more than what potential is demanding of you.

Both forms of self-delusion have the same root.

If you really care, if the desire is truly yours, you'll want it enough by default. It doesn't feel like work, but purpose. Desire taken from others does feel like work. And, because you don't want it enough when push comes to shove, you're also driven to stick with how you know yourself over evolving through feedback.

To avoid the mimetic trap demands careful introspection and checking of your self. Peel back the layers of outside influence to find what authentically moves you. In the words of Socrates: "Know thyself."

Show up

All else is fallacious assumption, an excuse to not at least try.

People will say things like "I'm not as smart, I'm not as talented as him/her." As much as that might be true: if you are honest with yourself about your desires, you'll find your fit and try sincerely, finding and learning your path through whatever reality feeds back to you.

VV

@visualizevalue

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." – Joseph Campbell

3,189

9:55 PM • Oct 3, 2022

With such sincerity, even if you fail, you'll realise that it's not actually about the desire but about the journey itself. Your path shows itself as you walk it. Win or lose is irrelevant dichotomy: because you'll come out the other end genuinely changed either way. The only "competition" is with previous versions of yourself.

Ambition

One thing I've learned over the years is that you can't ever really change someone.

But you can raise their ambitions. You can demand more of them in a way that expresses your belief in them. Inspired by such loving demand, they will change themselves.

gilles

@gillesdc

The kindest thing you can do for someone is to believe in them.

Most people don't need your help. They just need some spirit so they can help themselves.

Simply asking more of them, in a way that hints at your confidence, goes a long way.

290

7:53 AM • Jan 8, 2023

That is true of how we relate to ourselves, too.

You will rarely change by beating yourself up about things you could've done better.

But** if you raise your ambitions from a sense of potential, then whatever you need to change will change — as a byproduct.**

The ambition works as an attractor that pulls you towards your future self. You just have to keep doing the work, keep showing up, and keep being kind to yourself as you move in the direction.

The case for being ambitious

Ambition can sound like a bit of a dirty word. But I'm convinced that people should absolutely be ambitious. Not for themselves, but for others — and the world.

In fact, I believe you should especially be ambitious if the word feels dirty to you. Because that means you're aware of the traps that come with ambition. It means you'll think deeply about your ambitions and won't choose them based on vanity.

In that sense, the opposite of ambition isn't humility as many pretentious people like to claim: humility in fact signals the thoughtfulness of one's ambition.** No, the opposite of ambition is pettiness: people who have nothing of their own to care about and so instead spend their lives caring about what everyone else is doing — without ever looking at themselves.**

It doesn't matter what the ambition really is. Whether someone wants to lose weight, get enlightened, master the piano or save the the world: as long as the ambition is sincere and genuine and doesn't come with baggage or out of irrational attachments, the pursuit will make them a better person over time.

And I think we can't get enough people like that in this world.

Here's how I approach questions like this:

gilles

@gillesdc

Truth is bound by context.

Each moment has a different truth.

Some truths, however, have greater reach than others; they're true in more contexts (eg. laws of physics) — making them probabilistically sound.

Both "it's relative" and the reach for "objective truth" make sense.

16

2:04 PM • Sep 22, 2023

This is my way of rhyming the objective with the subjective.

• The modernist, scientific worldview rightly realises that there are patterns in nature we can study, quantify, and reason with. That the outcome of the experiments we conduct when we hypothesise about these patterns tells us something important that can’t be denied. Something that is "objectively" true.

• The post-modernist, existentialist worldview rightly challenges that any truth can always and anywhere be “true” by remarking it takes a leap of faith to go from direct phenomenological experience to the abstract symbols (language) we use to describe that experience. That is, there is no pure, unfiltered way to think about and reason with truths — only through a layer of symbols, models and metaphors that represent them but can ever only approximate the “real thing”.

Both have a point. Neither get the full picture.

• Those with a scientific worldview shrug off the importance of subjective experience.

• Those more grounded in their conscious being tend to pretend there is no such thing as “objective truth.”

The post-modern paradox

The idea that truths can only be understood within their contexts is post-modern.

Original perception of reality happens through individual bodily sensations: sights, smells, sounds, touches, tastes. Only after direct experience can we think about it. Our brains abstract experience into linguistic concepts, which we then use to build mental models of reality that can be reasoned with and communicated to others.

This capacity for thought is what sets humans apart. It’s what allows us to create and coordinate shared realities at scale: cultures, technologies — civilisations.

However, thought can ever only refer to direct experience and therefore never fully grasp it. The description is not the experience. The map is not the territory.

"The menu is not the meal." — Alan Watts

The further abstracted and complexified through time/language/media, the further thought fades away from the objective world it describes. Thus, says the post-modernist: since we can only think and communicate in symbolic systems, knowledge of the objective is, strictly speaking, impossible. Knowledge as constructed by human minds can ever only reflect the real thing.

"All words, in every language, are metaphors." — Marshall McLuhan

What's more, the reflection is relative. The same reality looks different from different points of view. Literally, but also culturally, historically and individually: **truth is contingent on perspective — **from where you see it.

Subjectivity of individual experience is verified by neuroscience: the brain interprets (predicts, actually) reality through mental models it learned from the past. That is, every individual sees the same reality differently in function of their unique history.

"There are no facts. Only interpretations." — Friedrich Nietzsche

So far so good.

But then the post-modernist goes on to say that, since all truths are distillations from personal experience, every individual has their own truth. That there is no basis for one mind to make judgements about the truth of another. Flat-out, he denies the truth of one context can be more true than that of another.

As anyone with the slightest common sense will sniff out, that is obviously wrong. A million different people making a million different statements about the same reality can’t all be equally right.

Somewhat comically, the post-modernist falls into the trap he was trying to escape in the first place: he tries to assert the impossibility of objective truth as the one and only objective truth.

Reach of truth

Here's where the idea “reach” comes in useful.

Reach of truth implies that every context is a part that connects with other parts to make wholes. And, while each part can have its own truth, the whole, too, can have truth that picks one part over the other.

In every interaction we have, in every moment we share, there is something in our experience that is true to that interaction, that moment.

At the same time, some truths are more true in more realities than others. They dynamically persist across many evolving contexts, while others fade when conditions change.

Per Alfred Korzybski's: the map is not the territory. But it doesn't have to be: the map just needs to approximate the territory well enough to navigate it effectively. Crucially, maps (truths) are bound to the territories (contexts) they predict: what is true in some isn't in others — which is what we mean when we say that "truth is relative". And some maps are true in more territories than others. Their predictions hold true across a greater variety of contexts, i.e. they are more probabilistically sound. They have greater reach.

“A map is not the territory it represents. But, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory — which accounts for its usefulness." — Alfred Korzybski

We are constantly negotiating what is true in the world with other people. But some truths are less negotiable than others. Just because I imagined an ability that defies the laws of physics (eg. "I can fly") doesn’t mean the laws of physics are suddenly disputable.

The laws of physics hold true across far, far more contexts than whatever I'm capable of imagining. They are in fact the most ubiquitous truth humans have found thus far. **And yet, not even the laws of physics are absolute, i.e. they're contextually bound.**‍

For example, quantum mechanics and general relativity each work exceptionally well at describing phenomena in particular areas of spacetime, but trigger inconsistencies when we extend them beyond to understand the universe as a whole.

“All our theories of physics, in one way or another, apply only to subsystems of the universe. They don’t apply to the universe as a whole.” — Lee Smolin

**Reach helps us measure and rank truths by scope. **It recognises that, even though pure objective truth may be impossible to achieve, we can pursue and approximate it.

Another example of truths with great reach are those of human nature.

Sure: every person, every culture is different and it’s near-impossible to compare each in a reasonable way. Still, there are universal patterns that have held true across history, across culture, across all people. A few come to mind:

• Social — Humans have intrinsic desire to belong, form relationships and create communities. We make families, tribes, societies and Discord groups.

• Meaning — Humans seek meaning and purpose beyond themselves — be it through religion, philosophy, art or personal achievement.

• Mimesis — Humans learn by imitating others. It’s how knowledge, values, rituals, traditions and beliefs proliferate from one generation to the next.

• Cooperation/Competition — Humans work together at scale to achieve common goals. At the same time, groups compete for resources and status.

• Creation — Humans are driven to create — be it art, writing, music or any other form of expression. It’s how we process experiences, share stories and connect with others.

• Curiosity — Humans are relentlessly curious about their environments, leading to exploration, scientific discovery and the proliferation of knowledge.

• Hierarchy — Power dynamics recur across different societies — whether based on wealth, gender, wealth or other factors.

These patterns recur so consistently and ubiquitously across space/time that they cannot just be dismissed every time an outlier experience seemingly doesn’t fit them.

Incomplete measures

The original problem lies with the terminology of subjective versus objective in the first place. It sets up a dichotomy that doesn’t need to exist in the first place.

This, in turn, is downstream of the larger problem with language itself. **In one way or another, language ultimately always refers back to itself. **And so inevitably creates paradoxes, inconsistencies and ambiguities.

“The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.” — Frank Herbert

The self-reference problem of language famously manifests in the Liar’s Paradox.

Consider the statement “This statement is false.”

• If the statement is true, then it’s false — as it claims.

• If the statement is false, then it must be true.

Due to the self-reference problem, every system of language is bound to be incomplete in the face of capturing reality.

Vectors of truth

What about math?

Surely the most direct, unambiguous (objective) way to describe nature. Its principles so predictively powerful across history and universe that they appear universal. Its reach so vast it evokes the divine.

"Nature is written in mathematics." — Galileo Galilei

But, as many have echoed throughout history: we couldn't get by with just math. As much as it excels at exacting quantities, relationships, patterns and structures of reality, math can't express the human experience [feeling] of it. It has no capacity for storytelling and the culture it springs.

"What is truer than truth? The story about it." — Old Jewish saying

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." — Albert Camus

Math and natural language (eg. English) are not alternatives but complements. They're different vectors of truth, covering different layers of reality.

For example:

• Human feeling is a computed summary of all bodily sensations going on in a specific moment. At the most fundamental level, these are biochemical processes that can be exacted as mathematical values.

• Our brains conceptualise these feelings as emotions. Emotions are how we linguistically label and interpret various hues of feeling. As such they come to "mean" something as subjects for storytelling, imitation and culture. In a way mathematical values could never.

Just like language, math is a measure of reality. And just like language, it is incomplete.

In his Incompleteness Theorems, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that the self-reference problem isn’t limited to language but also appears in mathematical and logical systems. Each is bound to make statements that cannot be proven true or false using the rules of the system itself.

No one model of the world can fully compute the complexity of the world around us. Every system of description is inherently incomplete because it attempts to ascertain something inherently uncertain. Reality is complex, intricate and always in flux to a point that every attempt to define/measure/abstract it must always fall short.

Case in point: not even our laws of physics currently describe the entire universe. There is no theory of everything; no truth that describes all contexts.

“Man is always in danger to confuse his measures with the world so measured.” — Alan Watts

Truth in overlap

Uncertainty is the hand we are dealt and the way to deal with it is through probability — measuring how often something is true.

While no single model nor language can 100% capture truth, we can combine many different models and languages. Then work with probabilities to approximate it.

"All knowledge degenerates into probability." — David Hume

Overlap becomes the measure for truth: the places where different models of the world say roughly the same thing — even if so in different ways, in different terminologies, in different contexts.

To illustrate, consider this snippet from Science, Strategy and War by Frans Osinga, which explores the strategic theories of US Air Force Colonel John Boyd. (The book is most famous for OODA — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.)

• Imagine you are on a ski slope with other skiers.

• Imagine you are in Florida riding an outboard motorboat, maybe even towing waterskiers.

• Imagine you are riding a bicycle on a nice spring day.

• Imagine you are a parent taking your son to a department store and that you notice he is fascinated by the toy tanks with rubber caterpillars treads.

Next:

• Imagine you pull the ski’s off but you are still on the ski slope.

• Imagine also that you remove the outboard motor from the motor boat, and you are no longer in Florida.

• And from the bicycle you remove the handlebar and discard the rest of the bike.

• Finally, imagine you take of the rubber threads from the toy tanks.

This leaves only the following separate pieces: skis, outboard motor, handlebars and rubber threads.

Boyd’s challenge: what emerges when you pull all of this together?

His answer: the different parts taken from different tools together make a snowmobile.

This isn’t obvious to most grappling with the question at first thought. Precisely because we had just before been seeing the independent parts in separate contexts do we struggle to see them beyond. Each independent part can mean something different depending on how it fits in a particular setting, depending on how it’s used. At the core of it all, however, it’s the same thing — just extending its truth across various contexts.

VV

@visualizevalue

18.6K

9:03 PM • May 9, 2022

The same principle is at play when we study different disciplines, different languages, different philosophies. More often than not, they describe the same things in different ways. The same truths from different perspectives.

Language itself can never precisely capture truth in words — which is why deep affection to precise meaning is futile. But many different perspectives looking at the same thing defined in multiple ways, in different contexts, can identify general consistencies.

The bigger the diversity of contexts across which a truth remains true, the more general, the more universal, the more context-independent, the more “true”. The bigger its reach.

"Realize that everything connects to everything else." — Leonardo Da Vinci

The test of time

What we’re really talking about here is time.

When trying to identify patterns we can trust to be useful in dealing with life’s uncertainty, we have to look at how well they have stood the test of time — how adaptive they’ve been over the course of history. Endurance of truth across societal, technological and environmental change signals universality.

This is why we say that “history rhymes” rather than “repeat itself.” Truths remain, contexts change. It’s similar, not the same.

Here the post-modernist may come at me and say that history, too, is only available to us through symbolic systems. We do not have access to the experiences of people throughout history, only symbolic accounts thereof — bounding us again to self-referential limits.

Fair enough.

However: the next best thing is to evaluate how adaptive those symbols have proven themselves across ideas, domains, disciplines — across time.

Recurrence through time means it works and predicts with a high degree probability that it will continue to work in an uncertain world, i.e. the truth is time-less. It's the best signal that there is something more than meets the eye.

Immeasurable truth

Each moment in time has a particular truth of its own. Trapping it in numbers and language inevitably falls short of the real thing.

At the same time, it's the only version of truth we can talk about in the first place.

1. Reality

2. Experience of reality through bodily sensations (individual)

3. Description of the experience of reality through thought (shareable, scalable)

Sensing

**The closest we can get to "truth" is what comes before trying to trap it: direct, pure experience. **To know the truth of a moment means to sense it. To feel it, move with it, be a part of the moment itself.

Thinking

Thought is downstream from sensing, gets triggered by it.

Once we think about the moment, we snap out of it. At that point we enter the world of abstraction, symbols and language; inevitably losing that part of truth that cannot be represented by it.

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier and simpler.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

What's more, thought is generative: it keeps chaining from itself when not halted — at the cost of abstracting itself ever further from reality. Eventually, chaining thoughts get stuck in self-referential loops. We over-think, get lost in the shadows.

"You can know the name of a bird in all languages of the world, but know absolutely nothing about the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing: that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." — Richard Feynman

Ceci n'est pas la verité [This is not the truth]

Sensing and thinking split reality into two layers. **One is the thing, the other is thinking/talking about the thing.**‍

The described and the description. The measured and the measure. The map and the territory.

Few have nailed this distinction more elegantly than Belgian surrealist René Magritte with La Trahison des Images [The Treachery of Images].

Magritte paints a pipe but then writes "This is not a pipe".

‍No, it's a not a pipe: it's an image of pipe. If we go deeper into the abstracted layer, the word "pipe" is not a pipe but a configuration of arbitrary symbols (p, i, e) that points to the reality of a pipe, as socially agreed upon by speakers of French (and, coincidentally, English).

Symbolic knowledge

The talking about the thing is symbolic knowledge. The capacity for it has differentiated humans in the animal kingdom.

Conceptual thought enables us to create abstractions. Complex, symbolic language enables us to share those abstractions with others.

• We can mentally model realities around us, then combine and remix those concepts as composable mind LEGOs to imagine realities that don't exist yet.

• We can share these models with others as ideas using symbols and language.

• Minds sync together around shared ideas, and can work together to make it real.

Symbolic knowledge unlocks and scales human civilisation. It's the seed of epic narratives (Christianity, democracy, human rights) that mass-socialise us around greater good goals. No other animal can get millions of strangers to work together as a tribe.

Earth metaphorically shifted on its axis ~50,000 years ago. After ~4 billion years of nature programming minds, minds started to program nature.

This collective consciousness is a distinct plane of reality: a social sphere that select ideas much like the biosphere selects genes.

• Ideas on what is good and bad program human behaviour through culture. Implicit norms and values network together into ideologies and religions, then become encoded in laws and institutions that enforce them. In culture, thought takes on a restrictive form.

• Ideas on how to achieve more with less program the environment through technology. Embodied in objects and structures, they expand our capacity to protect and provide. In technology, thought takes on an active form.

