My sense is that the conceptual territory we’ve covered so far roughly “hangs together” as a loosely coherent framework, so I thought it might be a good time to risk a bit of philosophical waxing in service of review and synthesis. So, here’s my meditation on a profound and simple concept that usefully weaves through the previous topics: the idea of shape.
What is a shape? A shape is a structure, a particular way of arranging things, a collection of parts in a particular relationship to one another. When I say that an organism has a particular shape, I’m talking about the way it’s structured, its edges and boundaries, how its parts are put together, and the relationships between the parts, structures and edges to one another.
A shape is a description, it exists only as information. The way I’m using it, shape is essentially synonymous with the word pattern—both the nouns a shape and a pattern, and the verbs to shape and to pattern. In that sense, the familiar concept of pattern recognition is a process of perceiving shapes—“picking out” something repeated, something that hangs together, or something nonrandom amid background noise. When we see an object, hear a recognizable sound, or taste something familiar—we are talking about recognizing patterns, perceiving shapes in the features of the environment. When we do something in response to the shapes we recognize in our current situation, we produce a pattern—enact a shape—calculated to interact with the present environment in a beneficial way.
Shapes All The Way Down
The entropic universe has a tendency to pull shapes apart, and stable shapes are the ones that tend to hold their shape in spite of this. Living shapes are shaped in such a way that they actively resist entropy, characteristically with adaptive behavior such as homeostasis, evolution, or learning.
Starting with evolution, a gene is a shape—the order of nucleotides that constitute it—which has a functional relationship with the shape in the body of the organism to which that gene gives rise. When we talk about the “fitness” of an organism to its environment, we are talking about the relationship between the shape of the organism and the shape of the environment. An adaptive shape is a better fit than a maladaptive one—with adaptive and maladaptive being descriptions of the shape of the relationship between the shape of the organism and the shape of the environment. In natural selection, it is the shape of the environment that selects particularly shaped organisms, which selects particularly shaped genes, in turn reshaping the genomes and the bodies of the organisms of that species over time.
Like the shapes in an organism’s genome, we find analogous shapes in the organism’s connectome—the state and structure of the components of its nervous system. Like the way the shapes in the genome determine the shape of the organism’s body, the shapes in its connectome determine the shape of its behavior. When an organism’s connectome is shaped in such a way that it is capable of learning, it means that its connectome has the ability to be reshaped by the environment, shaping behavior that effectively shapes the environment into shapes beneficial to the organism. It’s the relationship between the shape of the environment and the shape of the behavior that determines the shape of that behavior’s function. And that function, in turn, has a particular shape—the shape of the effect of that behavior on the environment.
Different organisms have differently shaped “preferred environments” in which their shapes are best supported—in which they most effortlessly thrive. Their behaviorcan be understood as an attempt to reshape the present environment in the direction of that “ideal world.” In considering complex organisms such as humans, the shape we call “personality” has a lot to do with the shape of the individual’s preferred environment—the same thing we might call that person’s “reinforcement profile” in behaviorist terms.
Understanding behavior as a cycle of action and perception, we see perception as a guess about the current shape of the environment, and behavior as a guess about the best shape to reshape that environment into a preferrable one. So, the shape of the active behavior depends on the shape of the perceptive behavior. There’s a shape in the kind of situation that gives rise to an emotion of a certain shape, which motivates behavior of a corresponding shape. The shape of the situation determines the shape of the emotion, which determines the shape of the behavior the mind feels the impulse to enact. Behavior you’d call aggressive has a different shape than behavior you’d describe as joyous, much as the shape of a facial expression you’d call happy is different from one you’d say is sad.
When a message is communicated, a sender “transmits” a shape to a receiver. The message is the shape, in the sense that the contents of the message are the particular pattern of symbols that make it up. The sender relies on the hope that the shapes in the receiver’s mind that correspond with the shapes of the symbols in the message are shaped similarly enough to the corresponding shapes in the sender’s mind that the receiver will hear what the sender meant to say.
A system is a particularly interesting sort of shape—one which is shaped in such a way that not only are its arts of the shape related to each other in a particular way, they are related specifically in such a way that the shape starts to do something. When it comes to systems, structure determines function—which is to say that what a system does is determined by how it’s shaped. The shapes that make up a system are linked in a chain of influence, with connected shapes functioning to reshape one another. The systemic characteristic of homeostasis refers to the system’s tendency to return itself to a certain shape even after becoming temporarily “misshapen” as a result of external influence.
