A Puppet is Free as Long as it Loves its Strings
Or a guide on how to become haunted by path dependence
I. On Imagination
How hard is it to picture an imaginary world, to construct in your mind’s eye a wholly original microcosm unchained from the physical laws of our universe?
If the rules in this world were your own and you weren’t bound by physics or organic chemistry or whatever else, could you picture a place that is truly unique? The only constraint is the breadth of your imagination. Try it now. How would this place look? Is there life? Are there constructed systems? Can you see patterns? Try your hardest to imagine entirely new forms and functions, don’t let this place remind you of anything here on earth. Can you conjure a world unlike our own?
In 1981, a mysterious manuscript surfaced, and it offered an attempt at this unfettered inventiveness. It was called the Codex Seraphinianus; a gorgeous 360-page opus described as “an encyclopedia of an imaginary world.” The book is thematically organized and rich with fantastical imagery. It displays all manner of invented life, from grandiose reproductive cycles and chimeras evoking the work of Salvador Dali, to banal taxonomies of flora and fauna. It depicts forms of dress, habitats, general ecology, ceremonial congregations, activities of the world’s basic inhabitants, and more. And, fascinatingly, each page is replete with the Codex’s own indecipherable language and number system. It reads like a Hieronymus Bosch retrospective. On Adderall. It is an enigma in its entirety.
But, if you stare at the pages long enough, your mind starts to notice patterns and impose meaning. You will come to see elements of this imagined world echoing our own, like two colors bleeding into each other at the edges. Some parts of it will begin to “make sense.” The obvious wonder of the book is that it does not constrain the reader with any imposed narrative, but rather lets each reader infer what they like — your mind is the blank canvas, so to speak. The Codex shows us that in the absence of human infused meaning, written “language” is just pointless curves; the cultural glue cohering our societies is just inconsequential myth-making. It’s a very real lesson in how the mind imputes meaning. It is not the spoon that bends, Neo, it is only yourself.
But, like an M.C. Escher drawing, the greater meaning is revealed when we consider the negative space — when we contemplate not only what the book shows us we can do, but what it shows us we can’t do.
The ambitious Codex sets out to construct an entirely unique imaginary world, yet we find familiarity in its every image. Even a perfectly imagined world where anything is possible cannot divorce itself from our known reality. No matter how hard we try, we cannot construct even a single truly original form untethered from experience contained in our minds. What would it even mean to imagine a form that does not borrow from our conception of geometry or physics or what we know? The mind cannot dip into a pool of unknown unknowns and conceive of something outside of our collective experiences. Indeed, even what we call a “new” idea — including an entirely imagined one, unchained from theoretical constraints — is, at best, a unique combination of many themes that preceded it. These variations on a theme are the very crux of what we call creativity.
“Newness” is not conjured, as in the romantic notion of zero-to-one. It evolves.
We cannot imagine into existence a complex structure or technology. Rather, our thinking, discovery, imagination, and inventing follows a gradual path dependent process where, like evolution, it proceeds to the adjacent possible, building on what came before. It does not leap far into the future. And this inescapable path dependence is “one of those things that, like air or gravity or three-dimensionality, tend to elude our perception because they define the very fabric of our lives.”
We are prisoners of path dependence, surrounded by it at every turn, and this imprisonment is so total that we do not even realize we are locked up.
Go ahead now and try picture an imaginary world with a single form that is not a derivative of forms in this reality. :)
II. On Evolution in Invention
Peter Thiel has this famous bit of startup advice:
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
And I think the spirit of this point is correct. But, as Peter seems fond of saying, this advice is best taken seriously, not literally. And I worry it’s unnecessarily discouraging. It elevates invention to a sort of separate pantheon, a domain of lone geniuses forged from different stuff to us mere mortals. Here they conjure beautiful ideas from a transcendent plane due to some unanalyzable, ungraspable mental alchemy.
Take, for example, a Rubik’s Cube. At some point, an avuncular man named Ernő Rubik invented this simple 3x3x3 cube with little colored faces that turn. It was a big deal at the time, I’m told. A transcendent moment of creation. He has patent HU170062 to prove it. But our lucky generation has more than just Rubik’s Cube — we have the 5x5x5 Professor’s Cube, the 6x6x6 V-Cube, and even the 2x2x2 triangular Pyramorphix. One may dismiss these as mere copies of Rubik’s masterpiece, not at all related to the groundbreaking invention process behind Einstein’s general relativity or Facebook. But why should it be so?