Monkeys can make spears, but you can't make cars and computers without compounded and coordinated symbolic knowledge. From myths to religion to art, science, morality, corporations, banks, bombs, blockchains and spaceships: all of its roots from thought extended through symbols.

"That's all a motorcycle is: a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind." — Robert Pirsig

Tacit knowledge

But the scalability of symbolic knowledge comes at the cost of truth. It’s generalized and typically breaks in contact with the specificity of reality.

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever-less involvement.” — Marshall McLuhan

For example, you can’t learn riding a bike, boxing, designing, coding or leadership by reading books about it. These are skills; embodied knowledge created in interaction with specific contexts — iterated through trial and error.

This type of knowledge is silent or tacit: things we just know, don't think about, and apply intuitively through our bodies from situation to situation, moment to moment, context to context — evolving with time.

"All knowledge originates from our sensations." — Leonardo Da Vinci

Intuition > intellect

Our bodies have a supreme capacity for learning truth from direct experience, stored as intuition.

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

‍Intuition dynamically operates without thought and thus feels like autopilot: behaviour executes fluidly. By no means is that behaviour random: these are non-linear patterns of reality the body has learned from past experience.

Try to understand these patterns with intellect and you'll find nothing. Underneath symbolic knowledge there exists an original, irreducible sort of truth. Something immeasurable that intuition senses more completely than intellect can.

"Intuition is a sacred gift and intellect a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift." — Albert Einstein

Lost in thought

Language is the tool through which we can codify some but not all of this tacit knowledge into symbolic knowledge.

"To define is to limit." — Oscar Wilde

"Whatever one can say, no words express the whole." — Carl Jung

This very post, Hegel’s philosophy, Naval’s aphorisms on wealth, the idea of human rights, scientific paradigms; all we read in books and media.

Mental mapmaking is humanity's triumph over nature's constraints. But the very tools we use to navigate and bend the world to our collective will has ironically distanced us from truly experiencing it. We get so caught up in our vastly interconnected webs of meaning that we forgot to feel our feet touch the ground.

Out of touch with reality and our innate sense for it, we fall prey to overthinking. We think, think and think — only to keep getting trapped in the same self-referential loops over and over again.

gilles

@gillesdc

Action resolves uncertainty to reach beyond the limits of intellectualization.

Intellectualization gets stuck in self-referential loops. Action affirms life in such a way that it expands outward, exploding with unspeakable possibility.

14

8:47 AM • Jul 13, 2022

A map is a function of the territory it reflects. Thought is a function of the body it serves. Mistaking the echo for the music leaves us feeling restless, alienated.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal

The body as truth

The symbolic level slices and dices the whole, fluid truth into pieces, focussing our experience on some while denying others. This is what post-modernists mean when they say that “truth is subjective”.

"Thought is so cunning, so clever. It distorts everything for its own convenience." — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The fatal post-modernist error is that they pose "truth is subjective" as final conclusion, reducing truth to "personal narrative." This pretty much denies the idea of truth itself and thereby constitutes an inherently pessimistic philosophy, casting doubt and suspicion upon the most basic things of life.

Reading post-modernists, you'll find pretty much all of them are nihilists. Strip away everything as "relative" and you're left with silence, and "silence is nothing."

But is silence really "nothing"?

Listen to silence with intellect and you'll indeed find nothing. You'll probably even use big words and fancy arguments to convince yourself there is indeed nothing. Really, you're just using your intellect to blind yourself.

What most miss is that thought is a tool of the body, and the body is not a tool of thought. When a thought serves the body, it is useful. When it doesn't, it gets trapped in its own prison of delusion.

At the most essential level, there is an irreducible creative energy that moves through the body before thought can make judgements about it. It doesn't care about assumptions of meaning and meaningless. It doesn't care about what a thought thinks because it itself is what the drives the existence of that thought to begin with.

Talking about a thing is not the thing itself. Thinking about the body's experience is not the body's experience. Thinking about being alive is not being alive.

"Be a philosopher. But, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man." — David Hume

**Most people, including many philosophers, confuse the talking about the thing with the thing itself. **Falling in one of two traps:

• They cling to their thoughts, their assumptions, their world views because it gives them stability. They fear what is on the other side: uncertainty.

• They take deconstruction so far it becomes destruction: nothing is left. The intellect becomes a weapon rather than a tool. This is the post-modernist sin.

Both approaches break your thinking:

• Ignoring things that don't match your mental model doesn't make them any less true.

• Nihilism, in its denial of reality beyond the symbolic, misses out completely.

This is not to argue that thinking is bad, but to acknowledge its limits. Thinking is a tool for building structures through which to perceive truth and share it with others; socially shared conceptual structures are what binds minds together at scale. But the structures should not be confused with the truth itself.

The point of philosophy then is to ask better questions so to create better models. But if you want the truth, you are better off listening to silence.

"If you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it." — Alan Watts

Surfing uncertainty

How then do we get in touch with this unfiltered essence?

For starters, by stopping to talk and think about it. To simply *be *in the moment, still and sensing.

"Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know." — Lao Tzu

For most, that is easier said than done. To not think feels weird, uncomfortable — unnatural almost. What would we be doing instead of thinking, then?

Remarkable, isn't it?

The symbolic, the abstracted, the mediated has conditioned us so much as to become our default state of being.

The truth is right here, and there, all around us, to be felt through the body. But we are too preoccupied with memory and expectation to notice. Too fascinated with names, numbers, symbols, signs.

Getting out of your head

Mindfulness trains attunement to the body and its truth. Flow states also come to mind.‍

Both are practice. They exactly need to be done, not said. Reading this post and whatever more can only get you as far as intention.

“To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet. Still.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

In fact, there's a telling contradiction in writing about these things. By now you'll have noticed my struggle to verbally express the inexpressible. I can merely point, hint, walk around — not trap.

**The closest I can get is the idea of Shoshin, which in Zen Buddhism expresses something like "beginner's mind".

Shoshin means to practice looking at the world like it's the first time you're seeing it. It's a state of emptiness open to absorption, rather than projecting understanding.

Beginner's mind

If you have ever surfed, you'll know that the ocean is unforgivable.

Every time you get in the water, you are operating under new conditions. The learning never ends because the ocean is never the same.

It's why they say surfing is one of the hardest sports to pick up as beginner. It's not like golf, where you can get your swing down by sheer repetition in roughly the same conditions.

Surfing teaches you to yield, to lean into each moment and figure it out as you move. To attune yourself to your environment, absorbing the pattern of the waves onto your board and into your body — adapting in realtime to what you are sensing.

To surf, you have to be a beginner with every new wave. If not, the ocean will humble you in one way or another.

To see the truth of the moment means to ride it with a beginner's mind — life a surfer rides a wave.

He knew his way around numbers and formulas, of course, but his breakthroughs were a function of creativity rather than knowledge. Einstein’s genius was in asking novel questions, then playing them out in daydreams.

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” — Bertrand Russell

In his epiphany Gedanken (thought) experiment, he imagined a lightning bolt striking each end of a train moving past a station.

• An observer standing at the station would say both strikes happened at the same time.

• But another observer sitting in the middle of the train would say the one in the front happened first — not at the same time.

Both observers would be right and so Einstein realised that simultaneity is relative. Inversely, the one thing that is constant and not relative to anything else must be the speed of light.

E=mc2. That's where he'd land: the idea that energy and mass are interchangeable.

The spacetime that makes up the Universe is composed of both energy and matter, yes, but they are entangled. They are interconnected to a point where anything that moves can be broken down to energy.

As such, the Universe is a thermodynamic system where every thing holds energy capable of doing work.

The arrow of time

The first law of thermodynamics says that energy and mass can neither be created nor destroyed: they can only change from one form to the other.

For example, an ice cube left in the open will melt into water by absorbing heat from the air and cooling that air in the process. Keep heating the water and it will evaporate all over the place as gas.

As the ice cube changes into water and gas, its structure becomes more chaotic. We call this chaos entropy: the measure of disorder in a system.

Now, we can decrease entropy by freezing water back into ice, but this, in turn, takes energy from a freezer. Decreasing entropy in one system (water) always increases entropy in another system (freezer).

The second law of thermodynamics says that, as energy transforms from one form to another, bits of it go to waste.

Wasted energy still exists — as per the first law — but is unavailable to do work: it can't perform processes anymore.

So, as the freezer changes water into ice, some of the energy gets lost in the process as heat (coming out the back). That is, freezer entropy increases more than than water entropy decreases. Ordering one system (water) disorders another (freezer) more and so, net balance, total entropy always increases.

Universal entropy is the price of local structure.

If I turn water into ice and back a thousand times only to end with water again, it's as if nothing happened. The only thing that really changes is the increase of total disorder.

Per implication, entropy is the only true irreversible process in the universe. So much so that Stephen Hawking called it the "arrow of time". The perpetual movement towards more entropy distinguishes past from future.

The dissipation of useful energy as heat is a constant throughout all energy conversions, including all processes that run life on Earth:

• A photon from the sun contains lots of useful energy.

• Using photosynthesis, a plant can capture the sun's energy as sugar. However, as the the energy transforms from one form to another, some dissipates as heat. And so, the sugar contains less useful energy than the original photon.

• Animals like us can eat the sugar and transform it into ATP — the energy molecule that powers our cells. But, here too, some of the original energy got lost in the conversion process.

• ATP enables you to contract muscles, so you can lift dumbbells. Once again, not all useful ATP makes it into the actual movement.

The pattern is clear. Always and every time, useful energy decreases and entropy increases.

Increasing entropy has been a constant in the Universe since the big bang. Will it ever end?

Scientists think the Universe will eventually run out of energy capable of doing work. As no more processes can take place, the Universe reaches an equilibrium. Entropy grinds to a halt, as does time. This hypothesis is known as the Heat Death of the Universe.

Biological rebellion

So far, this is a depressing story.

But there's a twist.

About 4 billion years ago, something strange happened. Somewhere in a tiny galaxy, on a tiny floating rock, abiogenesis happened for the very first time. The tiny rock is Earth and abiogenesis is better known as the origin of life.

"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe." — Ray Bradbury

We don't know how or why, but out of non-living matter arose living organisms. Over time, single cells evolved into complex species as they adapted to their ecologies. This went on for billions of years, until, two hundred thousand years ago, a great ape by the name of Homo Sapiens began to roam the planet.

With the arrival of humans, the Universe became self-aware. We are both part of the Universe (literally: the atoms we're made of were once forged in collapsing stars) and a way for the Universe to know itself. As we make sense of our selves together in the collective dance of civilisation — making art, meaning and culture — we order things and effectively rebel against entropy.

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, its magnificence." — Alan Watts

Biological organisms are an oddity in the Universe because they maintain internal order in constantly changing environments. That is, they defy entropy by virtue of how they manage energy to stay alive.

At all times, the body is working hard to keep itself together. When change comes at us, we don't break down. We deal with it, our internal systems adapt, and we come out stronger. We evolve.

"Biological systems somehow violate the fluctuation theorem, i.e. the second law of thermodynamics. — Karl Friston

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." – G. K. Chesterton

Biological organisms swim against the entropic stream.

The fight is, of course, futile. All biological bodies eventually give way to entropy —  long before the Universe's heat death has anything to say about it.

But humans are unique in yet another respect: we are aware of these realities. We are aware of both the impossibility and impermanence of our lives.

Grateful for the former and in attempt to defy to latter, we take the fight against entropy to another level: that of the mind, imagination, ideas, symbols, meaning and culture. Here, we can create things that last long after we're gone.

Split in two

"Man is split in two," wrote the anthropologist Ernest Becker in The Denial Of Death.

We are the only animals that can imagine the future, and so imagine a future in which we are no longer alive.

To deal with its mortality, the mind creates an immortal story about itself: the self. The self tries to defy impermanence by living on forever in the hearts and minds others: culture. And so it tells grand stories, builds empires and self-expresses in art.

Man is split between a limited body destined to die and a limitless mind that can imagine living forever.

“The person is both a physical body and a symbolic self. The body represents determinism and constraint. The self represents freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinity of symbolism." — Ernest Becker

Body and mind split our reality into "IT" and "I" — the objective and the subjective.

In shared experience, they become the things we build together to extend our bodies (inter-objective) and the culture that organically emerges from our interactions (inter-subjective).

• Subjective — The mind, its imagination, thoughts, emotions, perceptions.

• Objective — The body, its abilities and behaviours.

• Inter-subjective — Shared immaterial values, ideas, stories.

• Inter-objective — Shared material world, its objects, structures, technologies.

Mind over matter

Some 50,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens developed the capacity for complex symbolic language, grounded in conceptual thought.

Conceptual thought enables us to create abstractions. Symbolic language enables us to share those abstractions with others.

• We can mentally model the reality around us, then remix those concepts as mind LEGOs to imagine realities that don't exist yet.

• We can then share these models with others as ideas using symbols and language.

• This effectively syncs our brains around the idea, so we can work together to make it real.

"Logic will take you from A to Z. Imagination will take you everywhere." — Albert Einstein

"The world of reality has limits. The world of imagination is boundless." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Syncing minds around shared imagination is the mind's triumph over nature's constraints.

Epic stories (religions, ideologies) mass-socialise us around common greater good goals. No other animal can get millions of strangers to work together as tribe. Monkeys can make spears, but you can't make cars and computers without compounding and coordinating ideas from across minds through language.

"That's all a motorcycle is: a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind." — Robert Pirsig

Earth metaphorically shifted on its axis. After 4 billion years of nature shaping minds, minds now started shaping nature.

This collective consciousness is a distinct plane of reality: a social sphere that select ideas much like the biosphere selects genes.

• Ideas on what is good and bad program human behaviour through culture. Implicit norms and values network together into ideologies and religions, then become encoded in laws and institutions that enforce them. In culture, thought takes on a restrictive form.

• Ideas on how to achieve more with less program the environment through technology. Embodied in objects and structures, they expand our capacity to protect and provide. In technology, thought takes on an active form.

Everything that has come since — from stories to religions, morality, art, empires, bank, corporations, phones, bombs, blockchains and spaceships — roots back to the first minds imaging new realities with linguistic legos, then collaboratively made real with others.

“Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but imposes its laws upon nature.” — Karl Popper

Beyond our biological bodies, we also create order in the external world. Human civilisation fights entropy on planetary scale.

Long after our bodies wither and die, our contributions ripple on in the hearts and mind of others. Be they the children we raised, the kindnesses we did, the wisdom we shared, the art we made, the businesses we built, the technologies we invented.

In big and small ways, we live on. It's that meaning that makes the shortness and impermanence of life a little more bearable.

"Life is not about finding our limitations, it's about finding our infinity." — Herbie Hancock

“A man is not really dead until the last man who knew him has also died.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Create > consume

Nature balances producer and consumer species.

• Producer species are plants and bacteria that convert energy of the sun.

• Consumer species are organisms that eat to fuel their bodies.

In nature, most animals are consumers — including humans: we take more from the biosphere than we add.

Let's apply this lens to the intersubjective sphere.

Each individual is a network of energy. This network consumes not just food, but also mental models from its surrounding informational ecology — visually and audibly: knowledge, education, values, ideas. The memes we pay attention to shape who we are, and each time we express our selves, we add something back.

As humans we are innately creative: producing more than the sum of what we consume.

Infinite-sum mind-space

What's more: the mind realm knows no upper limit for creativity.

Where nature can't grow beyond what scarce energy enables, knowledge and art can keep compounding from itself into infinity. Intersubjectively, we can always build on what came before, and create more than we consume.

• Nature, the material body-space, is zero-sum: for an organism to win, another has to lose.

• Culture, the immaterial mind-space, is infinite-sum: a collective win-win with unlimited horizons for expansion.

We can think of civilisation as the intersection of the inter-subjective (culture) and the inter-objective: things and technologies we build in the material world from immaterial ideas.

In that sense, civilisation might not be infinite-sum, but it can expand as far as the laws of physics allow. We keep pushing that limit out in front of us — precisely by materialising the immaterial.

Compounding civilisation is the spirit of Isaac Newton's famous quote:

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." — Isaac Newton

If Newton hadn't first read the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, he wouldn't have known where to start.

Complex language and communication technology (writing, printing, internet) connect us across seas and centuries. Knowledge scales exponentially because existing knowledge provides a greater contextual scaffolding for new knowledge, making it easier to integrate.

Our minds can always pick up where others left off.

• When someone raises awareness, organises people, or builds technology to take on a problem; they produce more than they consume.

• When someone makes art that moves others or a sage guides our moral compass in a more meaningful direction; they produce more than they consume.

• When Einsteins deepen our understanding of the Universe and ourselves; they produce more than they consume.

Even the simple act of working on yourself — ordering your inner world so to be an inspiration and example for others — is an act of value creation.

Many actions have many more indirect consequences. Little things add up to big things. And big things eventually break down barriers previously considered unbreakable.

“One of the secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.” — Lewis Carroll

Dreams dreamt together become real

We don't know where we came from and we don't know where we're going. Can we ever really overcome entropy? By the physics we currently know: no. But we don't know what discoveries still lay ahead.

