Once again, I want to talk about the eidon. If you have never heard that word before, you are not a frequent reader of my blog as that is currently the only place where you could have heard about it. I strongly advise that you read earlier posts about it first, but I’ll recap the most important points here. Your eidon is your model of reality. It’s your brain’s best attempt to approximate those parts of the universe that are accessible to you via your senses, filtered by the human condition. It’s the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave if the whole cave was your mind. Most importantly, an accurate eidon is a serious evolutionary advantage and probably the main reason we evolved to house such complex, energy intensive brains in the first place.
While it is not necessarily always the case that you want to blindly follow the path that evolution has put you on, having an accurate eidon is probably desirable to you. After all, your eidon is your ability to make predictions about the future. Sure, literally predicting the future is impossible as it would require perfect information, but being able to use the information you have available to expect certain outcomes with a very high probability is not only satisfying but it will give you a serious edge on almost any competition. But this post is not about how important or how great the eidon is. In this post, I want to reveal the dark side of the eidon. I will ask some uncomfortable questions and introduce you to a fear you didn’t know you could have.
I want to start with the question: is there such a thing as a perfect eidon? Your first instinct might be that this would be a perfect model of reality, one that accurately predicts what is going to happen next in all cases. This would require perfect knowledge of the universe, something which quantum theory tells us is impossible, so you’d say no, a perfect eidon is impossible. But in that case you are misunderstanding what the eidon really is. It is not just any model of reality, it is a specific type of model. A perfect dishwasher is not one that also cleans the bathroom, that would just be an unfair standard to hold a dishwasher to. In order to understand what a perfect eidon would be, we have to understand what constraints define the eidon.
Any question answered by the eidon has to be posed in terms of the human condition. The eidon cannot make predictions about objects unless those objects have a name, i.e., they are represented within (note that, within a specific working context, “that thing” is a perfectly reasonable name for an object you know nothing about). In addition, any prediction the eidon makes has to be based on previous sensory input. If you ask it to predict the lottery numbers, it is very unlikely to give you the correct numbers. But that does not mean it is a bad eidon, as long as it correctly predicts that the numbers will probably be wrong. If the numbers drawn do not match the ones predicted, you should not be surprised. In fact, that is one important measure of your eidon’s performance: how often you are surprised. An accurate eidon does not mean that you are always confident, it means that you are confident if and only if you are probably right.
Even though we haven’t fully answered the question if a perfect eidon is possible, this leads me to another question: what if we get there? Or to reframe it: what would it be like to have a perfect eidon? Well, as we just learned, you would never be surprised again. Surprise, wonder, the joy of novelty, all would be erased from your life, never to be felt again. After all, their only purpose ever was the gradual improvement of your eidon. You know how prominent these emotions are in children because their eidon has so much more room for improvement? With a perfect eidon, you are an anti-child. You’re at the end of the journey they only just started. If you made it this far, you probably found these emotions quite enjoyable. Too bad, because as you were getting closer and closer to the perfect eidon those sensations became rarer and more difficult to find so you had to spend more and more effort to seek them out, like a junky desperately trying to find a new dose of the drug they are addicted to. But now that you’ve achieved perfection, there’s none of it left.
Doesn’t sound too great, does it? Evolution set us up on this road but it doesn’t care where it leads to. The fear I was hinting at earlier is the fear that your eidon might be nearing completion. The fear that novelty in your life might run out. Imagine the slight dread you are feeling when the TV show you’ve been loving to watch is nearing its final episode and you know there’s not going to be any more. Now apply that to every TV show ever. Now apply that to any form of media. Now apply that to anything you are capable of experiencing.
You might think that this is ridiculous, as human perception has so many variables that simple combinatorics dictate a sheer inexhaustible number of combinations. But anyone who has ever experienced procedurally generated content will know that combinatorics is a bad way to estimate the amount of novelty in a system. Sure, you might have never seen a dog with a yellow hat, but you’ve seen a dog before, you’ve seen a hat before and you’ve seen enough characters wearing hats that it will not feel truly novel. It’s a new sensation but it fits neatly in your eidon so it will not trigger the feeling of surprise and wonder you’re craving. Abstraction is the key to building a powerful eidon but it eradicates combinatorial complexity.
So let’s get back to the question if a perfect eidon is actually possible. Is it really conceivable that a human being finds all the classes of sensations they are capable of perceiving and integrates all of them in a single, consistent eidon? Well, probably not, but that might still be the wrong question. We have previously established that truly novel experiences get scarcer as we live our lives. So a more practical question might be: how scarce can they get? Or if you want to put it in actually measurable terms: how much time will pass between the last time you experience something truly novel and your death? Or in the framing that newly developed fear would prefer: what if the most recent time you experienced something truly novel was your last time?
Are you afraid now? If not, good. But if yes, also good. It wasn’t me who gave you that fear. If what you just read resonated with you, that fear existed beforehand. What I hope I could help you with is understand it. That is the first step towards conquering it. Oh, and if I successfully did so, I guess you just learned something new. That should serve as proof that, at least right now, it’s still possible.
