Boolean operators beware: Logic is necessary but not sufficient. This is not a safe space for concrete thinkers. Truth is a li(n)e. Abandon ifs; thens; ors; ands; and nots. Invest in inaccuracy. Say “certainly” to uncertainty. Leave atomism alone_ snuggle up to fuzziness, and expand your conceptual continuum. Attachment is suffering; let. it. go. RELAX. Breathe in, breathe out… now let it flow

Wait!

First we need a set of rules

Biologists use a thing called a ‘phenotype’. We’re going to use it. What is it? Etymologically speaking it’s a word.       made up of two parts, a prefix and a suffix. The middle is empty.

Well ackchyually it came from the German word ‘phänotypus’, which was based on the Greek word ‘phaino’, meaning “shining” and/or “appearance”. It was introduced by a Danish dude, Willhelm Johansenn, in his excellent book Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre (Elements of the Exact Theory of Heredity) (Johansenn, 1909), which also introduced another useful semantic construct called a ‘gene’. Johansenn was looking at plants and noticed their appearance (phenotype) emerged from an interaction between heritable factors and the environment, so he constructed some language to help describe what was going on.

We’re going to take this idea of a ‘phenotype’ and generalize it, because it’s a robust and versatile heuristic for capturing the most salient features, or traits, associated with any [insert noun here]. By adding a couple of prefixes, we can also capture some relationships that help us describe how a phenotype emerges via interactions within a broader system. For example:

Endo- (inner/internal) ∴ ‘Endophenotype’ = the stuff [shining] inside a thing.
Eco-   (outer/external) ∴ ‘Ecophenotype’ = the stuff [shining] outside a thing.

For the sake of brevity, ‘endophenotype’ will refer to internal variables that are most salient to the phenotypical traits you’re wrangling, and ‘ecophenotype’ the most salient external variables. A phenotype describes a set of relationships that model sparse interactions across a Markov blanket, but the space between ‘endo’ and ‘eco’ is arbitrary; the middle is empty, until we fill it. So phenotypes are ephemeral, adaptable, and imaginary utilitarian constructs that can be fit to whatever context helps to understand stuff. Now we can look smart (and a bit silly) by using ostentatious sesquipedalia to quickly schematize relationships between the things that make any thing become that type of thing.

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A while ago, after he’d crafted the ‘epigenome’ (1942), Waddington (1959) introduced the concept of ‘canalization’ to describe what happens as a biological phenotype settles into a relatively stable configuration over time, like how a species can eventually emerge via a lot of different things having a lot of sex, or a stem cell differentiates into tissue. More recently, a British lad called Robin Carhart-Harris (2023) stole Waddington’s idea to describe how psychopathological phenotypes could get fixed within brains; we’re going to steal it from him, alongside his idea of ‘temperature or entropy mediated plasticity’ (TEMP), so we can twist them to our own purposes.

TEMP is a measure of the capacity a phenotype has to change its state over time. The phenotype of a steel knife is relatively stable; let’s describe it as sharp and pointy. If I start using it like a spoon I may be able to place some ecophenotypical pressure upon it, now it’s not only used for cutting and stabbing but for scooping, scraping, digging, then eating stuff too. But, it’s probably still going to remain more useful to describe phenotypical traits related to cutting and stabbing ∴ the steel knife has relatively low TEMP. And, I can lower the TEMP to solidify a phenotype just by being very specific and saying “This knife”… (unless we’re playing knifey-spoony, of course).

The general metaphysical construct ‘knife’ is broader; it has higher TEMP because different types of knives have different properties that are better for stabbing, slicing, dissecting an eyeball, or whatever you use your knife for (e.g. a cleaver is good for cutting off fingers but not for cutting out tongues). Mobile phones have TEMP too. They’ve changed over time, becoming increasingly powerful so people can use them in novel ways, which might change what phenotypical traits people look for when purchasing one. A phone’s phenotype emerges from an interaction between endophenotypical pressures related to its internal structure and function, and ecophenotypical pressures from consumers and designers.

Carhart-Harris (2023) operationalizes the relationship between TEMP and canalization as a gradient in a phenotypic state space: TEMP decays as a function of canalization. High TEMP is associated with a phenotype’s capacity for variation, volatility, or commutation of state, and canalization occurs as it becomes more stable, fixed, discrete, or tightly bounded. This relationship is characterized as a function of model specificity, precision, or inverse-variance, which is related to temperature/entropy because they’re measurements of disorder (in a thermodynamic system); as temperature increases via increasing entropy the number of possible states the system can adopt at any moment in time increases, making it more difficult to predict the state of the system precisely, as a function of probability.