What we know is that, as a species, we're moving forward. We're adding order to our world, and that order is largely good — by whatever metric measured. We've come far in 10,000 years of civilisation and there's no telling how far our horizons will widen in another 10,000.

Even if we deny civilisation's moral arc; the curiosity, creativity and interestingness that come along the dance of collective self-awareness make life feel meaningful.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein

We're all tied into an interconnected web of action and meaning of which the ripples may reach all kinds of corners in the Universe. We have bodies of mass that move to fuel us with energy. From a first-principle perspective, the purpose of life is to harness that energy to create more than you consume.

Like Einstein: dream up new worlds, act on them creatively, and add order to civilisation in its rebellion against entropy. On whatever scale you are capable of doing so. And, last but not least: to have fun doing it, together with others.

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." — John Lennon

We might win, we'll probably lose and we'll surely perish. But none of that ultimately matters, because it's the attempt itself that helps us overcome our temporary condition.

Humans are flawed. Beautifully flawed in many curious ways. The one thing that differentiates us from any other organisms is that we know of our potential. We are the Universe observing itself to make sense of itself, and the things we create together in that quest may take us places we have yet to imagine.

"We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams. We are the dancers, we create the dreams." — Albert Einstein

Raskolnikov is a proud young man. He thinks he’s smart but feels misunderstood and belittled by others, alienated from society. To break out of the poverty he finds himself in, he decides to kill a lonely old loan shark and take her cash.

He needs the money, but the actual reason goes deeper: because he thinks he can.

The morale of the story is, of course, that he can’t.

The crime is perfect in the sense that he gets away without facing legal consequences. But he can’t get away from his conscience. Slowly but surely, his pride decays into paranoia and guilt. While he thought he had just killed a random loan shark, what he had really killed was a part of himself. The crime had irreversibly corrupted his soul.

What is morality?

The (masterfully written) tension between crime and punishment hints that morality is about the relationship between the self and the other. It concerns the question to what degree one should pursue one’s own self-interest relative to that of another person — be it a friend or stranger.

Schools of thought

Western philosophical traditions answer this question in different ways:

• Virtue ethics is about your values and character. Virtue ethicists ground their sense of self in a set of values. To be moral is to habitually act in accordance with those values.

• Deontology is about rules and duties. You recognise some doctrine or constitution as moral law and act in obedience. To violate that law is evil or wrong, or both.

• Consequentialism or utilitarianism is about the consequences of your actions. You don’t much care about the actions or means, it’s the ends that matter. Do the actions maximise the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of individuals?

Virtue ethics is the most individualistic and most relativistic because different people identify with different virtues. In that sense, it is also inevitably more about your self than the other: you do things to feel good about your self rather than for how it affects the other.

Deontology and consequentialism suffer from the same flaw: they assume a rigidity that doesn’t exist in real life.

• To deontologically act according to absolute rules negates that life is bound by often contradictory contexts.

• Similarly, consequentialism assumes we already know what is good for everyone based on our limited knowledge in the here and now.

One-size-fits-none

Reality is messier than philosophy.

There is no right approach that would work always and everywhere. If we apply the lens of complexity, it quickly becomes clear that different contexts and scales require different approaches. And so, societies typically mix these schools of thought.

But what about the personal level?

In every moment shared with others, we have to contend with the question of the other and the self. And it is never as easy as blindly acting from a list of values, laws or consequences.

On the other hand: what’s left if we don’t have such a list? Do we become like Raskolnikov, purely making choices from our impulses?

Good decisions are made recognising that life isn’t black-and-white, yet still having the courage to act — weighing inevitable trade-offs between values, laws and consequences to make a call.

A better way

The question then becomes: if virtue ethics is too subjective and both deontology and consequentialism are too objective, is there a better way to practise morality?

I think there is.

To see the other person

Let’s start from a quote by Alan Watts. In The Wisdom Of Insecurity, he writes:

“Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro [the book was written in 1951] in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person.” — Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a self-styled philosophical thinker who popularised a lot of Buddhist ideas for western audiences. Buddhist ethics start from the idea that the core unit of human experience is suffering.

The core unit of human experience

We suffer because we fear an uncertain future, and because we always desire more, i.e. there is no closure to the road of desire.

Fear and desire are the two sides of the inherent impermanence of life. In defiance of death, we create a sense of self — an illusion of permanence. It's in trying to uphold that illusion that we suffer.

“The basis of the self is not thought but suffering — the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and un-interchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.” — Milan Kundera

The point of mindfulness, for example, is to let go of the self-illusion. To simply be in a moment of stillness and peace, right in the middle of fear and desire, so we cease to suffer.

Still, we spend most of our lives somewhere in the complex dance between fear and desire. From there, everyone’s self can be thought of as founded from their unique causal chain of suffering.

To live is to suffer, and to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Whether rich or poor, looking this or that way, coming from here or there: we all get moulded by what we go through in life — good and bad — and develop character as a function of how we deal with that — grow through it.

“Suffering and disappointment are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity, but to mature and transfigure us.” — Hermann Hesse

Meaningful suffering

Humans bear their suffering by sharing it with other humans. Intimately with friends, family and partners; epically with strangers through books, movies, art, tweets and posts. In so doing, their individual selves become part of a greater, common story we call culture.

"Suffering is an ineradicable part of life. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering." — Viktor Frankl

Whatever the scale, in culture my suffering is recognised and therein becomes meaningful. It extends beyond my self to live on in the minds of others, even after I die.

“A man is not really dead until the last man who knew him has also died.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Suffering connects to morality not because all suffering is necessarily bad (it’s not) and should be eliminated — that would merely be pity.

No, suffering connects to morality through the deep-seated human need for recognition. It’s through recognition that suffering can be overcome and becomes meaningful.

While virtue ethics is subjective, and deontology and consequentialism objective, recognition of suffering is inter-subjective: the human connection between you and the other.

In that sense, “good” or “bad” aren’t as much about how much someone suffers, but the degree to which their suffering is recognised. The degree to which their very being is meaningful.

The kindest thing

Watts talks about the folly of being charitable for the sake of being charitable, the folly of eating someone for the sake of being unprejudiced. These actions, beneficial in result as they might be, don’t actually see the other human. They are about your self and don’t create meaning for the other.

It’s more human to see someone’s pain even if you choose to not act charitably than it is to act charitably for the sake of looking charitable. It’s more human to recognise someone’s being even if you choose not to interact with them than it is to be unprejudiced for the sake of being unprejudiced.

When you really see the other person you’ll often end up doing those things anyway — because you feel their suffering as your own and take action out of a deeper sense of love rather than to affirm your self.

Recognition is upstream of other forms of morality. The kindest thing to do for someone is to truly see them. Anything more is bonus, anything less leaves something to be desired.

Beyond status

The asterisk is that our need for recognition generally correlates with status.

Most people don’t care for a homeless person to see them as they do for their boss or someone with more cultural attention. Even the most powerful people want to be seen by history; what they think of as legacy.

True morality is then perhaps just to see any and all suffering that is in your immediacy before you act, regardless of who or what. That simple, that hard.

Morality as a skill

Buddhist ethics is far less philosophical than its Western counterpart. For Buddhists, morality is not about concepts but about practices that individuals need to test and iterate for themselves. It’s a skill.

In many ways, the Buddha was the first scientist. Rather than a scientist of nature however, he was a scientist of consciousness.

By teaching methods to purify the consciousness through deconstruction of the self, he gave people a path to walk themselves. Practising morality as a skill creates a direct feedback loop of attention and awareness with reality through which you can evolve intuitively over time. In this sense, morality starts from a sense of responsibility to purify the personal consciousness and, from there, extends outwardly as a skill in dealing with other people.

Sila

The Buddha’s core teaching is the Four Noble Truths:

1. The first is the reality of suffering or dukkha.

2. The second is samudaya; which says that desire is at the root of suffering.

3. The third is nirodha; which says mastering those desires ceases suffering.

4. The fourth is the Noble Eightfold Path.

The Noble Eightfold Path makes up the practices on the journey. It too can be divided into three parts:

• Sila (morality) — Speech, Action, Livelihood.

• Samadhi (meditation) — Effort, Mindfulness, Concentration.

• Prajna (wisdom) — View, Intention.

Speech, action, livelihood

The three practices for morality are right speech, right action and right livelihood.

Speech

Speech matters because speech create cultures. Humans are the only animals with capacity for abstract language and thought. It's this that enables us to cooperate with large groups of strangers at scale.

One reason Raskolnikov feels alienated after his crime is because some part of society lives in his brain. His act distanced his connection to other nodes (minds) around him.

Speech creates invisible webs of meaning we embody in ways hard to see. And so all begins with the intent of the words we speak to people around us — and the culture we create with them.

Action

While the effects of speech manifest indirectly, what we do with our bodies (action) is the most direct expression of our ethics.

Most doctrines ask not to kill, injure or steal. In reality, our actions set off interdependent chains of second-, third-effects and beyond that are hard to foresee. Only after a while does the precise degree of good or bad emerge. Within such complexity, there are ways for some actions to be more skilful than others, and thus to do better next time.

Livelihood

Livelihood brings speech and action together. It means to make our living in a nourishing way. On a fundamental level, this is about giving more than you take from other people and our surroundings.

‍The laws of thermodynamics say we can reduce every interaction to an energy exchange. This is obvious on the level of work and trade, but energy exchanges happen at every moment in connection with others.

Courage

The bigger point is not to say these things, but to walk the path in day-to-day life and improve one’s way through trial-and-error.

Most Western traditions embed a notion of perfection in them. Be it as absolute, static virtues, laws or consequences: they ignore the dynamism of life. To practise morality as a skill is to humbly acknowledge and honour that intrinsic imperfection.

In that sense, morality is courage. Courage born not from the judgement to absolutely and abstractly discern right from wrong, but the judgement gained from seeing someone's pain and making the right call, iteratively.

Why should we care?

The main question Dostoevsky asks through Raskolnikov is: if laws are arbitrary and faith is not more than a delusion, why should you be moral at all? Who is the judge?

The Buddha answered this question the same way Dostoevsky did: the psyche.

It's not arbitrary that sila (morality) comes before samadhi (meditation) and prajna (wisdom) on the Buddhist path. The implication is that liberation, enlightenment and freedom can only be gained from a foundation of morality.

Only when the body and the livelihood it creates with others through speech and action are cleansed, can the mind itself be cleansed with concentration and wisdom. You can't be in harmony with your self when you're not with the other: they're the same peace.

As the skill of morality improves, so does your relationship with the world and yourself. As that happens, the three components come together as a dynamic morality that evolves with what happens, rather than rigidly impose outwardly what should happen.

As such, your well-being and that of the world become one. In the words of Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa:

“Well-being of body is like a majestically solid mountain with no mist and no rain. Well-being of mind is like a great lake with no ripples, no waves, and no wind. Well-being is simple, majestic, and uninterrupted.” — Chögyam Trungpa

Intuitive morality

At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov confesses to his crime and wonders whether he was weak to do so. The Buddha would have likely told him he was only weak to not clean his mind of the impulse to begin with.

To know what is right has nothing to do with some predetermined concept, action, or result. It comes from doing the work to unstain one’s psyche to the point where, from seeing someone’s suffering and through trial-and-error, the skill of morality becomes intuition — deeply embedded in mind, body, speech and every movement.

It’s not that values, laws and consequences don’t matter or that one matters more than the other. It’s that life isn’t black-and-white and reducing it to one variable always leaves something to be desired.

Good decisions are made acknowledging there is no absolute right and wrong, yet still mustering the courage to weigh inevitable trade-offs and act, iteratively — to hone the skill as you go by holding yourself accountable. Rather than some philosophy you feel good about, a good place to start is the felt recognition of someone else’s pain.

Part 1 laid out how perception gets constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed as the body evolves in relationship to its environment. It can update itself based on reconciling prediction errors, or it can project itself into the world through action.

Part 2 looks at how the different elements of experience might interact within the predictive theory. Its point is not to perfectly capture real-world complexity, but step outside of the system and actually see its mechanics at work. It's high-level awareness that reveals leverage points, so we can be intentional with our experience and behaviour.

Let’s consider three things we might want to improve with intention:

• Relationship to the self

• Relationship to others

• Relationship to goal-oriented work

Relationship to self

Part 1 modelled how baby brains mature.

At first, brains rely on sensations only to learn what (not) to do for health and survival. Caretakers help contextualise what these sensations mean in given contexts so the brain gains control and agency. I learn to be calm when my parents are calm and anxious when they are anxious. As we develop faculties for language, we come to conceptualise these sensations as emotions.

Over time, emotions solidify in a foundation of memory that enables the brain to start predicting more and reacting less, to save energy. Because prediction guides experience from what we already know, patterns of interpretation and habit become rigid intuition. We get used and attached to feeling, thinking, and behaving certain ways in certain contexts. The self emerges from these self-reinforcing loops of memory, habit and interpretation.

Maturation is inherently bumpy. We all get moulded by what we go through in life — good and bad. No matter how great your parents and childhood, you inevitably pick up some "stuff" along the way. From within the foundation of your self, this stuff may propagate into misguided cycles of interpretation and habit that consistently lead you astray.

Addiction ↔ growth

People typically handle their baggage in one of two ways: they either shrink away or lean in.

• Shrinking away leads to addiction — a habit of seeking short-term escape — and only feeds the destructive loops. Instead of dealing with trauma, we seek release in substances, consumption, relationships and/or cycles of resentment, anger and self-pity. Whatever it is, the object of addiction becomes a crutch, bound to eventually break under pressure.

• Leaning in leads to growth. It is to check your self and deconstruct the pattern onto its root memory so the dysfunctional habit can be un- or re-learned from the ground-up. There is no way around trauma; it needs to be faced, interpreted and acted on for change. Every time we do that in a way that affirms life, we create a piece of ourselves that wasn't there before.

Nassim Taleb would call the first state fragile (harmed by disorder) and the second anti-fragile (gains from disorder).

Self-reflection

To improve the relationship to the self, focus on thoughts and memory through awareness.

You can do this by introspecting destructive thought loops and tracing them back to the memories that trigger them. From memories, you can understand the root cause of your emotions. From there, you can do two things:

• First, you can work on changing the habit from a re-interpretation of its underlying memory.

• Second, you can change thoughts patterns by changing how you talk to your self.

The change of habit helps you deal better with the same problem in the future. The change of thoughts help you break out of the loop to start learning healthier ones.

It’s as important to forget as it is to remember. The past provides necessary continuity, but some chains of interpretation are better broken.

Self-development

Awareness subjects prediction loops working in the background of the self to conscious thought so you can set intentions for changing them.

Intention is the hard limit of thought: change itself can only manifest through action. Without actualising them in new behaviour, new intentions just create new thinking loops on top of unchanged intuition. You cannot think your way out of thinking.

The brain updates internal models by correcting prediction errors fed back to it from the environment. It learns through new information that violates what it knows. Such novelty is only found doing new things in new contexts. You need to put your self out there to be proven wrong.

Change is hard because it requires payment of metabolic resources the brain was naturally selected to save. Thought can add the long-term perspective that learning pays compounding metabolic returns, as internal models gain greater predictive reach. You grow more effective in more contexts with less energy.

Anti-fragile flywheel

Change and learning becomes easier the more you do it.

Firstly, because knowledge compounds: existing knowledge provides greater contextual scaffolding for new knowledge to integrate with.

Secondly, because the brain comes to recognise the long-term metabolic gains of challenging itself and reorients its its energy efficiency model around it. To seek out novelty rather than avoid it becomes hardwired intuition. The more habitual your curiosity, the less intention and energy it takes, the more naturally it happens.

As your predictions compound reach, you feel comfortable in a wider diversity of contexts and have more energy left over for curiosity, actively seeking out prediction errors.

The flywheel gets flipped on its head. You dance with chaos rather than shy away from it. In the process, you evolve in complexity: more attuned to contextual diversity, more differentiated in personality.

You are your choices

In philosophical terms, intention carried by thought can be considered a source of free will.

Initially, our brains wire themselves to the surroundings they're born into — physical, social, cultural. You have, in fact, no say over the models and concepts you inherit. These determine your first predictions, experiences, behaviours and initial self-development.

As you grow up however, you gain agency over how, where and with whom you spend your time. What you pay attention to. Through awareness and intention, you can deliberately seek out new experiences, contexts, people, media and ideas so to evolve your internal models and the predictions they guide. The choices you make trace the path of who you become.

"Day by day, what you do is who you become." — Heraclitus

As the brain predicts from memory, your past determines your present. You can't change that past and who you are today, but you can change your present and, through it, who you become tomorrow. By being intentional in the present you can cultivate your past as a means to control your future.

You aren't responsible for the models you were given, but you are responsible for the models you have now.

Relationship to others

To improve the relationship to others, focus on speech and behaviour.

People don't perceive your beliefs or intentions, only the output: what you do and say. Help them understand you better by choosing words and actions carefully. You can iterate this through awareness of the impact your words and actions have with others and how your intentions may be misinterpreted.

