Working on one’s own eidon is a central part of the human condition. Be it consciously or subconsciously, we all want our eidon to improve with respect to the metrics we chose to optimize. This means we are modelers at heart, constantly fitting our eidon to the experiences we encounter every day, the endless stream of new data life throws at us. For some, this task may be difficult enough as it is because they chose some really unstable metrics, because they are constrained by indoctrinated biases or just because they are bad at modeling. But for others, like myself, the model converges so rapidly that they actively seek out more data, because without it a special kind of boredom emerges. Not the regular kind of boredom brought about by the absence of stimulation, but a terrifying, existential, meta-boredom which I want to talk about in this post.
The problem is that you can’t just use any data to feed your hunger for eidon refinement. Anything you’ve seen enough of before will be neatly compressed by your eidon into well established parts of its latent space, dropping the remaining entropy as meaningless noise. And speaking of noise, you can’t just feast on randomness as it is by definition unpredictable, so trying to find patterns in it will only lead to instability and stability is a very sensible metric to have for your eidon. What you need is data that is novel in the sense that it is not easily compressible because of entropy that cannot be discarded as randomness. But as your eidon improves, it becomes increasingly better at compression which makes this particular kind of data increasingly hard to find.
As an analogy, look at video games that have randomly generated levels. One might think that you could play these games forever and that they can never get boring because you will always have new levels to play. But anyone who has played them will attest that you do get bored of them, often quite quickly. When you first play them, there really is a lot of novelty as there would be for any new game. But as you continue playing, you will notice recurring patterns as you build a model of what the generator can and cannot generate. At some point, you will be able to clearly understand which parts of what you are seeing are pre-programmed patterns and which parts are meaningless noise. That is what makes the game boring in the end, so you’ll feel little motivation to play yet another randomly generated level. It is essentially the same problem, just at a much smaller scale: a world conjured up by a few game developers instead of the mindbendingly complex universe you and I exist in.
I understand that the last part seemed like a contradiction there. After all, how arrogant would it be to claim that your eidon even remotely models the complexity of the universe? But the fallacy here is that it doesn’t try to model the universe in its complexity that for all we know might actually be infinite. It just tries to model the universe as filtered through the human condition which is very much finite. Also, the problem with convergence is not the fear of arriving but the horror of noticing how the sweet, rewarding, novel experiences get fewer and further inbetween. It’s like using up a resource that was abundant at first but before you even notice how fast it’s depleting you’re down to panning for crumbs. It’s a good reason to envy children.
This would be the place where I would usually present my solution to the problem. I would give you some advice on how to deal with it. But this problem isn’t solvable. It’s just an inevitable consequence of the finiteness of the human condition. If mortality was its first rule, this would be its second. To break it, you would need to transcend the human condition and add means of perception the human body does not possess. You don’t need more data, you need data with more dimensions. But even if you could do that, it would only kick the can further down the road, unless you had an infinite amount of independent dimensions available. This is clearly ridiculous.
So you just have to accept it, just like you have to accept your own death. There’s no point in being aware of it either, except that it is just another little pattern you can distinguish from random noise in your little eidon project. So maybe this post was like fishing one of the last remaining raisins out of the bag, just to discover it tasted bitter. But everyone has their personal preferences and, to me, the bitter truths are the most beautiful ones.
