The Invisible Structure: How Life Approximates Reality
Argues life uses approximations (like VI) of underlying structures (survival, connection, etc.), and growth involves refining internal models by subtracting illusion.
Look closely at the seeming chaos of human history and individual lives. Beneath the surface-level turbulence of changing cultures, technologies, and personal dramas, lies a startling **consistency**. Certain fundamental forces, or perhaps deep structural patterns, seem to persist across eras and civilizations. Think of the relentless drive for survival and self-interest, the deep need for social connection and belonging, the dynamics of power and influence, the innate curiosity that pushes us to seek meaning. These act like hidden constants, an **invisible structure** shaping the unfolding of life, regardless of whether we acknowledge them.
The Hidden Constants of Existence
Classical education teaches us skills, histories, and facts – the visible curriculum of life. But beneath this operates a deeper, often **unacknowledged** framework built on these persistent forces. These aren't necessarily conscious choices but underlying currents:
- **Survival & Self-Interest:** The fundamental drive to persist, protect oneself, acquire resources, and manage fear. This manifests in countless ways, from basic needs to complex economic and egoic pursuits.
- **Social Connection & Belonging:** The powerful need to form bonds, cooperate, create families and communities, and define ourselves through relationships.
- **Influence & Power Dynamics:** The inherent ways individuals and groups navigate status, control, and leadership, shaping social hierarchies and interactions.
- **Meaning-Seeking & Curiosity:** The drive to understand, explore, create narratives, and find purpose beyond mere survival.
These forces constitute a kind of hidden 'generative model' for the patterns we see in life. They are the **underlying reality**, the **deep structure** beneath the noise.
Our Worldview as Approximation
Crucially, we almost **never perceive** these fundamental forces directly or completely. Our minds, faced with infinite complexity, don't capture the raw, underlying structure. Instead, we construct **approximations**. Our beliefs, our desires, our fears, our goals, our entire worldview – these are **simplified, often biased, projections** based on our limited experience and cognitive shortcuts. We build models that are **good enough** to navigate our immediate reality, even if they don't perfectly reflect the deeper truths.
Perception as Variational Inference
This process bears a striking resemblance to a powerful technique in machine learning and statistics: `Variational Inference (VI)`. When faced with a `probability distribution` (a mathematical description of possibilities) that is too complex to calculate directly – like trying to map every contour of an infinitely intricate mountain range – `VI` offers a clever solution.
Instead of tackling the complex reality head-on, you choose a simpler, more manageable family of distributions (like smooth hills and valleys) and find the specific one within that family that **best approximates** the original, complex truth. You're essentially finding the **closest possible match** using a model you can actually work with.
Our perception seems to operate similarly. We cannot compute the 'true posterior' – the perfect understanding of life's underlying structure given all possible evidence. It's simply too complex. So, we build subjective, variational **approximations**: our personal beliefs, cultural narratives, biases, and desires. These internal models try to minimize the distance between our **limited understanding** and the **unreachable true distribution** of life's hidden constants.
Awakening as Clarity, Not Creation
What, then, is growth, wisdom, or even "awakening" in this framework? It's not about inventing new truths or imposing a new order onto the world. It is the process of refining our internal approximations to **better align** with the invisible structure that already exists. It's about **improving the inference process**.
When we become aware of our own biases (aspects of our simplified model), when we recognize recurring patterns of behavior driven by fear or ego (glimpses of the underlying forces), when we see through cultural narratives that obscure these dynamics – we are effectively **improving our approximation**. Awakening is not an act of conquest over reality, but an act of **clarity** – seeing more accurately what is **already there**.
Intelligence and the Drive for Better Models
In this light, intelligence itself – whether biological or potentially artificial – can be seen as the capacity for, and perhaps the drive toward, the **progressive refinement** of these approximations. A more intelligent system, in this sense, is one that can build more **accurate, flexible, and less biased models** of the underlying structures of reality, allowing it to navigate the world more effectively.
Implications: Subtracting Illusion
This perspective suggests that true progress, both individually and perhaps societally, isn't primarily about **accumulating** more information, technology, or material wealth. These can be useful tools, but they don't automatically lead to a better approximation of reality. Indeed, they can sometimes add layers of complexity that **obscure** the fundamental forces even further.
Awakening or genuine evolution cannot be forced through external means; it arises from the **internal process** of refining perception. It involves recognizing and **discarding** the parts of our internal model that don't align well with the underlying truth.
Conclusion: The Unending Refinement
True evolution, therefore, is not primarily about adding complexity to our lives or our understanding. In a fundamental sense, it is about **subtracting illusion**.
It's the ongoing process of peeling away the inaccurate parts of our approximations, allowing the shape of the **invisible structure** beneath to become gradually clearer. This refinement of perception towards hidden truth is potentially infinite; our approximation may never become perfect, but the journey towards **clarity** is the essence of **growth itself**.