Empathy

Through the lens of the predictive model, empathy is the brain inferring how someone else is feeling. It does this by anticipating and interpreting sense data (i.e. actions and words they see and hear) through the concepts it modelled from past experiences and what it learned from others, books, movies, and so on.

Overcoming experiential blindness

So, not only do people not see your beliefs or intentions, they are also likely to see your words and actions differently than you do, from their different internal models.

"If you'd understood everything I said, you'd be me." — Miles Davis

If two people don't have concepts to interpret certain sense data in terms of feelings, they might not "see" them at all, i.e. they are experientially blind to it.

The more different two people are, the harder it is for their brains to infer how the other is feeling — the harder it is to empathise with each other.

For example, on a Lex Fridman podcast, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests children of colour in the United States are under-prescribed medicine by physicians not necessarily because they're racist, but rather because they are experientially blind to what they're feeling. Similarly, female patients are often misunderstood by male doctors — sometimes dangerously so. Different lives create different concepts construct different experiences.

"A person hears only what they understand." — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Thoughtfully expressing outwardly how you feel makes it easier for others to empathise with you. It signals other brains sense information to sample and infer your feelings from, through their own conceptual maps.

Empathy is felt because your brain is literally constructing emotions: you feel as your brain understands how the other feels, from its own emotional concepts.

Syncing brains through prediction errors

Since no two people are identical, one can ever only approximate what the other is feeling in their own way.

Open dialogue can bridge the gap, syncing each other's concepts through reflexive feedback. This requires genuine motivation from both sides, to understand and be understood. Better yet, to have one’s concepts understood, one also needs to other understand the other’s concepts so to be able to communicate one’s own concepts in terms the other understands. Effective empathy is a two-way street wherein brains meet each other halfway. In the process, concepts on both sides assimilate.

Obvious as that may sound, remember concepts only update through prediction errors; something the brain by default prefers to avoid because of the metabolic tax. In fact, people often unintentionally mistake learning someone else's concepts (empathy) for trying to validate their own. Rather than trying to see the other, they themselves try to be seen.

Empathy only works when you care enough to pay the metabolic price of learning the other; to actively seek out where your concepts fall short to construct how the other feels (prediction errors) in open dialogue — enriching them in the process.

The best/worst thing for a brain is another brain

Why bother with empathy in the first place if it costs metabolically?

Your brain's job is to anticipate and meet your body's needs so you are at all times ready to act as you need to. It continuously makes predictions when to deposit, withdraw or invest bodily resources given the situation, e.g. can we relax, rest and replenish (deposit), should we release cortisol to ready the body for action (withdraw) or is it a good time to work out so the body grows stronger (invest)?

The metabolic roots of depression and anxiety

Your actions can only be as effective as your predictions. In novel and chaotic situations, your brain is forced to learn and pay a higher metabolic price. You may start to feel distressed and overwhelmed, typically a signal to withdraw to safe place like home where everything is predictable so you can rest and replenish.

‍But when unpredictability costs for too long, predictions become chronically mismatched, actions ineffective and body budgets mismanaged. Exhausted metabolic resources in turn impair the brain's predictive ability in a vicious cycle; less and less can it afford to learn from prediction errors and thus keeps repeating them. As distress and misguided predictions feed each other, unpredictability becomes ubiquitous to the point where you struggle to relax and replenish even at home.

Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes such a downward spiral of stress, metabolic depletion, misguided energy regulation and ineffective predictions as a way to think about depression and anxiety.

A hug a day keeps metabolic imbalance at bay

Framing depression as metabolic illness highlights the importance of of sleep, healthy eating and exercise. Where does empathy come in?

Your brain can rely on other brains to help manage its body budgets. Humans evolved to take care of each other's nervous systems. Empathy originates from caretakers guiding baby brains through the sensational sea of uncertainty. While parents take care of their children’s body budgets (feeding and protection), they also guide them how to map, feel and act in certain contexts and situations — shaping first predictions so they themselves learn to manage their bodies.

Even so we grow up to take care of ourselves, the people close to us still help relieve stress in much the same way. With empathetic words and actions (hugs), they help us make sense of uncertain situations — instilling us with confidence to resolve doubts (thought) through action. Knowing you’re not alone makes you feel safer and stronger. As such, the empathy of others lightens the metabolic load and co-manages your body budgets.

Think about the impact of a hug or even a simple WhatsApp message from a loved one has on how you feel — it regulates your nervous system. When your partner texts I love you, it changes your heart rate, breathing and metabolism. You feel this as affect, and conceptualise it as emotion. Same effect in the opposite sense when the message adds to uncertainty and is felt as anxiety, e.g. You are useless.

In that sense, the best thing for a human brain is another brain. Inversely, other people can also majorly add to the chaos and uncertainty in our lives. And so, unfortunately, the worse thing for a human brain is also another brain.

You are your relations

It’s easy to see why we evolved as social animals. For most of history, survival and thrival odds were higher for individuals in groups. Empathy scaled from kin to tribe to community levels alongside the success of big groups working together. Nowadays most societies collectively solved food, shelter and security needs to the extent you can easily survive on your own. Yet, empathy still has clear biological advantages.

You can perfectly manage your nervous system on your own, but it'll metabolically cost you more. Dealing with life's inherent uncertainty all by yourself takes a slow but certain toll over time. So much so you’re likely to die sooner.

Many studies have replicated a negative causal link between loneliness and longevity. On average, people who are socially isolated, living alone or experiencing loneliness are ~50% (adjusted for age and gender) more likely to die earlier than people with close relationships — friends, lovers, and even pets. Along the same lines, the widowhood effect is the increased possibility of a person dying shortly after a long-time partner's passing. Losing the main steward of your nervous system devastates metabolic health, making you more vulnerable to disease. People literally die from a broken heart.

Losing a loved one is often described as losing a part of your self. That’s because, in fact, you have lost a part of your self. That someone co-managed your body budgets and was an inherent part of the concepts that make up your sense of self.

Biologically, empathy is a metabolic investment: it costs short-term but pays long-term.

• In intimate terms, it builds a close circle of people that help manage your body budgets by reducing fundamental uncertainty in many ways.

• On a larger scale, the bigger the diversity of people you invest to empathise with, the richer your concepts, the more of reality you know to navigate, the less uncertainty your brain has to deal with altogether.

Empathy works like a flywheel, too: the more people you empathise with, the easier it becomes (the lower the metabolic cost) to empathise with the next one. You grow in complexity in a dynamic, integrative way and are healthier off because of it. Though beware of empathising with others who don't empathise with you. Helping manage others' body budgets while no one helps with yours only adds stress.

Relationship to productivity

We’ll consider productivity as the ability to actualise thought into action, imagination into result.

Prototypically, this happens through a runway feedback loop of thoughts producing actions that feed into new thoughts and so on.

The productivity process takes on a different structure in each uniquely different brain. We all develop our own habitual way of being productive, mirroring who we are as persons — the self. But while personal algorithms differ, the principle is the same: creating a straight path from thought to action.

Habits are great at executing tasks, but counterproductive for what makes work “great”: creativity. Quantity matters, but it’s quality that makes a difference. One is optimising existing ways for greater quantity (efficiency), the other is coming up with novel, better ways (effectiveness) altogether.

For productivity, linearity is both a strength and a weakness. The more you focus on increasing input-to-output conversion in the moment, the less attention is left for making new connections. True creativity is non-linear, born not out of focused but wandering attention. You can’t predict how it’s going to work beforehand and trace steps to it. It happens spontaneously and suddenly when intuition can freely play around in chaos — the very thing structure aims to minimise.

You've probably noticed how your best ideas come to you not when you’re trying to come up with them, but randomly in the shower, doing housework, gardening or taking a walk — precisely because you’re not trying to come up with ideas. It’s a relaxed, undemanding way of being that leaves room for intuition to self-organise the chaos, making non-linear connections.

We'll split the two dimensions of productivity as (1) goal-oriented work and (2) relaxed creativity, then marry them together in (3) flow.

Relationship to goal-oriented work

To improve your relationship to goal-oriented work, focus on imagination and attention.

Define and simulate a vision, then trace actionable steps needed from future back to the present. This’ll instil a deeper certainty of what you want, to guide your predictions and actions going forward. Contrasting the vision of the future with the present channels your attention to purposefully learn new things as you co-evolve with the new reality you’re actualising. Your imagination pulls your attention to itself in an actionable way.

Now, goals are constrained within the channel traced back from your vision, i.e. the product of creativity. As you purposefully work and learn towards that vision goal by goal, you build creative capacity for a better one. To harness it, step away, out of the channel, and give your updated intuition a chance to make new non-linear connections by inviting relaxed creativity. You might come up with better ideas that bypass tons of linear work within the previous paradigm. Sometimes, the most productive thing to do is to not try to be productive.

Relationship to relaxed creativity

To improve your relationship with relaxed creativity, focus on sensation and intuition.

Carve out purposeless pockets of time and space for your intuition to pick up new connections in new sensory environments. This is the opposite of goal-oriented work. Without goals (thought) commanding attention, the brain can freely chase novelty on top of what it assumes to already now. Through prediction errors, novel sense data non-linearly integrates with existing concepts, subjecting new ideas to thought as they evolve.

For example, I invite relaxed creativity through walks, showers, housework, cooking and gardening. These are activities the body can do without much thought, leaving attention to freely wander and pick up on novelty for intuition to play with.

Flow: Goal-oriented creativity

Goal-oriented work and relaxed creativity are seemingly at odds with each other, as the first structures attention and the second diffuses it.

But there’s a sweet spot.

‍At the edge of order and chaos, we can achieve a flow state: a minimum viable structure that fends off ineffectual distractions while retaining enough room for intuition to self-organise chaos into creativity.

Optimal human experience

Flow is a magical sort of state, found out as the “optimal human experience” by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi after decades of researching high-achieving people. In his words:

‍“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Sitting at the edge of self (order) and selflessness (chaos), flow is felt as a total experience of the unfiltered present moment. It augments both emotion and thought, syncing them in the core unit of consciousness: attention. Whatever you are feeling and thinking feels much richer.

In flow, you choose what you pay attention to, not some distraction. You feel naturally happy without thought and grow in complexity, merely by virtue of being active towards where your mind is focused.

Matching mood to momentum

According to Csikszentimihalyi, flow comes when an activity feels both sufficiently difficult and sufficiently possible. If it’s too difficult, we get anxious. If it’s too easy, we get bored.

It’s also about the psychic energy we have available. What is difficult and easy changes throughout the day as our thoughts, feelings, moods, interactions and environments change — much of it subject to body budget levels (food, water, glucose, electrolytes, sleep).

Optimising for flow starts with matching your focus to the content at any given moment. If you have four hours, you sit down to write, but if you only have twenty minutes, you send emails. Better yet; if you don’t have the clearheadedness to write, you pick something that better matches your mood.

By proactively context-switching to match psychic energy with task, you become an architect of how you distribute attention to the environment. This process is conducive to creativity because it’s messy and non-linear, yet it still respects the output. It prioritises quality without neglecting quantity, and as such maximises productivity.

Minimum viable structure

The challenge of flow is to create a structure that minimises wasteful distraction (goal-oriented) but not so much it can’t context-switch in function of available psychic energy.

This is where intrinsic personal goals come in. Goals not based on external rewards they bring, but on values that give you a sense of conviction about your place in the world. Such goals are an extension of your self and living them is, in fact, self-expression: the reward is the act itself.

For example, I write to think and learn better by indulging in my curiosity; hopefully creating meaning for and connection with others in the process. It is selfish self-expression more than anything else: something I naturally want to do regardless of the external rewards.

Value-based goals are habits at the level of belief: they trace a purposeful, dynamic scope for flow to happen at the level of experience. The balance is struck: enough structure for order while enough space for the brain to non-linearly organise its way through chaos. For this to work, you need to deeply feel and believe the goal. In some sense, bet your life on it.

As Csikszentmihalyi puts it:

‍“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to themselves. They have to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Here’s how I practically apply a minimum viable structure for writing flow.

Writing is my scope and within it, I switch contexts to match my psychic energy levels.

• In the mornings, I’ll typically sit down and actually write, surfing the creative flow following restful sleep.

• When I feel stuck, I’ll step away from my desk to do some housework, shower, cook or take a walk — so to let my intuition play with ideas in the background of my wandering attention. Later, I'll come back to write with a fresh perspective.

• As soon as I find myself forcing to keep writing, I’ll move on to more linear client work (I freelance) that pays the bills. This enables me more time to write later.

• In the evenings, I’ll shift from creating to consuming, reading and listening to books (or podcasts) — possibly while walking or alike. More input for the mind to run away with and refill overall creative inspiration.

• Throughout the day, I’ll optimise food (low-carb and fasting), activity (walking, workouts) and sleep (unwinding, rhythm) for clear thinking. I'll flow across all of these things within the purposeful scope of writing well.

Rather than goals being an end in themselves, they become a means to experience flow. As such, they marry the noun to the verb, the being to the doing.

A change in perspective

Understanding how different elements interact to shape perception and experience is a powerful way to take control of your life.

The computer scientist Alan Kay once said:

"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points." — Alan Kay

That's what happens when we step outside our sense of self to update the assumptions that guide it in the world. Through awareness of its parts, we can better rhyme the flow of our internal systems with the reality and other brains around us — intentionally evolving in harmony as we go.

Part 1 explained predictive processing as the central model grounded in neuroscience.

1. Top-down, we predict experience from mental maps modelled by memory.

2. Bottom-up, sense data comes in from body and world to confirm or correct.

3. When bottom-up sense data conflicts with top-down experiential construction, prediction errors and the map updates.

What follows is my own mapping of the model onto different features of experience.

Emotions

We start by modelling the world internally through emotions.

Emotions are grounded in affect, which is the general sense of feeling in the body. Specifically, affect is a felt summary of the sense data resulting from whatever your body (organs, hormones, immune system) is doing to anticipate metabolic needs.

Affect ranges from idle to aroused and pleasant to unpleasant. These basic states mirror the biological drives of fear and desire, whereby fear is reactive (avoid harm so to survive) and desire is active (seek benefit so to thrive and procreate).

Emotions, like joy and sadness and peacefulness and anger, are names we give to specific configurations of affect. They signal how to act in specific contexts relative to our past habits. If something made you happy in the past, you’re more likely to seek it again. If something scared you in the past, you’re more likely to avoid it this time.

In this sense, emotions are nebulous indicators of predictive calculations happening in the background. It’s how you feel the brain computing sense data from inside and outside the body through what it knows from memory for effective prediction. Affect is how you feel the body as function of what is going on inside of it (biology), emotions are what you conceptually categorise that feeling as (language, culture).

When emotions persist over longer periods of time, they fade into moods — felt less specifically than emotions.

The myth of "universal" emotions

This explanation of emotions runs counterintuitive to the classical (and still popular) view that emotions are hard-wired into our bodies. For example: when the body feels threatened or scared, it runs through an anger or fear pathway that evokes the same response every time in every one.

Yet, there is no evidence for universal emotional fingerprints.

Instead, research shows that emotions are simply how we linguistically label and interpret various hues of affect as it ranges between levels of (dis)pleasure and stimulation. They are concepts the brain contextually applies in prediction.

"An emotion is your brain's conceptual construction of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world." — Lisa Feldman Barrett

Categorising the complex storm of feelings inside of you "anger" anchors it as a specific experience that primes the way for action. It is also simpler to communicate, which is why we all seem to have the same emotions: they're culturally shared (or inter-subjective) concepts passed on to us as kids and constantly reinforced in social interaction.

Emotion concepts in fact vary across cultures. So much so that, for example, Eskimos have no equivalent concept for "anger" and Tahitians don't have one for "sadness." Under the hood, they'll feel similar hues of affect that correspond to those concepts in English but conceptualise them differently. Vice-versa, English has no versions of hygge (Danish), saudade (Portuguese), age-otori (Japanese), fago (Ifaluk), litost (Czech), tocka (Russian), or gigil (Filipino).

Learn more in Lisa Feldman Barrett's excellent How Emotions Are Made.

Intuition

Signalled through affect (interpreted as emotions), intuition non-linearly structures patterns in the chaos of sense data relative to actions.

Intuition springs from embodied cognition and operates without thought, which is why it feels like autopilot: constructed experience and executed behaviour come fluidly. It’s what the brain knows and predicts from memory without checking against sense data.

When the prediction accurately represents reality and executes effective behaviour, this intuition is wisdom. When the prediction is limited and executes misguided behaviour, this intuition is bias.

Attention

When a prediction errors against sense data, it shakes our intuition to update the underlying mental models. We experience a sudden shift in attention: the source of learning.

Attention is the brain focusing on uncertain elements in the environment, on top of what it assumes to already know. It’s always chasing novelty and surprise to seek out threats and opportunities. Since every moment has at least a small degree of novelty, attention can feel like it’s constantly scanning all over the place — which it is.

