manifesto

the bug

While on guard post duty, a small bug came up to me and started climbing up my boots. Cameras are supposed to be disabled on base, so it took me a while to figure out what the little scuttler actually was. It ended up being, disappointingly, a stink bug.

I shook it off a few times. It continued to try, but eventually it started avoiding my foot, climbing around rather than over it.

But how'd it know? How smart is this thing?

In some minimal sense, it classified my boot as a threat and knew it needed to change direction. Survival likely accounts for nearly everything its nervous system is built to do.

But what does it not know? Probably everything else.

It has no concept of a "foot," a "human," or my intentions in the way I do. It can't conceive that I have thoughts, memories, and plans extending across years. Definitely not that I'm sitting here thinking about it.

The bug exists in my world but has no framework to understand most of my world. Entire parts of my reality lie outside what its nervous system can process—not because it hasn't learned them yet, but because it probably lacks the capacity to represent them at all.

How am I any different, as a human?

There are probably forces shaping my life that I can't conceive of, and frameworks structuring reality that I lack the bandwidth to recognize. They may lie completely outside my puny little brain.

If the bug's perceptual and cognitive apparatus limits what dimensions of reality it can access, then mine limits what dimensions I can access. This seems almost trivially true.

But even though it seems obvious, we mostly live as if it isn't.

the bandwidth problem

I thought about it, and how we're limited seems to come down to two broader domains. I'll refer to them as the "surface"—limitations we're aware we have—and the "underground": concepts we don't even know we're missing.

Some well-known surface limitations include physical and cognitive limits. We only see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, while sharks can detect electrical fields. Learning quantum physics is fun because it feels like your mind is being blown, but that might just be a symptom of a bigger problem: despite being able to understand it, I'm ultimately incapable of intuiting it.

There are also conceptual limitations. Medieval humans couldn't conceive of relativity. Even educated people in the 1800s couldn't have thought in terms of information theory. Rather than just lacking knowledge, it seems as if the thoughts themselves were unthinkable at the time.

But what about the underground?

Either we aren't aware that the problems exist, or we understand them through a very limited lens. What if we perceive time under a suboptimal bandwidth, so time isn't what it actually seems to be? What if our modes of expression—verbal language, body language, and everything else—are severely limited, and we're only receiving a fraction of what could theoretically pass between two people?

By definition, I can't tell you what we're actually missing.

Like the bug, we're probably just doing human things, unaware of what we're missing.

the response

I do think very valuable work happens within frameworks. As founders, we think we've found something meaningful when we discover a technical possibility or insight that others missed and turn it into something useful. Likewise, scientists work within the scientific method. It's how progress actually happens, and you need constraints to do anything.

But I think it's still reasonable to ask whether some people should simultaneously take the time to question the frameworks themselves.

Consciousness, for example, often seems to be set aside because it's "too hard." That may be a productive simplification that lets us make progress, but unless I'm overly naive, it's still a simplification.

How would you know if you were in a local maximum? By definition, it looks optimal from within.

Right now, I'm not any different. Gold tries to pick up on patterns existing systems miss. We're trying to make more of the person visible to a system without giving the company their underlying personal data.

That doesn't solve the bandwidth problem in its fullest sense. But it comes from the same instinct: there's probably more there than the current system knows how to see.

what can i do?

Yeah, now that we've come this far, life might seem pretty dark. But I'm pretty optimistic.

We're not like the puny bug. I can work on important problems using existing frameworks because that's fulfilling on its own. But there's a big difference between noticing where contradictions appear or frameworks break and simply assuming the framework is complete.

So I should do both: push what we have as far as it can go, while staying alert for where it stops working.

my purpose

If all of this started from the bug, that would be pretty darn sick. But in all honesty, I would say it also came from observing, over time, how people around me perceive their lives.

A limited bandwidth's implications make me uncomfortable. But within our current bandwidth, life is still beautiful and worth living, and capable people should work on the most important things they can find.

Environments with solitude and distance from social performance also seem to create conditions for this kind of thinking. Military service, especially in confined and isolated environments, did that for me in a way school didn't. It made it easier to notice how many things feel overwhelmingly important only because your immediate environment treats them that way.

This leaves me with a purpose in two parts:

I find sufficient purpose in solving important problems for humanity, using whatever bandwidth we currently have.

My ultimate purpose is to solve problems we can't yet see, which requires expanding our bandwidth to perceive them.

I don't know exactly where that leads. I guess that's kind of the point.

But unlike the bug, at least we can hold the question.

Eric