Each and every one of us operates on top of a vast network of experientially accumulated predictions. We wake up, we experience, we make sense, we act, we go back to sleep. Apart from the baseline constraints imposed by our own existential exposure — securing food, water, shelter and safety for the day — how we make sense and act beyond that baseline depends on our own personal and unique histories.
That history accumulates within us in the shape of cross-layer and interconnected priors in abstraction. They are resolved encounters with uncertainty that become metabolically efficient survival proxies, allowing rapid future classification and action.
Our base nervous system is formed inside a particular environment—warm, nourished, sheltered, safe, connected. The first massive prediction error our system encounters is when we are removed from that environment—we are born. Suddenly, we are confronted with an overwhelming slew of incoming signal. Yet we carry one foundational prior linked to a presence we’ve grown accustomed to over the course of nine months that endures: mother is survival. In the tragic cases where the mother does not survive child-birth that prediction gradually transfers to the particular presence sustaining survival.
As the weeks, months, and years pass, we progressively extrapolate that survival prior into the wider environment. As our nervous system develops, it is shaped by observing how our most important experiential presence is itself embedded within a wider network of cause and effect involving other agents. The rules, behaviors and expectations of that network are naturally assimilated into that safety prior over time by proxy. That’s why norms, traditions, ideologies, cultural narratives, religions and values are so suspiciously local.
They are proxies we are born into for how to make sense and behave in order to secure individual and collective survival. For how to stay warm, nourished, sheltered, safe and connected. But they are shared and local abstractions of reality, not reality itself. That’s why the frog is starting to boil, we’ve come to inflict actual, global and objective consequence while our nervous systems evolved and are raised to prioritize perceived, local and subjective consequence. Even if the discrepancy between perceived and actual consequence has become grotesquely distorted, it’s that powerful.
As we grow up in our own corner of the world and ingest the version we happen to be a part of, we self-adapt to that version in order to seek, maintain and defend relational coherence first and symbolic coherence later as our own conscious narrative about ourselves and our place in the world forms. We receive warmth and praise when we meet the expectations we encounter, we receive coldness and scolding when we don’t. Depending on the unique makeup of our developmental phase and ongoing demand in daily life, a more or less limiting corridor of perception is formed.
It’s a self-policed space we maintain inside ourselves to maintain perceived safety, as we unconsciously and semi-consciously shut down thoughts, feelings and possibilities that fall outside that space. Our inner critic is merely the loudest and most recognizable expression of that policing. That space is made up of both personal and universally shared priors. It influences what signals arrive in conscious awareness at all, which ones we associate negatively and immediately circumnavigate out of awareness, how we make sense of those we do engage actively, what we can imagine, how we engage the world and what we think is possible.
I am currently developing a service where I create an anonymised, tailored map of a customer’s web of experientially acquired predictions about perceived consequence. The goal is to provide a working map of where current priors potentially distort or constrain perception. It can then serve as a basis for recalibrating those predictions against actual consequence, depending on where one wants to get to. I aim for it to be a cooperative artifact that evolves as it is worked with, leading to lasting and liberating change. It’s an ambitious project, but it’s also the exact kind of personalised application my work and this Substack have been building toward from the very beginning. 🌱
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