Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief | Pt. 2 - MetaStory & Predator Zero

Remember lying in bed as a child, unable to sleep, with eyes fixated on the darkness spilling from the cracked door of your closet? Seemingly, the shadows within shift and morph to the shape of your imagination— a silhouette of a person, no, a monster? Or is that just your winter jacket? Either way, you wouldn’t dare to find out.

Maybe there really was a monster in your closet. But not the kind you can see, or even a ghost— the unknown appears to take on a life of its own, taking form and haunting us as darkness.

Similarly, this monster also takes form as complexity. For example, we are burdened to be vigilant of the unknown while hiking simply because snakes exist: since there are problems and things that can hurt us lurking within complex environments, even plain sticks in the path may cause us to jump. Snakes can be threatening to find, yes, but what’s really terrifying is the looming possibility of NOT seeing the snake.

This is Predator Zero: the dark, complex unknown within which problems may be hiding. Today, we will discuss how meaning is generated through confrontation with this beast.

Making Sense of Zero

Let’s go back to the question I introduced in part one: “How do you decide what to point your eyes at?”

Previously, we concluded that the act of directing your attention is done with motivations set forth by value systems. They give us the ability to label objects and determine their relevance, providing a reason to look at them. But this time, imagine what you would see if there were no value systems influencing your perception.

Through eyes of indifference, everything would appear equally both interesting AND uninteresting. Without values, complexity would overwhelm any ability to make comparisons between objects. If you had no ongoing goal or narrative, everything would appear equally relevant/irrelevant and there would be no recognizable meaning or value within the objects you perceive. It’s important to note that there’s still something there, but to you it would appear empty, like a blank slate. You would have no reason to look at anything or even open your eyes because everything would appear equally void of value— all you would see is zero.

Zero is an interesting number because it’s the category that contains nothing. You might wonder why we would need something like that? It’s not like we ever need to count the absence of something in the real world. You can’t exactly count to zero because you’ve already finished before you started— in this way, we can conceptualize zero as the thing we are always counting both to and from.

The idea of zero is actually a relatively recent concept in human history. As it turns out, we need a representation for the foundation of value in order to do mathematics. It acts as a placeholder, a category for everything that has not been categorized. Without it, value would not be valuable.

Zero describes the fundamental domain of chaos, unexplored territory, and the gold-hoarding dragon that has yet to be conquered. We encounter it every time we’re confronted with something we don’t understand. In order to overcome this ever-present burden of uncertainty, we must develop a framework of transformation that enables us to prevail amid uncharted terrain.

The Descent into Chaos

The complexity problem is no joke. In fact, the fundamental problem that humans face can be conceptualized as an ongoing struggle with complexity; we must perpetually encounter and deal with the eternal existence of the absolute unknown. As things change, we continuously find ourselves lost and unsure of the future yet must fight to keep pace with the unraveling complexity of life.

Complexity emerges as a consequence of the contrast between the finite boundedness of individual consciousness and the incredible excess of the unbounded everywhere else. Even under the consciousness, there you are surrounded by a mere pool of things you understand in an ocean of things you don’t understand at all, including yourself.

We could say that chaos is the fundamental nature of reality and we are chipping away at it from within.

This place that resides outside our cognitive structure and everything we have yet to understand is a domain of latent information— information that has yet to be categorized. The problem is that even if we don’t understand it, we still have to accept and deal with its existence as it continues to present us with potential danger and hope. While value systems help us categorize our perception, mapping out the unknown proves to be a very difficult task because it requires us to view the world as it manifests outside our symbolic categories through the lens of those categories.

We experience a descent into chaos when what we perceive no longer fits the frame through which we interpret the world.  Sometimes we can make adjustments, but other times it can disintegrate us into an unstable state.

If you’re sitting calmly in class minding your own business and the person next to you suddenly jumps up and starts shitting on their desk screaming at the top of their lungs, you’re brain will immediately recognize that something has broken the expectations and implicit social contract of the environment. You will be shocked and most likely freeze to process what’s happening because for all intents and purposes, you are lost as the territory you inhabited has suddenly shifted into something completely unexplored.

The same uncomfortable process occurs anytime you enter a novel situation. Perhaps you discover that you partner has been cheating on you. Suddenly, the frame you’ve built and relied on is destroyed as even what you thought you knew about the past is called into question. Or if you’re entering a new career, you will be faced with situations and expectations that you have no precedent for.

Our job is to continually confront this this domain of chaos and extract out information. Consciousness itself is essentially a process of transforming chaos into order— it makes sense, literally. The fundamental problem is that there are things that object— obstacles in our path.

So how do we figure out how big the obstacles are if they’re outside our frame? The process we use to manage chaos is the same as our ancestors used to figure out how big the beast lurking outside the cave was and what they could do to overcome it.

Information means “in formation,” thus the process of dealing with the infinite unknown can be conceptualized as slaying, or taming an archetypical predator.

The idea of the unknown is much more abstract today, but yet we can think of the unknown ”as such”— things we don’t know. Just like zero, it’s the category that contains everything that has not been categorized.

