I pressed pause on my Spotify app and sighed. Oh God, this monotony is torture.
It was February 2019. I was 27 years old, sitting in an open-plan co-working space in Sydney, staring at my laptop screen. My fingers darted across the trackpad, copy-pasting content and formatting headings on the new website I was building. This was the closest I'd ever come to a stable job and it was putting my mind to sleep.
Don't get me wrong — I valued the work. I'd joined the non-profit on a part-time contract while CodeMakers kept running, basically coming on as a general fixer of things — a solver of trivial problems that added an un-trivial amount of value to the organization. It was a strange concept — you know, actually getting paid for my work. I could sit at a computer, clock up some hours, and money would magically appear in my bank account each week. At 27 years old, this was still a novelty for me.
I listened to the rhythmic tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. But is this the best I have to offer the world? I asked myself as I edited the size of an image. So many people would kill for this contract — decent pay, flexible, location-independent, a fun team, a great mission. And it's not like I'm bad at this. I can do it. I always try to do my best. But is this really it? Is this what life is supposed to be for me? Is this what I have to contribute to the world in order to survive?
I flashed back to ten weeks earlier — the day I arrived home from Phuket. Muay Thai had kept my mind in check for several months, but my depression had deteriorated. After a strong intuitive hit, I decided to press pause on my nomadic dreams and return to Australia to regroup. Chaos wasn't working for me. I needed some order in my life.
My parents picked me up from Sydney airport. As my mother and I sat in their living room, she asked what my plans were for the future.
"I think I'm going to apply for that job Pandora told me about," I said. "They seem keen to have me. I've never had a job before. I've tried being incredibly free. Now there's something oddly appealing about being constrained. Maybe I'll like it. I'm a bit curious."
A huge smile broke out across my mother's face. This was the moment she'd been waiting for. My words were music to her ears.
At that moment, my father walked into the room holding two drinks. "Well, that's great if they'll have you," he said in his jolly tone. "You're 27 years old with nothing to show on your resume."
My eyes locked with his. I froze. I could feel my throat constricting, my eyes tearing up.
Nothing to show on my resume? Nothing to show on my resume? Is that what he thought of me? That I was a deadbeat; a failure; a fuckup who had wasted the past ten years of her life? I was 27 years old and had achieved nothing. I was 27 years old and should grovel on the ground for any job I could get because who the fuck would want to hire a worthless, skill-less, stupid little girl like me? Who would want to hire the girl with no degree, who gave up her university scholarship and dropped out to move to New York and chase her dreams when she was 20 years old? Who would want to hire the girl who wasn't a specialist in anything — I wasn't a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant. I couldn't tick boxes. I struggled with authority. I didn't fit neatly into a category or a job title. There was no label for everything I'd learned in my life. I'd received no certificate on completion of the many exams I'd sat: the hard knocks of failure, rejection, and crippling self-doubt. I had no value to offer society because I was 27 years old with nothing to show on my resume. At that moment, he may as well have called me the biggest disappointment of his life.
I gasped for air and immediately ran to my room before the tears could start. I closed the door, turned off the light, dove into bed, and pulled the covers over my head so I didn't have to look at the world around me.
I'd spent my entire adult life being told by The Matrix that I had no skills. My innovations were insanely difficult to get off the ground. Although they were risky ventures, I came away from them feeling like a terrible entrepreneur because I couldn't harvest financial fruit from my labor. I was either a bold warrior or a skill-less failure. There was no participation trophy.
When I moved to the US for 99dresses, I had to get a special O1 visa because I had no university degree — as if a university degree were a proxy for my value and worth to society. For some reason, my parents bought into this paradigm too. When 99dresses failed, they tried so hard to convince me to return to university. According to them, university is the place you "learn how to learn" — as if I couldn't figure that out without the assistance of a huge institution, some textbooks, and many terrible group assignments that clearly demonstrated why communism is a shit idea: I always got a high distinction for the group while my teammates drank beer and did nothing.
