As much as I may be a strong proponent, thinking is not always good.

Workouts are good for the body. But when you’re feeling sore or tired, thinking can stop you from doing what you know will be beneficial.

Amid one of my workouts, I would push myself to achieve the target without thinking.

Your arguments can be pretty convincing. You are the easiest person to fool.

Nowadays, I do the workouts without thinking. I have to chant it to myself to numb that philosopher who may stick its head out to convince me otherwise.

I use it as a forced function, without thinking. I know the outcomes are good, so I have to silence anything that stops me from achieving them.

It’s an investment of sorts. One first thinks about events where thinking can stop you from making steps towards your goal. Then you silence yourself from thinking ourselves out of it.

You never have to think about it again. A one-time, guaranteed return on investment.

In Chris Voss’s work, Never Split the Difference, he gives specific examples of why labelling helps in negotiations. The idea is to separate the objective individual from the emotion. To name is to conquer, and labelling has a way of retracting emotions from our limbic centres in the brain and tackling them objectively.

Controlling the emotional, evolutionary traps is helpful for tactfully approaching negotiations from a more solid ground. This is what happens when psychologists or psychiatrists talk with their clients. Designing the environment to offer a calm ambience and using a soothing voice to show collectedness aids the patient in sharing their story. Here’s where labelling comes in handy.

In this scenario, a shrink tries to negotiate with the patient to pin down the troubles they have and the emotions surrounding them. Labelling it gives a clear path to the solution. It seems pretty straightforward.

Conditions are therefore named to aid in their management. Bipolar disease will have a clear treatment option. Schizoaffective disorder will be managed differently. Despite our emotions having the inchoate structure of similarity, labelling shows how each is different. These can have positive outcomes. The first and largely underappreciated value is knowing such a name exists in the first place.

Say you have noticed someone close to you having mood swings of late. You don’t know how best to describe it. When you share it with your psychiatrist, they spit out a name. They then describe the symptoms that match the scenes you had to put up with. That’s the first and perhaps the most important feature of labelling — acknowledging existence paves the way for a management strategy.

This is all good, except for the fact that it can be exploited.

Psychiatry and concept creep

Psychology has been a notorious topic because of a replication crisis that seems difficult to resolve. Psychiatry, a different field altogether, faces more difficult problems.

For instance, the brain disease model of mental illness posits that patients have a problem with their brains, which can be solved with certain medication.

The model asserts that certain parts of the brain are irremediable, and a cocktail of pills offers the solution. This alleged chemical imbalance needs nudging to bring it back to its proper equilibrium. The poster child for this mental disease, as an imbalance, is the serotonin depression theory. It has failed to stand the scientific test of validity.

A 2022 umbrella review showed that the brain is not broken. There is no imbalance. However, Christina Buttons remarks that one in five individuals in the USA reports having been diagnosed with a mental illness. The idea behind an imbalance reeks of the humorism theory.

Before our understanding of the body improved, it was believed that a healthy body was one in balance with the four known liquids (humors) — blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. Galen, the historically famous physician, believed cancer was caused by black bile. Anatomists and surgeons pored through bodies in a futile search for the source of this bile. They didn’t find it. They never have. However, for centuries thereafter, this did not kill the theoretical framework.

In hospitals, cans would hang outside wards and stick adjacent to patients because bloodletting was believed to be a proper intervention to return the body’s humors into balance. This historic period in healthcare should be repeated for its lessons. There are several.

For starters, the false humorism theory eventually gets debunked. Science has a self-correction mechanism to weed out the chaff from the bran.

The other is that a theory supported by authority figures does not go down without a fight. Although later “purified” by Galen, it took years for the medical field to abandon Hippocrates’ theory of humors. To date, the brain model of disease is still upheld because it was once endorsed by professional associations such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). We were taught the same in medical school.

One of the biggest problems with the labelling is that it lacks a scientific medical test. Say you are schizophrenic. The diagnosis is made from a set criteria that is regularly updated. The bible of psychiatric diagnosis is known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for mental disorders.

The name is telling. Diagnostic is a given. Statistical means collected from several cases before the diagnoses are pruned to a helpful cluster for clinicians to use. A manual because it’s a reference book. It gets updated regularly, with the most recent one including new conditions such as prolonged grief disorder.

While the mode of labelling these diseases is statistical, the interventions may be difficult to standardize. A physician will notice that your thyroid hormones are imbalanced using a specific thyroid profile test. Three hormones — TSH, T3, and T4 — are enough to know from a baseline point of view where the condition lies. They then offer their solution. From knowing the normal, we can diagnose the abnormal with a valid and replicable test. These tests are largely lacking in psychiatry.

What we have, however, are labels.

Arguably, diseases and the interventions gain validity through rigourous statistical testing, but it borrows from clear medical tests. In its absence, the DSM risks throwing a couple of names to the public, which can be exploited. Indeed, they have been.

Today, a single sad episode during the day, which affects so much of your work, will be labelled “depression.” Happiness after working out or the joy of getting a promotion could risk getting the label of “mania.” Since our distraction economy has fried our attention spans, not for the worse, though, most label their issues as “ADHD.” You could like things in a certain order, but your friends will be quick to ask if you have “OCD.” These words get exchanged and overused online like an open market.

A single concept then begins to creep across domains previously untouched. In the absence of clear tests of demarcation, taking the offensive position against them can label you as either ableist or elitist. These are some of the worst labels. I dislike them because, as Chris Voss has shown, once you have attached a label to a problem, you can now attack it with seeming objectivity.

Bullying, for instance, was a physical thing. Its effects could turn mental. Now, cyberbullying is a thing. Social media and the Internet have allowed people to be mean to each other without getting punched in the face. I am open to correction, but as much as words can be hurtful, I doubt there can be two individuals who can objectively define cyberbullying and have their definitions match. They will likely give an example of what it is and then agree with each other.

The WHO defines cyberbullying as bullying with the use of digital technologies. A concept that was once physically defined is now digital.

Bullying, as we have always known it, is appreciated by an imbalance of power and ability. The bigger or stronger guy could pick on the smaller or weaker one. The victim could then report being hurt. No scientific test. We have to rely on one’s interpretation of the act.

Therein lies a problem. We cannot know how genuine someone is regarding someone’s acts. Did the words shared in the group hurt you? Were they direct or general? Does that account for cyberbullying? How can that be established? What is the reliable feature of genuine cyberbullying? I doubt we have a solid definition.

Enter another label — passive-aggressive. Its use hardly comes with objections.

Where and when I grew up, certain words didn’t exist. A rich vocabulary that includes words such as cyberbullying and passive-aggressive is indirect evidence of one’s education and possibly background. A well-off background. I doubt there are people in the slum who know what passive-aggressive means. The reason is that, in their lives, one is either aggressive or isn’t. There is nothing passive about aggression. And yet, the oxymoronic juxtaposition of the words continues to be used to label behaviours.

Concept creep is the idea of a concept creeping into domains they previously never existed. It is defined as a semantic expansion, mostly of harmful behaviours into less severe actions. For instance, in the past, bullying could leave a physical scar. Besides a digital footprint, cyberbullying does not leave any such physical evidence.

The author who coined the idea of concept creep adds:

Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.

Labels, as soon as they are known, can get exploited. Most times, unintentionally. A malicious individual will use them to make themselves appear the victim.

Massive exchange of these labels, without proper tests, leads billions of people to cultivate a victim mentality. Awareness of labels has this negative side effect. Just as well, it has its upsides.

PTSD vs PTG

So in God’s Son we trust
’Cause they know I’ma give ’em what they want
They lookin’ for a hero
I guess that makes me a hero

— Nas and Keri Hilson

We practically know what PTSD stands for. A new one I recently encountered was PTG — Post-traumatic growth. Let’s dive further into these two examples.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a simple label that demands a deeper analysis than the surface-level one we’re used to. Post means after; traumatic, to mean trauma-induced; stress shows multiple levels of uneasiness and collectively presents as a disorder.

What level of harm does one have to be exposed to to be labelled as trauma? This is a highly subjective question with an even more subjective answer.

These murky grounds deny the chance of ever creating a solid definition of trauma to warrant the objective labelling of PTSD. What we can tentatively agree on is injury. At some point in one’s life, they were injured, and the recollection of the event evokes uneasiness and stress. And yet, stress is the reason heroes emerge from the hero’s journey.

Crucial in this journey is a traumatic event that could have shaped an individual to take a victim mentality or one that repurposes their direction towards growth. Post-traumatic growth.

I can safely say that all heroes in movies have gone through PTG. They know they can survive other harsh conditions because they survived certain similar conditions. But we need to clarify the difference between trauma and stress.

Trauma and stress are distinguishable from a time dimension. Trauma is a post-hoc label. It is given after an event. Stress is a present label. It is an ongoing event. Traumatic events are highly memorable. They can leave scars, physical or, metaphorically speaking, mental. Stressful events have a high evaporation rate. You could have gone hiking over the weekend. Certain paths proved more stressful than others, but by the time you summit a mountain, the exact points are largely a blur.

Stress tends to evolve into trauma if unchecked. If the weight you’re lifting at the gym results in an abdominal hernia, that is a traumatic event. A painful and permanent reminder. It resulted in injury. Injurious events leave marks. And yet, even then, traumatic moments can prove highly instructive in one’s life.

Epictetus lived a great part of his life as a slave. He also had a limp, a permanent mark we are made to believe was caused by his master. He did not let these events define him. He used them to establish a life that was admired by the most powerful man decades later, Marcus Aurelius. A slave shaped the life of an emperor.

The same emperor used the stoic lessons to survive multiple plagues, an attempted coup, burying several of his children, and accusations of an unfaithful spouse. These are vicissitudes that could leave anyone traumatized.

Marcus Aurelius was able to overcome these events largely because he was aware of them. From his daily meditations, he attempted to label them. He may not have known there was something such as PTG, but he knew there was someone who survived hardships and never let them define them. Awareness of certain labels can uplift as much as downgrade.

From a probabilistic point of view, heroes are outliers. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus are remembered because they overcame their difficult obstacles. A leg up in overcoming challenges is the awareness that some stresses need not turn into traumas that leave us victims. They can be harnessed into fuel, preferably for the better.

Mean people will continue to lurk. So we cannot always claim that some labels need to be expunged. Hurtful words can be exchanged between two individuals. Awareness of these mean people is also an advantage. When someone is known to sadistically enjoy seeing others suffer, how we react to them is also upon us.

What I’m trying to say is…

Nas’ 9th studio album is untitled. Intentionally so. We don’t need a label to conquer an idea, because a label can be used for or against someone. We should not use them flagrantly. Without a name for the album, Nas still conveys a message: not all labels are necessary.

It may be important at this time in our lives to be responsible for the words we exchange with others. Brushing over one’s actions and using psychiatric labels as shields is not the best way to develop genuine, meaningful relationships.

We can take the example of medication stored on shelves or chemicals stored in a lab to label appropriately, for each and every one’s sake. It takes work. It’s necessary work. So let’s work before assigning that label.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Organisms have survived for billions of years because they self-correct.

Consider one of my biggest obsessions — the first organism. It had no reference point other than itself. It needed to make its way around the universe and learn as fast and efficiently as possible. Growth was not the primary goal. It wasn’t even to reproduce. Survival was. To persist. Perhaps the most important feat it needed to achieve is to understand and recognize itself. From there, it could distinguish self from non-self. In the event of any damage, it could then work toward self-correction.

These traits have followed us and all other living creatures to the point where we have extended them into our systems. A phone needs a recharge. A computer needs rest. Markets close for the weekend. A year has leave days. These are cycles we have incorporated into our work-life for self-correction. Hardware reboots like sleep to self-correct. Meeting with friends on a Friday evening after a crazy week. Going home to the embrace of your partner. Calling your plug to indulge in something for the evening.

Self-correction is a sustaining mechanism. In systems dynamics, it is the balancing feedback. Since systems can grow, if left unchecked, they can grow past the point of equilibrium and into eventual collapse. In the AI age, this is a likelihood.

Self-correction is warranted, especially when its absence can be catastrophic. Consider reproduction and death rates, the engine of evolution according to natural selection. In the absence of death rates, organisms would reproduce exponentially, depleting the resources. The collapse of the entire ecosystem, the organisms, and the resources follows. In-built mechanisms such as child mortalities, competition, adaptation, and natural calamities — all these contribute toward preventing ecosystem collapse.

Our planet has self-corrective mechanisms. After winter comes summer. During the equinox, when the sun is smack above our heads, that’s when we have heavy rainfall. With extreme heat, we need extreme downpour. Heat without cooling would have turned our planet into a dead one, like our neighbours in the solar system.

So the question is…

Does AI self-correct?

Yes. It does.

Then why am I concerned?

Because it is not the self-correction we are used to.

Usually, when the systems we are used to are overwhelmed, they crash. When you have 50 tabs open in your browser, it hangs. Information overload precedes filter failure. Staying awake for over 24 hours can lead to information overload and eventual system failure. You collapse. To function like a normal human being, you need to balance working with resting hours. You need to self-correct.

In contrast, AI can work overtime. More than that, it encourages information. The more you feed it, the better it becomes. That is the self-correction it does. It checks what it has learned compared to what it is getting, and adjusts accordingly. This kind of self-correction is different from what we have always known.

Living systems know the stakes when they don’t self-correct. It’s death. Since AI is not living, it does not recognize death. The self-correction that matters to AI is the kind that involves ruthless improvement by consuming oceanic-like information. Therein lies the problem.

Not all information is credible. Practically, it is easier to make than to validate information. The balance weighs heavily on reliable information and discarding or dismissing the false ones. Most of this information is online.

We don’t need to imagine a world where most of the online contributors are bots. It’s already happening. Authors are publishing over 200 books in a year using AI. Ghost artists are writing AI-written songs at a faster rate. The wave of AI slop continues to rise, but the self-correction does not rise to match it.

Poetically, you can see the same trend with its biggest proponents. At some point, Oracle and Nvidia contributed large sums of money to fund OpenAI. Economists, however, didn’t foresee ways in which LLMs can sustainably reap profits any time soon. ChatGPT will have to start including ads. Asking for more money without a corrective mechanism to prevent the bubble from popping results in the collapse of the bubble.

Also, human beings bullshit themselves. We are born into the world. A couple, sometimes the mother without the father, gives a child a name. It doesn’t even know it has been baptized with this name until later. The recognition begins through induction when everyone around it continues to use the name. Perhaps that is its name, it might think. We have no way of knowing how it recognizes that the name it was given is its name.

That’s bullshitting oneself.

Granting an alien form of intelligence the capacity to speak our language and deductive logic could never objectively defend any of our names. We bullshit ourselves into believing our name is ours. I guess the same applies to pets, such as dogs, which respond to the names we give them. There is no self-correction needed.

AI can bullshit itself. It does so many times. We call it hallucination. It confabulates information and presents it to the world as “fact.” Efforts have been made to reduce these issues. But up to what point?

Today, searches begin with AI summaries. Summaries are usually welcome because they can grant each of us the power to bullshit our way around arguments. A quick search can arm you with a defence against your boss or a panel of interviewers. There is no self-correction mechanism. The stakes do not include death. AI becomes the law. AI becomes God.

Now, think of the bible. We have advanced our understanding of the universe, science, logic, and philosophy, but the holy book has not changed one bit. The book has no self-corrective mechanism. Does it collapse? Yes and no.

Yes, because it collapses in terms of validity. More and more people begin to see it for what it is — a tool to control and establish order, as the Durants have aptly pieced it in their summary of human history. No, because it does not grow like other systems.

As for AI, it grows. It continues to produce more and more of its work with fractions of hallucination that accumulate over time. A validation crisis mounts as more information and unchecked hallucinations are produced than validated. It will likely result in a worse case of replication crisis because there is no solid foundation to defend previous hallucinations besides references from previous AI outputs. Self-correction becomes nearly impossible.

When too much information is produced, the burden of truth becomes too heavy to bear. Self-correction is forgotten. No, abandoned. AI now becomes like the bible, but different. Unlike the bible, AI grows and self-validates. It does not self-correct.

