Scarfaces - The Most Beautiful People
Optimal Information Processing & Why people taste exactly like wine!
[warning: i changed in this article my writing style - “no real grammar checks, no fine-tuning, more wild & dirty brainstorm style” - therefore you may encounter “austrian english“ monster sentences]
Recently, I lost myself in the old world called Twitter (maybe you heard about it) and stumbled on a tweet by
:That resonated deeply with me and here I want to explain why I think that “humans with healed wounds” create souls that taste like fine wine.
Personalities and habits are in their most effective case “links between the worlds”. Like imaginary numbers, they don’t really exist (or do they?) but help us play games, work, dance and share our dreams about the world.
Personalities are driven by rewards that collapse our vague potential into concrete actions (add here some esoteric quantum wave-particle collapse thingy). If our role was trained by our parents & other environmental influences and is without conflict, we will stay in this role. Like a sleepwalker that was never needed to be woken up because his mindless walking didn’t result in hitting his nose on the closed door.
If you put a sleepwalker in a completely safe environment, he/she might walk even longer in this state. If our monkey-like ancestors would walk in their sleep, they would have fallen from their cozy trees and therefore become quite fast prey to tigers or whatever ancient predators there were (ugh pseudo evolutionary explanations…)
Only conflict forces agency to change - or for people who don’t like the word conflict (let’s call them “challenges“). I would suggest in a way, that conflict form our agencies. The tension of desired rewards form our roles. The more connected these roles are to ground reality, the more effective our agency. Old patterns & habits get moldy quite fast in our technological hype societies.
A role is often a crystalized form of mental habits (reaction patterns). They are simplifications for our agency. Therefore potentially updating them is quite useful. As we recognize, we get possessed by different roles in different social situations.
If our actions lead to our external rewards, everything is a bingo!
Yet in this conflictless case, like many external received information patterns, our personality never needed to be proven, tested or grounded. Like a lie that is never doubted because it was not necessary.
In this way, our personalities/roles stay isolated and shallow. Also, they stay top-down fragile recipes for behavior.
Bottom-Up Personalities & Cheap Wine
Bottom-Up personalities are different. They know ground zero. They know how to build their own house. They know how to cook their own meals. Also, they orientate themselves because roles navigate, and if we never need to reflect on our own goals we have no idea how to find or create new paths.
Another beautiful aspect of “Bottom-Up Personalities“is that their souls taste more like rich wine. If you have one social role, you are like a caricature - a simple Disney prince - or nowadays “entrepreneur, businessman, hipster“. Similar to cheap wine, you embody only one taste (in the case of wine eg “sweet“). Cheap wine doesn’t age well.
Only bottom-up processes (let’s call them here “natural emergent) are diverse in their taste. This richness in taste is healthy because our reality is not simple. A heart rate that is too regular is deadly because our bodies demand in every moment different blood circulations. Even if my small finger is slightly in a different position, the optimal heart rate is already quite different. We are not steam engines that go on rails.
In the same way, that our heart rate needs rich dynamics our personalities need rich dynamics. Because both ultimately serve base reality - and base reality is a beautiful (sometimes ugly) mess.
The more we allow reality to touch our souls, the more bottom-up they become. Yet the way reality usually touches us… is with conflict. The more conflict, the more factors influence our spectrum of light. The richness of our color spectrum depends on the touch points with this nasty reality.
Optimal Information Processing
A little thought experiment: You stand on one side of a beautiful lake, your friend on the other side. You throw stones into the water, which create waves that ripple on their way to the other shore. Your friend has now the challenge to guess how many stones you threw in the lake by counting the waves.
In a nearly frozen lake, the waves die out fast (no waves arrive at your friend)
In a comfy summer lake, each stone creates one wave (number of stones == number of waves)
The (hypothetical) water gets traumatised/overexcited by the stones and creates many more waves (all the chaos makes it impossible to see which stone creates which wave)
In case number 2, we can find optimal information processing. The lake adapts to the size and number of stones (the theory behind: “Self-Organized Criticality“). This can serve as a (bad) metaphor for emotional sensitivity. Riding the waves of adaptions between over- and under-excitement.
When our soul respects feedback loops of learning, we constantly adapt to them. Rebuild our own source code into a new “minimum viable product”. Similar to a code base that looks too simple or a heart rate that looks too regular, we should be suspicious if our own motifs become too stiff & simple.
A human soul that is trained to ride waves of crises, consists of batches of software. We become more like a beautiful Frankenstein monster. A decentralized fluid patchwork of modules that can be updated.
And for the fans of infinite games: Scars need to be updated. There will be never a point when we will be done with getting hurt and touched by reality. Because this will be the point we stop adapting to messy reality.
To be clear, I don’t want to romanticize suffering. Suffering is when the information feedback loops for our souls don’t resolve. “Deep Soul Challenges” on the other hand, are forcing us to reconnect with reality. When our purposes hold hands with base reality.
Also, that’s the exact reason why Flow experiences are so valuable. They are on the edge of our old mental maps. We are riding a wave that is a bit too weird for our maps, so we need to update them. If the needed updates are too large, we call that suffering. If the needed updates are too small we call that mindless dream walking. If the updates have the right size, we call it Flow.