But attention can also find novelty and surprise by focusing in on something deeply, which creates the experience of flow. Rather than jumping between the most interesting distractions that come into the field of perception, this kind of focus actively changes perception by bending it around the subject of attention. Time spent in flow feels slower, richer, and more emotionally qualitative. (Part 3 further explores flow).

Thought

Attention can be focused in a way that bends perception with intention,which is the product of thought.

‍Thought extends the goal-seeking behaviour of our basic drives. It is triggered by whatever emotion lies underneath to question it.

Thought enables us to reflect on and regulate emotions, consciously consider perceptions and granularise judgements as a result.

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier and simpler.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Grounded in language, it’s thought that unlocks abstraction; the conceptual compression of realities into mental LEGOs the brain can remix and combine to imagine new realities that exist in the mind alone. Through language we can furthermore share these mental models with other brains, networking them together in culture.

Within the brain, thought is generative: it can keep chaining from itself, though at the cost of becoming more abstracted from reality. Eventually, chains of thought inevitably get stuck in self-referential loops, channelling emotions in ways that are either destructive or productive — depending on the output.

Memory and imagination

Reflecting on perception with thought splits perception into memory and imagination. Past and future, what has been and what can be.

Memory is accumulated mental modelling iterated on feedback from the world. It’s past experience stored through emotions felt at the time. Memory guides prediction and ensuing behaviour from what the brain believes to be important and true in any given context. When we learn through surprise, this is what it is being updated. It can also be changed by reflection.

Imagination, on the other hand, is mental modelling on top of memory; creatively recombining conceptual LEGOs to extend self-referential loops into possible scenarios for the future.

"What you can imagine depends on what you know." — Daniel Dennett

Imagination creates attractors: visions for tomorrow that pull action toward itself in the present. It’s what orders and orients creativity, driving it in a particular direction.

Both intuition and attention are rooted in memory and imagination, but intuition tends to be more strongly guided by memory and attention is more powerfully pulled in the direction of the vision being imagined.

Self

By creating loops of memory and imagination to split perception, thought creates what we experience as the self; something that clarifies the distinction between body and environment.

The self is the emerging experience of the body in its environment, computed in real-time as predictions correctively integrate with incoming sense data. It’s how the brain experiences itself in the present through the network of mental models it learned from the past. Through the prism of self, we predict, understand and interact with everything else.

Awareness

To step out of self-referential loops is to experience awareness.

‍Awareness can observe the different components of our self interacting in experience of the environment, uninvolved and without judgement. From the outside looking in, it can spot misguided habitual chains of interpretation impossible to see from within. Through awareness, you can come to understand your self better and orient it for growth with intention.

Awareness enables intentional learning, by directing feedback loops between self and environment. Whereas the brain by default seeks to minimise surprise and prediction error to save energy, awareness can seek them out.

Action

All these components network in ways too complex to precisely model. But they express into objective reality through action: speech and motor behaviour.

What we do and say is what others perceive and judge. They are the outputs of our internal models as measured by external agents. It’s what the moving parts predict and what awareness can observe through its detached lens.

The interplay between action and awareness determines the adaptive potential of the system: what it learns and how fast it learns.

Summary

In summary, the brain predictively experiences its self in the world through the perceptual model it accumulated from the past. Awareness can see its actions and retrace chains of interpretation for intentional learning. The self tries to minimise surprise. Awareness can maximize it.

Continue reading Part 3 — Leveraging awareness →

The young man was drafted against his will. Ordered to hunt down the same guerrilla fighters who were his comrades just months before.

Now, he found himself deep in the wilderness doing practice drills with his new squadron when, suddenly, he spotted rustling in the bushes. His heart pounding in his throat, he saw a formation of camouflaged guerrillas looming with AK-47s ready to burst. Instinctively, he raised his rifle, flipped the safety and aimed.

“Don’t shoot.”

A hand on his shoulder.

“It’s just a boy.”

He lowered the rifle, looked again, and was dumbfounded by what he saw: a ten-year old boy herding cows. Not with an AK-47, but with a stick.

The soldier shared his story with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who recounts it in her latest book. He was desperate to understand how he could have mis-seen what was right in front of him and nearly killed a child.

“What is wrong with my brain?”

There was nothing wrong with his brain. It had worked exactly as it should have.

The red pill

How would you react if someone told you your day-to-day experience is, in fact, a carefully controlled hallucination?

This would sound familiar if you've seen The Matrix. But what if this was science’s version of your reality?

One of the great emerging theories in neuroscience is predictive processing. It asserts that the brain predicts large swaths of experience from memory before it happens, rather than construct it from what you see, smell, hear and feel as it happens. This saves energy that can be focused as attention on new, uncertain elements in the environment.

The soldier’s brain predicted guerrilla fighters from matching earlier experiences so he could react quicker. If it really had been a guerrilla, the seconds he won predicting the scene rather than reacting after fully perceiving could have saved his life. The prediction was wrong but killing the child as a result — tragic as it would have been — wouldn’t hurt him biologically. The predictive brain wins at natural selection with metabolic efficiency.

Contents

This post looks at how brain and body construct how you experience yourself within the world in every wakeful moment.

Experience is a real-time product of many different parts interacting together in a system too complex to finely model. Instead, the focus is to simplify without straying from scientific lines. We're stepping outside the system to see its mechanics at work and identify leverage points. So we can be more effectively intentional about what we want to improve.

• This first part lays the neuroscientific groundwork with the brain's central principle of predictively processing experience for metabolic efficiency.

• Part 2 maps how different experiential elements interact within the predictive model: emotions, intuition, attention, thought, memory, imagination, self, awareness and action.

• From this sketch, Part 3 explores how to improve relationships to our selves, others, and goal-oriented work.

Sense chaos

From the day you’re born to the day you draw your last breath, your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box — your skull. Blind and deaf, it depends on data collected by sensors to know what's going on inside its body and the world outside:

• Extero-ceptive sensors — Eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue bring in sense data from the world around.

• Intero-ceptive sensors — Neural pathways bring in sense data from within the body.

Sense data isn't actionable. It doesn’t come in as meaningful sights, smells, sounds and touches, but as random scraps of light waves, chemicals, vibrations and air pressure changes. It's reality rendered as numbers without intrinsic meaning: objective and quantitative.

The brain’s job is to interpret sense data in context of the environment so it can keep you alive and well, i.e. avoid you falling down the stairs, getting dehydrated or becoming lion lunch. In context, data gains meaning and becomes information.

As per information theory pioneer Claude Shannon, information “resolves uncertainty”. In doing so, it informs agency: your brain knows what to do next.

• Data — My body records a drop in temperature and increasing friction from wind. Information — My brain interprets the change as a sign of bad weather to come. Action — I put on a rain jacket.

• Data — Eyes record image of a lion near the river. Information — I’ll be in danger if I continue my path. Action — I head to another water source.

VV

@visualizevalue

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”― Daniel Kahneman

863

10:07 AM • Jul 25, 2021

Past resolves present

The brain faces an inverse-inference problem: how does it figure out what's going on (causes) from random data (effects)? It solves this by drawing from its lifetime database of past experiences: memory.

Inside the skull, the brain asks itself what happened last time it was in a similar situation. "What are these wavelengths of light most like?" The answer need not be perfect, just close enough to inform effective action.

‍Chaos becomes structured and navigable through mental maps modelled from past experiences. We make sense of new things through what we already know. Inversely, we can't make sense of data we don't have mental maps for.

For example:

• When you look at a rainbow, you see distinct bands of colour. In nature however, a rainbow is a continuous spectrum of light — it doesn't have any bands. You see bands because your brain projects colour concepts onto the sense data that neutralise the variations within each colour category.

• Human speech is a continuous stream of sound. Yet, you intuitively make out words hearing a language you know. It's because your brain has learned patterns it can project back onto speech streams to structure it. Inversely, a language you don't know sounds like random gibberish.

The Beholder's Share

Take a look at these three visuals. You probably see fairly meaningless black lines. Go read the descriptions below and look again. The lines form familiar scenes now. Not because they changed, but because your brain has.

1. POV of ski jumper with spectators.

2. Inside-view of Napoleon's coat.

3. Ship too late to save drowning wizard.

Reading these entries made your map brain draw mental maps of meaning it then projected onto the otherwise random visual data. Making the lines mean something.

The conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp famously said an artist does only 50% of the work in creating art. The other 50% is done by the viewer's brain.

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” — Marcel Duchamp

Mental LEGOs

Such pattern-matching follows from the brain’s capacity for abstraction. Lived experiences are not so much stored as unabridged memories, but rather compressed into concepts: LEGO-like conceptual building blocks that can be mixed and matched across contexts.

This how you intuit flowers, watches and wine as “gifts” even if the objects look nothing alike. Different realities with the same meaning in a particular context. Inversely, the same reality gains different meaning in different contexts: a glass of wine can mean blood of Christ, a toast and a cosy evening with friends.

**Abstraction summarises physical realities to their functional features. **How something looks, sounds and smells is abstracted away; stripped down to what it can do in a given context. They become pieces of meaning for the brain to recombine in novel ways and project onto other realities so it can pilot them quicker.

• Flowers, wine, watches can all be "gifts" in festive contexts.

• Umbrella, coat, plastic bag, car, apartment and a mindset to not care can all "protect from rain."

• Salt, barley, little shells, copper coins, paper notes, mortgages, Bitcoin have all been used as "currency" in context of transacting goods and services.

Contextually integrating concepts abstracted from past experiences is how you intuitively know what to do in situations you've never encountered before — without having to think about it. Memory bits are integrated into functional mental maps to resolve present ambiguity for action.

Abstraction also unlocks imagination: mental modelling that builds on top of memory. The brain playfully remixes mental LEGOs into possible scenarios for the future. It's what orients creativity and pulls attention in a certain direction.

"What you can imagine depends on what you know." — Daniel Dennett

Prediction beats reaction

Scientists used to believe sense-making happened reactively bottom-up. Data moves in through senses and travels up the nervous system into the brain where it gets interpreted through the lens of memory so we can act. Senses record, brain processes, body re-acts — in that order.

Such an input-reaction sequence seemingly matches how we experience the world. For example, the brain's visual system feels like it works like a camera: eyes record visual information and the brain processes it into an image. Hence, the soldier believed something was wrong with his brain. How else do you explain mis-seeing a boy herding cows for guerrillas with machine guns?

Analysis gets you killed

The picture changes in the face of survival. Remember, the brain's job is to keep you alive and well. The constant influx of ambiguous data is cognitively overwhelming. If the brain were to reflexively interpret all of it from the ground up, it'd drown in uncertainty and be (too) slow to act. The soldier would get shot before he'd understand he's in danger.

To avoid analysis paralysis, the brain takes a shortcut. Rather than process all the sense data, it pattern-matches with memory to predict what is most likely to happen next. "Last time I was in a situation like this, what did I see, hear and feel next?" That prediction is constructed as experience.

Experience ⇄ Expectation

The soldier mistook the child for a guerrilla because that's what happened next last time the bushes rustled when he was: (1) in the woods, (2) with his comrades, (3) holding a rifle, (4) his heart pounding.

From memory, the brain (1) meaningfully structures random data and (2) fills in blind spots to proactively create a meaningful experience that guides action. How you see the world is not a photograph, but a construction of your brain so fluid and convincing that it feels like it is. Lightwaves, air pressure changes and chemicals are predictively constructed as objects, sounds, tastes and smells based on what the brain believes most probable from past experience.

Flipping Pavlov

In case it hasn't fully sunk in yet: prediction is to be taken literally. Yes, you sense changes before they actually happen.

Most of the time predictions are accurate and match reality. You look at cows and see cows. But have you ever seen a friend's face in a crowd when they weren't actually there? Ever sworn your phone vibrated when it didn't? You really did see and feel those things. They were sensory anticipations then invalidated by reality. Prediction errors.

Same is true for experience of your body. Internal changes are sensed before the relevant data from organs and hormones arrives.

• When you're thirsty and drink water, that thirst seems to subside at once. In reality, water takes about 20 minutes to hit your bloodstream.

• Research verified the expectation of having consumed caffeine alone improved attention, cognitive performance and mood.

• Turns out Pavlov's dogs didn't drool as a reaction to the bell, but rather (their brains) anticipated the experience of food from memory of the bell and prepared the body for eating. Similarly, if you'd imagine your favourite food right now, scans would detect increased activity in brain regions associated with taste and smell — which trigger salivation.

Prediction errors

At any given time, the brain experientially represents what it believes is going on in body and world, and, from there, computes what is most likely to happen next.

It does this according to Bayes' theorem, which describes the mathematical probability of an event from prior knowledge of variables related to that event. Each time a prediction proves true in a context, the brain attributes a higher probability to it and is more likely to re-project it in the future.

Every once in a while however, incoming sense data unexpectedly contradicts the prediction. Guerrillas turn out to be cows and the friend isn't really there. The brains corrects the experience, our attention suddenly shifts and we feel surprised. We learn: reality forces the mental map to update. The correction will inform more accurate predictions going forward.

The brain works much like a scientist. It continuously makes and simulates hypotheses, then tests them against data:

• In the face of inevitable prediction errors, it can be a responsible scientist and change its models to match data or it can be a biased scientist and selectively filter or even ignore data to fit its hypotheses.

• In moments of learning, it can be a curious scientist — focussing almost solely on input to enrich and update its models.

• Like Einstein, it can daydream and imagine — simulating the world from its mental models and concepts alone.

While intention and habits matter (see Part 2 and Part 3), your brain's scientific style is first subject to its bodily resources. Its main job is to keep you alive and well, to make sure your biological needs are timely met. So when you're running low on glucose, dehydrated, sleep-deprived or in danger, the brain will spend less energy on processing sense data. It will go with its predictions without checking for errors, because it is the shortest path to replenishing its bodily balances.

Metabolic efficiency

Brains predict and then correct rather than detect and react because it reduces uncertainty and costs less energy. Reactive brains would have to compute everything on the spot from scratch every single moment: too ineffective and inefficient to be naturally selected.

Predictive brains follow Karl Friston's free energy principle, which says that organisms aim to minimise energy use so to maintain homeostasis: a state of internal biological balance.

Body budgeting

The brain carefully budgets bodily resources (salt, glucose, water) to succeed efficiently in any given context. It continuously makes predictions when to (1) deposit, (2) withdraw or (3) invest bodily resources given the situation. For example: can we relax, rest and replenish (deposit), should we release cortisol to ready the body for action (withdraw) or is it a good time to work out so the body grows stronger (invest)?

Predicting known situations saves energy to spend in unknown, potentially dangerous, situations. When it's unsure what will happen, the brain is more likely to predict threats and allocate resources accordingly, e.g. pumping the body with cortisol to prepare for flight.

Such threat predictions more often turn out false and the energy wasted — as was the case for the soldier — **but the spend probabilistically makes sense for survival. **You're rather safe than sorry — or dead.

In fact, the brain's readiness to check its predictions for errors against sense data is yolked to heart rate. The faster the heart pounds, the more stubbornly the brain will insist in its predictions to construct experience — wilfully ignoring all invalidating sense data. You see shepherds for guerrillas and sticks for AK-47's in a real-life hallucination.

The map predicts the territory

Predictive brains can move faster through territories using maps they already have rather than constantly drawing new ones on the go. By assuming known parts of the territory, the brain saves energy it can focus as attention on new, uncertain parts — those we are not sure to be safe yet.

Of course, as the saying goes, the map is not the territory. But it doesn’t have to be: it just need to approximate the territory well enough to be practical. That point about utility is often left out of Korzybski's famous quote. When the map errors in the face of utility and the territory hits us in the face, it is forced to update so the brain can predict better next time.

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory — which accounts for its usefulness." — Alfred Korzybski

VV

@visualizevalue

1,366

7:28 AM • Aug 2, 2022

Context matters

Crucially, the map is bound to the territory. Human truths (i.e. mental maps) are contextual based on utility.

‍‍What is true in some situations might not be in others, which is what we mean when we say "it's relative." Different contexts have different truths and require different mental models to navigate effectively. When we predict from an old map in a new territory, we trip and fall: prediction errors. The brain learns and fills in the blind spots.

As trial-and-error adapts mental maps to mirror differences across territories, they become dynamic and context-independent. Predictions from these models are true in a greater variety of contexts, i.e. they have greater reach and are more probabilistically sound.

Novelty costs

The free energy principle implies the brain innately avoids novelty for as long as it can afford to.

Because correcting internal models is metabolically costly, uncertain or contradicting data is purposefully left out in constructed experience. The brain doesn't predict what it doesn't know and it doesn't map what it doesn't have to, to save energy. You never see the full picture of reality, only the sliver the brain has learned about in the past.

*"We all think we know how the world works, but we've all only experienced a tiny sliver of it." — Morgan Housel

Learning ROI

The brain only corrects its models if the future risk of not doing so warrants the cost. Metabolic investments need to pay off.

• If your model predicts that lions are friendly and one almost bites off your arm because you tried petting it at the zoo, your brain will update the model so you are more careful next time.

