As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately obvious why change isn’t conquerable, and why isn’t knowledge a finite resource as the siren of modernism sweetly suggests. As far as infinity goes, there are infinite stories to convey it, and here’s but one of them. It’s an examination of a particularly interesting kind of change: reciprocal adaptation.
Adaptation is all around us, and is largely responsible for the never-ending change. For example, when I rest on a tree stump in the forest after a long hike, I may notice a fragrant flower bush abuzz with the bees. I am seeing the effects of adaptation. Over the eons, flowers adapted to attract bees to solve their problem of pollination (my sincere apologies to passerby biology experts – I know too little of the subject to speak so confidently about it).
However, if I notice large yellow eyes examining me through the forest’s canopy, I would be experiencing another kind of adaptation. The predator is trying to build their own mental model of me. At that moment, I am its problem: the current nature-enjoying me as “what is” and the meal version of me that “ought to be”. Obviously, this makes the predator’s intent a problem for me – and thus engages me in reciprocal adaptation.
In a non-reciprocal adaptation, our understanding of the problem must include some hypotheses on how the phenomenon’s behavior changes over time. Even though it is already a pretty challenging task, we can choose to be careful, neutral observers of the phenomenon. With such commitment, we still have a chance at arriving at the model that produces an effective solution. For this kind of adaptation, the process of understanding looks like the one I described earlier.
Once we find ourselves in a reciprocal adaptation, things get rather hairy. Two or more entities see each other as problems – or at least, as parts of them. Each continuously develops a mental model of the problem that includes itself, the other, and their intention. In such situations, we are no longer neutral observers: every solution we try is used by other parties to adjust their mental models, thus invalidating the models of theirs we keep developing.
A pernicious fractal weirdness emerges. When you and I are locked in reciprocal adaptation, your intention is my problem, which means that my model of the problem now has to include your intention. Because I am part of your “what ought to be”, a mental model of me — how you model me — is now embedded in my model of you. In other words, not only do I need to model you, I also need to model how you model me. To produce an effective model, I also need to model how you model my modeling of you, and so on. And you have little choice but to do the same.
In this hall of mirrors, despite all parties acquiring more and more diverse models, we are not reaching that satisfying solution effectiveness found in other situations. Every interaction between us rejiggers the nested dolls of our mental models, and so the process of understanding looks bizarre, with effectiveness wobbling unsteadily or hitting invisible asymptotes. The “convergent” stage keeps getting subverted back into “novel”, and the “routine” stage of the process of understanding no longer develops. Correspondingly, the effort is pegged at maximum and while our valence of feelings about the situation remains negative.
This under-developed learning cycle is something that happens with us anytime we touch infinity. We struggle and we feel out of our depth. To illustrate this in our ever-growing process diagram, we’ll add an extra short-circuit from “convergent” back to “novel” stages, splitting the “learn” cycle into two. We’ll name the outer part of it the “solve” cycle, since it does culminate in arriving at an effective solution.
Let’s call the shorter circuit the “struggle” cycle. I picked this name because inhabiting this cycle is stressful and unpleasant – the effort remains at maximum for prolonged periods of time, exhausting us. The force of homeostasis tends to rather dislike these situations. It’s literally the opposite of the “apply” cycle – lots of energy goes into it. A good marker of touching infinity is that sense of rising unease, progressing toward a full-blown terror. My guess is that this is our embodied, honed by the evolution warning mechanism to steer clear of it.
When we’re in the “struggle” cycle, we gain one additional problem. You know, like it wasn’t enough to struggle with infinity, right? This additional problem stems from our intention to exit this cycle as quickly as possible. We even come pre-wired with a few solutions to break out of this cycle: fight, flight, and freeze. As an aside, I described this same phenomenon differently in “Model flattening” a while back, but hey — infinity and its infinite stories. These built-in solutions are what helped our cave-dwelling ancestors survive and we’re grateful for their contribution to humanity’s progress. However, they tend to work out rather poorly in somewhat more nuanced situations we experience in the present day.
To end things on a more positive note… I kept describing reciprocal adaptation in almost exclusively adversarial terms. And there’s something to it. When we are part of someone else’s problem, it’s a decent chance we will feel at least a little bit threatened by that. However, I would be remiss not to mention the more sunny side of reciprocal adaptation: mutuality. Mutuality is a kind of reciprocal adaptation in which our intentions are aligned. We have the same “ought to be”. As you probably know, mutuality produces nearly opposite results. We no longer need to build a separate mental model of our partner in reciprocal adaptation. We can substitute it with ours. This substitution pattern scales, too! If I can reliably assume that a given number of people is “like me,” (that is, has the same mental model as me), it feels like I gain superpowers. When we put our efforts to solve a common problem together, we can move mountains. Perhaps completely without merit, even infinity appears less infinite when we are surrounded by those who share our intention.
2 thoughts on “Touching infinity”