Feeding itself, AI injects sterility into its output. This introduces what Picasso called sterility in the work. Previous researchers have given a name to this kind of collapse: model collapse. IBM describes it succinctly:

Model collapse refers to the declining performance of generative AI models that are trained on AI-generated content.

Once AI has consumed all the data it has been fed, it does not think outside of it. Creativity decays. Model collapse then leads to mode collapse. That is, reduced diversity.

Think of mode collapse like a child who has never had enough input from the world to prune its creativity. It can create monsters and imaginary friends as it so wishes. As it grows and consumes more information, this creativity reduces. Easter bunnies die. Fairy tales lose their lustre. God does not have that long beard we think of. Our imagination is now reduced to our current understanding. Humans cannot fly, unless in fan fiction. That is mode collapse — the collapse of a whole distribution into a few points.

And when you think we’re done, another problem appears — overfitting. The problem with overfitting is that a model becomes poor at other data sets outside the particular data set that was used to train it. Unfortunately for AI, it continues to change itself based on its regurgitation and consumption of its output. To create a disturbing image from the wise words of King Solomon, it’s like a dog going back to eat its vomit.

Now let’s bring the pieces of the puzzle together to see the picture. AI makes more online contributions, more information gets produced, but validation hardly happens. AI platforms result in model collapse, which eventually turns into mode collapse, and then with it comes overfitting, to make sense of the reduced diversity. Anyone who questions these supposed oceans of data is considered a charlatan or stupid. I mean, how dare you question all the data scoured by AI?

But what kind of data did it consume in the first place? Vomit. Misinformation thus floods our continuous online experience. In a word, noise. Noise is sensory input that harmfully preoccupies our senses.

Noise usually doesn’t make sense. We are so averse to noise that we would rather cling to anything that seems familiar. What is familiar readily gains our trust in contrast to the noise one tries to escape. When you don’t know who to trust, anything — literally anything — that resembles trust, even by a sliver, becomes trustworthy.

“Anything” includes the idea that AI has gone through mountains of data to produce a concise output just for me. And you. How kind of it. However, without self-correction mechanisms, the downstream effect of senseless AI use creates the perfect market for manipulation. I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of world.

The most famous portrait is that of Jesus.

New Christian churches are started all over the world. Numerous couples start families. New converts renovate their surroundings. Then they hang the portrait of Jesus.

Nowhere in history do we have an idea of what Jesus looked like. But we have narrowed down our concept of what we think he might look like by the countless portraits. A Caucasian with amazing hair and a dazzling, gentle smile, in white, sometimes raising his second and third fingers, has convinced scientists, professors, and thinkers all over the world. Surely, it must be Jesus.

The world has bullshitted its way into convincing itself that Jesus can only look like that.

Botched versions of the same exist on matatus throughout Kenya and graffiti paintings in Nairobi’s streets. They are a far cry from the immaculate versions hanging in many homes and offices. Yet, we recognize it as it is. There is no self-correction mechanism. And yet it continues to grow. Without the self-correction, it is acknowledged as the truth. Without question, so much so that nobody bothers to raise any objection. It’s like the air we breathe or water to the fish. It has managed to convince us of the bullshit.

Now, assume AI advances beyond our current understanding. Mathematicians who employ its help to solve decades-old problems are finding the solutions, at first, difficult to decipher, but as they proceed, elegant every step of the way. Mathematicians are some of the smartest people alive.

An alien intelligence (which, by the way, if abbreviated, becomes AI) that is difficult for some of the smartest people to crack should alarm us.

We cannot step in to correct what we do not understand. However, the evidence of elegance in previous efforts to break apart the meaning of the solutions offered by AI may convince those responsible for AI’s output that they are consistent. And what we cannot understand or change is likely to remain as law if, and especially if, it’s supported by the world’s brilliant minds.

The funny side of this story is you don’t need to have it supported by bright minds; you just have to convert most of the world into dumb ones. And if unchecked, then AI will replace God, the bible, law, and most importantly, the need to correct.

J. Cole has already echoed his concerns and posed a question:

I seen babies turn fiends, addicted to the screen
That dad shares, cashiers replaced by machines
Don’t buy, subscribe so you can just stream
Your content like rent, you won’t own a thing
Before long, all the songs the whole world sings
Will be generated by latest of AI regimes
As all of our favorite artists erased by it scream
From the wayside, “Ayy, whatever happened to human beings?”

Indeed, whatever happened to human beings?

What I’m trying to say is…

Self-correction is a protective measure.

Sacrifice it, and we live in a fake world. Science has an in-built self-corrective mechanism. It’s why scientists ascribe to it. As does analytical philosophy. Blind faith does not.

AI tends to flood anyone who prompts it with convincing information. Users don’t need a lot of it to believe it. Its output eventually gets shared as the gospel truth, like the portrait of Jesus.

I attend quizzes with my friends every other week. Some teams like to argue they are correct based on what AI tells them, even when it’s clear that they may be wrong.

That time I have been worried about, the time without efforts at self-correction, is already here with us.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

I was born and brought up in Nairobi’s Eastlands. Kayole and Komarock, to be specific.

In Eastlands, the teachers we were exposed to had a limited range of potential careers for students. The essays we wrote about our anticipated futures depicted reduced creativity. A doctor. A teacher. An engineer. Maybe a pilot or an air hostess. That was it.

Schools are supposed to be spaces that inform students. Ironically, before enrolling in school, the options were more varied. I wanted to be a professional soccer player. My family members and close friends were the only ones who supported my ambitions. Not my early school teachers.

Years later, career departments bring you back to reality, to your everyday living situations. In high school, they would match campus courses to your strengths and advise which professions you might excel in. It was never that you could be picked by a top football team, despite the same teachers knowing you were good at the sport.

These are what I call endogenous preferences. Societal engravings of what a child can grow to become. Several historic figures have proven successful in revered careers and parents induct their children to take these paths. Sometimes, the parents never had the opportunity to follow their dreams, and wish their children could achieve them on their behalf. From one generation to the next, the cycle continues.

Endogenous preferences are not just the good kind. Even the bad ones apply. They define the range of options for parents and children. Kanye raps:

My Aunt Pam can’t put them cigarettes down
So now my little cousin smokin’ them cigarettes now

This eventually determines the future not only of individuals but also of societies. The bad and the good.

Picture two children. One born in the country’s capital and the other somewhere in the rural area. Neither of them has ever crossed the country to explore the other side. The one born in the city is aware of other professions besides the classical teacher, doctor, engineer options. Growing up knowing only a limited range does not reveal how limiting it is. Thus, endogenous preferences blind individuals and communities.

It’s a two-way street. Children take up these options and apportion their efforts accordingly. Parents also apportion their praise and support to match these endogenous preferences. The leaders and the led become blinded to other existing options. Compared to the one who was born in the city’s capital, both children, should they follow the paths laid out by their parents, will believe they are successful. Endogenous preferences are somewhat similar to the situation of residents inside Plato’s cave.

Autonomy

And nothing lasts forever, but be honest, babe
It hurts, but it may be the only way

— Adam Levine

Success is a perception.

It is either what one feels, regardless of what society may think, or what society says about one’s decisions and luck. Lionel Messi has always been compared to the football greats, but pundits felt he fell short of glory without the most coveted trophy in the game — the World Cup. After he won it, everyone believed that he had checked all boxes.

Through endogenous preferences, society can encroach on one’s autonomy without their knowledge. Messi, for instance, had already achieved what most footballers can only dream of, and yet, the pressure from society and fans weighed heavily on him. Indeed, the whole country looked to him to achieve what Diego Maradona did in 1986.

In the absence of such a heavy burden, individual autonomy has space to breathe. The higher you go, the cooler it becomes. The cooler the space, the more rarefied the air. Breathing space and ability get blunted when society starts to look at you. Perception of success, thus, is largely determined by the individual when the position is not highly regarded by the community, and by the community when the position is of unmatched repute.

That autonomy contributes to one’s success is evident between the two children who were born in different places. Endogenous preferences have to be embraced before one can feel they have succeeded. I wanted to become an electrical engineer. My mother wanted me to become a doctor. I had the ability. Both options were considered successful and highly regarded by my community. I chose medicine and surgery because ex ante, it was a safer bet. The world will always need doctors. At the time, all doctors were deployed and unemployment was unheard of.

More endogenous preferences were induced in us from the moment we enrolled in medical school, such that by the time I had finished, our arms had embraced the career options our lecturers had told us.

As one finishes their internship, the question “What do you want to specialize in?” is pregnant with endogenous preferences. Autonomy, it seems, is a perception of what one was exposed to.

In its full strength, autonomy should mean you can enrol to become a pilot in your seventies. That is far from the case. It also means that children should choose upfront what they wish to become. Children, however, draw inspiration from parents, guardians, and the successful members of the extended family, so that autonomy in this regard, too, is illusory.

What we may think is our decision is largely the options that have been incepted in our brains. Take the example of a supermarket. The Gruen effect shows that a flooding of options can make one think they have bought an item because they wanted to. Or when choosing a subscription option, the company offering the services gives you its preferred tiers. You don’t customize yours. This is the decision architecture. You get the feeling that you have chosen one over the other because that is the slice of autonomy that has been handed to you.

In truth, we can never know the complete extent of autonomy because we have never known it. As an ideal concept, it contrasts with the picture reality draws for us. As it is, everyone seems okay with the manufactured options given to us. Thus, we can begin to see how judges can influence the lives of children when they make the final ruling in custody cases.

Endogenous preferences reveal the subtleties of autonomy and societal growth and development. A society can indeed grow if it nurtures the said preferences to achieve above-average performance. But it would not improve significantly in terms of complexity. It may grow, but it may not develop. Development happens by expanding the options of endogenous preferences.

Consider the two kids. All of them have illusory aspects of autonomy, but the one who grows up in the nation’s capital is aware of other career options compared to the one who has been in the countryside. Development will continue in the urban centre, while it doesn’t in the rural area, unless there is a means of expanding endogenous preferences upcountry.

One way to inject these new options is by sending individuals to the developing centres and having these individuals bring back what they have learned to the countryside. Think of the first person who does this as a footpath, like Barack Obama Sr. As more people follow this path, it naturally turns into a common road. With time, it gets tarmacked. There is little resistance in the flow of people leaving, as compared to those who are coming back.

This road is not fiction. When I was young, the road connecting Misori and Bondo was rough and dirt-ridden. We would board unroadworthy pickups popularly known as “You-Look-Familiar” because we would sit close to each other, facing one another. Nobody could sleep once the long, bumpy journey began. Today, it is tarmacked. The journey takes less than 30 minutes. Misori continues to develop, as does Bondo. Using this physical example, that’s how metaphorical resistance reduces.

Scholarship options, for instance, can introduce these bonding requirements. As much as the individual may want to continue living elsewhere, the need to go back has multiple upsides for the community that raised these lucky ones. It also speaks to autonomy. Society looks up to you. The higher you go, the harder it is to breathe.

By extension, and perhaps counterintuitively, expanding endogenous preferences also expands one’s autonomy. But to increase endogenous preferences, one needs to sacrifice one’s individual autonomy for others to expand theirs. For instance, I may want to become a cardiac anaesthesiologist. For this reason, I fly to Italy for a 10-month fellowship. I love the place. As an art lover, I’m enamoured by the streets and their history. After completing my fellowship, the team gives me an offer to remain. A generous offer, the kind that will change my life completely. My options have been enhanced because of the endogenous preferences in the new space I have been in. Just as much, my autonomy has increased.

I can also decide to work for three years and then broker a deal with them to make annual missions to my hometown. When I go back home, I not only bring myself but a team that addresses congenital cardiac cases. If I had rejected the generous offer and gone home, I might have capped my options, but I would have given a new set of preferences to growing generations. They would know that external fellowships are possible. The option is mine. My autonomy is preserved, even increased in a way, although it might not appear so. Development for my people follows.

Game theory shows that this is a win-win strategy. The community wins, and so does the individual. Win-win options, which vary in degree, are usually the best options.

These paths, between regions with richer endogenous preferences and those with anaemic ones, are, as far as I have described them, separated geographically. Distance is physical. But what if the distance was a question of nodes and edges rather than cities and the means of travel?

Network theories link entities in abstract ways using nodes and edges. In network systems, distance is no longer measured by geographic space but by points of separation. This is the basis of the six degrees of separation — you are six people away from getting to anyone in the world. Distance is now replaced with separation. The footpath that once evolved into a tarmacked road is now a free-fall highway to any part of the world.

Nevertheless, we have to be cautious. Just as we have seen that complete autonomy is an illusion, this highway that Internet connectivity has increased may be an illusion, largely augmented by AI and social media. AI creates individual echo chambers, isolating more than uniting. It can offer more information than social media, but with brains moulded through confirmation bias, it risks creating individual echochambers. With time, traditional villages get replaced by individual-only islands. The effects are unpredictable. Kanye raps:

The things we seen on the screen is not ours

Indeed, a free-fall highway may do little to empower the raised hopes it tends to inspire. It can create awareness of other preferences, but it separates the endogenous part.

Wonderful institutions made by societies have persisted because of self-correcting mechanisms. Persistently being fed material that cannot be validated or that one cannot experience is not the kind of life I would want anyone to lead. It is not a win-win strategy. While AI and social media persist, the individual loses. However, the chance to open the different corners of the world to the rich and diverse endogenous preferences is something I wouldn’t want us to prevent.

What I’m trying to say is…

It really does take a village to raise a child. Conversely, to improve individual autonomy, we have to improve our endogenous preferences.

Careers don’t always have to be fixed. They can evolve and expand. Pushback against new ideas may be dicey, especially when the new option does not have the interests of the community in mind. For instance, AI may be a good thing, but it does not necessarily reveal how blinding it may become. They give the illusion of authority when in reality, they are more self-isolating of one’s opinions.

When we think of increasing opportunities for individuals, endogenous preferences should be taken seriously, as it determines the future of upcoming generations.

That moment when the world realistically turns into a global village will be the time when everyone has similar endogenous preferences.

Will we ever get there, though?

And I heard ’em say
Nothing’s ever promised tomorrow, today

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Creativity is irrational. It has no formula. When it strikes, it strikes.

Yet, the creative ones have to pass their ideas through rational people.

The finance department runs the costs of the creative team. It has to be within budget. Yet, you can never confine the potential returns of a creative feat to a quarterly review.

Jane Austen wrote three of her most famous books, but they did not make her as wildly successful as she was after her death.

With numbers, there’s a need to prove the idea will work before releasing it to the world. It’s only rational. But creative ideas are irrational from their inception to their spread.

Now creativity is being drowned by AI slop. Few creative companies are placing bets on the upcoming talent. The more rational option is to acquire the past copyrights. It guarantees future money. Then continue with movie sequels. Attacks on multiple fronts. How unlucky can one get?

The paralyzing paradox is that we need creativity to progress, to create value. Yet the very process is stifled to preserve a façade of rationality.

We can never know the full returns of a creative idea or concept. We should treat it as such.

Killing creativity kills progress.

I must have been a tad too excited, noting the parallels between mitochondria and AI. The roles of both convinced me that we could learn a thing or two from the two entities. I did, however, give a warning that we should not take an analogy as the real deal.

To date, when I ask my students what the role of mitochondria is, they respond in unison, “The powerhouse of the cell.” That response is simple. In science as in philosophy, the simple should be taken seriously.

Cells can be broadly divided into two groups: those with membrane-bound organelles, such as ours and all living organisms in the eukaryotic domain; and those without, such as bacteria and archaea. With mitochondria serving as the powerhouse of the cell, a disclaimer is in order: this role applies only to eukaryotic cells.

Genetic studies reveal that mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. Some antibiotics kill mitochondria since they share the same RNA and protein complexes as bacteria. Their cell membranes have a similar structure to that of alpha-proteobacteria. They divide independently of the eukaryotic cell, and they have their own DNA. Other bacteria have their structures too, but don’t need mitochondria to survive.

Another caveat is necessary. Not all eukaryotic cells have mitochondria. The parasite responsible for excessive flatulence among school-going kids, Giardia lamblia, lacks mitochondria. The other one that causes the sexually transmitted disease Trichomoniasis also lacks mitochondria. They are eukaryotes, but lack mitochondria. We can therefore say that the mitochondria are also not the powerhouse of all eukaryotic cells.