My parents also believed that university provided a safety net. I'm sure the US-based millennials of the world — many of whom are drowning in student debt — would laugh at that concept as they flip burgers for minimum wage, wondering why they spent years of their life and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to receive a piece of paper. A degree guarantees nothing in this ever-changing world.
I knew, logically, that my father was wrong. I knew he was stuck in an old paradigm. I knew he meant well. I knew he just wanted to see me safe and secure. If I was stronger and more confident in myself then maybe I would've shrugged and said, 'Okay, boomer,' and taken the drink from his hand.
But he was my father, and I'd always craved his approval. I so wanted him to be proud of me like I felt he was proud of my siblings. Alex was a golden child — an orderly high performer who owned her own apartment and car and had a highly successful career as an executive at a fashion e-commerce company. My other brother, Hamish, had a nice, secure, well-paid job as a software developer at a fast-growing multi-billion-dollar startup. And my youngest brother — well, he was just graduating from university and beginning the hunt for his first full-time job.
And then there was me: the renegade. The one who wasn't content to live an orderly life. My parents both did their best to embrace my natural talents and support me on my journey through this world. Yet, they also wanted to stop worrying about my ability to survive. It was difficult for them to watch my projects grow and die, then for me to start something new all over again.
I heard a knock on my bedroom door. A strip of light spread across the wooden floor as Dad poked his head into the room. "I — I didn't mean to make you cry," he said awkwardly. My father has many talents — performing high-stakes surgery, fixing things around the house, making everyone laugh with a well-timed inappropriate joke, cooking a mean chili con carne. Dealing with emotions is not one of those talents. "I'm sorry, Nik. I didn't mean it."
"Yes, you did." I pulled my head above the covers. "It's okay. It's not your fault I'm upset. I wouldn't be reacting like this if I didn't subconsciously believe it on some level. You just struck a nerve. They're only words, anyway. I'll get over it."
"Oh... okay." He didn't know what to do. "I've got some chocolate. Do you want some chocolate?"
"No thanks," I giggled as snot dripped from my nose.
"Okay." He closed the door.
I heard talking in the hallway. A moment later, my mother entered the room, turned on the light, and sat on my bed. “He didn’t mean it like that, you know.” She rubbed me on the shoulder. “Your father can be a bit insensitive sometimes.”
“He did mean it like that.” I sat up and hugged my legs to my chest like a child. “He meant exactly what he said: I’m 27 years old with nothing to show on my resume. No breakaway success, no university degree, no neat stack of job titles and achievements. Nothing. I’m uneducated and have no specific skill set. I should take any job I can get because I’m basically worthless to society. There’s no need to sugar-coat what he meant just because it upsets me.”
“You’re just a bit different, Nik.” She continued rubbing my back. “You’re a free-spirited creative and your father is a disciplined doctor. He loves you very much and he does what he needs to do for this family. You know he's always standing right behind you, ready to support you. You know he is your number one fan.”
“I know.” A tear ran down my cheek. “And I appreciate that. I just wish I was actually good at something. You both worked so hard to give me the best education and every opportunity in life, and I’m not even good at anything. I have nothing to show for all of Dad’s sacrifice and all the years he woke up at 4 a.m. every morning so he could send four kids to private school. Here I am, standing on the world’s tallest podium of privilege, and I’m still a failure.”
“You’re not a failure-”
“-I just want to be successful at something, Mum. All I ever do is fail, and fail, and fail — all the goddamn time. And the only thing I’ve ever been successful at was becoming the poster child for fucking it up with some semblance of grace when I was twenty-two. Awesome. That’s what I always dreamed of for my career: being that girl who failed really well, then told the world about it.”
***
I snapped back to the present moment, sitting in my chair in the Sydney office. I could hear the clickity-clack of keyboards above the mild chatter of my colleagues. I looked around to see entrepreneurs happily talking with each other, drawing optimistic growth charts on whiteboards and discussing marketing campaigns.
