Ant tracing complex path

Image: 4o Image Gen

Human cognition is trivially simple, Herbert Simon says.

  • We can only process one discrete idea at a time.
  • We have limited working memory (7±2).
  • We can do basic pattern matching but not much more.

We’re like ants who walk complex paths when traversing complex terrains, but simple ones when crossing simple terrains. What looks like complex behavior from the outside is:

largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

The environment includes everything external to us. They are physical objects that constrain our actions, tools that we use, systems of information representation and storage we rely on. Including, for example, our long-term memory:

a human being can store away in memory a great furniture of information that can be evoked by appropriate stimuli. Hence I would like to view this information-packed memory less as part of the organism than as part of the environment to which it adapts.

We don’t have to accept that Herb Simon got everything right. Indeed, I think our inner lives are far richer than the Turing Machine moving on a tape that he’s imagining. Nonetheless, if we grant that this conceptualization explains some part of our behavior, especially the part of our inner life devoted to Thinking Logically, then there are interesting implications.

Implication 1: Writing as Environment Fabrication

Writing is the best way we’ve invented to transform our cognitive environment (the thoughts that we have ready access to, as opposed to our physical environment, the objects around us). Thinking through a complex issue involves many steps of logical deduction from many empirical statements, and we use writing to build an environment that increasingly resembles the logical structure of the issue. By immersing our mind inside this canvas, we exhibit increasingly complex behavior, fashioning it to be ever closer to the reality that we seek to simulate on the page.

So, what we cannot hold in our head, we make it part of our environment, and let it guide us.

Implication 2: We Become What We Read

What we read fills and structures our cognitive environment. Thus, if our cognitive environment largely conditions our thought, then We Become What We Read.

And more, if our cognitive environment corresponds more accurately to reality, then our thoughts will be more effective in the real world. (So it goes vice versa.)

How scary. I don’t want to become some of the things I read…

Implication 3: Writing Changes the Cognitive World

We can alter our environment through physical means (cleaning beaches, locking away unhealthy snacks, creating beautiful spaces), but physics is hard.

The cognitive environment follows fewer laws. And writing is our way to change it. It is almost too easy, compared to how hard it is to get out of my room to exercise…

Implication 4: Software = Writing + Physics

And now, the crazy thing: Software is the rich interface for our writings to directly affect our physical environment, and computer infrastructure is the complex inner workings of that interface. This is why computers are revolutionary.

Wow

Herb Simon makes the Environment the primary source of complexity. How amazing?

From this perspective, we see that words are just as real as physical things, and part of our environment just as much as physical things. Therefore, we should treat words as carefully as we treat physical assets. Pick what we read as carefully as we pick where we live.

Further, it tells us that we all can become better thinkers. To do so, we don’t need to have a “faster CPU” (think IQ). Rather, we only need to be responsible gardeners of our cognitive environment.

:)

Appendix

Reading through this essay, it occurred to me that I’ve been guided by these fixtures of my cognitive environment:

  • “In the Beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). Needs no explanation.

  • Confucian self-cultivation (修身): Education is fundamentally about shaping ourselves through deliberate practice and environmental design.

  • 文字狱 (Literary Inquisition): Literally, “prison of words”. Semantically, when rulers imprisoned writers for their sentences.