Well, of course, inventing a 4 X 4 X 4 cube is far less deep that coming up with a breakthrough in physics but, in all likelihood, a similar path-dependent process is at work in each case. The trick is being able to see the deeply hidden prior themes.
In the case of the 4 X 4 X 4 cube, it is easy to see the 3 X 3 X 3 cube as its predecessor. But the more technically complex the breakthrough, the more deeply hidden are the preceding themes to the layperson, and thus the more tempting it is to attribute the breakthrough to an unattainable and seemingly magical insight. To see the preceding themes upon which general relativity is a variation requires familiarity Newtonian Physics, Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, differential geometry, linear algebra, and vector calculus. Each of these, in turn, is itself a derivation of thousands of preceding themes. To see the path that led to Facebook, look to the scattered corpses of preceding social networks and internet forums. Complex new forms aren’t imagined into existence — they’re invariably the combination of simpler existing forms, as we saw with the Codex.
As an artist at some point in time must have said, “Everything is derivative.”
So where does that leave us? The evidence suggests that much of what we view as a top-down creative breakthrough is better described as a bottom-up evolutionary process, an inexorable path-dependent march rather than immaculate conception. Chance mutations matter. “Newness” does not spring into existence, it evolves from the adjacent possible.
III. Short History of Path Dependence
It’s not so easy to come up with a precise definition of path dependence. It’s perhaps easier explained as a mirror to its opposite, path independence.
A process is said to be path independent if it converges to a unique (and globally stable) equilibrium regardless of where it started or how it approached that eventual outcome. In other words, the outcome is inevitable. Death is path independent for biological systems — you get there no matter where you start or the decisions you make along the way. Certain economic theories, like the Solow Growth Model, are path independent.
A path dependent process, in contrast, is one where temporally remote events, including random ones, can exert significant influence upon the eventual outcome. History matters in path dependent systems. Chance events impact outcomes, but the degree of this impact only gains significance post hoc. In other words, it’s not obvious in real-time what decisions will impact outcomes; this is only obvious after the outcome is known. And if you ran a Monte-Carlo simulation of 1,000 counterfactuals, a slight change in variables may lead to 1,000 different outcomes. Stated technically, “a path dependent stochastic system is one possessing an asymptotic distribution that evolves as a consequence (function) of the process’s own history.”
Path dependence has been long recognized but gained popularity with economist Paul David’s 1985 talk on QWERTY keyboards. He argued that chance events in history led to a sub-optimal equilibrium in keyboard design (i.e. it’s possible to arrange the keys to allow quicker typing) and that it’s been very hard to break this lock-in.
We may have ended up with a better keyboard standard but for a design quirk in its predecessor, the typewriter. Typebars used to jam if struck in quick succession; QWERTY ordering minimized jamming. The typewriter proliferated the business world and became part of an interrelated ecosystem. Economies of scale drove down costs and furthered proliferation. Folks were trained on QWERTY and it soon became a standard. Why learn to type on a different configuration when every employer was standardized on QWERTY? Its cost was lowest, and its ecosystem (replacement parts, software, etc.) was most robust. When technology evolved from the typewriter to the keyboard it made sense to maintain the standard — everyone was trained on it, and all ecosystem contributors were organized around it. Today we take as given that our keyboards “make sense.” But a quick survey of history shows how initial starting conditions and chance disturbances can echo far into the future. Blaise Pascal remarked, “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed…”
IV. Free Will
What people call “free will” is actually a combination of path dependence and neurophysiological randomness. This news seems to upset people. Folks cling deeply to the mistaken belief that we are the authors of our thoughts. A simple experiment should dispel this notion.
Think of three male celebrities. Go ahead, take a moment, and actually do this. Get the list ready in your mind. Okay, now disregard George Clooney or some other first choice because you think I am pulling a trick. Trade him for someone more esoteric. Got your list? Great. Hold it in your head. Picture these guys’ faces. Now here’s the question: were you “free” to pick the list of celebrities you ended up with?