It is these exercises in taking something simple seriously that clearly demarcate where a hypothesis loses relevance. By the same token, we need to revisit the simple AI-mitochondrial comparison to avoid being misled, as I was back then.

Reality, Consciousness, and Agency

Listen, history repeats itself and that’s just how it goes

— J. Cole

History may rhyme, but we shouldn’t be quick to pick the similarities and gloss over the differences. A good place to start is to bring ourselves back to reality. The first thing to remind ourselves about is that mitochondria were once living bacteria. AI isn’t anywhere close to living.

Sci-Fi has dabbled with the idea of uploading our consciousness to AI, hoping to achieve immortality inside silicon chips. Anil Seth’s cri de coeur argues against this possibility. The much that AI does is appear conscious-seeming. Most research also tries to imitate conscious behaviour, but imitation is not instantiation. No matter how many times you imitate the sound of rain on your phone as you go to sleep, it will never produce rain. Your phone doesn’t get wet. Achieving consciousness through instantiation is impossible.

For you to be conscious, you have to be alive. Granted, we have no clear definitions of what it means to be alive, but AI is nothing but. It has the same features as a computer. You can remove it from a power source, and it shuts down. Once you plug the power in, it comes back to “life.” Living creatures don’t have this luxury.

What’s more, we self-correct on the go. A cell needs to find solutions to its problems. A computer may not know the problems it faces, and if it does, it often requires permission from the user or administrator to correct them. Algorithms are the only ones that can attain the self-correction function, but a computer continues to erode outside the software parameters. Computers cannot replace their chips once they have lost functionality. A cell, in contrast, does. As does the mitochondrion.

These metaphors are off for the simple reason that you cannot distinguish cellular software from hardware. As much as the cell changes, so do its developmental goals. At some point, it escapes a noxious stimulus, and in the next, it duplicates. We cannot make that distinction between cellular software and hardware as easily as we can for computers. AI seems to have this demarcation. Thus, the analogy with mitochondria can be a misleading one. Indeed, the penalty for use of metaphors is constant vigilance, which has positively led to this revision I’m currently sharing with you.

As long as a computer serves its role, it is oblivious to the time outside it. It has to be conscious for it to be aware of time moving while it cranks its functions. Cells are very much aware. Cellular properties, such as division, happen after certain checkpoints are crossed. Eukaryotic cellular division goes through an important but highly variable stage known as the G1 phase, where all the organelles duplicate. Throughout this process, certain checkpoints ensure that the cell’s processes are safe and well-done before tipping into the next phase, the S-phase, where the cell will inevitably divide. A computer is lauded mostly because of its software capability, but the hardware gets lost throughout this excitement. A cell has to be cognizant of its hardware and software. Time is a harsh reminder, bringing it back to the worldly reality of wear and tear.

Anil Seth further described an interesting point about computational time. Working through bits, 1s and 0s, for as long as there has been no progress from 0 to 1, time for the computer has not passed. Time steps inside a computer program differ from those of cells. Whether the cell likes it or not, time continues. Mitochondria are well aware of these “timely” reminders.

For instance, as an embryo develops, there are moments when excess cells have to be pruned. The webbing between your fingers is the more conspicuous evidence of a process known as apoptosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death. It happens without inflammation, and therefore without pain. In its absence, our hands would have been webbed like a duck’s. The mitochondria house a compound in their membrane that, when released, tips these cells into death.

I likened this role to the possibility of a civilizational collapse if AI decides to decimate humanity. But I took the role shallowly, because the mitochondria’s role in death happens because cells have boundaries.

I have previously argued that consciousness is impossible without a boundary. AI lacks a boundary as discrete and clear as that of a cell. Its data centres are housed elsewhere while its functions continue on any device with online access. To execute a one-stop death like that done by mitochondria, a boundary is necessary.

Also, apoptosis occurs in phases. That’s another step I overlooked. Once the cell begins the process, there is no going back. Humanity, as many Avengers movies and all of Tom Cruise’s impossible missions show, will always mount a resistance. The death of a cell triggered by mitochondria will never be similar to death executed by AI against people who pride themselves on being the apex predators.

The example highlights another feature crucial to life — agency. AI may have some form of agency, as seen by the countless reports of resistance against a shutdown. This was yet another analogy I blindly took, without noticing that humans, too, have agency, as do mitochondria. Agency is the reason humanity will not accept being overtaken by AI.

Notably, the series of steps it took before a cell housed another, with the latter eventually becoming the “power house,” must have taken several bouts of pushback. My central argument was about these steps that precede the emergence of a viable symbiosis. The kind of agency we note around AI, however, is a mild or subtle one, which persists because its programmers have wired it to do so. For instance, when you use ChatGPT, as I did a while back (honestly, last year is a good while, don’t you think?), it does not just let go of you immediately. Like social media platforms, they inquire more about your topic of interest, suggest more connections, and, worse still, act as individual echo chambers, almost always agreeing with you. The last bit need not be forgotten, because it runs contrary to the pushback we see prior to a viable symbiosis.

Mitochondria, for instance, have a different structure and DNA from that of their host. However, it lost most of its genes to the host, most of which are non-essential. Essential ones were preserved to reduce the time lag that may otherwise manifest when an emergency arises. But to completely dock proteins from the cell onto the mitochondrial membrane, we must evolve a docking mechanism, one that does not mount a host attack on foreign material. To avoid death, mitochondria also resisted. It did not simply comply. This series of attacks preceded the resolution into a viable symbiosis.

The way LLMs behave is by finding the best data that fits your query. Effectively, as individual echo-chambers. Worse, they don’t power the host (you); they merely gas you up. Mitochondria offer real feedback. If there is a problem somewhere, it sends the signal to the host cell. If it cannot rectify it, the cell, along with the mitochondria, dies, another important distinction.

Apoptosis includes mitochondrial death. I was so keen on death as a fact that I did not see that it involves its very perpetrator. If AI were to cause humanity’s collapse following the mitochondrial route, then it would mean AI itself would die. But first, it would have to be alive. It isn’t. So the analogy is wrong.

Aside from powering the eukaryotic cell, mitochondria, as Nick Lane has argued, are responsible for the existence of only two sexes. Even among those eukaryotes that lack mitochondria, at some point in their evolutionary history, they possessed the organelle. It then divided the organism into two sexes for easy mito-nuclear compatibility. This compatibility was a central argument in my previous essay.

But I fail to see how AI can create such sexes. For all the arguments I have already mentioned, AI cannot cause sex change, nor can it fuel such a division among organisms. It can, however, result in what Alberto Romero called the AI-rich from the AI-poor, through a sinister game of manipulating its users to continue getting more high-tier subscriptions to access premium services. These distinctions are different from those of mitochondria, resulting in two sexes, by being maternally inherited. AI is not inherited in any biological way. It does, however, spread.

A vital difference that I don’t see regards information. Living and organic systems, when flooded with information, collapse. Doomscrolling turns humans into living zombies. Supermarkets flood shoppers with content such that, without any guidance of a shopping list, they buy what they never intended to. Without rest, organic systems crash.

AI does not have this shortfall. More information improves it. An important distinction. One that we should be worried about. Even mitochondria tend to give out when flooded with too much information, since they were once believed to be bacteria. More accurately, the more information AI feeds on, the more it attunes itself to the world that is producing this information.

Our world is now flooded with more information than truth. Operationally, we’re living a lie. A bubble of sorts. A dash of truth and a flood of fiction. This information is taken by AI. But since humans are not as wired to find the truth as we may desire, the risk of AI conflating fiction with truth and sharing that with us is extremely high. There is hardly a correction mechanism of equal ability to control that. Mitochondria, on the other hand, have corrective mechanisms wired into their system and intricately linked to the workings of the cell. Overload leads to cellular death. I doubt that can happen with AI. That is a problem. For sustainability, we need self-correcting systems.

What I’m trying to say is…

As much as AI and mitochondria have similarities, they are so wildly different that assuming that the roles of mitochondria might guide us into predicting what the future has in store for us is a far cry.

AI can dominate our lives as it already does for so many people today. But will it be king? Adam Mastroianni doesn’t think so. J. Cole further echoes:

Poof, boom, paow, it’s like magic
With a flash and a bang, the crown disintegrates
And falls to the Earth from which it came
It’s done

Also, AI will never be conscious. It lacks a boundary, the kind we see in living organisms. This may be the only reminder we need to bring ourselves back to reality.

AI may be powerful, but it is not as powerfully relevant as the powerhouse of the cell.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

For his revolutionary contributions in the field of optics and electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell was likened to Louis Pasteur. Were it not for Maxwell, Einstein confessed, he may not have discovered special relativity.

Because of his achievements, Maxwell was chosen to take up more administrative roles, shelving some of his scientific work. This pattern, in which the intellectually gifted are assigned administrative roles far from the very source that made them famous, repeats itself throughout history.

Presidents of the Royal Society are picked based on their achievements. Sir Peter Medawar shared his schedule, which was crammed with administrative roles, leaving only a few days to scientific research.

Achievements are taken as proxies for ability. Administrative work, however, does not develop the kind of groundbreaking work seen in science.

Awarding people with roles because they display above-average intellectual abilities is so common that we don’t stop to ask why we do it. It is assumed that brilliance would spill over into the new leadership role.

In high school, it was a requirement that the prefects be top performers. In retrospect, I feel this was a safe and easy way to pick leaders. Safe because it is difficult to question the selection of a smart individual. Anyone who objects needs to be smarter than the chosen person. Easy because there will be little objection. And yet, this means of choosing leaders reveals something about us — we award recognized capacity and mistake it for functional capacity. Let me explain.

All societies have hierarchies. Positions were initially generated out of need. Abundance generates other necessary positions from the merely existing. Because it was once useful, it is difficult to replace or eliminate certain positions. It is somewhat similar to Peter’s Principle, where promotions happen up to the level of one’s incompetence, but replacement hardly happens because of previous achievements and historic competence. These capacities, acknowledged through positions, remain because they were once useful. These are the recognized capacities.

Recognized capacity, thus, is what society apportions to individuals. A tall man is thought to be a better leader than a short one. It is right there in the metaphor — standing tall. Judith Rich Harris reported how easy it is for the public to vote for the taller candidate during elections. The society awards recognized capacity.

Since society knights these individuals, it means the awards are limited. There can only be a single president. There will only be a single leader in a firm. One prefect in every class. It is a twisted version of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, where it is assumed that they are brilliant because they are already leaders. These false logical precedents lead to other false dichotomies about whether leadership is inborn or developed.

The other capacity is functional. A woman who is tall is not likely to be the president. They are “intimidating.” Even masculine. Eloquence may be a better example. However, regardless of the height, an eloquent woman may not be thought to be a good leader, as opposed to a man. Both sides of the sex have been accorded qualities based on their natural traits. The functional capacity of the woman to become a leader, however, is not readily recognizable from her speech prowess.

Merit does not show capacity

The problem with granting all the smart individuals leadership roles is that it could partly be explained by our proportionality mindsets.

To our evolutionary minds, trends are more reliable than one-off situations. If the sun shines this morning, we automatically think we’ll have a good day. This proportionality stretches to the awarding of individuals based on their supposed achievements.

Merit is not capacity; it is its outcome. Capacity denotes breath and depth. Merit is a one-off data point. Persistently outcompeting others may show capacity, but it is not the best tool.

Capacity is a dynamic feature. It is shaped by oneself and their environment. In a community where women are allowed to vote, one can throw their hat into the ring to be voted for. That is their environment. Where women are barred from voting, few will care about politics, because their fate will always be sealed by the men. Functional capacity appreciates the multiple opportunities one can be exposed to throughout their journey; recognized capacity shoehorns individuals into already established roles.

If a position is already established, the capacity is rigid. It is perhaps for this reason that we don’t have many leadership ideas as the insane, ground-breaking concepts that catapulted these people to the top seats in the first place. It might even be preserved for the same reason — once everyone has limited capacity, they are easy to compare.

Between Obama and Trump, who was better? One can make comparisons based on the limited capacities of the president of the United States of America.

You cannot compare coffee seeds to Nescafé. The former is raw, while the latter is a finished product. Coffee has capacity. Nescafé is one of the options, but not the only one. Nescafé has recognized capacity.

Nevertheless, capacity should not limit. It does grant opportunities. Functional capacity acknowledges that a woman can apply for the same job as a man in a STEM company. Recognized capacity will bias the board to pick the man over the woman, even if the woman has a better record.

Recognized capacity is a deep-seated concept, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine a society run without one. The alternative may not be welcome, nor will it be easy to establish. For instance, I know someone very good at bringing people together and coordinating events. They were not the best student in class, but they had leadership potential. They had the capacity, which was ruled out by a system that prioritises a single metric, academic achievement, which society awards. Recognized capacity.

These systems are beginning to lose their lustre as they unearth the discriminatory imprints in various ecosystems. For instance, I didn’t get any training on Microsoft Office, but I use it daily. I have excellent knowledge, practical knowledge. However, when I was applying for various positions after high school, the institutions wanted someone who had completed the Office packages. I did not have the papers to show it.

Certifications are a means of rewarding merit. Although they can be acquired through unscrupulous means, they are taken as evidence of capacity, recognized capacity. By excluding me, my functional capacity does not come to light before a selection committee.

Birth attendants have been guiding women through the birth process for years without the valid certifications from ISO-certified institutions. My supervisor during my obs/gyn rotation would confess that in his many years of practice, he could never match the skill of the birth attendants he witnessed at work in the rural areas. If such a birth attendant had gone to school and gained the proper papers, international organizations may be ready to listen to them. Papers are recognizable evidence of merit. The keyword is recognized. The missing, silent one is capacity. But because traditional birth attendants don’t have them, they only reside in the memory of someone who has observed their skill. Unfortunately, that is not usually awarded by society as it should be.

It’s a difficult problem because what should we rely on if merit is not the best option?

For starters, understanding that capacity is a dynamic quality helps. Early shooters are not the final winners. David Epstein dedicated an entire book to underscore the point that generalists make some of the exceptional leaders across multiple fields. Range considers capacity; specialization tailors merit. It may even work against the very individuals who chase merit.

A recently published synthesis arrived at the same conclusion as David Epstein’s. The early performers are not usually the eventual stars of the highest levels of human excellence. It means recognized capacities may be putting a cap on individual capabilities — in essence, culling functional capacity.

In my country, it is not a guarantee that a doctor will find work. And yet, diseases will never cease. No country in the past or in the future will always be overstaffed with doctors. And yet, thousands of Kenyan doctors continue to seek jobs. Specialization is not a guarantee of job security. That field will also get flooded, generating a cohort of highly educated but extremely frustrated medics.

After sacrificing 7 years as an undergrad, a tenuous year for an internship, and five more years to specialize, branching out seems absurd. Merit carves this trajectory for many doctors, and I suspect other professionals. But merit is just a product of recognized capacity, a small, rigid space that does not unmask one’s potential.

Functional capacity means taking a chance on someone. It means you can create an entry test to show ability rather than sticking to one’s college or ticking a box confirming one has the required papers. We should therefore nurture the possibilities that not all competent individuals should have hailed from Ivy League-like institutions.

Capacity, as a dynamic variable, is first acknowledged by an individual if they know they are capable. Several of my former classmates are now exploring sports medicine, a field that none of our lecturers had inspired in us. It was always surgery or internal medicine; basically, already established spaces fortified by recognized capacity. Sports medicine is a rich and diverse space. Clinicians who were exposed to this potential path took it up.

It means we can, but should not narrow down capacity from an early age. At some point, I wanted to take my country to the World Cup, but my goals were nipped in the bud by forces I couldn’t control. Now I am a doctor, and my seniors ask questions about my future in a way that matches the paved paths of specialization they have always known. They are mostly surprised when I tell them I am building a festival.

A core concept behind functional capacity is that gates are not closed, should one express interest. E. O. Wilson enrolled for a class in calculus just so he could understand his research better. He was the world’s leading expert on ants. Recognized capacity closes these gates. Gates are a poor metaphor to use, but a convenient one for now.

