The Cybernetic Loop: Cheat Codes For Life

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What do self-guided missiles have to say about how we can live our best lives?

If someone asked you what life was like, there’s a million answers you could give. It’s skinny-dipping with the love of your life, it’s crashing a golf cart with your teenage friends, it’s screaming as you watch a spider the size of your face skitter along your bedside, it’s when you get high for the first time and start to doubt everything you ever knew. A cyberneticist would shake their head and simply say: “life is simply a collection of cybernetic loops”.

To understand this answer, you’d have to first learn what Cybernetics is.

Cybernetics is the study of self-regulatory systems, which raises a question: what the hell does that even mean?

Well, let’s start with the word system. A system is just a set of things working together. For example, a human being is a group of cells and organs working together, so a human being is a system. By similar logic, a car is a system, the climate is a system, and your company is a system. The world is a system of systems.

Now cybernetics applies to a specific class of systems: self-regulatory. A self-regulatory system basically means that there is some mechanism within the system to control itself for the purpose of achieving a goal or set of goals. For a human, this would be the executive thinking processes in the neocortex of our brains which allow us to direct our impulses, and the overall behavior of our system towards our evolutionary goals. The control system of a country would be its executive government and economic elites guiding the country towards greater economic growth, prosperity etc.

The reason why Cybernetics is so widely applicable is because the most interesting aspects of our world are living organisms and the hierarchical structures they create and inhabit. Pretty much anything involving living organisms happens to be a self-regulatory system. To recap, almost anything you think of, from cells to organs to individuals to businesses to nations, can be thought about as self-regulatory systems. This means they all can be described by something cyberneticists call the “cybernetic loop”.

A cybernetic loop is a simple diagram which captures the flow of how self-regulatory systems behave. It looks something like this:

This is your life in a nutshell. You, a system, exist in an environment. You take in information about the state of that environment as tactile, emotional, or sensory feedback. You have an internal model of the world and your own knowledge about where you would like to go. You use that information to make a decision that gets you closer to your goal(s). You follow through on your decision with action. This action leads to an effect on the environment. Finally, you gather new information about how close or far you are from your desired goals, and repeat.

This is exactly how a self-guided missile works.

A self-guided missile scans its environment with sensors. It utilizes an internal program to calculate where it should move to achieve its goal, in this case being on track to hit its target. Then, it uses vents and flaps to reposition itself. And finally it re-evaluates its environment to check if it is closer or further from its goal. Rinse, repeat.

There’s one last important piece to touch on, and then we can use this analogy to learn how we can be better humans.

Algorithms That Rule Us

Another way you can visualize a system is like this:

A system takes in inputs as information, processes them and reaches a decision, and finally outputs an action. Because systems can be represented as “black-boxes”, the nuances of how each type of system transforms information into actions can be easily lost, and this is a crucial piece of the puzzle when trying to carry over the analogy of the cybernetic loop and applying it to our own lives.

In order to turn input into action, an information-processing machine will follow a decision-making process, or algorithm. For clarity, I’ve tried to identify three important variables that define a decision-making algorithm:

1. Paradigm → A system can’t measure all possible information available in the universe, it can only deal with a subset. What information do you pay attention to, and how do you interpret that information?
2. Philosophy → A system can’t do everything. It can’t pursue conflicting goals. What goals or values do you have, what principles do you follow, and how do they apply to this situation?
3. Process → A system needs a map to achieve its end goal with the resources it has. What strategies and behaviors do you follow to achieve your goals/values?

For the sake of clarity, let’s refer to the algorithm a system uses to turn its information into actions its “software”. For a basic machine, like a thermostat, the “software”, or how the process it follows to turn information into action, is fairly simple.

The information a thermostat receives might be a simple temperature readout. The thermostat has only one very straightforward and measurable goal: get the outside temperature of the room to match the ideal temperature it has as an internal goal. To do that, it has two options: 1) Heat the room 2) Cool the room. The decision is an easy binary.

