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...
Today, I’ll be exploring the concept of “complexity” as a kind of synthesis of ideas from our discussions on functional behavior, systems thinking, emotion, intuition, and predictive modeling. Centrally, in the cross-disciplinary field of Complexity Theory, there is this idea of a “complex system” which describes things like organisms, ecosystems, societies, market economies, languages, or the...
Much like the general lenses of function and emotion,I’d like to add a third lens to our toolbelt—er… camera bag—the lens of systems. This has been a difficult one for me to write, partly because I’ve been nervous about doing justice to the joy I felt reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems for the first time. I doubt I’ve accomplished that, especially because this way of thinking has...
As humans, we find ourselves in the strange predicament of being “rational agents” capable of logical thought and intentional decision-making and simultaneously being emotional animals whose behavior is substantially organized by our instinctive and unconsciously conditioned responses to stimuli in our environments. Our collective behavior and experience are determined by the functioning of...
If you ask me, one of the more unsettling things about being human is that we tend to experience our selves as intentional agents capable of rational thought and logical decision making; while at the same time, all of our behavior – including that ostensibly rational “thought” – is substantially influenced by mysterious forces called feelings over which we have limited control. ...
One of the most challenging “engineering challenges” we have to confront as human beings in relationships is what often get called “negative cycles,” “bad patterns,” or “downward spirals.” Basically there’s this weird thing that happens, where – even if we really like each other and genuinely want the best for one another – as we continue to interact over time, we find ourselves...
So there’s this notoriously mind-bending idea popularized by the neuroscientist Karl Friston called the “Free Energy Principle,” the technical details of which are far beyond my comprehension… but if you listen to its devotees talk about it, it starts to sound suspiciously close to a “grand unified theory of everything,” so you know, grain of salt. I’m not even going to try to explain that, just...
The idea I want to share today goes by a range of different names, connecting the school of Radical Behaviorism in psychology, to the theories of predictive processing, reinforcement learning, and active inference in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Besides being particularly elegant, it’s also a very difficult “pill to swallow,” emotionally and philosophically, but...