I opened my eyes. The whole universe looked different. I touched my desk, my laptop, my empty coffee mug, with a new sense of curiosity and wonder.
A passage from the Wired article re-entered my mind.
After staring at [the wood lice] for half an hour, he deduced that they were not actually seeking the shade. “That was an illusion,” Friston says. “A fantasy that I brought to the table.”
He realized that the movement of the wood lice had no larger purpose, at least not in the sense that a human has a purpose when getting in a car to run an errand. The creatures’ movement was random; they simply moved faster in the warmth of the sun.
Friston calls this his first scientific insight, a moment when “all these contrived, anthropomorphized explanations of purpose and survival and the like all seemed to just peel away,” he says. “And the thing you were observing just was. In the sense that it could be no other way.”
Wired
I cocked my head to the side and stared intensely at the large green apple resting on my desk. I picked it up, tossed it in the air, and watched in slow motion as it neatly returned to my outstretched palm.
Why does the apple move? My mind asked.
After staring at it for a moment, I deduced that Newton was wrong. The apple was not falling to the ground because of gravity. Gravity was an illusion; a fantasy Newton brought to the table.
No. The apple didn’t move because of gravity. The apple moved because I expect it to. In fact, the entire system expects it to.
The apple merely followed the path of least resistance — the most parsimonious route — through mutual expectation. And we happened to call that mutually-agreed-upon emergent pattern, ‘gravity.’
Another passage from Conversations With God echoed in my mind.
For you are the creator of your reality, and life can show up no other way for you than that way in which you think it will.
Neale Donald Walsch
I stared at the apple again. This time, like Friston, the thing I was observing just was. In the sense that it could be no other way.
If I were to toss the apple and watch it hover in mid-air, I’d get a prediction error. Everyone in the office would get a prediction error. The apple itself would get a prediction error. Even the air would get a prediction error. The system would overflow with unnecessary free energy. Therefore, a hovering apple would not manifest in physical reality because doing so represented an unparsimonious route through mutual expectation.
I imagined a river flowing from the top of a mountain, all the way down to the ocean. A water droplet at the top of the river was traveling downstream via the path of least resistance. When it ran into a boulder, it didn’t try to climb over the boulder or go through the boulder — it simply went around the resistance in the most parsimonious route possible.
In my model, the water droplet represented the physical matter that manifested in my reality. The rivers were carved by mutual expectation. A deep riverbed represented a high-probability scenario that all Markov-blanketed ‘observers’ mutually expected — like an apple falling to the ground when I threw it in the air. The rocks and boulders and built-up areas of resistance were low-probability scenarios — like an apple floating in mid-air, defying all known laws of physics.
It’s not that the apple couldn’t float in mid-air. It theoretically could. A floating apple existed in a field of potential at the lower dimension. It’s just that the apple wouldn’t float, because that would be unparsimonious. A floating apple was like a water droplet climbing over a boulder or up the side of a riverbed instead of flowing downstream via the path of least resistance. The stronger the mutual expectation, the deeper the riverbed. Newton's laws were a deep and powerful riverbed; a powerful neurosis in the program. Therefore, the apple followed Newton's laws — as did everything else in the system. Because, like Friston observed, it could be no other way.