 

 

Finally, in the spirit of apocryphal attacks on ‘normalism’ and its ridiculous conventions, I’ll introduce the concept of a ‘Hebbian attractor’. In neuroscience, the principle of Hebbian plasticity is caricaturized as “neurons that fire together wire together” (Hebb, 1949). The premise is that if two interacting neurons are firing at the same time there’s a high chance the information causing them to fire is functionally related in some way, so by changing the strength of their interaction (i.e. potentiation via synaptic plasticity) they form an association that allows them to more efficiently process that information in the future. We’re going to generalize this idea of ‘association via similarity’ to describe how information that’s functionally related in some unspecified way gets tied together, and then use it to help identify relationships that involve endophenotypical pressures interacting with ecophenotypical pressures to promote canalization via Hebbian attraction.

These are the rules we’re going to use to navigate. Now, we can begin…

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Let’s take some random system like, ummm…. the universe (U). At one end of this system’s hierarchy is some minimum scale, a bit like an integer, let’s call it ‘Planck’. At the other end of the scale is all of U. Now let’s pick some arbitrarily-defined entity within this system to examine:

A carbon atom. It might be useful for us to consider the carbon atom’s phenotypical traits as its atomic weight, and its valence. The endophenotypical pressures canalizing its phenotype are leptons and fermions in the form of neutrons and protons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. TEMP is largely a function of its valence because electron density is a strong mediator of interactions with ecophenotypical pressures. Perhaps two oxygen atoms are close enough to interact. They canalize it into CO₂. Its phenotype adopts a relatively stable configuration, and its TEMP is reduced. Its biggest ecophenotypical pressures can now be represented as covalent bonds with oxygen.

Now let’s examine another entity at some random level of abstraction. A human. What’s a human like? They’re shaped like an ape that’s been ironed out very straight, and they run on two legs like a chicken does. Their most prominent phenotypical traits are their hubris and insecurity. They’re so over-confident about the things they think, they’ll keep insisting they’re correct even after receiving elaborate explanations proving them wrong, and they’re so insecure about their appearance that they almost always try to obfuscate it with artifice.

Human phenotypes have been canalized by a complicated set of endophenotypical pressures that include, but are not limited to: genetics, their peculiar ape/chicken-ish structural morphology, and the uniquely traumatizing experiences each human endures during their development. These interact with ecophenotypical pressures that assail them from the local ecosystem, which they’ve mostly engineered themselves out of steel, concrete, glass, wood, plastic, and gravel. They spend a lot of time consuming perspicuous propaganda on bright flat occurrent screens, and it contains easy-to-understand instructions for how to purchase, think, and behave in the correct ways to keep the greediest, most selfish humans in a state of bitter contentment. This system is an elegant display of how Hebbian attractors operate, because through this propaganda-medium humans have canalized their own ecophenotypical pressures to further reinforce their own hubris and insecurity, at the expense of their health and happiness.

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What next? Something hard like ‘qualia’. What is a qualia? I don’t know, forget it. Let’s just talk about an experiential phenotype. Experiential phenotypes are a thing that emerges from U at a peculiar level of abstraction. It’s a truly beautiful and horrifying phenotype to play around with. An experiential phenotype could be represented by a lot of different properties: Happy, sad, visual, acoustic, hungry, horny, vicious, warm. Experiential phenotypes are so rich with properties it’s hard to put them into words. The endophenotype is dynamic, and constituted by a fantastically complex organo-computer that supports high-speed, high-bandwidth, information-coupling with a variety of ecophenotypical pressures. It might be this combination of high-TEMP and fast response-time that makes them such effective vehicles for suffering and pleasure. They combine temporal volatility with high-dimensionality, fusing many modalities of information into a single unified representation. Some are dominated by electromagnetic radiation oscillating at frequencies between 400-700nm, but others heavily feature chemosensory signals, and there are even a few that are mapped largely to sounds.

Nations have unique phenotypes. So do states, cities, towns, and schools. Your local public transport system has one. Acid trips, ice-cream, religions, corporations, and cultures too. Sports teams, wars, politicians, memes, rocks, bands, brands, tin cans… and you, who are privileged by the ability to arbitrarily apply a phenotype to whatever you choose. You already use phenotypical constructs every time you describe the useful or meaningful properties of any [insert noun here]. When we label something we create a conceptual boundary around it, a markov blanket, and with our fancy new rules we can quickly parse how different elements interact to affect the unique color, flavor, and behavior of any metaphysical entity we’re able to catch and hold onto briefly within our ontological vaporware systems.