Now obviously, we’ve evolved to be a lot more complicated than a thermostat. To start we don’t just have one goal, we might have hundreds or thousands of unrelated, conflicting, and constantly shifting goals. We have numerous sensors… sight, hearing, touch, and much more powerful brains which allow us to generate much more complex representations of our physical environments. In addition, we are self-aware, meaning that our inner, emotional and cognitive states are a part of the information we use to evaluate our goals and decide on behaviors. From there, we have multiplex and more varied methods of taking action. With modern technologies we have drastically accelerated our ability to alter and modify the contents and structure of our external environment. We also have found ways to alter the information we process and how we interpret it through drugs, the scientific method, and narratives tales. But these changes doesn’t mean the cybernetic loop is any different, the boxes at each step are just more complicated.

We still turn information into actions. Our brains are simply a large collection of complicated algorithms. We still have software, it’s just that it’s a lot more complicated than that of a thermostat.

Now we can finally answer how we can use this analogy to improve our lives? What’s the best way to improve your life? The same way you would improve a thermostat. Improve your software.

In other words, to live your best life, you just have to address the three elements of your decision-making software.

1. Expand your paradigm and control your attention
2. Make sure you choose good goals
3. Consistently refine and improve your process as you seek to accomplish those goals

You Are Your Software

For all machines, software determines the success of the hardware. Software determines whether or not a self-driving car stays within the lines or drives straight off a cliff. If you think about yourself as the self-driving car, it would make sense that you would care about the software you are running.

The reality is that your model of reality matters pretty much more than anything else in the world. As the system through which all of your actions on the environment are filtered, software will determine your entire outcome as an individual.

The easiest way to put this into context is to recognize that as humans, we’re all pretty much running the same hardware. Yes, some of us may be taller or shorter, have slightly different pigments, and have minor differences in our sexual preferences, but our similarities are far more numerous than our differences. The difference that makes our difference? Software. Our paradigms, goals, and consistent behaviors are what make all the difference in how our lives turn out.

Think about the massive differences in outcomes between human beings throughout history, from Hitler to (insert your favorite role model here). This whole spectrum is just a spectrum in the quality of software these humans were running. The difference between having God-like power and virtue, and being an economically worthless piece of poopoo with no accomplishments or positive character traits to your name is a matter of the software you decide to run on your machine.

Your current reality is a reflection of your “software”. You are where you are because of the decisions you’ve made and the actions you’ve taken. For that reason, if you’re unhappy with any part of your circumstances or you’d like to have a better set of circumstances, taking a look at the software you have running under the hood is the quickest and most effective way to change your course.

At first, it might seem like spending so much time on something that has no immediate “physical” impact on our surroundings might seem like a waste of time. But this is because we aren’t used to the paradigm of a cybernetic loop. We neglect to notice that actions always follow decisions, and decisions follow from paradigms like falling dominoes. Your paradigm leads to compounded actions in whatever direction you’re pointed. If you have a narrow set of paradigms, it’s more likely you’re pointed in the wrong direction.

If you’re trying to get somewhere, the first thing you should do is make sure you are traveling in the right direction. You could walk 500 miles only to find out you’ve walked 500 miles in the opposite direction. If you think long-term, investing in your paradigm is actually the fastest and best way to make a positive impact, in your life, and the lives of others.

The issue is that this is not what most people do. Most people pay no special attention to the software they are running.

Where Does Our Software Come From

The odds are that you are currently running “average” software. Average software is exactly what it sounds like: basically what most people are running. To run average software is to think what everyone else is thinking, and to do the same things everyone else is doing.

Software doesn’t fall from the sky. It comes from two places: nature and nurture.

To start with nature, no human being is a complete blank slate. We all have “firmware” (think the operating system of a computer) that I’ll call Evolutionary Ancestor OS. This comes in the form of our lower level emotional brain processes: our pre-programmed fear of snakes and death, desire to socialize and mate with other humans, desires to seek food. These are programs that pretty much come pre-installed in us.

The software you are running today is the baby that popped out when your genetically programmed drives came into contact with your experiences. Your experiences (with a greater weight placed on your childhood experiences) are the nurture component of the puzzle.