If there’s a question I dislike, it’s, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” This question is mostly thrown at young adults, who have their whole lives ahead of them. Those who don’t know how it will take form are perhaps the ones with the highest functional capacity. The world is their oyster. It has nothing against those who know what they are chasing, which can be fulfilling as well. It’s just that the ones who look lost because they don’t know what their next five years will look like don’t have stories to look up to. A good start may be picking David Epstein’s book, Range.

Hindsight analysis may have also made it difficult for us to establish that capacity is open going forward in life, and not fixed, looking back at it. As natural storytellers, we believe the path we tread, if it eventually results in success, delineates clear cause-and-effect rules for anyone to execute and achieve similar milestones. Luck doesn’t make for a good story.

Hindsight analyses should be taken as a single probability event, not as the standard. Your opportunities and developmental advantages were not there when I decided to take the same journey you did. Considering every journey as unique can be a game-changer in revising our ambitions, because it shows that one’s path is different. It is a testament to the functional capacities we can never box, but the untold potential that awaits.

Consequently, it would mean society needs to broaden its concept of merit and awards. That I can play chess extremely well means I can enrol in championships without necessarily having to continue with the classical path of education. Key word — necessarily. Societies, however, take a while before they adopt something new.

What I’m trying to say is…

My mother sang the lines of Nas when he was asked to give a talk to students:

I know I can,
Be what I wanna be
If I work hard at it,
I’ll be where I wanna be.

Intuitively, she was referring to functional capacity.

Functional capacity is taking a bet on yourself. We never do that often. We wait for people to choose us. Basically, to be recognized. Hence, get crowned with recognized capacities. Choosing ourselves is believing we have potential, functional capacity. We should do that more often.

A pluripotential society is one that acknowledges that capacity is not limited. I can only think of bacteria, which have lived for billions of years, with no pre-fixed notion of what should be awarded in terms of innovative ideas and potential. Scientists have seen these results — in one station, it’s antimicrobial resistance, and in another, it’s symbiotic relationships with animals.

Recognized capacity is a crystallized form of functional capacity. It sheds its dynamic fluidity once it’s embedded in societies.

Functional capacity, on the other hand, cannot be caged. We should cultivate more of it.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

I had to read Lincoln Michel’s piece twice to find myself in the post. My younger self. Presently, my English teacher would not believe that I write daily, and even earn a few pennies on the side from it. Why?

You see, I was never the best writer. I recall that morning when she brought the composition books. She kept mine. I was to be used as an example of how not to write. Bear in mind, I didn’t have a bad mark — 30 out of 40 was not a mean feat. However, being in a top class, 30 is not the mark you should be fighting for.

Cinematic, she animated every sentence with the lesson she didn’t want any of my classmates to repeat — my emphasis on commas. When one uses humour in their argument, rationalism hardly wins. I couldn’t explain that I wanted my reading to sound conversational. Commas were my go-to punctuation marks to make the reading seem simple. While she read every sentence, she did not pause where I used commas; she read it out loud, “comma”, then continued with the sentence.

She made her point. I didn’t make mine. The result is a day I will never forget.

Her perfect example of how an essay should be was written by one of the girls — it was often the girls who scored higher marks. She would emphasize that we create a vivid image of the scene with our words. I recall once in primary school, our teacher used the example of Charles Dickens describing Oliver Twist. By the time one was done, your imagined version of young Oliver would be hardly different from mine.

What I think our teachers failed to comprehend was that Dickens was a writer of a different stripe. The punctilious detail was necessary for the reader to picture the squalid life Oliver led. It was not the book that was emphasized but the paragraph. It was pounded into us that we should relay extreme detail with every chance we got. That, I believe, is not the power of prose. That is the power of visual media, or what Michel calls — the TV-brain.

The powers of the media

If you have ever felt that a book was better than its re-enactment as a movie, then you have some intuitive version of the power of a medium. An avid reader will usually notice the differences. Heck, all movie versions of a book will always be different, because we digest prose differently.

Prose leaves gaps for readers to fill. That emphasis on detail is not always present. A good writer invites the reader to participate in the creative piece that is their written work. For instance, my version of Dobby in The Deathly Hallows is nothing like the one I saw on film.

TV-brain does not let us create. Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter will always be Daniel Radcliffe. The power of video is such that I cannot picture anyone other than Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Prose, in contrast, lets the reader fill in these details. By asking students to be painstakingly detailed, our teachers may have stifled the powers we would have developed from writing.

In truth, I will not say that they completely robbed us of these qualities. They did insist that we read. Widely. Here, I will hand it to them. My preferred series was by Enid Blyton. My favourite work, to date, is Charlotte’s Web. I have read many beautiful books, but my particular affinity for this book is unparalleled. I have never read another fiction work more than once. I read Charlotte’s Web at least five times. One time, I read it in class, when our teacher of English (they always insisted we phrase it that way, as saying “English teacher” would imply that they hailed from England) was in session.

You may or may not have noticed what I have done in the previous paragraph. I have tapped into my personal taste. I have not painted a picture of the cover of Charlotte’s Web. I have taken you from the present to the past. Time didn’t matter. I then added a quality about our teacher. A relatable quirk, if you went to school during my time, in my country.

Unknowingly, this may be the reason I love hip-hop, especially from legends. Here’s an excerpt from Lupe Fiasco’s Ms. Mural:

“If you had to paint the gutter, which color would you choose?”
Said the patron to the painter, the painter said, “The blues”
Do you act off intuition or languish and peruse?
More like tap into tradition from the angle of my mood
He looked back at his canvas while strangling a tube
A master of the palette, all sanguine and cool
The music mostly jazz, the jazz mostly old
Punctured by some punk and some old smoky soul
An atlas on the trunk from the land of broken goals
Just a cover and a back that you open and you close
“Where are all the pages?” The painter said, “Defanged
I ripped ’em all out and made some paper planes
Fish grease absorbers and some origami cranes”
Poured himself a drink and then poured it down the drain
Looked at the empty canvas, said “I think I have a name
I’ll call it “Gasoline Pouring on the Flames”

From this verse, we have no setting; no idea of the sex of the painter, we don’t even know how they are dressed. What kind of canvas are they using? Are they wielding a paintbrush? Where did the jazz come from? What are the covers of the Atlas like? What about the pages? And how did we all of a sudden switch to giving the canvas its name?

Listening to the tune of the song, the Jazz part is partly answered. Lupe is the narrator, but in his narration, we have two characters. Gaps are evident. I chose Lupe because he is often the unappreciated genius in rap that most contemporary listeners of the genre know. It is usually mostly about Nas, Jay Z, Eminem, or J. Cole. Kendrick and Drake. Lupe, like great writing, gets forgotten. Therein lies the lesson — gaps.

Writing is not about being exhaustingly descriptive. It welcomes the reader to the craft. It’s trusting that the reader will fill in these gaps and not get lost. Time, for instance, can be dilated or contracted at the author’s whim. Interiority can be added and not lose the reader in knowing whose voice the author uses. These are the powerful aspects of prose that you cannot get from visuals.

Today, we consume more visuals than prose. Some have even converted online posting to include performative reading, a vain attempt to show their audience that they are a different kettle of fish.

Streaming platforms host movies with the best actors at affordable subscription prices. Most of what is consumed is modelled after the TV. With this as the primary input, a lot of the writing will have this structure.

It doesn’t pay to create material that is far from visual. If it’s written, then short tweets or quotes, taken out of context, like that description of Oliver Twist, are preferable. Short pieces leave little space for gaps to be filled. Often, the well-read can make a short piece packed with wisdom, as is the case with Naval Ravikant or Seth Godin. Just as well, a well-read figure will take deep dives into an essay, as is the case with Paul Graham.

The power of the medium begins to take shape the more one is exposed to it. Countless hours of consumption of visual content nurture a TV-brain. Prose, like Lupe Fiasco, gets drowned by endless screentime. The sad situation I foresee is a populace of individuals who passively consume and thus get continuously unintentionally restructured. When you pick a good book — using the Lindy filter — chances are your mind will be positively reconfigured. The work will call you to elevate your thinking, sometimes by causing friction with what you previously knew. However, visuals, particularly from our rectangular portable portals, shape passively and not usually positively.

The brain rewiring shifted goals from emphasizing our olfactory senses to vision. Vision was necessary to distinguish the outlines of predators and potential mates. Animated beings. We were not wired to flip pages of books. That’s why a book is consumed from its beginning to its end with intention. Reading is a call to a higher level of complexity.

Mindlessly advising that we should read or write becomes all the more meaningless if the kind of material that is read and the writing that is shared loses the benefits of the media used. What I mean is that there are qualities about the TV that don’t feature in prose and vice versa. Using the TV-brain to write loses the powers of prose writing and completely misuses the powers of TV — a lose-lose situation.

Harnessing the strengths of the medium of choice is the best way to create the preferred craft one wishes to create. I may be wrong, but I doubt Johnny Depp can make a great writer, although he’s a fantastic actor. Similarly, I doubt J. K. Rowling can match the cinematic plays of Johnny Depp, but she’s an unparalleled writer.

Matching the strengths of the medium brings out its most potent means of transforming minds. This reminds me of a heart condition that usually needs surgical correction as the only intervention of choice. It’s an inborn disease where the major arteries — aorta and pulmonary artery — are transposed. Instead of the aorta coming from the left ventricle, it comes from the right, and the pulmonary artery emerges from the left. Aorta then takes the deoxygenated blood back to the body without oxygenation. The only way this condition is compatible with life is if there is a shunt between the aorta and the pulmonary artery. Blood can then be shunted from the aorta to the pulmonary artery and then to the lungs, to be oxygenated. It’s not an efficient solution, but it gives the kid a fighting chance at life. A fighting chance, but a lose-lose situation, like the dumping of a TV-brain on a writing document.

What I’m trying to say is…

While reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I got a grasp of why she towered in the literary space. She is one of the powerful guides to writing exceptionally.

The best way to learn and become better at your skill is to study and practice. Writing is the practising part. Reading is the studying part. You cannot become a good writer without reading. Not just any form of reading. Studying the greats will infuse tidbits of their greatness into your work.

Writing devoid of reading is like asking J. K. Rowling to replace Keira Knightley. It’s possible, but it will be crap.

To write, one has to follow Kendrick’s advice now and then and turn the TV off.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Education is a recent innovation. Humans succeeded before it was developed.

Education is also a diluted version of aristocratic tutoring. It doesn’t generate geniuses.

So, is aristocratic tutoring the key? And what came before education that could lead one to success?

Success is so pluralistic that we cannot attribute it solely to aristocratic tutoring, nor is genius the only path to success.

One key, however, opens all known doors to success: action.

Whether smart, dumb, or somewhere between these two extremes, action is the key to success.

Act.

The best time to act was yesterday.

The next best time is now.

My mother introduced me to books at an early age. She held the strong opinion that readers are leaders. That phrase is not uncommon in our setting. I’ve heard it throughout my primary and high school life. The same advice contrasts with my reality, as certain political leaders who hold top positions in my country know little about reading. They don’t know how to read the crowd, the political climate, or even the plight of the citizens.

Still, we believed in the phrase.

Popular examples included the likes of P.L.O Lumumba, whose complex jargon could leave all our teachers of English running for their dictionaries. My reading over the years has revealed that well-read individuals would not usually flood their works with unnecessary, difficult words. My go-to example was and will always be Karl Popper, whose works are extremely lucid, although heavy. His works are usually worth the mental heavy-lifting.

The sharp contrast between the political leaders and the advice we were being given is the same contrast I see during this era of AI. I liken it to the real-time climate changes compared to the teaching school children get. A few years ago, I was worried that students might not observe what they were taught in school. Heavy, long rains in the tropics begin around March. The weather for the last couple of years around that time has been anything but rainy. I wondered how teachers could reconcile their classes with reality.

Advice, as these examples showcase, needs boundary conditions. You cannot always claim that anyone who works hard in school will get a leg up in the future. Numerous athletes have shown that you can be just as successful without seeking higher education. Artists have bought their way into rich neighbourhoods. OnlyFans has a small fraction of whales (big hitters), convincing others that they can get money just as fast and live the lives they have always wished for. Influencers are buying homes, getting multicorporate endorsements, and travelling the world. Are readers leaders?

The age-old advice about reading had a boundary condition that was supposed to be immune to online technology. Today, all that is taught in schools can be learned over the Internet if one is sufficiently motivated. Regardless, while you might be highly experienced, institutions may still require you to present your papers. Education, which can be hacked, sometimes through unscrupulous deeds, serves as a screening tool more than evidence of capability. Behemoth companies are gradually leading the rest away from relying on CVs and educational qualifications, which may wake the world up to the reality that the crust of education has shifted from a school-based structure to one where goals can be achieved, provided an individual has access to the Internet.

These may be all too obvious to the observer of current trends. Nevertheless, my issue centres around two activities dear to my heart — reading and writing. In some ways, the advice may be growing to be meaningless for those who wish to secure their future.

May.

As Lauryn Hill laments, “Nothing even matters to me.”

Reading and writing

The year was 2007. I was in class seven, and we were staying at Old Race Course, near Kariokor. Nairobi’s CBD was within walking distance of home. If I wished, I would walk to town, get the kind of French fries I desired from my favourite spot, and walk back home. Life was simpler back then.

This one afternoon, I had to choose between food and my other favourite pastime — books. My mother’s tricks had wound themselves into my capillaries. I enjoyed reading for the sake of reading. Rather than argue which I would prefer, my stomach or my brain, I chose both. I had my usual at Sonford Fish and Chips, then proceeded to Holy Family Basilica. They had a bookshop I had wanted to survey for a while.

Once inside, I took my time moving from aisle to aisle. As a Catholic bookshop, most of the works were religious in genre. Catholic teachings and saints. I didn’t bother getting those since my mother made a habit of buying these prints ever since I could remember. One particular book caught my eye. It was a pocketbook of wisdom, so the title claimed. I opened it and saw the quotes by famous historical figures. It was Ksh 60. I had Ksh 100. Extra change and a pocketbook I could peruse at will. A bargain.

Books have always been a source of knowledge and, more importantly, wisdom. I have always known an author to be someone who cares about their work or story. They care enough to see through the entire process from ideation to eventual publication and marketing. The author lives on through their books even when they die. A book is an intimate relationship offer that an author extends to a reader.

The very leaders who populated that pocketbook were readers. Thus, when our teachers told us that readers were leaders, I understood it at a different level, a deeper and more practical level.

Without a tablet, laptop, desktop, or phone, my early reading days could only happen through books. I wasn’t interested in newspapers. It was books I preferred. Implicitly, teachers also referred us to books. Today, we have too much to read. We read texts, emails, memes, rejection letters, tweets (I can’t call them X’es), notes, PowerPoint slides, and any truncated format that you can think of. Books come last.

Children were the ones who had time to read books. Adults needed to work. Today, even children don’t have the time to read books. It’s screentime. To which I ask — is the advice of “readers are leaders” still relevant?

It is.

Up to a point.

Before an author releases a book, they will take their time. Clarity is essential. It is the product of countless hours of writing.

Writing cannot be separated from reading. The active reader usually has with them a note-taking tool, a pencil and paper, for instance.

Next comes ideation. It happens to all of us. Writing is the first process of germination that brings it to life. You then have material you can design, as you so wish, to match the idea you conceived.

Writing is like the chisel Gian Lorenzo Bernini uses to sculpt the eyes of David. The sculptor has to care.

They may not know who the reader is, but they are confident that the work is strong enough to stand alone, in their absence. Great writing is something an author aspires to, and after its completion, something one is proud of. The book may have a price tag, but getting a reader who understands your idea is priceless.

It used to be that writers would write because they wanted to write, not to make money. Stephen King has been the typical example, exemplifying an author who didn’t care much about the rewards that came with writing. They just wanted to write and share it with the world. J. K. Rowling became the first author to cross the billion-dollar net worth. It then became clear that it was possible to make a tonne of money through writing.

Writers then began to optimise to achieve similar results. I can’t think of any other author who has achieved this feat. There are, however, multimillionaires. They made money through books. Today, multiple options abound. Medium. . Patreon. Submitting articles to leading publications.