See Dad, I thought as I added another image to the website I was building. I have skills. They are self-taught skills, but skills none-the-less.
My mind began to wander again...
***
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," Hamish replied. "Shoot."
I was sitting in my brother's one-bedroom bachelor pad — complete with chessboard, liquor cabinet, a geeky multi-monitor hacker workspace, and a large wall-print of a cartoon monkey smoking an oversized bong. We were drinking beer and catching up at one of our semi-regular sibling dinners. My sister, Alex, was rummaging for snacks in the kitchen. Callum was late, as per usual.
"How do you not care what Mum thinks of you?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Like, you've always had this weird ability to not give a shit."
"Yeah," he shrugged. "I listen to Mum's opinions. Then I ignore them and do what I want."
"I know what you're talking about," Alex chimed in as she delivered some dips to the table. "Nikki, there comes a point in your life where you have to kill your heroes. We have amazing parents-"
"I turned out okay, at least," Hamish grinned.
"-but they're not perfect. They're flawed human beings. Take them off the pedestal and stop treating their opinion as gospel. I know Dad refers to Mum as The Source Of All Wisdom And Knowledge, but she's not. I went through this disillusionment process a year ago. Trust me — it's worth it."
"Yeah, I know," I sighed. "I guess it's easier for Hamish. He never does anything controversial."
"Valid," Hamish nodded.
"Like, a few years ago, I booked my ticket to Chiang Mai and got the visa before I told them I was leaving. I knew exactly what they'd say and it was just as I predicted. They spent an hour on the phone telling me what an irresponsible choice I was making. Apparently, I was 'running away' and 'abandoning my business' and 'going on holiday.' Three months later, I called them from Thailand and told them I was moving to Brisbane. And they were like, 'Why are you leaving Thailand? The business is going so well! Stay there!'"
"They're classic baby-boomers," Alex said. "They live in a different paradigm and are a product of their time. They just want to see you safe, that's all. You can't fault them for that. Learning to make your own decisions and take your own risks, regardless of what they think, is part of growing up."
I thought back to a few weeks earlier, sitting at the dinner table as I argued with my mother.
"Do I embarrass you?" I asked, visibly upset.
"What? Of course not," Mum replied.
"Then do you find me inappropriate? What is it? Because I saw you shuddering and shaking your head yesterday when I began talking about my 'weird ideas' to Diane."
"Well, not everyone wants to hear about all this strange stuff you're interested in."
"She asked me what I was working on!" I snapped. "Do you think your friend is stupid? She is a smart and successful businesswoman who sits on the board of all these public companies. What makes you think she wouldn't be interested in what I have to say?"
"I just know what you're like, Nikki. When you get started, you can talk someone's ear off. You're too much sometimes."
"Jesus! How poor do you think my social skills are? Do you think I can't read the room and gauge someone's level of interest? When your friend proactively asks me questions about my 'weird ideas', am I supposed to lie and sound normal?"
"Just-"
"You're really that ashamed of me, aren't you? I can't help what I'm interested in." A tear trickled down my cheek.
"What? I'm not ashamed. Why are you so upset?"
"Yes, you are. Every time I talk about my interests in public, you act as if I'm embarrassing you. It's like you think I'm your weird, defective child."
"What?! Where is this coming from? Why are you being so paranoid?"
"Paranoid?" I cried. "I'm not paranoid."
"Then why do you think I'm out to get you? This is all in your head."
"Stop gaslighting me, Mum."
"Why would you think I think you're defective?"
"Maybe because you visibly shudder when I open my mouth in front of other people. And you say to them, 'Oh, you don't have to listen to this.' I'm so sorry I embarrass you in front of your friends. I'm so sorry that you thought I was going to end up in some prestigious, high-paid career because I was your little academic wunderkind, and now I'm just bumming around the world like a dropkick with no financial security, exploring strange ideas. Raising four children is one of your greatest achievements, and I'm so sorry you can't show me off to your friends like a trophy. I'm so sorry I can't be who you want me to be."
