Adaptation

"I have a question," Zac said. "How come a human body is so compliant and can consistently rearrange into a low-entropy state to minimize surprise, but doing the same thing in a business is so difficult? If they are both following the same mathematical pattern, shouldn't they be equally as compliant?"

"No," I replied. "I do agree that your body is very compliant. I remember discovering this when I was a teenager. Towards the end of high school, I was not enjoying many of my classes. The lessons just seemed pointless and boring, so I'd decide in advance which ones I was going to skip. The only legit way to skip, though, was to go to sickbay. I felt guilty lying and telling the nurse that I was sick, so I'd just ask my body to give me a bad headache. Within a minute, I'd get a throbbing pain in my head. Then I was legitimately sick and could go lie down."

"So naughty," Zac smirked.

"Depends what your moral code is," I shrugged. "It didn't affect my performance in exams, which seems to be the point of school, unfortunately. Perhaps that's why I considered the lessons pointless. As I've just explained, box-ticking is not education.

Anyway, I'll answer your question with a Spiderman quote: 'With great power comes great responsibility.'"

"How is that relevant?" Zac asked.

"Would you agree that human beings are more intelligent than a white blood cell?"

"Err… I guess so."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because humans can think?"

"Here's my answer: humans are more intelligent than white blood cells because they can maintain and navigate larger prediction errors. A white blood cell believes it is a white blood cell, so it moves in a way that maximizes evidence for its own self-existence. A human, on the other hand, can imagine herself as anything. She can imagine herself as a doctor or a geologist living in Antarctica — even if all the information coming into her senses tells her she is neither of those things. She can then chart a path and navigate the journey to reduce that prediction error, and become the thing she believes herself to be. Therefore, a human has a much greater ability to adapt to change and resist entropy.

With this power comes great responsibility. Let's say you're an employee of a business. You're star-shaped, but the company says, 'Zac, we need you to become a square.' You then say, 'No, thank you. Becoming a square goes against everything I believe to be true about myself. It is not who I am, and I believe it is morally wrong. I'm going to remain a star. I'm going to remain true to myself.' So the organization fires you. Firing you and hiring a square is the easiest way to minimize surprise in their system."

"But if you're like most people, you'll just turn into a square to keep your job and keep everyone happy. You'll adapt to the shape of the world and the systems you're a part of, instead of demanding that the world bend to reflect who you are.

Of course, this same phenomenon happens in all kinds of situations. People adapt themselves to fit into a friendship group, or to get someone of the opposite sex to like them, or just to be accepted by such a judgemental society."

"You see, everyone has their own shape, and we all get to decide what shape we are. Ten years ago, I was a circle. My consciousness then ventured through life, often spilling onto areas that represented That Which I Am Not. When I realized Who I Am Not, that helped me define Who I Am. When I defined Who I Am, I could create stronger boundaries in my life and not bend myself to other people's will — although, that conviction is still something I'm developing. Over time, we all modify our shapes, and then our life rearranges into that specific shape to resist entropy.

When you understand this mathematically, it all comes down to knowing Who You Are. If you're a star, be a star. If you're a heart, be a heart. If you're a square, be a square. But recognize you exist within systems that are mathematically optimized to have you take on their shape. There's a mathematical reason why resisting the crowd requires so much inner conviction."

"Can you explain that more?" Zac asked. "Like, how can resisting the crowd be a mathematical thing. Can't I just think thoughts that resist the crowd?"

"But where do you think your thoughts come from? If your business exists within the global economy, and you exist within your business, and your thoughts exist within your mind, then technically, your thoughts exist within all those Markov blankets. Therefore, your thoughts are mathematically optimized to resist the entropy of yourself, the business, and the global economy — as well as every other system you exist within."