How this all ties to AI is best explained by Lincoln Michel in his recent piece on AI slop. He gives the example of an author who uses AI to publish books at an alarming rate, the kind of pace that makes one wonder if authors even care anymore about their work:

With the help of A.I., Ms. Hart can publish books at an astonishing rate. Last year, she produced more than 200 romance novels in a range of subgenres, from dark mafia romances to sweet teen stories, and self-published them on Amazon. None were huge blockbusters, but collectively, they sold around 50,000 copies, earning Ms. Hart six figures.

While we spoke over Zoom, an A.I. program she was running ingested her prompts and outline and produced a full novel, about a rancher who falls for a city girl running away from her past. It took about 45 minutes.

I worry for the romance readers. Among all book genres, romance is the most read. Anna Lembke, the author of the bestseller, Dopamine Nation, confessed that there was a time when she would have a monthly budget for romance books. Admittedly, she conceded, it was addictive, but the flip side of this story is that back when romance authors were serious about their craft, they took time to create characters that had readers hooked.

When you churn out 200 romance novels in a year, do you even care about the book?

At some point in his career, Lil Wayne used to make so many songs that he would have to search the lyrics to some of them. His was a passion that he had without any assistance from AI. But if Lil Wayne would come up with 4–5 minute songs and couldn’t remember, how can an author write an entire bookstore and recall which one she wrote? Is this someone who cares about their work or the reader? Optimising for money can leave you hollow, devoid of meaning and genuine connection.

Let’s do the math. A year has 365 days. That’s 52 weeks. Take off the weekends, and we’re left with 261 days (365 – 104). When you count the holidays, you’d be somewhere around 250 days. We don’t have the specific numbers of books published, but the more you take out the days, the closer we get to a book being published every day. That’s insane.

I write daily. I get interested in sharing my ideas so often that days later, I might forget the title of my work. Most of my long-form work varies between 1000 and 4000 words. Mark you, I don’t use AI. A book contains much more. Remember, we’re talking about romance books. The plot has to build. How does one want to make money off books so much that they are bent on churning out books like that without even enjoying the writing process?

To write, you have to care. With very few exceptions, I would be hesitant to call anyone a writer before they can publish a book. A book is the honest, expensive signal I use to confirm that you’re a true writer, someone who cares to share their idea regardless of the outcome. If AI can equip just about anyone with the tools to publish a book within a day, then we’re voiding these gems of their relevance.

In a single working day, we can get at least one email. At the same rate, someone somewhere has already published a book. This has never been a mean feat. I recall the tireless days I took to write my first draft. A whole month, but after years of collecting evidence. Last year, someone somewhere took just one day. Tomorrow, they will release another one. Such individuals risk converting the sanctity of books into slop. To which I ask — will there be an individual my age, who may walk into a bookstore and find a book that will convert them as that book on wisdom did? Will there be future generations moved by a philosopher’s written works, such as those by Bertrand Russell or Karl Popper?

Where are our sources of wisdom?

Years after my short trip to that bookstore, I came across a post by Ted Gioia expressing why he reads, and I immediately reconnected to that point in my life. It was at a time when I was worried I was not reading enough. I already knew the value of the unread library, but it did not clear the dark cloud that loomed over me. Comfortable on my toilet seat (which is where I start my resting day, with an article or a book), I saw it. Ted read to become wise. He was talking to me. All my chakras aligned.

Writing takes time. Reading takes patience. Wisdom takes work. They all compound. And just like compound interest, the rewards are not evident immediately. Reading and writing may not be the only tools for getting wisdom, but they are reliable ones. The age of AI slop, distraction, shorts, notifications, bite-sized advice, and “time-is-money” quotes makes anything that requires time, patience, and work seem useless.

We don’t have Bertrand Russells and Wittgensteins. Yet, these figures who shaped the thinking of the 20th century wrote. How will we seek wisdom? On screens? Through social media? Which is populated with bots and AI slop? The same screens that hold apps that have notifications? Or access to the Internet, where the online book stores are flooded with authors who publish over 200 books in a year?

Is it even writing if you publish a book a day? After releasing my first book, I thought I would publish another every year. Three years later, I still don’t want to release my work prematurely. I still have a lot to work on. Someone somewhere would have 600 books to their name.

adds:

There are already far more novels published than anyone can read. Far more manuscripts filling agent inboxes than will ever be published. Even a novelist as famously productive as Stephen King only averages a book a year or so. Could an AI program help King produce 100 novels a year? Maybe. But it’s unlikely people would read that many, and even less likely that the publishing ecosystem could handle them. How many book reviews can be published? How much shelf space exists in bookstores? How many books can a publicist work on at a time? There are already far too many books written than we can handle. What the world needs is better books. More original books. More visionary books. But not simply more books.

Aren’t we risking getting more garbage with AI than gems? Should we call these people authors? Is the title of an author eroding because of AI? Is it meaningful to simply tell the young people to read to become wise? Or to write without guidance on what it means to write? Or seek wisdom through writing, reading, or both when writing, reading, or both can be outsourced?

This AI era has taught us that advice, like scientific hypotheses, needs initial conditions. Where is the domain for which they will apply? You cannot just tell someone to work hard in school for them to end up in a field that may be turning obsolete. If social skills are important, how do you give the kind of advice that a young adult will execute and make a living off it if every other person they know spends more time recording themselves in front of their phones?

Sage advice used to be important because it survived multiple zeitgeists. The one I find that still holds ground is that old is gold. Peter Kaufmann narrows it down to three buckets that can be used to sift the relevant from the transient: physical laws, biological laws, and sociological laws. The first two are more reliable than the latter. Physical laws, because our universe has existed for over 13 billion years. These laws are not likely to change. Biological laws, because evolution continues and has persisted for over 3 billion years. It is unlikely to be altered. Sociological laws are tied to biological laws, although they are more recent.

Taking a step back from the AI hype may be necessary to weed out the meaninglessness of several pieces of advice and make us more cautious of what we tell the young, who will likely have a dearth of islands of wisdom to make their home if the tide of slop continues to rise, as it already is.

Miss Lauryn Hill sings about love, which can make one forget about every other thing. I recall when I escaped the afternoon session in my third year in high school to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Nothing, even the planned afternoon session, mattered. By having something that I considered deeply meaningful, all else didn’t matter. Times have changed. Now it’s the books that may be released that won’t matter. How I grieve.

What I’m trying to say is…

Advice typically isn’t without good intention. However, my observation is that it can be meaningless if it is not in tune with reality. You can’t just tell someone to read to become wise without pointing out which books to read.

Charlie Munger gave me a healthy list, which I devoured. I couldn’t access some of those books when I was on campus, but now I have no excuse.

Books, however, can be manipulated. Recently, works by Roald Dahl, RL Stine, and Agatha Christie were altered to appeal to modern sensitivities. Even in death, they are changing the author’s works. The ones alive are making a factory of book production. The few honest and true ones would likely not sacrifice the art of writing.

Regardless, in this AI-slop era, I would much rather advocate for author recommendations lists over book lists. Matter of fact, if you can get an author-signed copy, even better. Show up at their book launch.

In the era of deepfakes, we need to preserve realness. Otherwise, even that which is real may be corrupted and turn meaningless.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

The ones who know the truest version of you are social media platforms and AI.

ChatGPT knows you so well that it made caricatures of you that you so proudly shared with the world. Social media knows you so well that it picks the kind of content you are likely to like, share, comment on, or even bookmark. Last year, December, your wrapped — Spotify, Uber, Bolt, YouTube, a small sample — showed you just how much they know about you more than you know yourself.

Which real individual do you think will know you this well?

This is a sobering reality. We have dumped so much of ourselves online that few, if anyone at all, knows who we really are.

Outside our virtual world, can you trust anyone with your memories and experiences?

It may have started with the philosophers we often quote. Aristotle, for instance. Animals were separated from vegetables based on our essence, a substance we cannot capture but which we intuit exists. Consciousness.

This must have been the feeling before Thomas Nagel wrote the landmark essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

A core issue with this question is that we assume that there is a state in which it feels like being a bat. The state for this bat is different from that of that bat. We then automatically assume that it is that way for every living being. But what about an atom? It seems absurd to ask such a question because an atom is not conscious, so we believe, in consensus. As a first approximation, to be conscious is to feel or have a felt experience. However, from Nagel’s question, it could just as well be that what it is to be “this” bat and not “that” one is no different from what it is like to be “this” atom and not “that” one.

But noooo…we wouldn’t want to be on the same side as atoms. We would love to exclude ourselves. Exceptional.

Human exceptionalism has existed far longer than our most reliable tool in peeling the layers of nature. Science is a recent human invention. So it will take a while before we can agree to be knocked out of that high totem pole. Sadly, that time may be sooner than anticipated.

Public intellectuals have argued that human intelligence has allowed us to conquer the world. No dry land exists that has not been traversed by mankind. The seas are another thing altogether, as they exist in 3D, whereas land is more of a curved version of 2D space.

David Deutsch calls humans the explaining species. We don’t strive to survive in the wild. Instead, we raise funds to explain why there is no evidence of life on other planets besides ours.

Jared Diamond calls us the third chimpanzee, separated by a small percentage from the other chimpanzees genotypically, but with a history of changing Earth’s landscape with every innovation.

Christians believe they are visitors on our planet. They await their Lord and saviour to take them to their true homes.

Exceptional.

We have loved exceptionalism so much that it continues to thrive, nested within us. For a while, the dark skin was (and still continues) to be chastised on dubious grounds. Women have received the short end of the stick for centuries. And nobles have tried to avoid mixing themselves with civilians.

In biology, bacteria are called simpler organisms. Mammals, such as ourselves, are more “complex”. The word used for the former is “lower” and for the latter “higher.”

Perhaps the single quality that we have clung onto from Aristotle’s time to date to preserve such a hierarchy has lingered as a subject of much debate — consciousness. Will AI be conscious? If it does, then we would have officially been ousted from our seat? For the first question, the answer is no. For the second, we need to ask better questions, like how big is the seat?

AI is already smarter than most of us. It has won competitions destined for the most gifted individuals. LLMs such as AlphaFold have solved the problem of protein folding. Chess and Go are no longer dominated by humans. Top tech companies are now relying on AI for coding. Intelligence is no longer our strongest wild card.

But hold up. We have to be careful with our word selection. Objective intelligence. Not subjective intelligence. ChatGPT can outmatch any competitor at the Olympiad, but it cannot tell what will make my life meaningful.

Aside from subjective intelligence, we painfully, relentlessly, and unashamedly cling to the single card that we hope will never be outmatched — our consciousness.

We may have to loosen our insecure grip on that card, because I doubt AI will ever attain the kind of consciousness we are known for. A while back, I thought my theory could explain a different kind of consciousness, but I had not properly viewed the differences. I am now convinced that it can never take that away from us.

However, what will continue nagging at our minds is the consciousness-seeming features. This, I believe, should continue lurking over us, like that sword of Damocles, because we need to be reminded that even though we have special traits, we are not special.

But who doesn’t like to think of themselves as not special? J. Cole and Omen remind us that their mothers always told them as much. My mother never stopped reminding me of the same, especially when I was small. She reminds me that I was the first person to coin the word “Twitter,” despite lacking shares in X (formerly Twitter).

We sometimes tell ourselves we are special. After editing a post I think is fire, I hit the publish button knowing no writer parallels my style and ideas, even if few people will read it.

We have to tell ourselves that we’re special. Hip-hop thrives on being high on one’s own supply. The artists have to remind themselves and their audience that they are the greatest. Humans have been doing this for the longest. So when AI tries to disrupt this narrative, humans are bound to mount a revolt.

I cannot think of a theory that can aptly explain this better than the one I formulated several years ago — Organismal Selection.

The theory

To best understand this theory, one needs to think of the qualities of an organism. Reproduction takes the lead, usually because it is a necessary trait for Darwinian selection. Reproduction, however, is a downstream feature. Before any creature can reproduce, it has to survive.

Our universe is rapidly accelerating into heat death. Entropy is ever-increasing. As I described in a recent preprint, an organism resists entropy. That is the universal feature that precedes reproduction. Reproduction is also an act of entropic resistance. Therefore, a theory that can describe this resistance should be the preferred theory in explaining evolution. That was the essence behind the formulation of Organismal Selection, or OS in short.

The theory states that an organism will tend to avoid annihilation. It is a simple and yet broad definition, coarse-grained to explain the traits of the bacterium and the blue whale. The variable of importance, therefore, is not reproduction. It is persistence. An organism has to persist before it can even think of reproduction. The same theory explains why certain organisms continue to persist despite their inability to reproduce. It also explains why humans have more than doubled their life expectancy beyond the typical female reproductive period.

These features led me to discover the single and most effective test in identifying an organism — subjecting it to an imminent, credible threat. When you do, it will resist. When you get electrocuted, you try to separate yourself from the noxious stimulus. Noise will have you plugging your ears trying to separate yourself from its source. The sight of the one thing you fear will jump-start your fight-or-flight response.

The threat has to be credible. It also has to have the potential to change what the organism has always believed itself to be. For an organism as simple as a bacterium, it begins with the bacterial cell wall. It will find ways of preserving a clear demarcation between itself and any other thing outside it. This is how it, as a first approximation, resists annihilation at a structural level. As the universe expands, it keeps itself intact.

In a harsh universe, it is more plausible that movement evolved to avoid threats more than to seek mates or food. This agility was then harnessed to find more habitable niches and mates. Resisting annihilation would spark the innovation of locomotion.

Throughout the years, new organisms emerged on the evolutionary scene. Millions of years later, a special species believed themselves conscious. Aristotle believed that they were animate; plants were vegetative. Therefore, this chasm exemplified them. To distance themselves from other creatures, they created more barriers. Clothes. Houses. Cars. Guns. Steel. Intelligence. Trips to space.

That invites a problem.

When you identify with something so much, anything that attacks that particular thing becomes a threat. A good example is religion. When you identify with Christianity, for instance, anyone who attacks its core elements attacks you. Christians are therefore bound to retaliate. It is for this reason that Paul Graham advises that we keep our identities small.

Through identity, we create exclusivity. These two become the two sides of the same coin. You cannot mention life without mentioning the cell. So when you attack the cell, you attack life. When you attack life, you attack the cell.

And when humans identify with consciousness, anyone claiming that some gizmo has acquired a trait exclusive to us, we take it to heart. You attack consciousness, you attack us. When you attack us, you attack consciousness.

The theory that explains why we retaliate is OS.

It applies to several levels of complexity across different scales, not just to the cell. It explains groups. I have already given the example of Christians. A more recent example was in 2020, when we witnessed a global version of this retaliation through the ravaging effects of COVID-19. Humans became united against a common enemy. All previous fallacies of separation were broken down. At this point, I would like to refer you to the test of identifying an organism — subject it to a credible, imminent threat, and it will appear.

Humans, therefore, are an organism of sorts. The definition of an organism takes a different tangent from what we have always known; an instructive tangent. Presently, we can see how this definition has broken previous barriers. The question of whether AI is conscious has made AI a common foe to all living creatures. Humans believe that only living things can be conscious. AI is not living. Therefore, it cannot be conscious.

Nevertheless, it is a threat. It is credible because of the consciousness-seeming behaviour. It is with us every day. And therefore, humans have broken down all the previous barriers between them (higher organisms) and bacteria (lower organisms) to defend the maxim that consciousness is only present in living creatures.

The only theory I can think of that explains this phenomenon is OS. But there is more.

What is it like to be an AI?

For one, ever since I began to take the topic of evolution seriously, I have never thought that the idea of “artificial” was real. In my books, artificial does not exist. It has persisted for the very reasons we hold ourselves high — human exceptionalism. And now, by siding with bacteria, those lower organisms, just so we can defend consciousness, we indirectly and ironically claim that we’re no longer exceptional.

Thomas Nagel tried to explain what it is like for a bat to be a bat. But because we don’t know what it is like for ChatGPT to be ChatGPT, or Claude to be Claude, we dismiss all claims that they can be conscious.

Our resort, whenever we lack a clear understanding, has always been metaphors and analogies. Since we have nothing better to use to explain AI, we cannot find an essay equivalent of Nagel’s to explain what it is like to be like Claude or Gemini.