"What? Where is this coming from?"
"It's coming from the fact that you don't shudder when Alex talks about her eCommerce sales, or when Hamish talks about the programming project he's working on, or when Callum talks about a movie he's passionate about. But when I talk about my interests, you visibly squirm in discomfort. I obviously embarrass you."
"You don't embarrass me. This has got nothing to do with me. I love you, Nikki, and I just want you to be safe. You get very excited and you talk really fast. People look at you weird."
"It's called 'passion,' Mum."
"It's a very judgmental world out there. And when you start talking about how the smartest people in science are wrong, you sound like a — I mean, I just don't want people thinking you're-"
"What? What would they think I am?"
"It's just —"
"Do you think I'm crazy?"
"I never said that! It's just — not everyone wants to spend their lunchtime talking about first principles."
"Diane was asking specific questions and I was giving specific answers. And just because something is counterintuitive, doesn't mean it's factually inaccurate. I can't help it that the experts are wrong. It's their fault for being intellectually lazy, not mine. I don't care if it's Einstein or some other great mind. If they're wrong, they're wrong. I mean, do you think I haven't deeply thought through the logic underpinning my conclusion? Do you think I'm stupid?"
"I don't think you're stupid-"
"Besides, Diane is quite curious about the future of technology. If she wasn't interested, she would've changed the subject."
"She's very polite-"
"What do you want me to do then, Mum? Keep my mouth shut?"
"Just tone it down."
"Why doesn't the rest of the world tone it up?"
***
My focus returned to the Sydney office.
Click, click, click.
Tap, tap, tap.
This work is so monotonous, I thought. I needed a little cognitive stimulation.
I opened Youtube on my phone. A variety of videos filled my feed — videos on philosophy, technology, physics, psychology, spirituality, film analysis.
I tapped a thumbnail of Steve Jobs. It was his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. The video began playing through my headphones as I returned to my work.
Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs faded out as the video stopped playing.
It's easy to stay hungry when you're foolish, I thought as I mindlessly manipulated a vector graphic. Most artists starve.
I recalled the Rumi poem I'd read when I was crying on the floor of my Phuket apartment, lost and confused, just a few months earlier.
Proud scholar
step down from your summit
fall in love and become a fool!
Become humble like dust
walk with everyone
good and bad, young and old
so one day
you may become a king.
Well, that worked out well for me, didn't it? I thought. Congratulations, Nikki. You spent your twenties being foolish, following your rogue intuition on a wild goose chase around the world, thinking it would lead somewhere; having faith that the dots would connect one day. And then you realized that they don't. Because if there were any order to this chaos then maybe you'd actually be successful at something instead of sitting here, back where you started, adjusting the size of a typeface on a website. Failure is the only thing you've ever been good at.
My God, listen to yourself, another part of me rebutted. You're such an entitled millennial brat. Sit down, shut up and do your work. Add some value to the world, for once. Your father is right — you're 27 years old with nothing to show on your resume. It's time to grow up. The universe is not your magical playground. You're not a child anymore.
I sighed and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was 1 p.m. — lunchtime. My favorite time of day. I needed to get out of my chair and go for a long walk around the city to stretch my legs and my mind.
Before I could shut my laptop, a Gmail notification popped up on my screen. I opened an email from Darren.
Subject: Free energy principle
Body: This was the article about the neuroscientist I was talking about. Let me know what you think!
I'd run into Darren earlier that morning on a coffee break. We hadn't seen each other since we were in Shanghai together a few years ago.
Before long, he asked the inevitable question: "So, what have you been up to?"
"I spent the last few months training at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand," I replied.
"How'd you end up there?"
I followed the white rabbit.
"Long story," I sighed.
"Where were you before Thailand?"
"Just working online from Colombia."
"On your kids' coding school?"
A pang of nostalgia washed through my body.