Interestingly, the human brain has a separate linguistic circuit for swearing. It correlates to the same circuit that other primates use to warn others of a predator; they have different sounds to alert others of an attack from the sky, in the trees, or on the ground.

As with the way we perceive relevance and reaction before object-recognition (if you touch a hot stove, your brain tells you “jerk your hand away” before it processes “this object is hot”), the swearing circuit reacts more instinctively than planned out speech because quickly alerting others of a problematic situation is the most valuable use of communication for survival. This demonstrates the problem-identifying, meaning-response function of consciousness.

This also happens to be the circuit responsible for the effects of Tourette's Syndrome. You might think it’s pretty strange that there would there be a mental disorder that provokes uncontrolled utterances of swear words instead of other types of speech. Well, this is exactly why; the instinctive, problem-identification linguistic circuit is the targeted region of the disorder.

Many things can trigger the predator response in the modern world. When we experience unknown, potentially harmful disruptions of our frame, we are threatened once again with the problem that there are problems; we confront the archetypical predator. In essence, “predator” is a category of unknown, unexplored, and unmastered information.

There’s no solution to the infinite unknown, except for the solution of continuous mastery of the problem. The goal is to become a master of this category of all things that have not been mastered.

You can’t bank your contentment on achieving any specific goal or solving any problem, because it will always be replaced with more problems and accompanying discontentment. Just like cutting heads off the Hydra, more will grow back to replace them.

Since you cannot escape problems, the only solution is to become a better problem-solver.

This is the spirit of transformation.

Life’s Narrative

As I just briefly mentioned, our perception of reality is not built of objects or facts but instead what they mean to us. Because our perception is influenced by our values, we could say that the world we experience is made up of meaning rather than matter. As with the hot stove analogy, the meaning of objects dictate how we react and correlates with their perceived utility: “is it a tool or an obstacle?”

For example, when nearing the edge of a cliff, the mind perceives “falling off place” and then infers “cliffside” rather than the other way around. In order to react to the world more efficiently, it prioritizes the relevance of a situation before the object-recognition. Even the ergonomic design of plastic water bottles evoke the “reach out and grip with your hand” action pattern before the part where you actually identify it as a water bottle.

We deal with the problem that the world is too complex to properly perceive by simplifying it as a place in which to ACT rather than a place in which to perceive OBJECTS. In fact, you don’t see them as objects but rather as entities of functional significance. In this way, life can be more accurately conceptualized through the framework of a narrative.

Story & Metastory

You’re hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t enjoy stories in some shape or form. Whether it’s through literature, film, performance, or even music, it’s amazing that these things exist that no matter who you are or where you come from, we can all find meaning in it.

• A story is the simplest unit of useful information with regards to action and perception that can be offered.

• A metastory is a story about how a story like that transforms.

Years ago, Jordan Peterson watched the movie Pinocchio with his infant child. Quickly, it became his son’s favorite movie and would ask to watch it over and over, even rewinding to watch specific scenes again. Dr. Peterson became fascinated by his child’s obsession with the story, he thought “what is that kid up to?”

He began to notice that the movie presented narrative elements that transcended mere relevance to the story on-screen. In fact, even this movie that was made for children presents information about how to act in complex environments.

Something about the plot and characters resonated with a deeper, subconscious part of him. He realized that there was some form of indisputable meaning embedded within the story, and although his son was inexperienced and couldn’t fully comprehend what it all meant, he was watching it over and over in attempt to integrate that valuable information.

Dr. Peterson began to investigate the ways in which we assemble our identities from stories.

Stories like these are great, they’re both entertaining and teach us lessons. However, sometimes they only work in specific situations or lose relevancy through time. Likewise, the frame through which we look at the world can be useful and provide us with situational clarity, but it can’t hold up forever in the continual confrontation with chaos. There is always information outside of us we have yet to take account for.

However, it’s not so important to understand a specific knowledge structure than it is to understand how knowledge structures transform. You don’t want to cling to a static identity— a specific frame or place in time, it’s better and more accurate to identify with the part of you that transforms. It’s the continuity that ties together your entire life despite aging and continuously changing. The only way you can personally connect to a photo of your younger self is to have a story about how things changed from then until this moment.

Likewise, there are patterns across stories which give insight to a deeper metastory: the story about how stories transform themselves. This is the fundamental narrative that constitutes the human experience.

Here’s the story:

• I was here, then I implemented behaviors, and went there. There was better than here.

To illustrate this process, Piaget proposed a stage theory of cognitive development that observes the progression of how knowledge accumulates and transforms as children grow:

Stages are movements from one set of axiomatic presuppositions with which the child was structured in the world into a state where that system failed because it wasn’t sufficiently comprehensive (a descent into chaos) into the development of a new stage that could do everything as the last system as well as account for its shortcomings (an ascent from chaos, illustrated as the Pheonix rising).

In essence, you inhabit a story. The framework through which you look at the world is a narrative:

• You’re somewhere, and you’re going somewhere.