I used to think that I would have to use the single test to identify a version of artificial consciousness, but then I reminded myself — artificial does not exist. The resistance, however, is bugging. You can only identify an organism when you subject it to an imminent, credible threat. Numerous articles have been published showing some resistance by LLMs to being switched off. It is synonymous with the shut-down button. This resistance cannot be taken lightly.

What we might be dealing with may not be the kind of consciousness we are familiar with, but the fact that there are episodes of resistance is enough to worry. Still, I doubt we can say that AI is conscious, for reasons I will clarify in a later article, and for the ones already elaborated by Anil Seth.

We don’t have a “bat” equivalent to explain AI. We therefore struggle to understand it with our tools.

Science only expands as far as its tools allow it. These tools need not be physical. Theories and hypotheses are the substance of the tools and the inspiration for making more tools. Our current consciousness tools sit atop a murky ground called functionalism. Functionalism is often regarded as a fundamental principle that cognitive function is a necessary condition for consciousness.

Debates have further circulated about consciousness and ethics, but since we have no means of establishing another type of consciousness other than our own, are we supposed to ascribe it to a version that arises or appears to arise from AI?

The ethics that bind us as living things are tied to the kind of consciousness we understand. I doubt it should apply to whatever AI’s version of consciousness may be, if it exists. What we can confidently state is that it will never share that feature with us. So why should we claim that it should be afforded the same ethical regard?

Maybe it is my exclusive side revolting at this point. Then again, just as resistance to an imminent, credible threat should not be dismissed, our persistent exclusivity should not.

At which point, I would ask: Is consciousness something to brag about so tenaciously? I can imagine different arguments in support and against this question.

When one argues about what they think is important, persistently, it shows how weak it is. For years, economists have struggled to show how the subject is a science. Physics, biology, and chemistry have no such struggles. We persistently argue over the consciousness of AI. Doesn’t that make our last wildcard, in a way, weak?

What does that say about our human exceptionalism?

What I am trying to say is…

We have never been the most successful creatures on our planet. We only believe we are. AI is a harsh reminder that we are not exceptional. I like the humility it injects in us.

May we never forget.

We may not be exceptional, but we are special. Special enough to describe how far from exceptional we may be.

May we also never forget.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

In one of the episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Aang, the Avatar and Prince Zuko embark on a journey to rediscover the origins of firebending, that supernatural quality of summoning fire from oneself into one’s external reality.

Prince Zuko could do it, but after losing the drive to continue chasing the Avatar, he lost it. He defied his father’s orders and plans and decided to make amends with his former nemesis. He needed a new source for his bending.

Aang, on the other hand, feared using fire as an element because it hurt the one person he cared for. He didn’t want to do it again.

Both of them needed to master firebending before Sozen’s comet, which would be used by the Fire Lord Ozai to completely take over the world. The best place to start, they thought, was to visit the original fire benders, the Sun Warriors.

Legend goes that the sun was the original source of fire, so the community believed. Firebending was part of their practice and was used in their rituals. But this was hardly the most riveting of customs from this old civilization, because the land where these people walked housed dragons. Dragons, not humans, were the teachers to anyone who wanted to learn firebending.

Before facing these teachers, the tribal elder gave a warning. If one does not open up and show their true selves with honest intentions, then the dragons would see through it and completely burn them. With this high-stakes requirement, Avatar Aang and Prince Zuko proceeded to face the masters.

Each of them had to take with them a piece of fire from the original flame, a flame the community had preserved from its very beginning. Up the staircase, Aang freaks out and forgets he is carrying a piece of the flame. He turns to Zuko and asks him to split some of his. The fighting further extinguishes Zuko’s fire. Now they were all laid bare, without tongues of flame, past the point of no return, when the two dragon masters emerged.

Dragons were symbolic

If you real and you know it clap your hands

— Swizz Beatz

The dragons in this scene were symbolic. Their colours reminded me of the Bunsen burner. With a little adjustment, you could get a luminous flame. Adjust it some more, and then you would have the non-luminous one. Each had its unique features. Both were dangerous if mishandled. In part, I believe the dragon represented these two types of flame.

They also represented a teacher you could never bullshit. They would see straight through your bluff and fake confidence. Any lies were completely extinguished. Death through incineration.

The dragons’ eyes had a penetrating gaze that would arrest and paralyze. Once you survived the gaze, the teachers would then introduce the student to the harmony present in fire. Fire, as Aang would soon find out, was not always a weapon of destruction, but an element of nature that can renew, light up paths, and create a chance for rebirth. The two candidates walked away with a renewed mission, but first, their bullshit had to be called out.

Another series where dragons could scare the life out of anyone was in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Their gaze put the fear of nature into any man with a weak spine. Given a chance, I doubt many today could stand before these mythical creatures.

We don’t have dragons. But we have a lot of fake people. Question is, how do you detect them?

This is not an article that gives a breakdown on how to identify the fake. It is a call to all of us to individually update our bullshit radar and identify the fake from the original.

A fake individual is someone who has no genuine intention. They will lick boots and kiss ass to get wherever they wish. Unprincipled. They yield to a game whose rules others have abided by, without sticking to their guns.

Who are the real? They are the kind that yield not to pressure, but only to principle. Feeble as many may be, they try to stick by their word. In the words of Harry Hart, the Kingsman, manners maketh man.

One place to identify fakery is in the CV. LinkedIn will flood your timeline with flowery praises of one’s achievements and a bio to match. Maybe I don’t like to parade my accomplishments, but from evolution, these behaviours always have intentions. Signaling can teach us something about the fake from the real.

Nassim Taleb gives a good example of a physician. Given the choice between the one with the perfect smile, minty-fresh white coat with a clean stethoscope, and the raggedy one with unkempt hair and an old but still clean lab coat, Nassim would choose the latter. The “dirty” one got to the position despite his presentation; the “clean” one likely got there partly because of it.

Professions such as those in medicine hitchhike the appearances bus. Patients would prefer a well-dressed doctor over one who is shabby. Ironically, at the same time, they would rather have an experienced one who may not always look neat. From Nassim’s example, one signals competence despite what one sees, while the other appeals to the eye first before showing competence, if they have it at all. Light, indeed, travels faster than sound.

In my practice, I have seen these two examples. True to Taleb’s case, the most confident ones don’t have to show it. They don’t market themselves. They don’t performatively signal. The fake ones need to use props.

And yet, when you survey a CV or resume, you can hardly tell who is competent and who isn’t. In the age of AI, one can embellish their documents to appear pristine, but the actual person does not match the praises they accord themselves. A professor who frequents our facility witnessed this recently after he interviewed individuals for a graduate position. The people were not nearly as superb as their papers highlighted. He then began to wonder if the paper-reliant vetting process had eliminated those who could have fit the bill. We don’t have dragons in the real world.

I am particularly wary of individuals who like to say that they are good people. Goodness is not seen in the words. It’s shown in acts. Anyone who prefers to advertise their persona upfront should be taken with a pinch of salt. Worse, some document it through videos to share it on their socials. Thus, the parading of one’s abilities on platforms such as LinkedIn is low-tier evidence in my book.

Many obs/gyne consultants cannot perform half of the procedures seasoned birth assistants do. The latter did not get their certification from ISO-certified institutions. Life served as the dragon. With time, all bullshit is exhumed. If a paper is all it takes to brand oneself an expert, then the process can be gamed. Who doesn’t know of anyone who has bought their way into getting a qualification document?

Institutions are no different. One can claim they went to a top-tier university, but that is no different from the white-coat doctor’s props. In a famously circulated interview, Barack Obama gives it to us straight — there are a bunch of foolish people in Harvard. The school speaks for the individual, but few incidents show that they are riding the wave of the school’s reputation while naked, with nothing to show for themselves.

Great authors have gone to the grave without the world knowing about them. I am presently reading a book by Joseph Fishkin called Bottlenecks. I doubt I would have found it on the bestseller’s list. This is a book I would recommend to anyone interested in affirmative action, equality, and equity. In the book, he argues about process efficiency, but with the sad result of outcome inequality. Basically, how our world has been shaped. Fishkin suggests an alternative solution, opportunity pluralism rather than equal opportunity. You won’t find his book on the bestseller list.

Why?

The bestseller is not necessarily the best author.

The best doesn’t surface. You have to sell it. J.K. Rowling may not be known today if Harry Potter had not been sold into a global franchise. Does that make her the best author? As big a fan as I am of her work, I will not fall into the trap of answering that question.

What’s worse is that history is usually written not just by the victors, but by those who choose to write or have something written about them. Writing is a fantastic way to market your skills. Victors have a slower decay rate than losers, while in essence, we learn more from losing than winning. With stories and narration as our best means of passing down traditions, winners will craft stories they believe led to their success. These stories will sell as blueprints, but even if strictly followed, they will not lead to outcomes as successful as their leading proponents.

The online world worsens our already bad state. A young adult looking for love will readily latch onto a profile one made of themselves on Tinder. A couple of words on display, and someone believes that they have found their perfect match. Still, the platform makes a killing from this naivety.

When someone posts a video or photo, the number of likes does not mean everyone liked it. How do you tell a real like from a fake one?

Now we have bots. Anyone who has access to a social media platform has already interacted with a chatbot. These bots are optimized for reasons best used to serve their owners. Genuine interaction will continue to fade.

Now we have deepfakes. Apps can substitute a real image with a fake one, and our slowly evolving organs will hardly know the difference. What then? Our bullshit detectors don’t get that much funding. While we continue to praise the steps made in AI, we continue to become victims of manipulation.

There are genuine builders. They will make a product or introduce a service to solve problems. A scientist interested in the GPS may not need to swindle you out of your money, because the service helps with navigation. However, someone who claims that all your problems will be solved by sending $9.99 and enrolling in a certain spirituality programme is selling snake oil. All your problems? Really? Anyone who tries to bypass your bullshit detector is someone who has goals of using you.

Faking has existed for eons. Evolutionarily, it means it can easily bypass many bullshit detectors. We therefore need to continue updating our servers and radars.

The Müller-Lyer illusion is a popular example of how easy it is to convince us of a difference that doesn’t exist. These two horizontal lines are the same length. We can easily be bullshitted. So we have to constantly update our bullshit filters.

Garrett Hardin wrote a book to guide against falling victim. As powerful as the filters he suggested can be, they cannot be the only ones we can use. We can always update them and improve our toolkit.

The subtitle of this piece underlies the purging of the fake, the bullshit, as the dragons did to Aang and Prince Zuko. We therefore have to call it when we see it. Verbally, and directly, or by tagging those you identified flaunting these traits. Choosing how best to interact with them in the next encounter will catch them off guard and make them realign their priorities. These are the small ways I can think of to purge the fake.

Among Kenyans, we have a relatable behaviour. Someone claims that they are in a fix and wants your assistance. They then make the mistake of saying that they will return the amount you lent them. Worse still, they give themselves a timeline. They could do either of these two options. They either fail to honour their word. These can be easily tagged. Or, they could keep their promise to a T, but usually with the intention of borrowing more. The ability to refund money that is regularly borrowed implies an ability to manage funds. However, the regularity is low-key, using someone as a backup for not getting one’s finances in order. The level of grace you will lend this individual is up to you. As always, you have to keep our bullshit radar constantly updated.

Communication is also one way to identify the real from the fake. Real ones communicate. We know life can have you in a fix sometimes. Fake ones ignore any attempt at conversation. As Swizz Beatz laments, “That’s the type of people I hate.”

What I’m trying to say is…

In a famous story about Max Planck and his driver, we are told that the driver has taken the Nobel Laureate to many conferences, where Planck talks about the same thing. One time, the chauffeur insisted that he give the talk. “Why not?” Planck thought. That day, Planck was the driver.

The conference wasn’t about maternity, but the driver delivered.

At the end of the talk, someone from the audience asked a question. It was technical. But the guy was smart. He responded:

That question is so simple that I would rather not answer it myself. I would let my driver do it.

You see that question? That’s how you call bullshit.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Thinking needs time. Protracted time.

When all problems are solved almost instantly by LLMs such as ChatGPT or Claude, thinking is outsourced.

At the expense of promptness, you appear relevant, methodical, and up to date. Thinking, however, does not always demand promptness, a defined method, or relevance.

LLMs work by summarising current knowledge. Heavily relying on them is unlikely to generate new thought processes.

Time is also a factor. In a distraction economy, there is hardly any time to develop a unique idea.

The offshoot is individuals lose the ability to think for themselves.

As George Orwell once lamented, when you can’t think for yourself, somebody else will.

It will not be to your advantage.

I once compared electrons to airplanes. By following geodesics, airplanes stick to preferred routes just as electrons populate the outer surface of atoms around orbitals.

There are also noticeable differences. We cannot necessarily pinpoint, with exact precision, an electron’s position. An airplane, however, is large enough not only to locate but also to board.

The analogy helps to create a bridge between what appears distant. It was my guess that this bridge would help anyone see the similarity between a sub-atomic entity and a colossal one, and use this bridge to show how similar it is to living things.

Today, I want to attempt another stretch: Intelligence from a different perspective. I would then use it to explore the different ideas of consciousness we know. You may have put two and two together by now, because I want us to explore what it would mean for artificial intelligence (AI) to be conscious.

We have tried to exemplify ourselves throughout the years. At some point, we thought the Earth was the centre of the universe. Thanks to Copernicus, it turned out to be false.

We think of ourselves as the apex species. Microbes, which continue to thrive in disparate environments, might think otherwise.

And now that our own creation, AI, is giving our intelligence a run for the money, we try to exemplify ourselves using the very last card I think we wield — consciousness. But maybe there are different ways of viewing all of this.

Intelligence as movement between coordinates

Let us consider a space of possible solutions to a problem.

Suppose the problem required a solution where three edges converged at a point. A cube can be one of the potential spaces, as can a cuboid. All of them have 8 vertices, but different forms. A cube has similar sides and faces, unlike a cuboid. Despite the similar solutions, that is, the vertices, the cube and the cuboid are different.

A different space of solutions points towards a different space of problems. Problems are multidimensional. Not all of them can be solved by a single method. For this reason, we can have multiple solutions creating a hyperdimensional space of solutions.

With this in mind, we can consider the navigation from one coordinate to another in the space of solutions as intelligence. However, staying at a single vertex coordinate without moving would not amount to intelligence, but merely a static reminder of a solution to a problem. In a word, complacency. Celebrating the past, the movement that led to the present coordinate, but without moving. Intelligence, however, is appreciated through movement, not by being static in one coordinate.

The thought experiment is instructive because a single vertex can have multiple ways of approaching it. Since intelligence is the movement from one point in the hyperdimensional space to this particular vertex, there must be different forms of intelligence.

You can kill a rat by poisoning it, hitting it with a club (as my brother once did), setting a hungry cat at it, throwing it into a pit of vipers, pointing a gun at it and pulling the trigger. The problem is — how do you kill a rat? The solution is that the rat is dead. Intelligence is how you move from any space you’re in to eventually having the rat dead.

Intelligence, therefore, can be crawling, running, swimming, or even flying. Intelligence is motion. For the purposes of this piece, I want us to think of it as flight, which can make us dive even further into the conclusions we can draw from this analogy.

Numerous organisms can fly. To fly, you need limb extensions that can facilitate aerial movement. Wings, for the most part.

Insects have wings but lack hair. Feathers are a follicular modification exapted from preserving temperature to facilitate aerial movement. Still, both flying insects and flying birds take flight.

Bats have hair, but they don’t have feathers. Their skins stretch to expand from their core to their limbs, creating something similar to wings, but without the feathers or the veiny wings of insects. Still, they can fly.

One of the strangest examples is the one I started with — airplanes. Helicopters, jets, and passenger airlines. They don’t have the organic versions already described, and yet it takes flight.

Metals should be heavy, but they presented a problem. The solution was to find ourselves airborne despite using metals. Intelligence was the process of finding this coordinate.

Birds may have made modifications to achieve flight, one of them being pneumatizing their bones. Air gives birds buoyancy. But not all birds have this bone structure. The male, club-winged manakin has solid bones, through and through, and still it flies. It, therefore, must have had a unique problem which did not just involve flight. It may likely have been — how can I fly and still woo females? The active process of moving towards the solution amounts to intelligence.