Complexity and complex systems are characteristically shaped like fractals (shapes made out of shapes like themselves, appearing similar no matter how much you zoom in on them) and networks. Ecosystems—the archetypical complex system—are networks of functional relationships between the mutually-shaping shapes of the various organisms that make up that ecosystem.
Human Shapes
When I describe human minds and human relationships as ecosystems of behavior, I’m suggesting that the behaviors’ relationships to one another are shaped like those of organisms in an ecosystem—as a fractal network. In considering natural ecosystems, it’s a bit of a cliche to marvel at the awe-inspiring array of forms and structures—the kaleidoscopic dance of shape shaping shape. The analogous spectacle within mind, behavior, and relationship are easier to miss, if no less fascinating and intricate. Whether we’re looking at the shapes of the arguments in a rational debate between partners, or the shapes of the sequence of emotions in their attachment dance, the mutually-shaping influence of shapes on one another serves as a common underpinning to everything that occurs between people.
When we notice familiar shapes, or notice shapes that seem to occur together, we can start to make informed guesses about both causality and change—what other shapes contribute to the occurrence of a particular shape, and what might be necessary to reshape things in a useful direction. If I notice my emotions or actions are notably shaped like they were at other times in other relationships in my life, (especially if they seem maladaptive in my current context) I may be able to tease out the common factors from separate contexts that are leading to either desirably or undesirably shaped responses from myself. That sense that this is familiar, then, may serve as a starting place for actively reshaping my present context and present responses.
To the extent that minds and relationships do represent a “fractal” structure, we might expect to see similar shapes at different scales, and in different areas. So, it’s often true that a similarly shaped “problem” might appear in how partners greet one another, and how they divide up parenting responsibilities. One hopeful implication of this observation might be that a “solution” to one problem in one area might provide a guide to the kind of shape effective in confronting similarly shaped problems elsewhere.
We’ve discussed how different the shape of the function and of the intention of behavior in a relationship can be. There’s a general tendency, for instance, for our conscious intentions to be shaped more altruistically than the ultimate function of our behavior—I often experience myself as “trying to do” something more selfless and admirable than what my behavior actually ends up accomplishing. By comparing the shape of the function to the shape of the intention, and examining the shape of the discrepancy between them, I may be able to learn something about how my own mind and/or my relational system may somehow “disallow” necessary behavior. For example, noticing that my “well-intentioned” statements seem to hurt my partner’s feelings, I might wonder whether there’s a shape like “anger” in need of direct expression somewhere in the system.
Referring back to the idea of organisms having “preferred environments” shaped to best support their functioning, a central source of conflict in relationships is a discrepancy between each partner’s private model of the ideal relationship. The explicit and implicit models we each build of how relationships are “supposed” to work are typically both intricate and individualized, and it is very common for partners to leave a lot of their assumptions and expectations unvoiced. When each partner is working to realize their separate ideal relationship shape, the differences between the shapes of those two ideals will typically result in behavior that “doesn’t make sense,” until the discrepant assumptions are uncovered.
The linked shapes of punishment and avoidance pose a central threat to intimacy and collaboration in relationships. By learning what these shapes look like, feel like, and sound like, we may be able to recognize them soon after they become established, and before they infiltrate the core structure of a relationship. Relatedly, we may find that if we look closely, we may be able to pick out the differences between the shapes of the competing processes of “pain-avoidance” and “pleasure-seeking” which—though they can often result in similarly-shaped outcomes—imply significant differences in terms of the sustainability of the behavior in question and long-term effects on the trajectory of a relationship.
As in other complex systems, the emergent shape of a relationship can be difficult to either predict or control through top-down, “rational” management. On the other hand, utilizing intuition based on local, immediate information, attunement to recurring shapes, and repeated “nudges” rather than attempts at total overhaul, we may be able to gradually reshape our interpersonal ecosystems, carving out space for both authentic self-expression and meaningful connection.
Seeing shapes is more than an intellectual exercise, it’s a practical, learnable skill. When we can quickly identify the contours of our own emotions, the geometry of our interactions, or the silhouette of our habitual responses, we uncover the levers of change. Noticing the “shape” of an argument that spirals into blame, the pattern of avoidance that undermines intimacy, or the architecture of a homeostatic loop defending familiar but limiting habits—we’re able to intervene more skillfully, reshaping our environments and ourselves toward more adaptive, flourishing forms.