Preferably, the place where you’re going is better than where you’re at. However, in order to get there, going from “what is” to “what should be” requires a framework of “how to act”. You can’t figure out how to act with scientific truth alone because there are an infinite number of facts and you cannot possibly take them all into consideration. Which facts would you choose? And how would you decide which ones to ignore?

In contrast, pragmatic truth which envisions life as a narrative, a place in which to act, can better help us determine the best course of action to manifest the future we wish to see.

Culture does exactly this— art, literature, poetry, drama, and religious thinking are all dramatic expressions of the necessary human systems of value that are built-in and a part of our nature. Even if we don’t understand them, they present us with abstract forms of indisputable meaning. For example, most people enjoy some form of music even if they don’t know why. It actually means something, and often it means more than we can know.

In our ancient past, being inculcated into tribal culture was done with masks, music, and dance all brought together as a multi-sensory experience. You are being invited to take place in a drama.

Is the Drama Real?

It depends what you mean by real.

You could consider great dramas to be more real than real; they are hyperreal because they present pragmatic truth as opposed to scientific truth. They provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic, yet applies to an extraordinarily broad range of situations. They envision the world as a place in which to act, rich with symbolic meaning as opposed to a collection of dead facts.

Culture is an invitation to a drama— or a game. By organizing our values, we can better collectively cooperate and deal with unexplored territory while avoiding conflict along the way. We simplify our perceptions by agreeing to play the same game when occupying space together— understanding the game substitutes understanding other people in all their unexplored complexity. It’s amazing that humans can gather in large groups without descending into conflict despite all of our differences— the shared game promotes emotional stability.

Shared customs and rules enable us to play the same set of games and compete together in a way that we can all have a good time of it. It ensures that if someone cheats at the game, they may win that game but will ultimately lose across all games because no one will want to play with them anymore. The goal is not to be a winner, but a fair player that might not always win but continues to get invited to play more games.

As Piaget once said, “if you’re well socialized, you’re awake enough to identify the game that’s going on wherever you go.”

You can master the set of ALL games by being a good sport. Fair-play is the foundation of morality.

What is Real?

David Hume famously posited: “you cannot derive OUGHT from IS.” In other words, merely knowing the objective facts about something does not tell you how to implement those facts in your life.

From the scientific perspective, the world is made of objects as opposed to meanings. In fact, the whole point of science is to strip away the subjectivity and values of phenomena. It’s useful for understanding the properties of things that can lead to curing diseases or making the world a better place, but it’s not a useful guide for governing your life. Our perception is not organized with facts but with frames of meaning— we have to make some things more important than others to get where we want to go. You can’t base your decisions by taking into account all possible facts, instead you must focus on which facts are relevant through recognition of their meaning and relevance.

As mentioned in part one, you can figure out what somebody believes by observing their behaviors/actions. By identifying the most consistent congruency between subjective experience and behavioral response, we can determine what is most real from a subjective standpoint. Once again, this argument assumes that what you experience is real and relies on the axiom that there is no separation of object and subject:

• Although the relationship between what people say about their view of reality and their actions are not perfect, or perhaps even completely disconnected, nobody argues with their own pain. Everyone who hurts acts as if their pain is real.

What does this mean? Well, to put it bluntly: the ultimate reality is pain.

This appears as a common theme of religious traditions; for example, the Jews recollect past pain and trails, the Christian God is a crucified person, and for the Buddhists the fundamental maxim is that life is suffering.

Since people act as if their pain is real, that’s a good place to start in conceptualizing what is most real to the human experience.

• You can be hurt, broken, destroyed, AND you know it.

Something that separates us from other creatures is our awareness of the future. The future is a groundbreaking concept that allows us to plan, think abstractly, and work toward greater goals. However, it also made us realize that our time is finite and we will die. It’s a very harsh realization— enough to make you question not only the value of existing but of existence itself.

So, how do we deal with it?

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.” - Jordan Peterson

The solution is to increase your meaningful engagement. If suffering is the fundamental problem of existence, then it follows that the reduction of suffering is the most meaningful action you can participate in. If anything, you might as well take steps to reduce unnecessary suffering wherever you can help it.

What matters to you?

It’s not a trick question, it’s actually quite simple. Do you value your own well-being? What about your friends and family? Your community? Is there any way you can reduce the suffering of yourself and the people around you? Are you willing to adopt the responsibility required for your pursuit of purpose?

You can look at the most unjust, terrible atrocities of the world and understandably conclude: "A world in which x can happen should not BE.”

However, if that is a value you hold and therefore act out, you will only make what you’re objecting to WORSE.

The goal is to influence the world in a way that makes the burdens of existence worthwhile.

By mastering the category of all things which have not been mastered, you can embody the spirit of transformation and overcome the burden of chaos. Follow your higher-order goals as they are long-term socially negotiated solutions to the problems that are implicit in your being.

If you have a WHY, you can bear any HOW. So be the hero that stands up and is willing to go off the map to save your city from the dragon.

Not only is it worth it to become a hero, heroes make life worth it for all.