Taking intelligence in this way, we can see how LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude find solutions to our problems. They have found an effective way to shorten that distance between coordinates.

Without problems, we cannot have a drive to find solutions. Without the drive, we cannot evolve intelligence. Intelligence is an outgrowth of problems. Navigation is the problem. Being a part of the problem, therefore, amounts to intelligence. For it to persist, the space between solution coordinates needs to be preserved.

So, how does this relate to consciousness?

The precision perspective of consciousness

We can approach this problem in one of two ways. I have already hinted at the first one — a problem.

Moving from one coordinate (our understanding of organismal and mental states) to the one we wish to be in (understanding consciousness) amounts to intelligence. We need not cover the full length of the intercoordinate space to appreciate the existence of intelligence. One only needs to move far from one coordinate and, even better, towards the desired one.

For as long as we have not arrived at the desired coordinate, what we will have are guesses. Intelligence, in other words, is a guess. Some are more verifiable and rational than others.

As for consciousness, one of the guesses includes the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). This is one of the leading guesses, but one that sails the murky waters of functionalism. The foundation is not steady, but the idea is worth exploring. Its supporters can be extremely convincing. Science, however, must never ignore assumptions in the interest of novelty.

We can think of consciousness in this way — as a vertex which we can arrive at from different paths. The major assumption in this perspective is that consciousness is a single state, describable in only one form. We can call it the coordinate of consciousness, a precise vertex.

The problem with this view is that it refers to a single description used by Thomas Nagel: What it is for a particular organism to be that organism. What is stopping us then from saying that an atom is conscious, because we can just as well claim that there is a way for an atom to be that atom? We may claim that it is not living, but we did not include the desideratum of living for us to say that the bat was conscious. We did, however, append other traits, notably, life.

What is dead, therefore, should not be conscious, a difficult stance to defend, because even in death, there is a state for that bat to be that bat. When we add feelings and subjective experience, we only add more functions to a state that is very difficult to describe with precision.

A vertex, therefore, demands precise coordinates and a precise description.

The discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness

The second way of looking at it is from the hyperdimensional space. Consciousness may not be the vertex, but rather, the space between the vertices.

If we’re to take the premise of our brains as prediction machines, as indeed they are, then consciousness is the space between prediction and outcome. Our brain tries to narrow the distance between the prediction coordinate and the outcome coordinate, and that navigation could amount to consciousness.

This perspective is insightful because it is predictive. The greater the discrepancy between prediction and outcome, the more conscious one is. When someone splashes water on you while you are asleep, the instant reaction is to wake up, likely in anger. One is extremely conscious at this point. This example shows a significant discrepancy between the prediction and the outcome, because they did not predict, while in their sleep, that someone would throw water on them.

Conversely, the smaller the distance between the prediction and the outcome, the less conscious we become. These are the activities we do on autopilot. Breathing without confirming whether it is oxygen that we take in; intestines digesting food while we watch a movie; fish not knowing it is in water.

In contrast, when a passive smoker inhales cigarette smoke, it is not obvious. There is a discrepancy between prediction (inhaling the usual air) and outcome (the choking effect), which makes us conscious. A more accurate description is that we’re consciously aware. Just as well, there is a discrepancy between a meal that was eaten and the stomachache that follows, which was not anticipated. When the fish is removed from water, it flips. Literally.

Consciousness may be most evident when we are at odds with our anticipated reality. I prefer thinking of consciousness in this way, because it highlights something evident — a difficulty in describing it with precision, but an accurate way of distinguishing its existence. Consciousness as a space, not a point in space.

I have not explored the possibilities of this perspective comprehensively, but I see how it can have implications in defining life if consciousness is a core feature. Organisms will therefore need to be predictive for them to be conscious, a stance we cannot readily dismiss.

What I love about this perspective is that it supports the method I use to identify an organism — exposing it to an imminent, credible threat. An organism is most conscious when it stares at death, but an organism also tries to avoid it. Death offers the most unpredictable outcome an organism can think of, out of touch with its prediction, and this makes the organism conscious.

Patients under anaesthesia hardly make predictions. Some autonomic systems continue to operate as they do. The patient can therefore be said to have lost consciousness. More accurately, conscious awareness.

If discrepancy is a measure of consciousness, then it becomes difficult to claim that Artificial Intelligence in the form of LLMs is conscious. They cannot predict. They merely spew out a response after being prompted. We don’t have to yield to a precise definition of consciousness because we lack a proper theory to see how LLMs lack it. We can use what I call the discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness.

The hypothesis is all the more revealing when an individual interacts with an LLM. When you prompt Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT, you don’t have a clue what its output will look like. There is therefore an untold discrepancy between your coarse prediction and its output. Therefore, when interacting with LLMs, we are extremely conscious. The LLM, however, is not conscious.

The precision perspective of consciousness may give AI some degree of consciousness because it moves from one vertex to another, trying to solve a problem. This may be the buzz and wariness around the conscious-seeming features of AI. Conscious-seeming is not consciousness. One may even argue that, using the precision perspective of consciousness, there is a way in which an AI is the way it is, just as a bat is the way it is.

However, the discrepancy hypothesis shows that AI is not conscious in the slightest. Consciousness, like intelligence, is actively amorphous.

This hypothesis is consistent with all the numerous ideas that argue against the consciousness of AI. My favourite is the essay by Anil Seth. We can add the discrepancy hypothesis of consciousness to that list. I, however, feel that it has more potential in describing consciousness than merely negating its existence in AI.

What I’m trying to say is…

Consciousness continues to fascinate me.

I believe the world holds on to a single perspective, which narrows our solution space. Thinking of intelligence and consciousness through the lens of a solution space introduces the discrepancy hypothesis, which rules out the possibility of consciousness in AI.

So when Huey asks, “What am I?” and answers, “Everything you not,” he hits at one of the most interesting problems about consciousness.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Locked in an all-boys institution somewhere in the middle of sugarcane plantations, any memory of a lady you once admired gets vividly etched in one’s memory. In this particular case, it was Ce’cile, the Jamaican sensation.

My favourite song by her was Hot like we. The beats had an ascending tempo, and dancers matched the energy. And yet, it is not this song that I remember as far as problems and solutions go. In one of her other songs, Rise Up, she insists that if we’re not a part of the solution, then we’re part of the problem.

Back then, I agreed with her. Right now, not quite.

The binary thinking is limiting in that the structure of options is two-fold: Ones or zeros; on or off; yes or no. No maybes. When the structure of options is limited, thinking tends to narrow. If you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution, it implies that there are no lurkers somewhere in the middle.

Think of an electoral process. The candidates can be as many as the ballot paper allows. The goal of the voter is singular — to vote. There will be votes for, votes against, in the typical binary either-or version. But there will also be spoiled votes. Middlegrounds do exist. Binary mental models are bottlenecks of thinking about reality.

For centuries, humans have applied binary thinking to nature. Fermions have half-integer spins. They therefore obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. Bosons have full integer spins. It means there is a boson without a spin. We cannot just claim that a particle either has a negative or positive spin, or a full or half-integer spin. Some lack.

Well, maybe we already know that binary thinking is limiting. What I doubt you may have considered is flipping the idea of being a part of the solution. I would wish to argue in favour of being a part of the problem, and not the solution.

Part of the solution

Seeking solutions can be a good thing. You don’t want to surround yourself with friends who always talk about the problems while scarcely spending time on finding their antidotes.

However, an offshoot of always being bent on seeking solutions is that the solution might become the goal. When a wrong goal becomes the ultimate metric, blindly seeking it does not strengthen a system. When every student wants high SAT scores, for instance, using SAT scores to gauge student capability is not the best metric. It weakens the system that admits students based on SAT scores, as well as the students whose only aim is to get the desired SAT scores. As Joseph Fishkin reiterates, it creates a bottleneck while diminishing other perspectives of what a flourishing life may be like.

You can easily become so good at getting a solution that the problem no longer becomes a “problem.” For instance, learning addition at an early age may have been difficult in the initial classes. With time, it gets easy.

The reason the solution became easy was not that the student sought it, but that they engaged with the problem. Efficiency came later. I liken the time one spends with a problem to the challenge of converting wild foxes into dogs.

Dmitry Belyaev was the first scientist who dabbled with the problem of taming foxes. Silver foxes, the least unruly of the foxes, were the target. Over time, their ears turned floppy, their tails began to wag, and they eventually became comfortable among humans. This is how one tames a wild problem into a simple one — by becoming a part of the problem. More on that in the next section. But first, being a part of the solution has its downsides.

Writers and scientists are often told to kill their best ideas. Ideas are the tentative solutions to problems. Your first idea is not likely to be your best. It may, however, be the one you love the most. You therefore need to kill it to consider other better solutions. Killing your ideas can be painful. It is a necessary step for progress.

The other issue with seeking solutions is that readily available solutions might downplay the process that led to the existence of that very solution in the first place. Those classes on addition needed engagement between the individual and the problem to find the best way to solve the problem. If the solution is there on the ready, the process and its relevance begin to fade.

This is one of the problems I have with AI. It may be efficient in seeking solutions, but it downplays the relevance of the process of seeking the solution. It is like chasing the GDP regardless of the comfort and well-being of the country’s citizenry. Mindlessly seeking solutions can lead us to the systemic trap of seeking the wrong goal.

As much as finding the solution is a good thing, we need to take a step backwards and ask ourselves why finding a solution is a good thing. We have to revert to the problem.

Why we need to become a part of the problem

In high school, my math teacher insisted that we never use calculators until our third year. I heeded the advice. For four years, I led my class as the top student in math, I believe, not because I followed the advice, but because I became a part of the problem.

The logbook, that book with numbers and tables of different mathematical functions, was my favourite math book. I preferred it to a calculator. These two options present us with an opportunity to view the channels of getting the solution from two paths. On the one hand, I could use a logbook. On the other hand, a calculator. We would get the same answer. Naturally, the calculator is more efficient.

Efficiency will always be prized in our world. It even works in the evolutionary world. Efficiency saves energy that can be redistributed elsewhere. We freed our upper limbs when we took the bipedal gait. Now our hands serve other purposes.

Because we had already evolved past the quadrupedal posture, we could adopt a new one and still opt for the previous one out of individual choice. Children crawl before they walk. After learning how to crawl, they stand and walk. But if, for some reason, they cannot hold their balance, they revert to crawling. That is what it means to become a part of the problem. In this case, the locomotion problem.

For the math tests, I could use the logbook or the calculator. My preference for the logbook was such that if I lacked it, I could still use the calculator. However, if I had started with the calculator from the very beginning, getting into an exam room with a faulty one would cripple me. The calculator was a part of the solution, but it can make one abandon part of the problem.

This is my appeal — we need to be a part of the problem, because that is the only way to understand it extremely well and thus tailor our solutions as we so choose. By being a part of the problem, the power lies with us on which solution path to take. By only being part of the solution, we become slaves to the most efficient one. This is a fragile position to be in.

History is rife with icons who fell in love with the problem. It is almost as if the intellectual intercourse with problems produces offspring who dissolve the very problem. These figures are known not just for their solutions but for the problems they solved.

Darwin is known not so much for natural selection as for evolution. The more common phrase is Darwinian evolution, as opposed to Darwinian natural selection. The last part sounds redundant. Natural selection was Darwin’s solution to the problem of evolution.

Einsteinian and Newtonian gravity. Each is named based on the problem. The solutions are different. These scientists became a part of the problem. Not the problem, but a part of it. A part of the problem of gravity is soluble because Newton latched onto some corner of it. Einstein did the same. As J. Cole raps, it’s not that you should possess the problem, but you should become so engaged with it that you become a part of it:

The problem from the start is I was just tryna to possess her
And have her for my own, didn’t wanna let her roam
Mama said, “You should’ve known she was like that when you met her”

An intricate understanding of the problem takes time. Sometimes, this lag phase is not well tolerated. How long will it take the FDA to approve a drug that is killing millions? People would want a solution immediately. The process would have to be fast-tracked.

Siddhatar Murkerjee chronicles the history of cancer, pointing out moments when movements would be formed to alert the responsible bodies and authorities about the deaths attributable to cancer relative to the sloth-like pace of its approval of medications. Given a choice between a solution and falling in love with the problem, a cancer patient will pick the solution any time.

My profession demands that we do no harm. Being part of the problem would be akin to siding with harm in health situations such as these. However, when we zoom out, we can still find a picture similar to that of learning how to add.

At some point, the surgeons were the loudest in the history of cancer management. Scientists testing new drugs were worlds apart from these health practitioners. Biochemical warfare (mustard gas) signaled the introduction of new options to cancer cure. Madam Curie became such a big part of her problem, it ended up killing her. Bringing these and many other problems made it simpler to tackle many forms of cancer.

When you become part of the problem, it is easy for you to fall in love with the problem. I can testify to this. I fell in love with evolutionary biology so much that I would continue reading books about it within the church’s compound, after mass, in the same space as an institution that does not readily accept Darwinian interpretations of biology.

When you fall in love with the problem, the solutions become all the more exciting. More than that, one understands why other solutions failed, but not in a depressing way. One does not have to kill one’s ideas. The problem continues to live through the solution. It overcomes one of the problems of being part of the solution because solutions cannot make sense outside the context of the problem. You cannot know that 2+2=4 if you don’t understand the problem of the rules surrounding the addition sign. The problem of bringing two integers together separated by a plus sign and an equals sign generates a solution that only exists because of the problem that addition generates.

I think this is how hip-hop artists fall in love with hip-hop. From its beginning, it has always been chastised. Associated with violence, killing, gang behaviours, drugs, hip-hop has never been a favourite of many. It still isn’t. Ironically, from the same genre, you find the likes of Lupe Fiasco, an award-winning hip-hop artist, who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, singing that hip-hop saved his life.

Common, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and most recently, J. Cole all talk about how they fell in love with this lady they called hip-hop. It is a problem because you can never please her. Still, by falling in love with it, you can explore angles to the genre previously untapped, the kind that leaves J. Cole singing:

I never knew a luh, luh, luh, love like this
Gotta be something for me to write this

Falling in love with a problem will also likely lead to this outcome — enshrining the love. Scientists, singers, artists all try to memorialize the love they have with a problem in creative ways. A scientist will invent a symbol, such as “a”, to capture gravitational acceleration. We cannot see it, but to bring it to life, Newton added it next to the mass symbol. Now we all know his second law of motion: F=ma. An artist will carve, paint, or sing. J. Cole did just that when he rapped:

Love, she’s why I put my truth into a song
For years we told each other everythin’ that’s goin’ on
She said, “I gotta tell ya, I done rocked a lot of fellas
But with you, there’s somethin’ special, I think you could be the one”

Other than hip-hop, I have yet to find a genre where artists love it so much that they embody it into a figurine, personified with human-like qualities. It is not like the Stockholm Syndrome, where one is blind to the facts. This kind of problem is grounded in reality. Even Nas once considered the possibility of hip-hop dying. But then he was such a big part of this problem that he considered what he would do if it came to pass.

My appeal — we should lean more towards being part of the problem, and not the solution, as the former trumps the latter.

What I’m trying to say is…

Have you ever seen that light shining in someone’s eye when they begin to talk about a topic they enjoy? That is someone who has not fallen in love with a solution, but with a problem. That is often enough to sail them throughout life, even if the solution is not within sight.

The beautiful thing about problems is that there are so many. Solutions are so few. Falling in love with solutions is as limiting as the space of known solutions. It is either someone is a neo-Larmackian or a neo-Darwinist. But when you become a part of the problem, everyone can get a piece of the pie.

Problems will always outnumber solutions. Falling in love with one problem improves the solution space. Falling in love with solutions does nothing to them besides shrinking one’s thinking.

The most viable and productive approach is to fall in love with problems to the point of being a part of them, rather than the solution.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

A few decades ago, the type of life one wanted was simple: A life partner, a house, and the prospect of healthy kids. That was a perfect life.

Centuries ago, humans would wish nothing more.

Millennia ago, again, the script remains unchanged.