• People who believe they don't need sun-screen only do so until they get severely sun-burnt.

• Certain behaviours work better in some socio-economic contexts than in others. For example, kids "too cool for school" typically have their habits of partying, bullying, substance abuse, vanity and arrogance work against them in adult life later on. Their brains have to remodel for the sake of well-being. The longer it takes, the more dysfunctional it becomes.

We predict what the world will be like based on what we already know and in return the world adjusts those predictions by feeding back where they're wrong.

However, updates cost energy and so the brain by default avoids being proven wrong, sticking to what it knows. Here we may find a root of addiction: it's the brain avoiding the struggle of change by escaping in an easy distraction. (Part 3 further explores addiction and its opposite — personal growth.)

To learn beyond what is biologically necessary therefore takes intention, a willingness to expose our brains to information that is new or conflicting. You need to actively seek to be proven wrong by confronting your assumptions across contexts.

Experiential blindness

If your brain doesn't have concepts to anticipate and interpret sense data, you are experientially blind to it.

• Unless you already had concepts, the visuals shown earlier looked like meaningless black lines at first. Once you were handed concepts, you saw something in them. The visual stays the same, it's your brain that changed and now adds its prediction.

• A spoken language you don't know sounds like gibberish. Once you learn the language, the same sounds you didn't know what to make of earlier all of a sudden gain meaning.

• Some people that are born blind can gain eyesight through operation. Still, for days, weeks or even months they remain blind to parts of reality because the brain doesn't know how to experientially map them.

We all see the world through our unique prisms, modelled after the unique mosaic of (1) our own lived experiences and (2) those of others we are subjected to through relations and media (movies, books, timelines).

And so two people looking at the same reality can come to wildly different conclusions about it. The more different the information ecologies they've lived in, the more different their conceptual maps and the more they'll struggle to find common ground. They're experientially blind to each other.

It explains why conversations about politics and religion are mostly dead on arrival. These are games of language with no cost to being wrong. Each participant wants the other to see what they see and can simply keep arguing from the different concepts modelled from their different pasts, since there are no risks for well-being and no prediction errors. Not changing your mind is the path of least metabolic resistance.

Empathy can bridge the gap by assimilating each other's concepts in open dialogue — enriching them in the process. But it only works if the intention is to learn each other's concepts rather than to be 'right', other than the humility to acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of one's point of view. (Part 3 dives deeper into empathy).

Echo chambers

Each time reality doesn't correct predictions, the underlying models are judged effective and assigned a higher probability for future prediction. Predicting present from past, thinking patterns self-reinforce and become habitual over time. We naturally see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and believe what we want to believe.

In nature, misguided predictions cost you and so you must change your mind to survive. In modern environments however, most risks have been designed away so being wrong doesn't cost you — at least not biologically. When predictions don't occur or are easy to rationalise away, you can be very wrong for a very long time and be perfectly fine throughout. Naturally selected for metabolic efficiency, brains are wired to get stuck in echo chambers in risk-free human contexts.

From sensation to prediction

Baby brain development demonstrates how the predictive mechanics are tuned by mapping bodily sensations (emotions) to environments. It makes for a good summary before moving on.

A new-born baby's experience is pure sensation. They're overwhelmed by sense data they don't know how to deal with because they have no memory to predict from. Their world is uncertain and chaotic.

As the baby crawls, grabs and plays, its brain maps sensations to the environment and, through trial and error, learns what it should and shouldn't do. Thanks to sensory feedback, it learns that the couch is soft, the floor hard and the dog kind.

When sensation doesn't resolve uncertainty, the baby turns to mom and dad. When they are calm, the baby calms too and thus learns to be calm in said situation. Parents regulate their baby's emotional state with soothing touches, looks and sounds.

This is why caregivers are crucial to baby brain development. By contextualising sense data, they help the baby form its first mental maps to predict from. These maps make the uncertain navigable so the baby brain gains control and agency. As the empowered baby crawls through new territories, prediction errors refine its models and abstraction of patterns compounds its mental LEGO library.

As it ages, the brain typically predicts more and more while sensing less and less. After a while, all surrounding predictions errors have been learned and internal models stop being challenged. At that point everything is expected and nothing feels exciting. Wisdom from across the ages in fact suggests we start to feel old not so much because of age but because we stop discovering and learning new things. Curiosity is the anti-aging cure.

"Once you stop learning, you start dying." — Albert Einstein

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing." — George Bernard Shaw

Not having memory to predict from is one reason babies cry and sleep so much. The constant stream of ambiguous sense data and prediction errors exhausts the brain. In contrast, adult brains smooth-sail in familiar environments because every detail can be predicted without a cognitive sweat. But, like babies, they too tire quickly in unmapped exotic environments, as happens with culture shock.

Continue reading Part 2 — Elements of experience →

From the outside, crypto looks a lot like a casino. Its mechanics reveal something far more exciting: the blockchain.

Here's a question. What do you trust more?

• Institutions like banks and governments.

• Internet platforms like Facebook and Uber.

• Mathematics.

There's a history lesson in there.

Human societies first integrated when institutions allowed two strangers to do business by acting as trusted third parties. Then, the Internet replaced middlemen with monopolistic digital platforms. Now, blockchains use cryptography to get rid of intermediaries altogether. They unlock self-governing economic networks that make rulers obsolete and scammers impossible – through code.

Blockchain networks usher in a "new" Internet: web3.

This post helps you get web3 in one take

It uncovers:

• what web3 is, why we need it and how it works

• what cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have to do with it

• how to get started with web3

• web3 use cases: DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, social tokens, play2earn, the Metaverse

It's a thoughtful attempt to demystify the blockchain as a tool for building better societies.

If you let me be the one crypto friend you listen to, you'll learn why web3 ís the next big thing. You'll care not because it'll make you rich, but because it can propel humanity forward and makes us all richer in the process. Also: you didn't miss the boat. It's still early.

1. Short history of the web

The original Internet was invented in the 1970s by the US government to protect its nuclear weapons from hacking.

They realised a single computer controlling all the rockets in peak Cold War was a recipe for disaster. So they built a decentralised network of multiple computers instead.

This meant the US could keep its part of the "mutually assured destruction" bargain even in case of a Soviet cyberattack.

web1

In 1990, the Internet was a bunch of connected computers. The web was its first application, created by Tim Berners-Lee.

Web1 was designed as a "hyperlinked information system." A giant library of data sourced together on a screen from computers all across the network for users to browse by clicking around linked text and images.

Sounds familiar?

30 years later, three billion users are connected to a much bigger, faster and more ubiquitous web, powered by monstrous data centres. The clicking around has remained largely the same.

In its early days, the web was a niche tool, used almost exclusively by academics. Mass adoption came five years later with the introduction of browsers like Mosaic and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

These were the good old surfing days. You'd dial in. Downloading a picture took years. Altavista was the default search engine. Nobody had thought of web design yet.

Web1 was:

• Decentralised — Powered by regular computers from regular users.

• Open-source — Anyone could build on the web.

• Read-only — Publishing content required some technical skills, so most users were readers.

Web1's decentralised infrastructure symbolised its original ethos. Anyone could publish information of any kind, to anyone in the world, without the permission of central gatekeepers.

web2

Fast-forward 10 years, the Wild West had grouped around winners like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, pulling in huge numbers of users and talent black-hole style.

For the first time, anyone could publish online. As barriers faded, users and usage surged. The Internet had something for everyone.

In the backend, three big shifts shaped web2 as we know it today:

• Mobile — Smartphones move us from a few hours per day at our desktops to "always connected". Apps and notifications rule our lives.

• Social — Friendster, MySpace and Facebook get us to show our faces and emerge from anonymity. They make it easy to create, share, interact and recommend. We go from sharing photos with friends to getting into strangers' cars.

• Cloud — Amazon, Google and Microsoft make it cheap to build on the web. Instead of having to buy and maintain expensive hardware infrastructure, you can now rent it low-cost from vast data centres around the world.

The Internet has become centralised. It's essentially a bunch of closed systems interacting with each other.

As we suddenly gained access to more people, ideas and technologies than our brains knew what to do with, the central platforms blew up like mushroom clouds, consolidating network effects into monopoly power.

Networks become exponentially more valuable as they gain more users. You join WhatsApp to talk to your friends. Mom joins WhatsApp to talk to you. Dad joins WhatsApp to talk to mom. Before you know it, the whole world uses WhatsApp. You can't leave.

In February 2021, WhatsApp changed its privacy rules in a take-it-or-leave-it announcement: it would harvest more user data for profit. Millions swore they would ditch the app for more private alternatives — including yours truly. Not enough to escape the network's gravitational pull, it turns out. While many chat on Signal and Telegram these days, few managed to get off WhatsApp completely. You still want to talk to Mom and Mom still wants to talk to Dad.

In this digital era, customer value is a direct function of network size. Users can't leave. Startups can't compete. Media, developers and creators have no choice but to play ball. The network's pull is too strong.

Locked in, we pay the price not in dollars but in personal data and content. To be mined, sold and fed back into secret algorithms that hijack our attention so we'd give more. All under the veil of "free" and "improving user experience."

Your self-expression = their market cap.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFA) control our conversations, searches, content, media and data. The open forum has become a walled garden. Today's Internet is an oligarchy.

Locked in, we pay the price not in dollars but in personal data and content. To be mined, sold and fed back into secret algorithms that hijack our attention so we'd give more. All under the veil of "free" and "improving user experience."

Your self-expression = their market cap.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFA) control our conversations, searches, content, media and data. The open forum has become a walled garden. Today's Internet is an oligarchy.

2. Why web2 sucks

We need a new Internet because the current one is broken. It's a multivariate problem.

The attention economy

Starting out, the web didn't have a way for exchanging value. People weren't keen on pulling out credit cards online. So the default business model became to attract users with free stuff and sell access to their eyeballs: advertising.

Attention became the Internet's native currency. Sites compete for it with algorithmically generated content loops you can't stop scrolling and headlines you can't stop clicking.

Farming attention isn't new. The business of media has always been to keep you watching. To actually inform might get you to tune out and take action in the physical world.

But watching TV we are at least synced within the same self-perpetuating loop of opinions.

On web2, we are each fed a personalised diet of whatever triggers us most. Different opinions have become different facts. And as your alternative reality clashes with mine, Facebook's stock price goes up. The bigger the fire, the higher the profits. Social media brings the world together to tear it apart. Because it's good for business.

When clicks equal revenue, there is no incentive to tell the truth. The result is clickbait, misinformation, fake news, ad blockers, and ad blocker-blockers.

The Internet is owned

Platforms own everything you create online. That includes the profile data you fill out, the behavioural data you generate, and the images, videos, songs, status updates and comments you upload. Whatever you do on platform turf is platform property.

Quite literally: whenever you upload anything to an internet platform, the file is copied onto its servers and ownership is passed to the company. It becomes the raw material algorithms mine to generate the attention advertisers pull out their wallets for. You sow, the platform reaps.

There are returns for you too, to be sure. We wouldn't play ball if there weren't. Sharing content online builds reputation, audiences and connections. The kind of social capital that can be monetised in its own right. Artists and creators never had such instant access to so many potential fans.

Still, all of it happens not thanks to but by mercy of the platforms. They own both your work and your followers. You'd lose it all if you'd left to try and make it outside the walls. And so you have no choice but to keep turning the wheels of their money making machine.

Deplatforming and censorship

When Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump, he told his supporters to follow him to Parler. Next thing Apple and Google removed Parler's mobile app from their app stores. Whereupon Amazon delivered the final blow by kicking Parler's website from its hosting servers. Trump is digitally homeless.

Here's how that works.

Close to 90% of the web is stored with four hosting providers, the biggest of which is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Their datacentres run the sites and apps we use everyday: Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Reddit, Netflix and so on. We access them through browsers (web) and download them from app stores (mobile).

These companies control the gates to the global marketplace of ideas. You play by their rules or don't play at all. They ban your accounts, your apps, your websites.

Even if you behave, you can still be guilty of living in the wrong place. Censorship is easy when all it takes is blocking a handful central servers, as governments know all too well. Take China's Great Firewall: as effective at keeping state secrets as at keeping Facebook, Twitter, Google and Wikipedia from its citizens. If (when) Russia and India erect their own versions, the global marketplace of ideas will have lost 3 billion human minds.

Hacker paradise

An interconnected economy that combines decentralised data creation with centralised storage provides enormous rewards for hackers.

Billions of devices uploading their data to a handful of giant data centres is like a central bank with infinite doors to break in. It means I could steal your bank credentials by hacking my neighbour's smart fridge. It means Russian cyberterrorists can freeze ATMs, shut down railroads and paralyse hospitals in Ukraine by taking control of outdated Windows computers.

Today's web is a chilling case of the maxim that a system can only ever be as secure as its weakest link. The crucial flaw is that the weakest link can't be fixed because new links are added every day. By design, the solution can never match the scale of the problem. And as commerce becomes ever more peer-to-peer and device-to-device, the problem is bound to snowball into systemic bankruptcy.

Cybersecurity in its current form is a Sisyphus Myth: we keep pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down because it's too heavy. Here are the numbers. Cybersecurity pushes about $123 billion every year. The cybercrime boulder is projected to weigh $10.5 trillion in yearly damages by 2025. The greatest transfer of economic wealth in history.

Data breaches are the new standard for privacy. Cyberterrorism the new normal of geopolitics. A centralised internet poses a permanent risk.

3. The trust problem

How did we get here?

The pioneers of the Internet never meant for it to be centralised. But they overlooked the core challenge of human social organisation: trust.

Trust is the certainty not to be scammed. When you trust someone, you're sure they'll behave along the lines you expect them to.

In pre-civilised times this meant that, to stay safe, you only directly interact with friends and family. No trading information and value with strangers. If I don't know you, I don't do business with you. This capped the first hunter-gatherer societies at around 150 people:  the maximum number of stable social relationships a human brain can supposedly manage (known as Dunbar's number).

Units of civilisation

When the last ice age ended around 11,000 BCE, the nomads settled down in the Agricultural Revolution. Staying put for extended periods of time gave rise to private property and valuable possession (stored agricultural output). This was the cue for trust's alter ego to rear its ugly head. The incentive to steal had never been greater. To moderate the escalating violence between stranger tribes, we came up with third parties all strangers could trust: institutions.

Institutions widen the perimeter of trust between strangers by keeping records of what happened. Who owns what, who owes what. Taxes, payments, properties, exchanges. Records affirm truth and truth constructs trust. Governments, banks, courts, religious organisations like the Church, as well as private companies scale human cooperation into large complex societies by asserting a standardised narrative. A story we can all believe in.

In this sense, institutions are the basic units of civilisation. Offline economies can't exist without them. As it turns out, neither could the first online economy. The early web too leaned into the old habit of centralised trust management shortly after its decentralised inception.

Gatekeeper v2

Unbounded by space and time, today's internet institutions have slashed the latency and cost of economic exchanges - unlocking instant global business. They achieve this by letting software take care of trust. We stay, ride and trade with strangers all over the world because our phones assure us we can. Through records like reviews and ratings we, the users, build a culture around a particular core interaction. This culture sets the boundaries of what each of us can ('t) do. At the very least, we won't be scammed. Best-case, the sky is the limit for collaboration.

Networked software subverts the bureaucratic, fee-collecting middleman to reward individuals on both sides of supply and demand. Strangers can transact at scale in a peer-to-peer economy. The kicker is that the networks are owned and the house still takes most of the winnings.

Institutions keep failing us because they’re human

Every institution that distributes power, money or status eventually falls to bias and corruption. Centralised internet platforms are no exception. It's fundamentally self-interested human behaviour playing out at scale: a feature, not a bug. We can't trust banks, Facebook and Uber to take care of trust because we can't ultimately trust the individuals that constitute them. Especially when they can leverage laws and network effects to evade competition.

That is not a fancy way of saying "f*ck the system" nor is it blaming bankers and Mark Zuckerberg for all of the world's problems. It's bad design.

4. Blockchain: math > humans

The diagnosis is two-tiered:

• Record-keeping scales society by constructing a centralised version of the truth large groups of people can agree on. Crucially, records are not truth itself but a tool for approximating it. Subjective valuation inevitably creeps in the process of 'recording'.

• Society can't trust the record keeper because the record keeper is human and humans are naturally selected to be self-interested. Bias is a given, manipulation an ever-looming shadow. The incentives don't line up.

The word 'trust' in itself suggests the possibility of fraud. They're two sides of the same coin.

How can we keep records that are objective and immune to human bias? The answer, as embodied in blockchain technology, is to remove humans from the equation altogether.

Minimum viable blockchain

• The blockchain is a decentralised digital list (ledger) of who holds what in a network. This can be money, property titles, medical records. Anything someone would care to 'own'.

• Decentralised means every user in the network has an up-to-date copy of the ledger.

• This makes the records unchangeable. If someone messes with the ledger, the rest of the network rejects it.

• New records (blocks) are made unhackable with cryptography.

