Finding the Right Abstractions Summit 2021

Abstract:
Ilya Prigogine classified life as a dissipative structure: we dissipate entropy into our environment as we bring order to our bodies and our lives. We comprise a set of strategies—some in our genome, others learned in life—for capturing negentropy. Whether it be nutritious food or a profound system of thought, we are intrinsically motivated to seek out order and channel it into ourselves. We also convey order to our communities, by bringing in sustenance or new and useful ideas.

This internalized order isn't arbitrary: it's structured so that we can better seek and capture order in the future. Our genome is a record of the biological strategies, and our personality is a record of the social strategies, which together produce the orderseeker we now are. This behavior is not confined to us or even to biological systems, but is also seen in social systems such as organizations, legal systems, education systems, etc. The boundary of agency is blurry, but we clearly cultivate strategies for cultivating strategies.

In this talk, I'll flesh out these ideas and give intuition for why they seem like better abstractions than some others I've seen. For example, I propose shifting the focus away from utility functions and away from individual agents, and toward the autopoietic act itself.