"Yeah," I replied.
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
"Wow. Living the dream," he grinned.
Oh, if only he knew the truth.
***
So that's how I found myself leaning over my laptop, forgetting about lunch altogether as my mind gorged itself on new ideas. The article was titled The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI by Shaun Raviv. The byline made a bold claim: "Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself."
The piece began by discussing Friston's typical day and establishing his credibility as a serious neuroscientist.
When Friston was inducted into the Royal Society of Fellows in 2006, the academy described his impact on studies of the brain as “revolutionary” and said that more than 90 percent of papers published in brain imaging used his methods. Two years ago, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research outfit led by AI pioneer Oren Etzioni, calculated that Friston is the world’s most frequently cited neuroscientist. He has an h-index — a metric used to measure the impact of a researcher’s publications — nearly twice the size of Albert Einstein’s. Last year Clarivate Analytics, which over more than two decades has successfully predicted 46 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, ranked Friston among the three most likely winners in the physiology or medicine category.
For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well.
If it's the organizing principle of intelligence and life, then it's the organizing principle of everything, my mind casually commented. The entire universe is a conscious system. Duh.
Oh wait, I paused. I guess that's not obvious to a lot of people.
Peter Thiel's famous contrarian question echoed in my mind: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
I recalled a passage from Thiel's book, Zero to One.
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly I hear answers like the following:
“Our education system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
Okay then, I thought. Most people believe the observer and the observed are separate variables — but the truth is, they're the same thing. Most people believe the universe is primarily made from unconscious, inanimate matter — but the truth is, the universe is a conscious system, observing itself. Most people believe life is random and chaotic — but the truth is, randomness can't be defended from first principles. Most people believe they are thinking — but the truth is, they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
A dialogue from Conversations With God popped into my mind.
Such a choice — a decision coming from no previous personal knowledge — is called pure creation. And the individual is aware, deeply aware, that in the making of such decisions is the Self created.
Most of you are not interested in such important work. Most of you would rather leave that to others. And so most of you are not self-created, but creatures of habit — other-created creatures.
Then, when others have told you how you should feel, and it runs directly counter to how you do feel — you experience a deep inner conflict. Something deep inside you tells you that what others have told you is not Who You Are. Now where to go with that? What to do?
The first place you go is to your religionists — the people who put you there in the first place. You go to your priests and your rabbis and your ministers and your teachers, and they tell you to stop listening to your Self. The worst of them will try to scare you away from it; scare you away from what you intuitively know.
They’ll tell you about the devil, about Satan, about demons and evil spirits and hell and damnation and every frightening thing they can think of to get you to see how what you were intuitively knowing and feeling was wrong, and how the only place you’ll find any comfort is in their thought, their idea, their theology, their definitions of right and wrong, and their concept of Who You Are.
The seduction here is that all you have to do to get instant approval is to agree. Agree and you have instant approval. Some will even sing and shout and dance and wave their arms in hallelujah!
That’s hard to resist. Such approval, such rejoicing that you have seen the light; that you’ve been saved!
Approvals and demonstrations seldom accompany inner decisions. Celebrations rarely surround choices to follow personal truth. In fact, quite the contrary. Not only may others fail to celebrate, they may actually subject you to ridicule. What? You’re thinking for yourself? You’re deciding on your own? You’re applying your own yardsticks, your own judgments, your own values? Who do you think you are, anyway?
And, indeed, that is precisely the question you are answering.
But the work must be done very much alone. Very much without reward, without approval, perhaps without even any notice.
I continued reading the Wired article.
Over time, Hinton convinced Friston that the best way to think of the brain was as a Bayesian probability machine. The idea, which goes back to the 19th century and the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, is that brains compute and perceive in a probabilistic manner, constantly making predictions and adjusting beliefs based on what the senses contribute. According to the most popular modern Bayesian account, the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”
Cool, I thought. Makes sense.
Before long, a particular passage caught my attention.