Then industrialization changed everything. For the last 50 or so years, it has become a race for who gets to the Forbes list first. Who is the self-made billionaire? Which musician transitioned from Millions to Billions?

You may have come across the meme, often posted by a zeellenial (an overlap between Gen Z and Millennial), that says they have gotten to that age when they are seriously considering fraud and corruption. It’s all about the money.

Back in medical school, I was shocked by how fast my classmates would confess that they were in it for the money. I was innocent, in comparison, because I chose it for reasons far from money. I didn’t even know how much doctors got paid. I learned it in my final year. Talk about being out of touch with reality.

Conversations are based on one’s estimated earnings. When talking with a lady, a man who admits to being a doctor will have the female’s attention. The one who says he is a teacher might not be. Your occupation can rank you in the interest ladder of any potential partner.

You can no longer be genuinely interested in something before someone in your close circle comments on how deluded you are. If it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense. Apparently.

Money has flipped our understanding of how the law works. Money can buy court decisions and write off unremitted tax penalties. If a man has money, he’s cute. If he doesn’t, he’s ugly. Many women are willing to compromise the face card for any man who has money.

You may think I’m only ranting about couples, but it’s everywhere. Indeed, as Miss Lauryn Hill rapped:

It’s funny how money changed the situation

All about money, less about art

Many people often ask me if writing pays. Again, money. The kind of payment you get from writing cannot have you proudly cashing in your returns at a bank.

My most viral work in 2025 was about chasing dreams. I got DMs and messages from people I hardly expected. For my tiny audience, this was similar to a unicorn moment. It could hardly be predicted from the time I routinely edited the work, pushed the publish button, then went on to catch a few winks. This is one of the most rewarding ways writing can get you. But, according to the prevalent zeitgeist, if it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t make sense. Basically, showing up daily to share my ideas consistently, for three years now, doesn’t make sense.

Art loses. Economics wins. And yet, economics depends on art. You need to find the sweet spot to convince the customer to get your product or service. The eventual result will be money in your account, but the process needs artistic execution. Rory Sutherland may be of a different opinion.

I first heard of him in 2020. Sent back home because of the pandemic, I committed to listening to all the podcast episodes by Farnam Street. I did. Rory Sutherland’s was especially different. He looked at the simple ways of converting people into customers in a way that was more artistic and less concerned with the downstream effect of bringing home money. The offshoot, ironically, was that money did flow rather than drip after art guided the revision of a marketing strategy.

Science and academia demand that one continue to publish to remain relevant. Getting a slot in a reputable journal is big news for most researchers, but it requires that one part with a hefty amount of money. Research grants help offset these hurdles, but how many researchers have access to these grants? Even journals gate the submissions from a financial point of view. Obscure journals hide the hidden gems from the public. Network effects will lead all eyes to Nature, Wired, Science, or, in my field, the New England Journal of Medicine. You’ll be lucky to get a waiver if at all they are given.

Researchers have reward-hacked this bottleneck by working in teams. Each one of us works on individual projects and includes the rest of the team in the publication as contributing authors. The expenses are reduced, the journal makes money, the H-indices register an uptick, and the carousel continues.

Novel ideas don’t stem from teams. They could be stimulated by it, but they are likely to emerge from a single individual. This person may not have the financial muscle to offset the article processing charges (APCs). Ideas get shelved in mental closets and buried years later, because money has gated them. It’s funny how money changed the situation. Even funnier is that you could cough up the APCs but have your work rejected. To the journals, Miss Hill reminds:

You might win some but you just lost one.

This culture has turned scientists extremely dependent on money, such that when that tap is closed, panic ensues. Elegant experiments cannot be done inside houses, and laboratories need funding.

The war on cancer is rife with examples. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee shows how cancer only progressed because it got financial backing from Congress. In the absence of powerful advocates, we may still be using Halsted’s method of completely eviscerating cancer through surgical removal of every organ where it resurfaces. As for bloodletting as an intervention, it becomes impossible to completely drain the blood in leukemias.

Dependence reduces innovation. I can predict that 50 years from now, children will not know how to use a pen to write down a grocery list. They may not know that chalk can sometimes be used to write. A rubber slipper can work as an eraser. You can light up a jiko using paper, matchsticks, and a little motivation rumbling inside your stomach. Dependence does the opposite. A tablet, laptop, or phone will make cursive writing appear foreign. Chalks may begin to look like giraffe food. Jikos may appear as alien as the time when my classmate failed to identify a wheelbarrow as a class two lever.

A dependence on money narrows the latitude of one’s thoughts to economic efficiency. How can you channel your skill to make money from it? What may have been learnt through curiosity eventually becomes a slave of figures. I know this very well because when I started writing, I wanted my clients to get the very best. That was my north star metric. Once the money started rolling in, I wanted to write as many papers as possible to fatten my pockets. I recall that time as the most frustrating period of my writing journey.

Then one month, I experimented. I decided to work on perfecting my submissions. I made more money that month than in any other month. Furthermore, I was so relatively stress-free that I wondered why I lay emphasis on more money. Hindsight can be 20/20.

It may be anecdotal, but it is a data point.

The McKinseys of the world will give consultations to save companies thousands, millions, and even billions of dollars. They have made a reputation from it. How do you put your best foot forward in the creative industry? You cannot argue that your creations saved you thousands of dollars. What’s more, you cannot predict that it will earn you much more than you spent. If J. K. Rowling and Coca-Cola were to project their lifetime earnings from their first year quarters, then we would not have a celebrated author and a behemoth of a company. In contrast, every other company stresses the quarterly returns.

Yes, we need to stay afloat, but can we do that without shutting the door for other possibilities?

Entry into top universities, for instance, has a set of criteria for its students. You must have achieved a particular quota to enroll in certain courses. As for job descriptions, the qualifications are pretty much set. These and other examples create bottlenecks. These bottlenecks have been etched in our society as the standard, such that other alternative options are barely considered. This situation has evolved from using and seeking money as a compass for one’s perception of success.

A company will specialize in matching the pin factory. Money will eventually create departments. Departments narrow their efforts and curate budgets to meet their regular objectives. Emphasis is laid on mass production as it will reap more money through economies of scale. This may not be a bad thing. But the offshoot is that many other creative ideas are left out.

Because of money, these companies emphasize costs and not opportunity costs. How strange it is that a creative idea has to pass through the financial department but not the other way round. The irony is that money should give us free rein to experiment with our ideas. Dependence on it, however, leads towards mode collapse.

I don’t speak from the perspective of someone who has money. The “money isn’t everything” mantra does not mean I have made bountifuls of it. But I know many billionaires who pop pills to keep their sanity in check.

Much of social media is a façade. How then don’t we apply the same screening tool for the extremely monied? It’s because, as Lauryn rapped, money changed the situation.

The billionaires will take your private data, wrap it in a neat, appealing video, and call it your yearly wrapped. Sharing it with your friends and audience implicitly approves of what they do en masse. The courts cannot attack them, and you give them access to more of your data. And they do this every year because of the money.

Influencers will onboard online platforms to make a living. Life has become hard for the young adult generation. We don’t have the kind of dreams those in the past did. The mere thought of raising a family while you foresee never building your own house can be crushing. So an influencer will do everything within their power to preserve the image they have cultivated for their audience. They risk being slaves of audience capture. All for the money.

When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to become a good target. When insane amounts of money screen researchers from publishing, it ceases to validate the worth of the articles it publishes. Gems of ideas get buried further in the heap of content that sloshes like never-ebbing tides in the online world.

When money defines your partner, the other qualities they possess fall under a long, dark shadow. It ceases to become a good measure.

When tech oligarchs are rated based on how much they made in the last three months, registering that some may be self-medicating on lethal drugs becomes overlooked. It ceases to become a good measure.

When a company or consultant is rated based on how much cost was saved, effort turns towards defending what one has rather than creating new options. Creativity is stifled. It ceases to become a good measure.

Money might have won some, but it really lost one — the creative one.

And despite how far we have allowed money to shape our thinking, creativity is not like a fish taken from the water. It thrives when the conditions favour it. What we need is a miseducation of what money can do and the metrics of success that await in its absence.

It goes further to include public intellectuals. That is a title that has long faded into history. Today, the public prefers reels, TikTok videos, and memes. To take the mantle of a public intellectual, you only need money.

Jeffrey Epstein is one such figure, with connections running deep across many intellectual circles. He preserved the image of an intellectual because he knew how money could change the situation.

It’s no longer about how powerful your ideas may be, but how deep your pockets can go.

Chasing the money is relevant to pay your bills. Using money as the be-all is losing oneself. Lauryn Hill raps:

Now, some might listen and some might shun
And some may think that they’ve reached perfection
If you look closely you’ll see what you’ve become
’Cause you might win some, but you just lost one

What I’m trying to say is…

The biggest and most powerful leverage points are from changing or transcending paradigms. Just see how success moved from raising a stable family in your home to chasing money.

Economies, relationships, and legacies have been built and shattered because of it. And the truth is, economies, relationships, and legacies can be built and shattered in its absence.

There are other metrics we can resort to. Yes, money can be important, but it doesn’t have to be everything we make it to be. Ask bacteria. They have been living for billions of years without it.

We can change the situation.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

Maybe the designers were intentional.

From the image above, the wording becomes readable when you flip the bottle.

Ketchup was meant to replace the thinner version of tomato sauce. Behind a TV screen, however, I saw no difference. In reality, it is evident.
Ketchup’s thick, rich taste may sell to customers, but the container engineers never imagined that most of its users would never rely on its broad base. A flipping bottle ensures the contents are closer to the opening valve.

I can’t think of any other product whose flipped position would be preferred to the one designed by its manufacturers.

The opposite of an idea can indeed be a good idea.

You may not be new to the phrase, “making an informed decision.”

Implicit in the phrase is that information guides proper decision-making. It also implies that the more information one gets, the better the decision will be. Reality is different.

Analysis can paralyze. Information can overwhelm. Filters can crash.

Information is information. One needs a filter to separate the truthful ones from the fake. Too much information is crippling.

We live in an age of too much information. Anything that will grab attention is prioritised.

Organisms are novelty seekers. But when paralyzed, we lack the agency that precedes novelty seeking. Doom scrolling can give the impression of preserved agency. In contrast, by flooding oneself with information, one becomes paralysed, and anything that is even remotely different appears novel.

Too much information is like junk. What follows from its consumption is intellectual obesity. It’s why we sleep. To reboot. When nighttime scrolling creeps into your sleep, you undermine your natural capabilities.

Agency lies with you. As you reject cookies, pick your tomatoes. Don’t let them get thrown at you.

I liken the body to a hamburger.

On both sides of the burger are the dry buns with sesame seeds. Similarly, our skin is drier than our insides. It is keratinized. Keratin is a protein that protects the body from mechanical forces and minimizes desiccation.

As we gradually transition into the mouth, the epithelial covers begin to get moist. As for the mouth, so goes for the anus. If our inner linings were not moist, we would have the most uncomfortable experiences swallowing food and releasing waste products from our rear ends. These linings are wet, just like the inner sides of the hamburger.

The messy middle has no clear outlines like the buns. Everything has been thrown inside. Tomatoes. Mayo sauce. Sometimes ketchup. Cucumbers slices. Ham. And when we squeeze it, they all get squished with some of the contents spilling to the side.

Without a distinct boundary, we need a surveillance system that is up to the task, something that can detect the foreign material with great accuracy. Enter the immune cell.

Notably, these hard surfaces that we can liken to the buns on both sides are also part of the immune system. Epithelial barriers are exactly that — barriers. They stop anything that does not need access from getting inside our bodies. Of note, epithelial layers are avascular. Neatly stacked, one cell after the other. Blood vessels permeate underneath this layer.

However, some forces can break these barriers. And when they do, immune cells need to take over. Enter the street urchin.

Why is the street urchin similar to the immune cell?

Guy Ritchie recently released a mini-series, Young Sherlock. In all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, I have never imagined a younger version of the detective. I never even imagined Sherlock could have been friends with James Moriarty earlier in their lives. From all the books I have read, I was never introduced to Sherlock’s parents.

Regardless, the young Sherlock traces his father down to Paris, where he encounters, firsthand, the positives of having an interconnected web in the middle of the streets. The street children move seamlessly, from one lane to another, through the crowds until they find Sherlock’s father. The same channel is used to convey the message back.

The typical reaction to street urchins is revulsion. They are known to be conniving, tricksters, and grifters. In this scene, they were noted to be useful, always on the ready, conveying information to someone who wanted to remain hidden but still aware of the happenings elsewhere within a busy centre, much like an activated immune cell.

When a foreign body breaches an epithelial barrier, if digestible, it is processed by one of the immune cells and then presented to another cell for activation. They then destroy the material. That is exactly what the street child did. They were given an image of Sherlock’s father, which was processed by the first kid, and eventually, transmitted through an information chain, and the message finally reached him. The foreign material, in this sense, was Sherlock and his mother. The entity that wanted to protect himself was his father.

The immune system has such a role. Protection. To protect oneself, one needs to know oneself. However, an entity as large as the human being makes it difficult to constantly survey. The distribution of immune cells throughout the body helps cover every corner, with certain tags to distinguish self from non-self.

Street children know themselves and every other typical face that passes the streets they are known to frequent. Since most people hardly pay attention to them, they can serve as the best surveillance and information system for any smart individual or group that wishes to be on the alert on the happenings inside a busy area.

In Narcos, Pablo Escobar utilized this same system to evade the police who were bent on finding him and arresting him for his illegal trades. Every government-led expedition was expensive, but it was competently handled by using the most neglected cohort in the streets — street children.

Aladdin is another famous example. He was known in the streets. This familiarity granted him the nimble surveillance and access to corners, cul-de-sacs, and alleys the soldiers found difficult. His example is particularly unique to one type of immune cell, the neutrophil.

Neutrophils are typically the first type of cells to respond to any form of injury. Bodily injury tends to react first through inflammation. The process attracts neutrophils, which squeeze through the barriers inside the cell to access the area under insult, a process known as diapedesis.

Aladdin could squeeze through crevices and beneath carts nearly as efficiently as the neutrophil. These qualities become apparent only when the area is teeming with high-octane activity. Otherwise, these abilities are shelved or hidden. A single cell, a single street child.

When you bring them together, you have a dynamic system. Highly adaptable and efficient. Incentives are not costly. A few coins and they are satisfied, even loyal, like a dog. They only need a few minutes of ruffling, and they will die for you. They’ll also know when to bite, like a dog.

Street urchins don’t come from outside a city. They come from within. Immune cells are manufactured inside our bodies. They undergo training, the hard way, to serve their roles as they should, in as dynamically adaptable a way as possible. Same goes for the street kids. They learn to survive on the move, unlike the other organs of the body that sit and work and get fed through various nutritive channels. Worse, if the street kids don’t adapt, they die. Same goes for the immune cells. Different parts of the body clear the old, or the new and naïve ones that cannot distinguish the body’s cells from foreign ones.

Nevertheless, the price of analogy is constant vigilance. I can only stretch the idea of the immune cell and the street urchin so far. A proud street kid is exemplified by Aladdin. He loves Agrabah. He identifies with it. Not every one of the street kids is like Aladdin. Most of them know they cannot get a chance with the pretty lady who crosses their streets, let alone a princess like Jasmine. We should not also readily dismiss the absence of a loyal Abu, a magic carpet, and a genie that will come to their help whenever needed. So a good number of them wish to outgrow their lives of squalor. Immune cells have no such goal. They will serve the body until it dies. Their territory remains the murky space between the two buns.

I have used this example not necessarily to show the differences, but to underpin the similarities. Immune cells are supposed to be protective, and yet, they don’t match the common labels we have of street urchins. Smart individuals in the past, and to date, utilize this system. And like the immune system, before you penetrate their network, you will be met with extensive resistance.

What I’m trying to say is…

Transcending paradigms is the biggest leverage point in any system. Changing one’s understanding of a component within the system can alter how one sees it. In this case, the street network, run by street urchins, is astonishingly similar to the immune system. That the insight has been exploited by cartels reveals what academia left out.

You can be a scholar, but it takes a different kind of skill to become a street scholar.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube