Essay 4: Uncertainty

Essay 4: Uncertainty

        With the way I have been talking up until now, it’s a wonder we ever do new things at all. If we are all babies who get anxious at the sight of the new, why do we ever welcome anything new in our lives? Why would we ever watch a new movie, go on new trips, or converse with a stranger? These are not actions motivated by certainty, they are uncertainty-driven at their core. This need is so powerful that 67% of men would shock themselves (yes, with electricity) to alleviate the boredom of sitting in a room for 15 minutes. The claim that I already made long ago is that uncertainty is a need, and thus is valuable for its own sake. To demonstrate why I will first explain why it came about evolutionarily, then I will detail its expressions, how play helps with the early stages of development for a child, why we seek other people’s stories through conversation, and how to maintain a healthy relationship with the need for certainty.
        Uncertainty is the need for the unknown, change, and new stimuli. At its core, it is a need designed to incentivize exploring new environments. It may seem counterintuitive that the brains of so many animals, including ours, incentivize new stimuli. The opposite is more understandable; a familiar environment we regularly encounter has demonstrated in an experimentally reliable way that there are no threats so our mind should incentivize us to stay put right? It does that too, but then why the opposite? The first reason is that a species is a collective, not an individual. An entirely predictable species makes an easy target for predators, as predators adapt to the patterns demonstrated in their prey. Also, in the event of a rapid environmental shift, having everyone stay in one area is a bad idea, it would be better if the members of the species were more spread out and that requires the exploration of areas outside of one’s birthplace. Additionally, having groups remain separate limits a disease’s ability to wipe out everyone. All in all, it’s game theory, as individuals our odds of surviving are highest when we stick to what we know but the calculus shifts entirely when survival is calculated as a part of a collective, and thus species that experiment are the ones that survive in the long run. The second reason for uncertainty is that it allows us to learn behaviors earlier on in life that are not encoded instinctually. For example, a wolf pup is not born fully socialized. He may know how to drink milk, flinch, and cry but that is not enough to be a functional member of a pack. Take hunting, how does a pup learn to hunt? He does so by watching the older pack members do so and then emulates it. Not on prey the first time, at first “hunting” is done in a safe environment through play with other pups or even older pack members. Through play, said puppies also learn to moderate their own aggression towards pack members, work as a team, establish territory, read body language, stalk, respect hierarchy, howl, and even run. If their minds never incentivized the emulation of other wolves’ stories through play, how would they ever mature into wolves? We, as humans, generally have one of if not the longest dependency periods of any animal, which means a lower percentage of the behaviors we need to embody to be a functional member of society is encoded into us at birth; almost all of it must be learned. There are many more reasons but the last one I will quickly highlight is so that we can mature enough to recognize that other people exist. I am always brought back to a funny study my teacher showed me back in AP Psychology where some psychologists asked a bunch of three-year-olds with brothers if they have a brother. Expectedly, most of them said yes, but when they were asked if their brother had a brother or sister they consistently said no. The fact that they are the sibling of their brother has not been processed for them yet. This natural inclination for an entirely self-serving mentality that has been the norm for billions of years does not work to incentivize community-building and social behavior built on reciprocal relationships, uncertainty seeking behaviors such as play and storytelling is how we build empathy. This is just why we have uncertainty as a need, the next step is to detail its expression. 
        Uncertainty is most obviously expressed in the form of boredom and interest. Boredom is generally caused by a low-arousal state in our brain and is designed to get us to do literally anything engaging with ourselves. When there is a severe lack of new stimuli, we get bored, one of the most overwhelming urges in the human experience. Conversely, we have interest, which is much more complicated to understand. What must first be understood before defining interest is that new things can only be understood in the context of things we know. For example, we were not born understanding multiplication, so when we went to kindergarten the teacher first taught us that if we have two apples next to another two apples, we can determine how many apples are in front of us by using a “+” symbol to combine the number of apples in each set to get four apples. Only with that context can a teacher explain that if you have two sets of two apples you can put the “x” symbol between the number of sets and the number of apples in each set and get a result that is the same as adding. Adding, apples, sets, and numbers are all prerequisite things that need to be understood prior to the subjugation of the new thing we call multiplication. Interest appears when a number of prerequisite things that we already know how to interact with are used to subjugate something novel. This seems like an intuitively idiotic explanation as this just sounds like learning. School is infamously boring to most and it involves a lot of learning whereas a fun, stupid conversation can be immensely interesting; so what gives? This seeming discrepancy is because interest comes from a change in how we interact with a thing that is otherwise personally important to us. School is not fun because “multiplication” is only important to you insofar as it can prevent you from getting punished. If you want to be a doctor because you concluded from within yourself that it aligns with who you want to become, suddenly making sense of protein folding isn’t quite as boring. Conversations are interesting because there is something in the situation that is important to you. Maybe you are having said conversation with a friend, in such a case any conversation can be interesting. When your friend says something, it is new. Yes, it may have to do with a topic discussed hundreds of times before but you do not know what is about to come out of their mouth. Making sense of this new thing that is the point they are trying to make and finding a way to act in response to it is interesting pretty much no matter what it is if the person is a source of connection for you. Even conversations with strangers can be interesting if the topic is the thing in the situation that is personally interesting. I think a good way to tell how connected you are to someone is the range of topics you discuss with them, if conversations are only interesting when they are certain topics that you share a preexisting, mutual interest in, then the shared story of the topic is what drives the interest, not the person. The ideal conversation is an interesting topic with a person you are connected to. So learning is not the right way to interpret the cause of interest; a better way is to think of it as a moment of subjugation (realization) that incites a new interaction with a thing otherwise personally important to the individual. Note that an interaction is composed of a thing, need, and an action, normally it is the action that changes but there is no reason why it can’t be one of the other two components. Do not confuse the relatively lighthearted nature of the topic with lack of importance, uncertainty is essential to our development.
        The urge to play is the single most important one to the development of a young mind. I mentioned earlier that a baby is not born with the ability to do nearly anything necessary to contribute to the group, all of that had to be learned. If we did not have the urge to go out and explore the unknown, we would never interact with the world enough to be competent, which is why babies are born as uncertainty craving machines. The neuroplasticity present as a baby allows for the creation of neural connections (subjugation of the world) en masse at a level we are unable to replicate later in life. This also made reality so interesting, which incentivizes us to engage with it fully and reinforce what we learn. Play is essential because it involves both the full engagement of the mind in an activity without a predictable outcome and the continual reinforcement of something we learned previously. As babies, playing with objects like blocks allows them to put said objects in their mouth, look at them from different angles, or drop them to see what sound it make, this helps them subjugate reality, build a story of how to interact with the world, build hand-eye coordination, and learn how to make use of their senses. Toys like rattles, dominoes, or rocking chairs teach cause and effect, an absolutely essential and foundational story to the exploration and experience of reality that many of us take for granted but a baby does not understand. There are also skill-based games like drawing. Say there is a crayon in the house, a baby may press it on paper hard enough to leave a mark by accident and then continue doing that. They may realize that the right block can fit in the right hole and get engaged in finding out what shape matches with what. When we are babies all of reality matters to us because we’re not truncating the unnecessary, so anything that allows us to change the way we interact with it is hyper-engaging insofar as it is self-motivated. This self-motivation is also important as they learn to make decisions, play is a baby’s first taste of independence and autonomy as individuals. This exploration of autonomy is best exemplified in the games that have roles, be it career-oriented ones like Firefighter or Cops And Robbers, culture-oriented ones like House, or simply games with roles like Hide-and-seek, Simon Says, or Statues. Additionally, the overcoming of the fear associated with moving to a new house, being in a new place, or animals comes from play. Play not only familiarizes the kid with what is feared and allows him to change his story to suit a less fearful reality, but it also helps reinforce the idea that the way to overcome fear is to face it; the only way out is through. Everything above is the expression of the idea that uncertainty provides us with a near-insatiable hunger for new stories, and those stories create well-rounded individuals.
        This does not end, we continue to hunger for new stories. As children we never treated humiliation, failure, or injury with the same reality as we do as adults, so many of us became jaded and sought to satiate uncertainty through partying, videos, fictional stories, movies, shows, or games. Not to say these are worse in any way, but they are opted for not in conjunction with but in the place of mastering a skill, writing a story, being vulnerable, or telling the truth. This is because by putting everything you are into something, everything you are can be rejected, and while it may hurt some of us more than others it is nearly always enough to have us opt for the risk-free options as they are less tiring. Note, that it is the need for certainty, significance, or connection that contributes to that tiring element of it, but that is not a conversation for now. What is are other people. From the perspective of certainty, other people are generally a source of unpredictability but some are a source of familiarity or reassurance. Uncertainty loves unique people though; they are a bottomless pit of stories to absorb and integrate. Because we live in the same world, insofar as there is no barrier to understanding it is fairly easy to follow someone else’s perspective (which is a story). Insofar as this instinct is not overridden by another urge, we love the perspective of others on matters that are important to us because it is definitionally interesting to use their reasoning to challenge the way we interact with reality. Just as much as a game or a show provides an element of unpredictability that garners interest through the appeal to things we personally value followed by an unpredictable unfolding of events that mirrors reality, conversations follow the same principle but are targetted and engage with you. Other people are endlessly interesting for more reasons than I can ever write, but for the sake of uncertainty, they are a black box that provides resistance to our preconceived stories and whose interaction with needs to be modulated in real time.
        So how do we build a healthy relationship with uncertainty? As generic as this will sound, build sophistication in thought but stay a kid at heart. “As children, we never treated humiliation, failure, or injury with the same reality as we do as adults.” It is a long process to undo the damage that our various failures caused us. Our needs for certainty, significance, and connection become more dominant with age because of this, and along with it, we inhibit our own interest and curiosity because satiating uncertainty challenges the other needs and is risky. If we told the whole truth every time instead of manipulating our words in pursuit of an outcome, how would other people’s image of us change? If we put our effort, heart, and soul into writing a story or mastering a skill, then isn’t every loss or rejection that of our entire being? If we said what we really thought, wouldn’t they leave? Like a child, uncertainty is a delicate thing; a moment’s doubt ruins the magic. The only way to build a healthy relationship with uncertainty is to stop any resistance to acting upon it by “feeding the White Wolf”. In a month I will create a whole essay on the stories of the White and Black Wolves, but what's relevant to this is that every thought reinforces one of two stories, the aspirational White Wolf or the inhibitory Black Wolf. Each wolf has its time and place, and the time/place in question is reinforced through the thoughts we have in that situation. If every time we consider climbing a tree we have the thought of “Should I climb this tree?” or “What are my odds of injuring myself?”, then we are feeding the Black Wolf’s story. The next time we consider it we will have some other excuse and over time that becomes a habit with chains that are difficult to break. We are predisposed as a society and as creatures to err on the side of caution, so we treat logic as a tool to determine whether or not we should do something, which is Black Wolf thinking. White Wolf thinking is “How should I climb this tree?” or “What should I do while I am up there?”. This is an entirely underexplored half of logical thinking that allows uncertainty to thrive. It is a view of logic not as “whether or not I should do x” but as “how should I do x?”, a shift that feeds interest rather than stopping it. So be mindful of the fact that every thought feeds one of the two wolves, and explore living the overwhelming majority of life in White Wolf thinking. Do not stop yourself; do embarrassing things, ask people out, get hurt, fuck up, and smile through it all! Every time we do any of the above we become braver and reinforce our curiosity. That is how we build a successful relationship with uncertainty. 
        That is all, see you all sometime by January 30 for Essay 5: Problems!