Markov is the eponym of a concept called a Markov blanket, which in machine learning is essentially a shield that separates one set of variables from others in a layered, hierarchical system. The psychologist Christopher Frith — who has an h-index on par with Friston’s — once described a Markov blanket as “a cognitive version of a cell membrane, shielding states inside the blanket from states outside.”
In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
Ever since I first read about Markov blankets, I’d seen them everywhere. Markov blankets around a leaf and a tree and a mosquito. In London, I saw them around the postdocs at the FIL, around the black-clad protesters at an antifascist rally, and around the people living in boats in the canals. Invisible cloaks around everyone, and underneath each one a different living system that minimizes its own free energy.
The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-changing effect. But if you translate the concept from math into English, here’s roughly what you get: Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.
According to Friston, any biological system that resists a tendency to disorder and dissolution will adhere to the free energy principle — whether it’s a protozoan or a pro basketball team.
A single-celled organism has the same imperative to reduce surprise that a brain does.
Wait. What?!
My eyes squinted at the screen.
Did he just say what I thought he said?
I scrolled down, furiously skimming the remainder of the article.
This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction — absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world — or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.
And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis — my fantasy — through action.
For Friston, folding action and movement into the equation is immensely important. Even perception itself, he says, is “enslaved by action”: To gather information, the eye darts, the diaphragm draws air into the nose, the fingers generate friction against a surface. And all of this fine motor movement exists on a continuum with bigger plans, explorations, and actions.
“We sample the world,” Friston writes, “to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
I blinked a few times and cocked my head to the side.
I'd already begun running the computation in my mind. It played in my head like a multi-dimensional movie, full of purple Markov blankets and yellow shaded areas representing distributions of free energy in the system.
I replaced the Markov blankets with images of the things they represented: objects, people, money, ideas. Then I did something strange: I placed Steve Jobs in the system — a man renowned for his 'reality distortion field.' I watched as Jobs began expressing a belief in something that didn't exist yet.
As he held steady to his vision, a substantial buildup of free energy began accumulating in the system. He was deliberately creating and holding a prediction error — a gap between what he internally believed to be true, and what his senses told him was true. His prediction error was throwing the entire system out of equilibrium.
As he walked through space and time continuing to think, speak and act in alignment with his vision despite what was manifesting around him, his increased conviction generated even more free energy. That free energy created a magnetic pull, drawing his vision towards him.
As Jobs convinced others of his vision, they began expressing their belief in it too. Their new prediction errors generated additional free energy in the system, throwing it further into chaos.
Even the market's collective, unconscious desire for a smartphone was creating a huge buildup of free energy. It appeared as if the iPhone was being pulled out of Jobs to fulfill the market's desire and restore equilibrium to that economic system. Jobs was just the open vessel — the most parsimonious route — for that emergent pattern of information to flow through.
I watched in awe as the computation continued playing in my mind. Resources were shifting around, minimizing their mutual surprise via the path of least resistance. It all looked like disordered mayhem to the naked eye.
But then the free energy began to disappear. The gap between what Steve Jobs saw in his mind — what he believed to be true — and what was physically showing up in the outside world, had closed. There was no gap. He was holding a beautiful, low-entropy creation — an iPhone — in his hand like a modern-day sorcerer.
Holy shit.
***
I furiously flipped through Conversations With God until I found the parable I was searching for.
Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, “Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?”
“Oh, what, God? What? I’ll do anything!” The little soul said.
“You must separate yourself from the rest of us,” I answered, “and then you must call upon yourself the darkness.’
“What is the darkness, o Holy One?” the little soul asked.
“That which you are not,” I replied, and the soul understood.
I flipped back to the Wired article.
In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. [...] Without them, we are just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
My mind was reeling.
Souls are Markov blankets!
Another spark fired in my brain. I frantically began pouring through my notes, searching for another passage from Conversations With God.
And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole. This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the "image and likeness of God."