Let’s examine how biological species emerge out of U. Taxonomy is the art of navigating the representational space occupied by species, and it employs a range of strategies to define them via different characteristics ∴ the semantic construct ‘species’ has a degree of TEMP. Remember, Waddington used canalization to describe how relatively stable phenotypes, like a ‘species’, emerge via an interaction between endophenotypical pressures and ecophenotypical pressures. Both the ‘endo’ and ‘eco’ pressures of a species have relatively high TEMP, promoting high phenotypic diversity, allowing an odd medley of different types of species to shake out of U.

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‘Koinophilia’ describes a pervasive sexual fetish organisms have for averageness (Unnikrishnan, 2012). Organisms tend to be attracted to averageness because it helps them avoid having sex with weird freaks and mutants, and conversely that’s why humans find modals attractive… because they’re so mid. It also helps promote the canalization of organisms into species, so via sex it can lower TEMP, and it’s Hebbian attractors that drive us toward these deeply-rooted koinophilic perversions.

x̄

The first report of a human becoming self-aware of his attraction to average men came from Sir Francis Galton, after he developed a method to sum multiple portraits together using composite photography (1878). This was not long before he presented the very first statistical bivariate scatterplot to the world, in the same year he published his influential paper ‘Anthropometric Percentiles’ (Galton, 1885), which demonstrated that ‘women are the weaker sex’ by comparing the average ‘strength of squeeze’ in the preferred hand of 512 males with 276 females aged between 23 and 26 years old (Rodgers and Nicewander, 2012). After this… freshly-armed with proof of their dominant hand-strength sex-superiority, many average-men began vigorously stroking their own egos, which encouraged Galton to collect and catalogue more and more numbers and then invent the term ‘eugenics’ to describe the smug feeling he got when he carefully arranged them in a specific order (Galton, 1914). Galton’s pioneering ‘statistical’ techniques are still occasionally used by odd men to self-induce smugness, because it helps to buffer them against the terrible insecurity that inevitably plagues people who engage in excessive lonely ego-stroking (Cervilla, Álvarez-Muelas, and Sierra, 2024); Nisbett et al, 2012; Suzuki, 2024).

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, averageness (how exciting).

Humans have developed a preference for average faces by the time they’re 6 months old, and they evaluate them by generating a mental representation around the modal-average distribution of faces they’ve recently been exposed to, so the innate preference for an ‘average’ face doesn’t emerge from phylogenetically encoded a priori representations, but as a product of a posteriori models that are constantly updated with exposure to new information, and this process generalizes to non-human faces and non-face human traits (Grammer et al, 2003; Quinn et al, 2008; Rubenstein, 2008; Strauss, 1979). Visual perception can also rapidly adapt to accommodate surprisingly large facial manipulations; after exposure to faces whose features have been distorted along consistent dimensions, people will start to rate grossly distorted faces more attractive than normal faces (Rhodes, 2003; Webster and Macleod, 2011). It’s unclear how long these adaptations stick, but there is evidence that they are sticky (i.e. temporal plasticity is an important feature of visual processing; visual representations display both high TEMP, and rapid canalization) (Son, Walther, and Mack, 2024; Strobach and Carbon, 2013).

Hebbian attractors promote the autopoiesis of metaphysical entities because association via similarity is a general mechanism that supports category formation in perceptual and conceptual constructs (Rosch et al, 1976; Goldstone, 2004; Mandler, 2000; Son, Walther, and Mack, 2024). They factor into the parametrization of inclusion/exclusion criteria that organizes information into stable representations, allowing [insert noun here]s to coalesce, differentiate, and acquire phenotypical traits inside ontological vaporware systems (Mandler, 2000). They support the canalization of both metaphysical and physical entities (if those actually exist), and also allow associations to be formed more-or-less loosely between different entities based on their phenotypes. Their operation is deeply embedded in the architecture that ontological vaporware runs on (Hebb, 1949). But Hebbian attraction, and anti-Hebbian discrimination, also shapes nations, wars, empires, and civilizations. It shapes behavior, and identities, and it all happens so implicitly that even when people are aware of it, they dramatically underestimate how much it’s influenced them (Locke, 2023; McDonald and Crandall, 2015; Nolan, et al, 2008; Prior, Perfors, and Howe, 2019; Reynolds, 2019; Spears, 2021).

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