Worldview: building blocks

Chapter 1 - Our Worldview

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Welcome to the 'building blocks of our worldview' page

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Reality

“Stuff” that makes up reality like matter, space and time are seemingly stable, unchangeable aspects of nature. In truth, matter, space and time are mutable manifestations of deeper, unshakable foundations. It’s the relationship between space and time that always stays the same, even as space contracts and time dilates.

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Relational reality

The properties of people, teams or organisations are less a property of these people, groups, or organisations than how we experience them in their relationships between each other and with us.

Relational quantum mechanics postulates that reality exists in the relationship between particles, not within the particles themselves. On the most fundamental level, the direct connection between elements in the universe provides us with our reality.

A likewise principle provides us with a surprising result in our daily life. How we experience the world is not a characteristic of an entity we see, hear, feel or taste. Instead, it results from our relationship with entities in the world. The colour red, for example, is not a quality of the apple we see but the result of our ability to experience a particular light wavelength as red. Many mammals are colourblind and live in a different type of world. At the same time, they are as adapted to their world as we are adapted to ours.

As humans, we live in the niche (part) of reality we can relate to. At the same time, our world and the world of colourblind mammals intertwine at a deeper relational level.

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Physics & biology

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Entropy, not energy

There is a common misunderstanding that energy makes the world go round. This ensures that energy gets a mystical status in our daily lives.

If we were to live on energy, we would all live in the Sahara and only sunbathe. Instead, we live on the rhythm of entropy. We search for sources of low entropy, e.g. food. Our activity - and the time it takes - shift the low entropy towards higher entropy.

This process frees up resources we can use but also resources we can't use: waste.The entropy at the end of a process will always be higher than at the beginning.

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Examples of types of entropy

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Climat change

Climate change is a clear example of what we postulate above. We can't do anything with the low-entropy petroleum we use. So instead, we use the heat from the combustion process of oil. In this process, we create two sources of high entropy: heat and free co². The latter establishes a blanket of complexity in our atmosphere. Being a blanket, it radiates heat back to the earth's surface. Being a complex of high entropy, we can't use it anymore.

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Software entropy

Ivar Jacobson et al, in 1992 describes software entropy as follows: The second law of thermodynamics, in principle, states that a closed system's disorder cannot be reduced, it can only remain unchanged or increase. A measure of this disorder is entropy. This law also seems plausible for software systems; as a system is modified, its disorder, or entropy, tends to increase. This is known as software entropy.

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Knowledge diversity

Entropy is one of several ways to measure bio- or knowledge diversity. A diversity index is a quantitative statistical measure of how many different types exist in a dataset, such as species in a community, accounting for ecological richness, evenness, and dominance. As a result, knowledge becomes more and more complex. This complexity can become - like climate change - problematic. (See: We, the people with peculiar brains).

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Business entropy

Think of what is called the administrative burden. The administration aims to reduce variation (from an excel list to an ERP package). Yet, time and again, people complain that the workload is increasing. This increase is business entropy. You can think of examples from the operational side of the business.

Businesses that grow and sustain themselves, typically invest in interventions that stimulate creativity, alignment, brand awareness, training, and/or innovation and receive focus from these activities. They try to create stability by recreating business culture, systems, and processes as this is critical for growth and sustainability. But, at the same time, they encounter entropy in an ongoing fashion as collateral damage to their efforts.

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Entropy

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Free energy principle

Introduction

While the universe tends towards entropy or dissolution all biological systems resist the Second Law of thermodynamics, from the cell to the human brain. Karl Friston's 'Free Energy Principle' offers a plausible explanation of how living things go about doing so. To be alive is to act in ways that reduce the difference between your expectations and your sensory inputs. This idea calls the 'Free Energy Principle'. It is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your senses tell you that you are in.

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Active inference

With the idea of active inference, we can explain our changing beliefs and perceptions and the motivations behind our bodies' actions. It goes like this:

First, the brain signals the body to act in a way so that the body is in a new state
Secondly, new sensory input (tries to) match(es) the pre-existing belief.

This process is called active inference. Every 'moment' we act (doing something as subtle as whispering a word, to as violent as shopping up a tree), we sense the 'position' our body is in and match this with our prior belief about ourselves in the world.

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Free energie principle

The difference between our position and initial belief is called 'Free Energy'. We will always try to minimise this gap, this 'Free Energy'. So your brain will tell your body to act the 'next moment' in the expectation to minimise the gap.

The free energy principle is the opposite of entropy. Where entropy is about opening up, minimising free energy is about creating relationships and coherence between your bodily position, sensing the reaction of the world and the pre-existing model of the world.

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Attractors

In humans, our body and brain excitations can be described as moving towards our attractors, that is, towards our most likely circumstances. All our thoughts and behaviours push us towards more and more probable states. How do we do that? By using two functions in doing so:

on the one hand, surprise – that is, the improbability of being in a specific state
on the other hand, evidence – that is, the probability that a given explanation or model for that condition is correct.

If we exist, we need to increase our model proof or self-evidence to minimise surprises.

A rebounding state has a low surprise and high proof. Therefore, complex systems fall into known, reliable cycles because these processes are necessarily concerned with validating the principle underlying their existence.

Attractors force systems to fall into predictable states, thereby reinforcing the model the system has generated of its world.

If this surprise-minimizing, self-evident, inferential behaviour fails, the system will fall into surprising, unknown states – until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. Attractors are the product of processes that deal with inferences to bring themselves into existence.

In other words, attractors are the foundation of what it means to be alive.


Content source
Work and concepts of Anil Seth and Karl Friston

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Relational beings

We humans cannot live without others. They are even vital to us. But in addition, we are aware of the context in which we find ourselves and our position among those others. The unique trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures.

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Being human & the brain

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