"The image and likeness of God," I muttered. It's a metaphor for recursion. If every soul is made in the image and likeness of God, then every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing...
I cross-referenced this with a snippet I'd read in a scientific paper a few moments earlier.
The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
"Jesus Christ," I whispered under my breath. God is a computation...
I jumped to another passage from Conversations With God.
God is not a person, place or thing. God is exactly what you have always thought — but not understood.
You have always thought that God is the Supreme Being.
And you have been right about that. I am exactly that. A BEING. Notice that "being" is not a thing, it is a process.
I am the Supreme Being. That is, the Supreme, comma, being.
I am not the result of a process; I am The Process Itself. I am the Creator, and I am The Process by which I am created.
Everything you see in the heavens and the earth is Me, being created.
I immediately recalled Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata — particularly, Rule 30. A simple computation — a mathematical process — generated the seemingly 'random' complexity of that pattern.
Indeed, I even have increasing evidence that thinking in terms of simple programs will make it possible to construct a single truly fundamental theory of physics, from which space, time, quantum mechanics and all the other known features of the universe will emerge.
Wolfram's ideas ran around my head before colliding into those of the brilliant physicist, David Bohm — a man who was way ahead of his time:
The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. [...] Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
I knew Bohm was right, I thought as I furiously flipped through my tattered copy of The Holographic Universe. He's a fucking genius. The free energy principle is covered in holographic patterns!
I quickly found the section on near-death experiences.
This was especially true when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state. Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. "One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated," he observes. "But as soon as he started to think, he became himself".
"It's the same pattern: surprise minimization," I muttered. My blue eyes are a symbolic representation of an abstract belief in my internal model of reality. They're not fundamentally real. I stared at my hands. None of this is real...
I leaped back onto my laptop, performed another Google search, and began inhaling the results. I needed to see a very specific phrase reflected in the scientific research.
As I skimmed through a paper titled The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?, only one paragraph caught my eye.
In this setting, surprise is called the (negative) model evidence. This means that minimizing surprise is the same as maximizing the sensory evidence for an agent’s existence, if we regard the agent as a model of its world.
I needed more. I began skimming another paper titled The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle.
This teleological (Bayesian) interpretation of dynamical behaviour in terms of optimization allows us to think about any system that possesses a Markov blanket as some rudimentary (or possibly sophisticated) ‘agent’ that is optimizing something; namely, the evidence for its own existence.
But still, it wasn't enough. I was looking for something very specific.
And then, all of a sudden, I found it hidden in a paragraph about a spider.
It is in this sense that one should understand a Markov blanket as establishing a statistical boundary separating internal states from external states. To then act on inferred states of the world means to actively secure evidence that I am what I am; namely, a critter-eating creature.
That! That right there! That's what I was looking for: I am what I am.
My mind was on fire.
I recalled another paragraph from Conversations With God.
I tell you this: There is no coincidence, and nothing happens “by accident.” Each event and adventure is called to your Self by your Self in order that you might create and experience Who You Really Are.
It all made sense.
God is a neural network, observing itself.
Souls — a.k.a observers — are Markov blankets; holographic fragments of the whole.
Observers are made in the image and likeness of God, which means every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing.
And that thing is its own self-existence i.e. Who You Really Are.
God had cloaked his source code in mythology, then buried it inside the book I'd carried around the world for the past four years.
Well played, God. Well played.
***
Four hours flew by as I tumbled down the rabbit hole. Tabs upon tabs of scientific papers littered my web browser. My tattered copy of The Holographic Universe — the one I kept in my handbag — lay on my lap. Conversations With God was open on my phone's Kindle app. The dots all connected looking backward.
Perhaps this is a good time to go over once more how it is that I interact with you, because you think it is a question of My desire, and I’m telling you it’s a question of yours.
I want for you what you want for you. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t sit here and make a judgment, request by request, whether something should be granted you.
My law is the law of cause and effect, not the law of We’ll See. There is nothing you can’t have if you choose it. Even before you ask, I will have given it to you.