• Cryptography is impossibly complicated math that takes a lot of computing power.

• Users providing that computing power are "miners". They get paid in cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin) for securing the ledger.

• Mining makes the cryptocurrency scarce, giving it economic value.

Blockchains automate trust. Users don't need to trust records because they're verified by the network. Trust is coded into the system itself, distributed across all network participants. There is no flawed fee-charging central intermediary with an agenda. It's a self-governing networked community of strangers. The same way society pays you money for giving it what it needs, blockchains pay you coins for giving the network what it needs.

Different blockchains demand different value. It can be security, storage, computation, bandwidth, attention. The wild multitude of possible applications is beyond the introductory scope of this post. And bound only by your imagination.

Bitcoin — O.G. blockchain

Cryptodaddy Bitcoin makes for an intuitive case of how blockchains work. Its ledger keeps track of how much currency each user holds and rewards miners for securing the records.

• I pay you 1 Bitcoin (BTC)

• Everyone in the network updates their copy of the ledger with a new block that states our transaction.

• The new block is verified and cryptographically secured by miners, who get paid in Bitcoin for their computing power.

Think of Bitcoin as a giant spreadsheet that records every transaction.

Ethereum — Distributed global supercomputer

If Bitcoin is a spreadsheet, Ethereum is a spreadsheet with macros.

‍Macros are mini-applications you can use to automate tasks in Microsoft Excel. In other words, Ethereum is a blockchain with its very own programming language. Developers can build decentralised applications ("dapps") on top of it. As Bitcoin's blockchain pays BTC for securing the ledger, Ethereum pays Ether (ETH) for executing and verifying the code of decentralised applications. It's like a giant supercomputer made up of all the computers in the Ethereum network.

The idea of a network running applications should sound familiar. Ethereum is a decentralised alternative for the centralised Internet. A new Internet that is owned by all of its users instead of single corporate behemoth like Amazon.

Unhackable, uncensorable. Governed by its users and rewarding the work the network needs with a native currency. A trinity of Internet, free market and democracy. It's the original vision for the web come true.

5. The Internet Of Value

Don't limit your imagination to decentralised versions of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Blockchain technology unlocks a new kind of web: a human-to-human economic network in which strangers can trade currencies, assets and valuable data. No institutions charging fees, setting terms or asking questions for making it happen.

Value exchanges follow a prototypical contractual pattern. There's a performance and a reward. If I do X, you give me Y. Bitcoin provides a simple example of how blockchains automatically verify both performance and reward, fulfilling the contract with 100% guarantee that no party gets duped. These "smart contracts" are like robot vending machines. Trades are automated according to a logic that can't be breached.

Think art, insurance, real estate, intellectual property, credit cards, lawyers. You'll be able to trade it all without middlemen, using dapps built on Ethereum or other smart contract blockchains like Solana instead. Trustless and permissionless. Cheaper and faster.

The superior economic efficiency will open up previously impossible business models and possibly reinvent companies altogether. At its core, a company is but a mesh of contracts: with employees, with shareholders, with banks, with customers, with the state. All can be programmed on smart contract blockchains.

[
](https://gillesdc.com/web3/economic)**Blockchains allow everyone in the world with a phone and an internet connection to participate directly, immediately and without permission in the global economy.**

How web3 works

On the economic internet:

• every user is a wallet,

• every file is an asset owned by a wallet,

• every exchange is a transaction from one wallet to another.

Let's build some intuition.

web2: read+write

When you sign up for Twitter as @jack, a @jack-named directory is created in Twitter’s database — hosted on a central server like AWS.

Every time @jack tweets, a new page is added to the @jack directory in the Twitter database. When I like @jack’s tweet, I update the underlying database page with +1. When @jack mentions me in a tweet, the page is linked to my profile page. Adding and changing pages is called ‘writing’.

Each page is linked to other pages (home, profile, comment, mention, retweet) so you can click from one page to another. Viewing and browsing tweets this way is called ‘reading’.

On your screen, the user interface of Twitter’s web and mobile apps makes the experience of reading and writing intuitive and effortless.

Twitter is web2 because users have writing permissions. On web1, only the owner of the site could change the data: for users, it was read-only.

web3: read+write+own

**To reading and writing, web3 adds ‘owning’.**‍

As much as your tweets have your name on them, they’re still in Twitter’s database. On a blockchain-Twitter — let's call it 'dTwitter' — you own your tweets: they're assets in your wallet.

The mechanics would go something like this:

• @jack joins dTwitter by connecting his crypto wallet.

• When @jack tweets, a new file is created and stored on a decentralised file storage system like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

• At the same time, a token that represents the tweet-file is ‘minted’ on the dTwitter blockchain and allocated to @jack’s wallet address. It sits in @jack’s wallet and so @jack effectively ‘owns’ it.

• @jack can transfer ownership of his tweets to other wallets.

Whereas all Twitter tweets are owned by Twitter, all dTwitter tweets are owned by its users. You can think of tweets as assets that accrue value as a function of attention and engagement.

On web2, Twitter the company owns all tweets and trades the generated value for money with advertisers. When you write a viral tweet, Twitter’s stock price goes up. On web3, tweets and returns are all yours. You’ll be able to directly trade the attention your tweets attract with advertisers via smart contracts, or sell your best tweets as NFTs.

NFTs

A token representing tweet ownership is non-fungible, a Non-Fungible Token or NFT. That means the token is unique and not 1:1 interchangeable with any other token: @jack’s first tweet is different from his second tweet the same way Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is different from The Last Supper.

@jack can sell his tweets by exchanging the NFTs for a cryptocurrency like ETH (in fact he did). Like dollar bills and grains like wheat, ETH tokens are fungible: you don’t care ‘which’ ETH token or dollar bill it is because they are all the same. Fungibility qualifies things as money. We use fungible things to value and exchange non-fungible things. 

@jack could trade tweets in good faith, trusting the other party to send Ether tokens to his wallet address upon receiving the NFT. Or, he can use a smart contract that is programmed to transfer x Ether tokens from wallet x to wallet y as soon as wallet x receives the NFT from wallet y — automated trust. That’s how NFTs of (mainly) artwork .JPEG images are traded on OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace at the time of writing.

As the example suggests, the concept of NFTs reaches far beyond the current craze that sees people buying .JPEG images of rocks, apes and 8-bit avatars for millions of dollars. Essentially, everything you’d care to own — diamonds, Teslas, Pokémon cards, houses, land, paintings, songs — can be tokenised as NFTs so ownership becomes verifiable, unstealable, programmable, divisible, easy to transfer and cryptographically secure.

NFTs deserve a deep-dive of their own.

6. How to use web3

Connect wallet > Sign in with Facebook

To use a dapp, you connect your crypto-wallet, i.e. you signal the address of your blockchain account to the dapp. 

What’s the difference between a wallet and an address?

An address is a series of numbers, e.g. 0xec98c7935ae1db71884969919de58cd776cc017c. Wallets allow you to do things with addresses. They come in different purposes:

• Cold wallets are hardware devices used to store assets offline. Example: Trezor.

• Soft wallets are software apps used to store assets on a phone and/or desktop. Less secure than cold wallets but easier to use. Example: Exodus.

• Hot wallets can interact with dapps as mobile apps and browser extensions. That connectivity makes them less secure for storage. Example: Metamask.

Crypto-addresses associate with layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum. As such, they’re compatible with all the dapps built on it. So if dTwitter were Ethereum-based, @jack would connect his ETH wallet, as he would to other Ethereum-based dapps like Uniswap (to swap tokens) and OpenSea (to trade NFTs).

Clicking Connect Wallet feels as easy as Sign in with Facebook. Under the hood, there's a big difference. Whereas signing in with Facebook effectively hands over your profile details until you revoke access, a dapp never gets actual access to your wallet. Instead, you transact tokens — fungible and non-fungible — in a cryptographically secure way. Each transaction is privately signed for by both parties and recorded on the blockchain for everyone to verify.

A crypto address is anonymous. It could store personal identifiers like names and pictures as NFTs: digital assets that are yours to share with other wallets and dapps — not Facebook’s.

Your decentralised domain name

Anonymity is the standard for a reason. Blockchain transparency means everyone can see what each address holds. Putting your name on a wallet with 100 BTC is like painting a target on your own back. Giving up banks also means assuming risk and responsibility for assets ourselves.

Yet, 0xec98c7935ae1db71884969919de58cd776cc017c doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. To avoid having to unlock your phone, open your wallet app and copy-pasting your address in a messaging app each time your friend wants to pay back a beer, you can link your cryptic crypto addresses to an easy-to-market domain name, like gillesdc.eth.  

The same way netflix.com refers to the IP address points to the location of the Netflix site on a server, gillesdc.eth refers to my address on the Ethereum blockchain. Specifically the address of the hot wallet I use to interact with dapps. Use hot wallets like you use regular wallets on-the-go: only put in what you plan to spend. Treasures are better kept anonymous, in soft wallets protected by biometrics and 2FA (soft wallets) or offline cold wallets — the crypto equivalent of a vault.

Registering your crypto domain name make for a prototypical web3 experience:

1. Buy the tokens you need to purchase the domain name you want from an exchange like Coinbase. You’ll need ETH for .eth domains and SOL for .sol domains.

2. Transfer the tokens to a compatible hot wallet. I use Metamask for ETH and Phantom for SOL.

3. Navigate to the domain name dapp (ENS for .eth and Bonfida for .sol) and connect your wallet.

4. Search the names you want and complete the transaction from your wallet.

More detailed instructions:

• Step-by-step guide to registering your ETH domain

• Step-by-step guide to registering your SOL domain

7. Web3 tour

Smart contracts unlock new modes for trade, work, and play. Let's take a tour.

DeFi (Decentralised Finance)

DeFi is crypto’s way of Wall Street.

DeFi dapps let you swap, invest, earn, lend, borrow and insure financial assets directly with others users. Bankers are coded out: smart contracts automatically verify both ends of a transaction on the blockchain — slashing costs, overhead and bias. As of October 2021, ~$200bn of total asset value has been locked in DeFi protocols. (What is Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi?)

• Stablecoins — Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged against commodities like gold or fiat currencies like the dollar. For example, 1 USDC token is exchangeable for 1 ‘real’ dollar. Old-world assets get crypto features: they become programmable in smart contracts and, as such, can be used in DeFi protocols, DAOs and dapps.

• Uniswap — In spite of decentralised imperatives, most tokens are still traded on centralised exchanges like Coinbase. Uniswap fulfills the web3 promise: direct peer-to-peer currency trading.

• Aave — Aave is a crypto-lending protocol. Crypto-holders can earn high interests by lending out. Borrowers can take out loans without credit checks by putting down crypto as collateral. In case of default, collateral is sold off to cover the loan.

NFT (Non-Fungible Token)

A token is non-fungible when its value is perceived as unique, i.e. when it's not 1:1 interchangeable with another token. It's a matter of perception: dollar bills all have unique serial numbers, but qualify as fungible because the purchasing power of each is the same. It's a different story if you're a collector and care about the serial number.

In that sense, NFTs are just tokens with serial numbers that matter. If you issue 1,000 entry tokens for a giveaway, those tokens are non-fungible if a higher number increases chances of winning. They're fungible if the token number doesn't matter.

As I write this, NFTs have become hard to ignore. But as people and companies spend millions for Cryptopunks and Bored Apes, two important features of NFTs tend to get lost in the noise.

First, NFTs are on-chain tokens proving ownership of off-chain assets. They're not the assets themselves. Everyone can right-click + save a Bored Ape .JPG, but only one wallet can hold its NFT. What’s more, you could mint another NFT pointing at the same image (the Bored Ape .JPG file is stored on a public database). Crucially, that NFT would be minted by someone else (you) at different time; making it unique or non-fungible. NFTs capture origin or provenance: who made what when. It’s what gives art meaning. You could paint an exact copy of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and yet nobody will pay you millions of dollars of it, precisely because you are not Leonardo and you didn't paint it first in Renaissance Italy.

Blockchains are permissionless: you can mint whatever you want, including tokens linking to the Bored Ape .JPG files. It’s up to the free market to decide which token is more valuable: yours of that of Yuga Labs, the company that created the Bored Apes.

Second, NFTs are not synonymous with digital artwork or even digital assets. Everything you’d care to own can be tokenised to make its ownership verifiable, unstealable, programmable, divisible, easy to transfer and cryptographically secure. That includes the Mona Lisa, Teslas, and your house. Digital artwork is but the top of an iceberg that will go on to tokenise every asset on the planet.

I dive (a lot) deeper into NFTs here.

• Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) — The BAYC is a community for Bored Ape NFT holders. A compelling example of how NFTs can be tied to access and exclusivity, as well as social status.

• Ethereum Name Service (ENS) — When you register an Ethereum domain name, its NFT is minted and stored into your wallet.

• Audius — Audius is web3-Spotify. Artists directly stream to listeners without music labels and companies in-between. Ownership of songs stored on the IPFS is recorded on-chain as NFTs. Streaming revenue goes to whoever owns the NFT.

Owning ideas

NFTs free creators and consumers from the monopoly of platforms.

When you post image, video and audio files online, you copy-paste its ownership to Facebook & co as per terms of service.

Through NFTs, creators retain ownership of their content, without limiting their spread. However far and wide the files are copy-pasted across the web, origin and ownership are forever tracked on the blockchain. Platform-agnostic, endless content.

On web2, when content goes viral, it's the platform that profits. Verifiable NFT ownership inverts this relationship, redirecting all future cashflows of an idea to its creator — as defined in smart contracts. It is now in the creator's interest for their work to be copy-pasted virally. Every copy, share, display, use, and promotion accrues the cultural value of the original idea. NFTs capture ideas as assets so they become ownable and tradeable.

For a taste of how NFTs reinvent digital ownership, consider Mirror.

Mirror is a decentralised publishing platform, with tools that help creators express, share, and monetise their thoughts web3-style. You can publish posts on-chain, mint and auction off NFT editions for them, crowdfund new projects, split revenue with collaborators and tokenise your community. $WRITE tokens give creators ownership of the Mirror DAO.

You’re reading this post on-chain and can support my writing by collecting its NFT. Who knows, maybe it'll be worth a lot more in the future.

DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation)

As noted earlier, organisations can be simplified as synced webs of contracts.

• Employees get paid to perform a set of tasks.

• Customers pay for products and services.

• Banks lend money on certain payback conditions.

• Shareholders invest in exchange for a stake in the organization’s activities.

A DAO puts this idea on steroids, automating value transfers through smart contracts. Human managers are programmed out by code that is democratically agreed on by token holders. Each member owns a fraction of the DAOs assets and can weigh in on decisions proportional to token holdings — as programmed per smart contract.

Integrating economic and social features, the DAO model makes companies more like communities and communities more like companies.

• The DAO — The very first DAO was a venture capital fund launched in 2016, aptly named The DAO. DAO tokens, purchasable with ETH, came with the right to vote on where The DAO's collectivised funds would be invested. Investors were to profit from dividends and rising prices of the DAO token. Unfortunately, the underlying smart contracts had a critical bug that was exploited by hackers. Or maybe not so unfortunately: hacks expose vulnerabilities we can't have. Where the DAO Hack initially posed an existential risk to the nascent Ethereum protocol, it ultimately came to strengthen it.

• MakerDAO develops a DeFi protocol and issues a stablecoin named DAI. Many teams building web3 applications are in fact structured like DAOs, including aforementioned Uniswap and Aave.

• PleasrDAO is a collective of NFT enthusiasts that pool together resources to get their hands on rare pieces. Notable acquisitions include the Snowden NFT, the original Doge meme image and an extremely rare Wu Tang Clan album. Each member owns a part of these NFTs proportional to the number of tokens they hold.

Tokens capture the economic value of community membership, subjecting them to laws of supply and demand. Prices rise as more people want to join. As well as gain certain rights tokens may represent: ownership, voting, exclusive access. When prospects of rising demand attracts investors, the price climbs even higher.

This is as true for ETH holders as it can be for any group of people. Brands, artists, creators, influencers can turn communities in economies through tokenisation. I myself could airdrop $GIL tokens to subscribers and mint NFTs of pieces I write. The more readers I get, the higher the economic value. More so if tokens also unlock exclusive content, a Discord group, events and other fun stuff.

• Socios enables sports teams to monetise fanbases with fan tokens. Fans can buy tokens for a sense of ownership in the club, other than for “superfan” access to team decision polls, giveaways and rewards. Soccer superstar Lionel Messi reportedly got part of his signing bonus paid in $PSG fan tokens when he signed for the Parisian club in August — consequently spiking the price.

• **Mirror **is a decentralised publishing platform, with tools that help creators express, share, and monetise their thoughts web3-style. You can publish posts on-chain, mint and auction off NFT editions for them, crowdfund new projects, split revenue with collaborators and tokenise your community. $WRITE tokens give creators ownership of the Mirror DAO.

Play2Earn

Next, you can gamify the community by rewarding achievements with tokens.