Some common environmental sources of software:

• the people you hang out with the most (typically a reflection of your culture)
• parents
• best friends
• romantic partners
• the media you consume (typically a reflection of your culture)
• books
• TV
• music
• internet websites
• social media
• formal schooling

The thing is that all of these will typically fall under the influence of the wider cultural environment. If you were born and raised in the USA, odds are you were watching American movies, in the American public school system, and interacting with people who live out and believe in American values. As a result, you too will likely share their beliefs about the value of democracy, that a monotheistic Christian God is a good idea, and an unwaveringly positive regard for pizza and hamburgers.

Average software is pretty much what you get when you live a normal life and make no special effort to adjust your software or deviate from the herd. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with average software, as long as you are okay with average results, and as long as you are aware that to live with average results is a conscious choice.

If you want to achieve above-average results however, you have to have above-average software. Remember that in any area of life, you can find people who started from average backgrounds, and yet rose to batshit-crazy levels of excellence in a chosen area or few areas. Think about your biggest role models. The thing to realize, is that the only thing stopping you from achieving the same or even greater results is to tackle and improve each of the three elements of your cybernetic decision making process.

1. Have an above-average paradigm → pay attention to different things, instead of consuming media in the same way you usually do, push yourself to expand your knowledge about yourself and the world through self-education: books, podcasts, and mentors
2. Have an above average philosophy → learn to set higher standards for your behavior than your peers, set higher goals for yourself that correspond with your newfound ideas of what is possible and what is best
3. Have an above-average process → learn and experiment with different behaviors to find the processes that produce above-average results, don’t be afraid to do things differently, if you aren’t doing things differently you’re following an average process and are likely to experience average results

That’s it.

Call To Action

Applying this knowledge can unlock a huge potential for individual achievement in whatever area you want: greater happiness, wealth, satisfaction. But the main reason I care about this topic, and why I wrote this paper is the unspoken side-effect running better software on your machine: the software of the species as a whole will improve.

The fact is you’re a cybernetic loop living inside of a giant cybernetic loop. The entire human species is a self-regulatory system making decisions. The software of the world can be thought of as the the cumulative sum of the softwares of its individual inhabitants.

In the diagram, your software leads to actions on the environment, the the ecosystem we are all a part of.

Just as you can blame all of your individual problems on problems with your own software, you can blame all of the problems of the world on the collective software of the human race. We are only as good as the collective sum of our vectors.

Guess where the collective sum is pointing? Exactly in the direction of the “average software”. So if you think the world is heading off of a cliff, but you find yourself doing the exact same thing as everybody else, you’re a lemming, you’re a part of the problem.

For the world to end up in the best place, it is in your own best interest to improve your “software”. Begin to work on expanding your paradigm and controlling your attention, setting ambitious and original goals, and experiment with your processes for achieving those goals. Your future self, and the rest of the world will thank you.

PS, if you haven’t noticed, this is pretty much just an unsolicited and roundabout way of saying “be the change you want to see in the world”. I hope it was enjoyable or insightful in some way, or just got you to think about things a little differently.

Thanks for reading and happy cybernetic looping this holiday season!

TLDR / Summary

You’re a self-regulating system, your life looks like this:

Every cybernetic system follows a decision making algorithm that involves three factors.

1. Paradigm → A system can’t measure all possible information available in the universe, it can only deal with a subset. What information do you pay attention to, and how do you interpret that information?
2. Philosophy → A system can’t do everything. It can’t pursue conflicting goals. What goals or values do you have, what principles do you follow, and how do they apply to this situation?
3. Process → A system needs a map to achieve its end goal with the resources it has. What strategies and behaviors do you follow to achieve your goals/values?

Most people are running average software, which leads to average results. If you want above average results, you need above average software, which means improving factors 1, 2, and 3 above.

The world is moving in the direction that“average” software is pointing. If you have a more positive vision for the world, please work to address 1, 2, and 3, so the world can be in an above-average trajectory when you die.