Context Cascades 🍃 & the Bandwidth Squeeze of Consciousness 🧶
The operation of the unconscious
Summary
This week we wrapped up the formal lectures for a course I’ve been taking called Applied Complexity Science 101. As part of the final lecture we discussed some of the concepts we had talked about in the course including Context Cascades and consciousness as a bandwidth constrained process. I decided to write this week’s essay on these topics to try and clear up my thinking a little. I also read Invent & Wander which is probably the best ‘business‘ book - if it can be called that - that I’ve picked up in years.
Context Cascades & the Bandwidth Squeeze of Consciousness
In the morning you wake up and stumble over to the kitchen to make coffee. You've done everything in this routine so many times it is second nature. Blurry-eyed, you pull down the coffee beans from the shelf with your right hand and set the water boiling with your left without looking at the kettle. You set up the machine and again without looking reach over to the kettle but this time accidentally miss the handle. You recoil your hand fast and mutter. Ouch. At this point you hear the sound of your partner getting out of bed earlier than usual so you make sure to double the proportions so they have a cup of joe waiting.
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Nowadays nearly everyone has an intimate experience of being bandwidth constrained. We've all, at the very least, travelled to a place where the internet connection is limited and watched as a webpage that usually loads in under 200 ms takes a full minute to bring up its final images.
When we go about our daily lives, though we may not realise it, we are similarly bandwidth constrained. Consciousness relies on a narrow spectrum of the potential reality around us to present facts for perception. As you read this, not only are you unaware of what is going on directly behind your head, but even within your field of vision the elements to the side of the screen have blurred out. Further, until I mention it you aren't thinking back to how or why you started reading this just now, how the room you are in smells, or how you will get your next meal - all potentially relevant information for you as a creature.
One reason that consciousness may be limited in this way is because of contextual cascades1. These happen because in any particular situation there is always more relevant context than any description could cover. When you go to the grocery store, whether you know it or not, it happens within the context of the current geopolitical entanglements of your country. These entanglements may seem distant but they can materialise in very real ways when your local store runs out of soybeans. Yet, processing all of these contexts is completely unfeasible. They nest and interrelate recursively. Even if they could all be accounted for the accounting itself would not be possible to do in enough time to actually allow you to act.
Perhaps for this reason, your consciousness always deals with a single relevant context. However, we need to be able to respond when these contexts break through into the current situation. This is why your body is prepared to pull away after touching a hot object even before you become consciously aware of the need to do so. Due to the bandwith constraints of consciousness it is our intuitive, unconscious mind that often, if not almost always, plays the most important role for determining what we do in an infinitely context heavy environment.
At this finest granularity of detail we can start to see how it must be the case that we rely on knowledge beyond consciousness to operate effectively. However, in more complex settings like business, technology, science or politics we often don’t think about the importance of these unconscious processes. We believe that when we make a business decision it must be rigorous and fully explainable. Fundamentally though, nothing has changed. The world is still dominated by contexts outside of our immediate awareness. We may have a lot to learn from trusting our more basic, unconscious, judgements as we try to develop our various enterprises.
Book Review: Invent & Wander
Invent & Wander is a collection of Jeff Bezos’ writings organised and introduced by Walter Isaacson. Without hyperbole I can say it is the best 'business' book that I've read in years. The collection is unique. Rather than a business book that tries to develop a certain set of ideas around how business should operate after the fact, you get to see the real-time thinking of a practitioner, maybe the world’s most skilful practitioner, as they succeeded (and sometimes failed) to create a business.
The book begins with all the full year results memos from Amazon since 1997. This is followed by a collection of other essays and press releases Bezos has made for Amazon as well as his other ventures.
For anyone interested in these things, the memos are a wonderful history of a company as well as an era of business from the late 1990's to the late 2010's. The anecdotes are themselves wonderful to read but also sometimes accompanied by insightful commentary - for instance a reminder in 2000 following the dot-com bubble bursting of Benjamin Graham's phrase “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”.
There are many heuristics and mental models like this quote throughout the book and I highly recommend reading it yourself if you want to discover them. For me though the primary one I will take away is something that is never stated formally, the idea of earned consistency. If you have an idea for how you should operate and this idea consistently, over years, plays itself out in a positive way then even in a highly hostile landscape you can, and will, earn the right to your convictions.
Contextual Cascades is an idea that comes from Harry Crane. To illustrate he uses the excellent example of Phil Ivey’s edge-sorting . Phil Ivey is one of the world's most famous poker players. Poker, along with nearly all casino games is usually thought of as the closest the world gets to a purely mathematical situation. In 2012 however Ivey and an accomplice were caught using a defect in card manufacture to beat the standard odds in a game of baccarat where they took £7.3 million from a British casino. It was unclear if using this defect was a form of cheating and therefore illegal. However a court decided with the casino in the end that it was (the full ruling is great reading). In this case Ivey and his accomplice lost the winnings, but it seems possible that they used the same trick at many other locations beyond this one time they were caught. Even in something as supposedly context free and determined as a casino game the nesting of context can be overwhelming.