If you’ve ever chased Pokémon, World Of Warcraft weapons and FIFA player packs, you understand the value of digital assets. With a blockchain, digital assets become economically scarce. There’ll be only one Pikachu in crypto-Pokemon. And it won't have a central corporate game developer non-stop pulling in cash from players through infinite duplication of game items out of thin air. Instead, scarce assets are earned, owned and traded among game players in what is a proper economy. Yes, your kids will make a living playing video games.

• Axie Infinity is a blockchain game in which players breed, raise, battle and trade cute animalistic creatures called "Axies". Players earn tokens they can leverage for breeding Axies, owned as NFTs. Trading Axies and tokens, some players are already able to live off the game. The game's economy is surprisingly complex, as this thread explains.

Metaverse

Human-to-human economies, NFTs, tokenised communities and play2earn converge in what's known as the Metaverse: a virtual world where people work, play and live together.

Consider how much our lives is already happens through screens:

• Work — From working in buildings to working from laptops and phones. From meeting rooms to Slack and Zoom.

• Community — We care more about online followers than offline neighbours. Spend more time socialising on Instagram, Twitter, Discord and Reddit than in bars.

• Play — More people today play online games than offline sports.

• Identity — More people care about how we look online than in real life. Profiles, tweets and stories is how we broadcast who we are.

To digital work, play, friends and identity, blockchains add digital assets and ownership.

If the prospect of living in the cloud sends shivers up your spine, mind that in sci-fi virtual worlds feel dystopian mostly because of the central power that designs and controls them. This is web2’s version of the Metaverse: a virtual Facebook.

A crypto-Metaverse is open and decentralised, built from the collaborative creativity of all its creators, economically allocated through supply and demand mechanics. A world free from natural constraints and dictating institutions can have tribes, vibes and markets for every human individual. Can't find yours? There's your cue to get creating and connecting. You don't need anyone's permission.

8. Dive deeper

It's still early. As you read this, few people are in on how blockchains are transforming human society. Claim a competitive advantage in the marketplace by going wide and deep in a way that vibes with your personality.

Here are some places to start:

• Listen to Tim Ferriss' podcast with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Naval Ravikant.

• Listen to Tim Ferriss' podcast with Smart Contract pioneer Nick Szabo and Naval Ravikant.

• Listen to Tim Ferriss' podcast with Balaji Srinivasan.

• Watch Why The Blockchain Matters More Than You Think by Coldfusion on YouTube.

• Watch But How Does Bitcoin Actually Work by 3Blue1Brown on Youtube.

• Read The Truth  Machine: Blockchain And The Future Of Everything by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna.

• Read the Ethereum Whitepaper.

• Read the Metaverse Primer by Matthew Ball.

• Trade cryptocurrencies on Coinbase or other exchanges.

(Disclaimer: I hold several cryptocurrencies.)

The evening of February 27, 1933 in Berlin. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are playing gramophone records at Goebbels' home. The phone rings. “The Reichstag is on fire!” Goebbels struggles to contain his excitement. It's the pretext the Nazis had long been waiting for.

As Hitler and Goebbels race out, Hermann Goering, already at the scene, strikes the iron while it's hot. “This is the beginning of the Communist Revolution. We must not wait a minute! Every Communist must this very night be strung up!"

The Nazis double down. With the parliament cupola still smouldering, they clamp down on liberties and opponents. Storm troopers roar through the streets, rounding up victims at will. Freedom of speech and press are gagged, meetings banned and properties seized. Hitler assumes dictatorial powers. The German people went to sleep in a democracy and wake up in a tyranny.

The fire was a godsend for the Nazis. The sort that feels too good to be true. To this day, nobody knows what really happened. Those who did are long dead, many slain in the months that followed. The Nazis guillotined a Dutchman by the name of Marinus Van der Lubbe. While there’s no doubt Van der Lubbe was at the scene playing with fire, it’s doubtful he acted alone. So much is suspected from the sheer scale of the inferno, as flames sprung up from scattered gasoline pools — clearly poured in advance. Goering in particular is said to have been planning the plot for months, as well as boasting about it at Hitler’s birthday in 1942. A known arsonist and communist, Van der Lubbe was the perfect fall guy.

Daydreaming apes

Whether the Reichstag fire was serendipity or scheme is a moot point. The history lesson is not in what kindled the fire but in how it was exploited for power through humanity’s greatest skill: fiction. Though all complicit, it wasn’t brain size, walking upright or fire that separated humans from the animal kingdom. We emerged from the African savannahs to conquer the world by crafting imagined realities with complex language.

As real as they feel in our daily lives, things like money, the Church, companies, democracy and the Belgian nation have no grounds in the material world. They are figments of collective imagination we perpetuate by believing in them. Such myths can unite millions of strangers in narrative networks that coordinate their actions towards common goals. The same way code programs machines, stories program human beings. The more people believe a myth, the larger its power over society. Ultimately, multiple myths mesh together in grand cultures — like liberalism, capitalism, catholicism and nazism. Mass-scale socialisation in the name of the greater good.\

"You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven." — Yuval Noah Harari

Myths are not synonymous with lies. Telling you I’m on my way while I have yet to leave the house is different from explaining the Universe’s mysteries as divine presence. To lie requires knowledge of the falsifiable truth. In fact, there is little doubt most Nazis religiously believed their myths. History is a sequence of ideological battles between parties believing to be on the right side of it.‍

Intermezzo: notable Nazi myths

The Nazis knew how to tell a good story. Their Third Reich was constructed on a series of myths that cunningly explained the suffering of Germans as injustices done to them by enemies — justifying the aggression that would escalate into World War II as a matter of survival.

• Stab-in-the-back — The Nazis asserted that Germany didn't lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by the homefront, literally behind their backs. Jews and socialists supposedly stirred strikes and social unrest to destabilise the German war machine from within. The conspiracy to overthrow the Hohenzollern monarchy was completed with the signing of the armistice and ensuing Treaty of Versailles. These sanctioned Germany's defeat and gave rise to the Weimar Republic. By implication, the democratic leaders were traitors and their rule illegitimate.

• Jewish world conspiracy — Jews in particular were said to secretly control the world's banks and governments, colluding against white, Christian and German interests as some kind of shadow monster.

• Superhumans vs. subhumans — Nazi ideology claimed a hierarchy of human race, believing the Aryans (Nordic and Germanic) to be superior humans. At the bottom, Jews, Slavs and Romani people were considered *üntermenschen, *unworthy of life. They were to be enslaved like beasts or even eradicated like vermin, freeing up their lands als *living space *for the superior Germans.

None of these myths proved even remotely grounded in reality. Lies have a tendency to boomerang back. The Nazis found this out the hard way when the subhuman Russians beat them back and ended up invading the German fatherland. Hitler for his part madly stuck to his myths and died blaming the cataclysmic failure on the German people.

When myths meet Machiavelli

Myths become propaganda when they’re rooted in power more than in truth. Propaganda is machiavellian in nature: it cares more for the unity achieved by the story than the factfulness of its origins. It’s power’s means of self-preservation.

“A lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from its consequences. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Chief Of Propaganda

It doesn’t matter what really happened inside the Reichstag building on that faithful night in 1933. It was a communist plot in Nazi Germany as much as it would have been a Nazi plot in a Communist Germany. With Hitler already in power as chancellor and his thug henchmen terrorising the streets, the Nazi version prevailed by force.

Creative influence of power on ruling myths is not binary. It would be a mistake to think propaganda is an exclusive feature of totalitarian regimes. As much as democratic governments hail free speech — another intersubjective reality — and appoint Ministers of Communication instead of Propaganda, they too are at mercy of social order and existentially invested in preserving it. That is not criticism. After all, protection from chaos — social, economic, political — is what societies need laws and institutions for in the first place. Yet, however symbiotic the relationship, power is still granted upwards. And, like the genes of the faceless bureaucrats that rule the nation, power has an instinct to self-perpetuate. This inevitably filters narratives as they trickle down — be it in indirect ways and to various extents.

Information asymmetry

In communication theory, this top-down dynamic is known as informational asymmetry: one party has more information than the other. If I’m a marketer and you’re a developer, each of us has information gained from subjective experience the other one doesn’t. As I try to relay that information with you, part of it inevitably spills in the process. First, by objectifying the information as language. Nuances get lost, misinterpretations occur. No matter my effort, the information will never match the experience it tries to convey.

Time and space also matter: the further information has to travel via people and media, the more distorted it gets. By the time it arrives, actors along the way will have shaped form and function — be it through communicative shortcoming or deception to advance interests.

History is state-sponsored

History, as they say, is written by the winners. The story of human civilisation as taught to our children in school is truly the story of the few pulling the strings. Think about the number of mediums in space and time it travelled through. Think about how much was lost. Think about how much was manipulated. Think about how many knew they were writing their own history.

So-called Dark Ages make for an instructive example.

Ages are “dark” when few written sources are available to historically reconstruct them. As such, they are mostly glossed over, suggesting that nothing really happened. Almost as if there were no people around or that, if there were, they were uncultured beasts.

In reality, these were times when human culture was decentralised because state forms were few and fragile. History is really the story of states rather than of humans. Those living outside of the state are excluded from history as “barbarians” — prompting James C. Scott to rebrand Dark Ages as the Golden Age of Barbarians in his book Against The Grain. Scott estimates that, up until 400 years ago, a third of the world was inhabited by non-state barbarians, as hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and horticulturalists.

Information = Power

When criticised for arrogance, Henry Kissinger once said he only appeared arrogant to people who didn’t have the same information he had. His point being that the higher you are on the ladder of power, the more you have to hide. Not only do you obtain power by knowing things others don’t, you also keep it by maintaining that advantage. On top of that, a position of power also gives you access to new information. To stay in power thus means to protect the informational asymmetry that got you there, through manipulation of information supply chains.

How conspiracy theories ring true

Conspiracy theories turn this dynamic upside-down, hinting there’s something more going on than we are led to believe. They recognise inconsistencies in standard narratives and fill in the blanks. Often crazily so, but people who instinctively scoff at conspiracy theorists overlook the truism that some information is simply too valuable to share. And by implication trust sources above their heads to tell the full truth, while it’s often not in their interest to do so. Look no further than Covid-19’s lab-leak origin story: the more its status upgrades from ridiculous to plausible, the colder mainstream media seem to go on the story.

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Poisoned pipelines

Misinformation is the downstream symptom of an information supply chain corrupted at the source. Conspiracy theories are wrong by default because they're after hidden knowledge that can’t be verified.

Systemic ambiguity incubates alternative explanations. Misinformation then spreads not through truth but by preying on self-centredness. People subscribe and share because it makes them feel contrarian. Special and smart. They mistake misinformation for information advantage and get seduced by the power it projects. They all want to be Henry Kissinger.

The Nazis only won 44% of the vote following the Reichstag fire — the last election in Hitler’s life — against a combined 32% of his rivals on the left. Despite the terror and intimidation, many doubted the communist coup narrative. But with radio and newspapers at Nazi gunpoint, such doubts rarely made it past the stage of backroom whispers. Those who did raise their voice were sent off to concentration camps as enemies of the state.

Today, anyone with a smartphone has a worldwide total addressable market to share doubts with in real-time. Rather than downstream from a single radio station and a couple thousand newspapers, information now travels between billions of decentralised nodes at the speed of light. For better or worse, it becomes an unstoppable force no army of stormtroopers nor fact checkers could ever hope to halt.

Misinformation kills

For better or worse is a function of truth.

When truthful, information rationalises markets and tightens societies. It scales the trust that makes strangers talk and trade.

As we’ve seen, humans are the networked species. We’ve bypassed natural boundaries through shared belief in stories that align individual minds with grand group goals. These myths cast an imagined order, a mental map that allows us to navigate the messy, objective reality as large coordinated groups.

But what happens when the raw material is misguided, when the map shows a mountain where the territory is a ravine? The house of cards comes crashing down and the lies cause real suffering. So far mostly on a national scale: the Roman, Napoleonic, Nazi and Soviet networks fell to give rise to others. Historic selection of myths, if you will. Now, the internet has raised scale and stakes, uniting billions in a global digital network that defies national borders. If our global myths fail, we all suffer.

Web2 = Popular > True

The problem is that the digital networks we get informed by are owned by corporate titans with greedy shareholders. Their algorithms govern information for profit similar to how Nazis governed press for power. Attention is the native currency of the Internet as currently constructed. The longer you keep watching, the more eyeballs to sell to advertisers, the higher the stock price climbs. When clicks equal revenue, there is no incentive to tell the truth. Feeds show what is popular over what is true. Fact checkers face the impossible task of holding back a raging river with a bucket. They are too far downstream: (mis)information spreads a lot of faster than it can be invalidated against truth. The genie/virus can’t be put back into the bottle/lab.

Reality → Data → Information → Story

At this point, it’s important to remember the difference between data, information and stories.

Data renders reality as numbers that can be verified through measurement and calculation. It’s objective and quantitative. Information interprets data in relation to an environment so it gains meaning. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, defined information as the “resolution of uncertainty.” It leads the way for agency. For example:\

• Data — My body records a drop in temperature and increasing friction from wind. These changes can be measured and rendered in numbers.

• Information — My brain interprets the change as a sign of bad weather to come. Action: I put on a rain jacket.

When building blocks of information are pieced together as one they become a narrative or story. As dots are connected, blind spots filled in and inconsistencies glossed over, the original information is increasingly abstracted away from reality through subjective interpretation by the brain. From there, abstraction increases the further it travels from the original subjective experience through space, time and media.

The point is that the stories that shape culture and society depend on the data and information that feeds them.

• A weather forecast interprets metrological data in relation to historical patterns.

• A sports report makes sense of box scores.

• A financial article relates market prices to analyses, trends and news.

• A political article creates a story around words delivered through speech and tweets and actions like votes and orders.

Fiat information

In modern times, our feeds are controlled by centralised institutions we trust to care more for truth than for power and profit. To care more for enlarging our collective societal pie than for protecting their own piece of it. Against the backdrop of human nature, that reads like a self-defeating idea. Governments, banks and Facebooks look out for your best interests for as long as it lines up with theirs. Ultimately, they are incentivised to maintain a level of information asymmetry, skewing information as it travels from data source to society.

Of all myths, fiat money must be among the most impressive ones ever devised. Billions of people trusting notes of paper to be worth x. Not because we can trade it for scarce assets like gold, but because a band of faceless central bankers says so. What’s in a name: the Latin word fiat effectively means “let it be done.”

By analogy, Balaji Srinivasan coined the term fiat information for information we trust to be true by proxy of the institutions backing it. So when the institutional top proclaims the corona virus doesn’t infect humans, masks don’t help, handshakes are fine, psychedelics are dangerous, Iraq has WOMD, inflation is within expectations and the housing market won’t crash, the societal bottom believes, repeats, and acts accordingly — at devastating costs.

Crypto-information

Those who read my other piece on the flaws of institutions may know where this is going. Society can’t trust the gatekeeper because the gatekeeper is human and humans are naturally selected to be self-interested. Bias inevitably creeps in, with manipulation always lurking around the corner.

Blockchains show how to create better feeds. At its core, a blockchain is a chronological feed of records, protected from human bias by replacing humans with cryptography.

On the Bitcoin blockchain, each record is a transaction specifying:\

• What — Amount of BTC transacted.

• Who — Sender and recipient who digitally signed for the transaction.

• When — Timestamp.

Each transaction is cryptographically verified by miners and sent to the network. Because every user has a an up-to-date copy of the list, the records are fundamentally unchangeable: if someone alters a record, the network rejects it. There is no need to trust any third party these records are truthful and won’t be tampered with. Everyone can verify for themselves. Trust is programmed into the system itself.

Truth as a scarce resource

This model can be generalised to represent any scarce resource. Already, blockchains are used to track ownership of cryptocurrencies, non-fungible assets like art, intellectual property and real estate, and identity.

‍In his talk at SmartCon, Balaji Srinivasan suggested we start thinking of truth the same way: a scarce resource. People, sensors and machines would shift from posting data and information online to on-chain. Tweets become a computationally checked records of who said what when in feeds everyone can fact check. Finding the original source of any story flaring tempers across the web and verify its integrity becomes dead easy. Cryptography purifies the well of our information pipeline, and with it the research, reporting and regulation downstream.

Now, the incentives align. In crypto, an entity that records data with offline origins on-chain is called an oracle. As such, every person and organisation eventually becomes an oracle. Posts become scarce assets that can be traded in a marketplace that rewards truth and holds liars accountable.\

To keep track of what was recorded by who when separates verifiable facts from the narratives constructed on top of them. It protects the integrity of the information that drives our actions as individuals and societies. It prevents misinformation, pops propaganda and allows us to anchor myths in reality. Truth matches cultural maps to real-world territories.

In short, it's Joseph Goebbels’ worst nightmare.

Dive deeper

• Read how blockchains build better societies by replacing institutions with mathematics.

• Watch Balaji Srinisavan's talk on The Ledger Of Record: Creating Sources Of Definitive Truth With Blockchain Oracles