I ran my fingers through my hair and stared at the model in my mind. Am I interpreting this correctly? I wondered. The past is creating the future, but the future is creating the past. The mathematical dance between my neural net and God's neural net was creating a retrocausal loop — like Escher's Drawing Hands lithograph. Even before I asked for something, this algorithm had already given it to me...
"Well, that explains life plans..." I whispered as I thumbed through The Holographic Universe, searching for the relevant section.
Decades later and after each of these predictions had come to pass, he found himself in the very scene he had witnessed as a child and realized that the strange object on the wall was a "forced-air heater," a kind of heater that had not yet been invented at the time of his NDE.
I snapped the book shut.
My Akashic records reading from eighteen months earlier echoed in my mind. I'd asked The Oracle why Jesse had suddenly been ejected from my life in the same week that James had handed back all of his equity and left me as a single founder. Love and loyalty were the only things keeping me in Australia. And in the blink of an eye, both of those commitments crumbled into dust.
But The Oracle... well, she'd channeled a message. Something about a plan...
Your records want you to know that those [events] were [part of] the big plan. The timing, the shifting to give you the opportunity if you should choose to move to the next stages of your journey. And you are riding it, so...
So heartbreak was always part of the masterplan. My love story with Jesse was doomed before the first line was even written; from that day in the little French village of Albi, months before our fates collided on the opposite side of the globe.
Those events only manifested because the system can't evolve without chaos, I thought. And that means what happened in Chiang Mai was a long-term optimization...
I flashed back to eighteen months earlier, standing on my bed in shock as I watched my flip-flop move across the floor of my Thai apartment by itself — completely defying Newton's laws. That incident generated the biggest prediction error of my life. It was the moment reality broke for me and exposed itself as an illusory construct, lodging a sharp splinter in my mind that twisted and turned, day in and day out, invalidating everything our materialist society had taught me to believe.
If I was computing this correctly, a pattern of information that surprising would've only emerged in my reality if my observing it then set me off on a choice trajectory where my future self was minimizing massive amounts of free energy in the system. If I wasn't doing something impactful in the relative future — if I wasn't fulfilling a vast collective desire or answering a grand collective question — then my observing that pattern of information would not have mitigated enough expected free energy to disrupt a neurosis as strong as Newton's laws.
So, what is my future self up to? I wondered.
And then it hit me: The Prophecy.
And you will actually be utilizing this, helping more people than you can see now. Like, of course you have a business and you run your business and all that. But your records want you to have this understanding... what you're doing... the way you're doing it and how you're doing it, is actually pretty valuable.
So down the road when you feel called to do it, just do it the way you always do it. Allow it to happen. If you're called to share with people about how you live your life and how things work for you, feel free to share it. So this is just something your records want you to have some heads up about. Because your gift is not just teaching kids coding for the game. There is a lot more that you'll be able to share with the world. [...]
They show this image that's you, but not in this lifetime. The wardrobe is more like an ancient lifetime, but everything they show is metaphor. What they show is a tiara... it's almost like you're in a ceremony or something and it feels like it's a king or queen or a royal kind of feeling. You're in a ceremony and a tiara is being put on you.
So the records want you to know... the message is... at some point in time your soul actually chose to accept this mission that you're going to complete in this lifetime. You actually decided before you became a person here, you had decided that you were going to do this. This is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you.
My entire life flashed before my eyes. I gasped as a bolt of clarity struck my consciousness, sending shivers down my spine.
I’d never believed in destiny. It always seemed like a nice, romantic idea relegated to myths and fantasy novels, where heroes slayed dragons and sorcerers cast magic spells and oracles made prophecies.
And yet, I'd marched straight into destiny like a mathematical soldier.
The irony of the journey took my breath away. This whole time, I thought I was searching for the answers to the universe; for God. But, in the end, I was really just searching for myself. They’re the same thing, after all...