Optimization is a powerful lens to see the world. Through it, many human endeavors and natural phenomena converge.
An obvious one is the development of a new technology. Imagine you’re designing an engine. Maybe you have size or cost constraints. Then you try to maximize something — power output, efficiency, some number.
Other examples include running a business or investing. The basic principle of business is to use the assets you have to maximize revenue. From an investment perspective, you chase the area of highest return.
Even lifeforms in nature seem to strive for survivability and energy efficiency within the environment.
Optimization underlies these structures. Namely:
- they have solution space and objective function
- you try to maximize (or minimize) the objective function within the solution space
When many entities optimize the same objective functions, fierce competition emerges.
When many of us live under the same objective function — like money or survival — we effectively become one of these agents in an algorithm like Particle Swarm Optimization, collectively searching the solution space.
Then, of course, we must strive to reach the global optimum, right?
Energy to Rule Them All
Recently, an especially powerful variant of the optimization view is taking hold in our culture.
It starts with a premise:
Energy is the fundamental currency of the universe.
And generalization:
The purpose of life and civilization is to get more energy by using energy effectively.
And it promises to bring us a utopia with maximum freedom, made possible by unlimited energy.
Technology plays a critical role here as the lever to increase the rate in this compounding interest game.
There are abundant facts that seemingly support this.
- Yes, energy use in our history has been growing exponentially.
- Yes, lifeforms grow exponentially given enough resources.
- Yes, cells in nature are highly energy-efficient nanomachines.
Building a Dyson sphere and converting planets into a giant computer seems like an inevitable — even desirable — outcome.
Worldview of Optimization
As we’ve seen, optimization is such a powerful framework, that we sometimes end up internalizing it not just as a means to an end, but the end itself.
We’re on the grand quest to reach the “global optimum.” But individually we cannot observe the entirety.
So, we accept our role as gradient-descent agents, while occasionally wandering or rushing into new lands of hope. Hectic life, but satisfying as we think of ourselves as part of the grand whole.
Or is it?
Origin of Agents
So far, we’ve seen the world as a giant optimization system, where entities (like humans, organizations, lifeforms, etc.) are parts. However, causality tells otherwise. Agents exist first, and then the system emerges. Let’s take a deeper look into why agents behave a certain way.
All lifeforms, including animals and humans, have some intrinsic survival drive. Getting food and avoiding harm. As we go up the intelligence ladder, we have more nuanced meta-drive of emotions. Like satisfaction, boredom, sadness. These basically force us to make good use of our intelligence, which is costly 1. For example, boredom and curiosity enable us to explore.
Humans are so intelligent that we can believe in abstract ideas, and even share them with others. Thus culture and religion are born. This external information is not just capable of modulating our behavior, but it can completely flip our animal instincts. Death can become bliss. Life can become torment.
The behavior of agents vary widely. But their shared survival origin and constant exchange of information give rise to powerful commonalities.
That’s why this view does not outright contradict with optimization model. Optimization view is a simplification that assumes more uniform objective functions, rather than time-varying, agent-specific desires.
Now let’s go up and see the system from above.
Worldview of Fertility
With an agent-centric view, the world stops being something that preexists the agents. For an individual agent, the world is the direct surrounding environment first and foremost. And then we have collective worldview enabled via our intelligence and communication. In the case of humans, much of what we call the world is formed by the latter.
Each agent generally optimizes for something but not always.
Agents are more like inhabitants of a shared space, which is a collective worldview. They interact, and they contribute what they observe, merely by existing. This act expands the observable space itself, both for the agent and the collective.
There’s no longer a big problem to solve. Absolute objective functions are reduced to one of the many ingredients of each agent’s desire. Local optima, once blockades, are now comfortable homes for agents, where they can gather power and plan the next journey.
The system is highly dynamic, so sometimes you need to compete or make radical changes. However, it’s much longer-term decision in a vast complex world.
There’s no promised land of ultimacy. Purpose becomes a dynamic process: back-and-forth of decision making and telling your own story. As long as agents are connected, struggle of each and every agent expands — cultivates — our world.
I call this a worldview of fertility.
It also reveals a few failure modes, which we can readily see parallels in our societies.
- Fracture: If agents become too different and communication becomes mutually unintelligible, the network fractures and observable world shrinks.
- Monoculture: If agents become too similar and occupy tiny space, they contribute less and less to the expansion of the collective worldview.
When we reflect on our lives, you find many seemingly random things; quirks in our culture, which we probably can survive without, but we cherish them. Even the field of technology or business is rife with weird ideas and inventions.
I, as an engineer, sometimes dream of rebuilding everything from a clean slate. Especially when I’m bogged down by messy legacy designs or institutions. The ideally designed world where everything fits together perfectly, and has no place for random legacy (see also Learning and Life).
However, what kind of place would I live if this were somehow accomplished? Would there be anything left to experience at all?
View of fertility tells us to be more humble and long-sighted; that a source of short-term annoyance is often a long-term source of meaning.
Dual Views and Nature
Optimization and fertility are the same system, seen from macro vs. micro sides.
However, their implications are profoundly different.
Optimization view assumes existence of pre-determined landscape. Prophets tell a grand story of the global optimum, and we all race towards it. You get closer by solving ever more complex problems; but your focus will become winning, more and more detached from the rich world which forged your personalities.
Fertility view forces you to see limitations of yourself, but also liberates you from the grand quest.
I turn my eyes to nature. It is a system that has been running at planet-scale for billions of years. It has unchanging principle of energy and survival, stemming from the physics.
I see enormous variety in ways of life. Totally different in form, strategy, and lifespan. Even their boundaries are vague; individual cells themselves reproduce, giving birth to bigger structures like animals and plants.
Do I see a grand quest for most energy-efficient singular lifeform in a never-ending competition?
No. Rather, I see a harmony where each life has its own place, yet inescapably connected.
Footnotes
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you might also enjoy Principles of Neural Design, like I did ↩