Of course not. I asked the question, and thoughts of three names appeared in your head. You were no freer to think these names than you were to think the next thought that pops into your head. These thoughts arise in your mind before you are even conscious of them (MRI scans can detect a voluntary thought three hundred milliseconds before the thinker). And the list from which you were able to select is entirely determined by the celebrity names you’ve encountered in the past.
In a way, your entire life has been a series of exposures that prepared you for the moment you picked that list, a path-dependent collection of information that constrains your decision space.
Going back to our QWERTY example:
The agents engaged in production and purchase decisions in today’s keyboard market are not the prisoners of custom, conspiracy, or state control. But while they are, as we now say, perfectly “free to choose,” their behavior, nevertheless, is held fast in the grip of events long forgotten and shaped by circumstances in which neither they nor their interests figured.
At this point, you may be tempted to throw up your hands and rebut, “If everything is determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and let things happen?” This confuses fatalism with determinism and misses that “doing nothing” is, in fact, a choice that will produce consequences. The fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean they don’t matter. If I had decided not to write this essay, it wouldn’t have happened. But, as Sam Harris argues in his book Free Will (from which the title of this essay is taken):
“Choices… are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter — and there are paths towards making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do — for instance, after going back between two options — I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.”
Stated differently by Spinoza, “Men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” It’s turtles all the way down…
I’ll avoid descending further into a survey of compatibilism vs. determinism (which is covered to death in the philosophy literature) and merely point out that your “freeness” is constrained by the path dependent process of information collection that is your life. Like the great men of whom Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, “every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history…” This has important implications for how you spend your time. You can expand your future “free will” (i.e. decision space) by putting more useful information and frameworks in your head (see my essay on the value of reading).
V. Why Does it Matter?
Path dependence can lock in Pareto-inefficient equilibria. This is particularly acute in the presence of strong technical interrelatedness, scale economies, and irreversibilities due to learning and habituation. It’s hard to break this lock-in (see, e.g., VHS vs. Beta). But there are simpler cases of path-dependent lock-in that arise due to neglect or ignorance and these are often easier to alter. We can break certain types of path dependence by learning history.
Take the simple example of a sneeze, which elicits an automatic and strangely urgent “Bless you!” in response. I always found this odd. So at some point, I looked to the history. Turns out that Pope Gregory ordered unceasing prayer for a divine reprieve during the bubonic plague of AD 590. He commanded that anyone sneezing be blessed immediately (“God bless you”), since sneezing was often the first sign that someone was falling ill with the plague. It became a custom and spread. Now we’re forever cursed to bless germ spreading strangers on the subway. But not me. Knowing the history of this absurdity has freed me from mindless participation. Admittedly a small victory, but I’ll take it.
Simple reframing can often break the path dependent lock-in that emerges from neglect. Lincoln once remarked that the best way to get rid of one’s enemies is to make friends of them. This aphorism, often dismissed as another example of Lincoln’s folksy charity, is deeply intellectual. Things can continue being done in a sub-optimal way just because “that’s the way they’ve always been done,” and no one bothered to question why they’re done the way they are. At some point, we forget the reasons that set us on the path. Romeo and Juliet die for our sins.
Reframing can save us from time travel paradox. As Joe says in the movie Looper (spoiler coming) before shooting his younger self in the back, “Then I saw it. I saw a mom who would die for her son. A man who would kill for his wife. A boy, angry and alone. Laid out in front of him, the bad path. I saw it. And the path was a circle. Round and round. So I changed it.”
Breaking path-dependent lock-in has bigger implications than eschewing sneezing pleasantries or escaping time loops.
We can improve many sub-optimal situations by examining the history that got us to “now” and asking if there’s a way it can be done better. Yuval Harari argues in his book Homo Deus that, “The best reason to learn history [is] not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.”
If you’re interested in identifying sub-optimal path-dependent equilibria, then look to any system maintained by authority. Government programs, cultish doctrines, religions, and corporate systems are good starting points. Many systems are self-perpetuating, last long past their useful lives, and get stuck in inferior equilibria. Be wary of cases where things are done the way they are because that’s the way they’ve always been done. Try to imagine counterfactuals where small changes in causes may have produced vastly different outcomes.
In Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw writes, “You see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream things as they never were and ask, “Why not?” I encourage you to remember these words as you consider the state of things in our world. And, while you may not be free to choose your next thought, at least this suggestion now exists in your head, free to be accessed on the path dependent process that is your life.
