Variety Won't Solve Your Problems

Hey guys, welcome back to another edition of Generick Ideas!

It’s been a while since my last update but i’m excited to be back on it. I’ve decided to be less strict with myself about editing and iterating in favor of just getting more pieces out into the world, so this post will eventually devolve into a stream-of-consciousness about the brain and stuff, but I hope you enjoy at least some of the chaos. I try to include a little something in here for everyone. Let’s get started…

This week, i’m sharing some thoughts I had during a conversation with a friend. We were talking about life and its tendency towards mundanity. My friend expressed to me that he’s noticed his days starting to become self-similar and that he feels dread about the lack of variety in his schedule.

Wake, work, eat, sleep, repeat– or some minor variation of this.

Obviously vacations, weekends, birthdays, and the Like can give us occasional bursts of variety to look forward to, but these one-off events seem to be the exception rather than the rule. He explained how he’s working to solve this problem by incorporating more novelty into his daily habits– taking new routes to work, sitting at a different desk, and listening to new music more frequently.

I pushed back on this. I don’t think that this sprinkle of variety will solve his problem. 2nd Street is not so different from 3rd Street. The far corner of the office will host desk chairs identical to the ones in his usual spot, and new music isn’t strictly more captivating than old music.

I insisted instead that he take the same route to work every day. The idea that we’ve “been here before” or “done this before” or “seen this before” is not a problem with reality and its overbearing self-similarity and uniformity, it’s a problem of perception. Each day that we walk the same path the sun is in a new position, the strangers on the street are in a different arrangement, the context of our story has moved further along, and the world finds itself in a perfectly unique arrangement that has never been seen before and will never be seen again.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, a prominent 20th century spiritual figure put it well when he said “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again”.

The first time the child sees the bird, he will see a beautiful and unique creature that is alive and rare, but the second time she sees the bird, it will just be a pigeon. “I’ve seen that before” the child will say, as if they’ve somehow found the same pigeon from the day before.

See, the problem of mundanity is a problem of filtering reality through concepts and frameworks that we think we understand instead of interfacing with reality directly, and viscerally. These concepts provide incredibly powerful heuristics for us to organize and make sense of vast amounts of information so that we can safely interact with the world, but they also create a barrier between ourselves and reality. These concepts are so strong, in fact, that we sometimes forget that they are only symbols for reality but are not, in fact, reality itself.

I told my friend that he won’t solve his problem merely by re-shaking the snow globe each day to obtain a new configuration of the snow. Each configuration is already perfectly unique as it is. Every shake will look the same to him if he so decides.

The world will not require him to form any new concepts or filters for reality simply by taking a new route to work or sitting at a new desk and thus will not deliver the variety and novelty he hopes to attain. Instead, the problem of mundanity is solved by realizing that mundanity does not and cannot exist in the world as it is. We solve the problem of mundanity only by internalizing, viscerally, that each bird we see is a brand new bird, that each path we walk is a brand new path, and each day we experience is a brand new day.

By learning to use labels and concepts when they serve us but also understanding how to drop these filters when they don’t, we can summon novelty on-demand, just by paying attention.

Bonus: Extend Nerdy Version

This section is raw and largely unedited- read at your own discretion

A different friend of mine published an exciting and relevant paper on the neurobiology of functional neurological disorders (FND) characterized by impaired awareness while pursuing an MD program in Italy in computational neuroscience. I couldn’t help but make connections between this topic of daily variety and some of the ideas expressed in the paper.

One of the coolest ideas expressed in the paper was the idea of Active Inference, which “posits that all organisms hold an implicit model of « how life should unfold »… Deviations from (adaptive) predictions are surprising, so that organisms must minimise this type of surprise… through controlling their actions to resolve uncertainty towards belief in benign observations to come (Bayes-optimal behaviour).”

The Active Inference theory basically states that humans are at all times trying to come up with a framework for the world that allows us to predict the next state of the world as accurately as possible and that deviations between our predictions and the true state of the world trigger corrective processes in our brain to update our priors and obtain better predictions. In other words, Active Inference states that we’re basically just try to minimize predictive error at all times.

I could go on and on about some of the other cool ideas in this paper (which you should read for yourself), but I want to focus again on the topic of mundanity. From the perspective of Active Inference, it makes sense that we would incorporate labels, concepts, and frameworks into our model of the world, since these units of information are critical for helping us to make accurate predictions about the world. Furthermore, since Active Inference posits that we are, at any given point, attempting to minimize prediction error or Surprise (referred to in the paper as Free Energy), we’re essentially hard-wired to desire mundanity, since minimizing the actual observed variance in the world around us is one of the best ways to minimize free energy.

There is, however, another way to minimize free energy which is just to have the most accurate model of the world possible. These two approaches–limiting variance in the external world and fitting our internal models to match a highly variable external world–are our only two levers for minimizing free energy. The difference though, is in both the controllability and resilience of the approaches.

Although we can minimize free energy by building cocoons for ourselves and interacting with intentionally small fractions of life, we remain at the mercy of chance, unprepared to face new challenges should they come our way. The second approach, intentionally interacting with a highly variable external world as a catalyst for updating our internal priors in order to achieve the best possible approximation for Reality builds resilience and anti-fragility and prepares us for the unknown.

From this angle, it makes sense that we would want to reduce mundanity safely and incrementally, since mundanity leads to stagnation and, therefore, to fragility in our internal models. In this sense, suspending our beliefs about the world as we interact with it (meditation) allows us to increase our sense of surprise (free energy) as we interact with otherwise mundane environments, allowing us to build resiliency without necessarily requiring more variance from the external world. Stream-of-consciousness insight as I write this: Meditation is like performing dropout on your brain to reduce overfitting on our worldviews.

I’m gonna be honest, those last few paragraphs were fully stream-of-consciousness but I do not intend to revise (I got shit to do, man). If you’ve gotten this far, I hope something in here has triggered some kind of interesting thought or reflection for you.

Regardless, I'd like to leave you with this: Mundanity is a filter, not a fact.