“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
-Søren Kierkegaard
We begin with inaction. The variability of the world hints at the true absurdity of existence. In philosophy, the paradoxes hint at the attainability of better understanding, a greater reverence for the complexity of life, but where do we proceed from here? In a life of no respite, is regret inevitable? Every choice is the pruning of a life that could have been. In a world of infinite possibilities, how is then choice even possible? How do we live from day to day, making innumerable choices, and never even looking back at what could have been? Choices also exist in gradations, from minor choices like eating a toast or cornflakes in breakfast, to whether or not you should end your life (which Camus would say is the ultimate philosophical problem). Regret varies directly with the significance of the choice. If you choose cereals over toast, you might be on your way to your office and find someone having toast and wonder if cereals were the right choice. Maybe you reach your office, order a toast, and attempt to mitigate the regret. Even if you do not have toast, the regret dissipates over the course of the day as other choices take over. However, with the significance of the choice, the regret of missing out increases and more often than not, there are minimal opportunities to mitigate it. The regret of the unlived life, also exists in the temporal plane—the regret of a future that will never happen, the regret of a past that has passed, and the regret of the present that we fail to live. The discourse on the temporality of our choices or the lack of it is intricately related with the probabilistic prediction mechanisms that evolution has granted us.
A fun away to understand the temporality of regrets is to imagine experiences as data and our brains as an algorithm that is constantly being fed with this data, and is constantly updating itself based on the base primitive functionality it was born with and new experiences. To increase its prediction powers, it is constantly working on two processes- updating based on counterfactual thinking, that is using the experiences that happen to keep updating its predictions, and at the same time predicting the future to ensure the minimization of adverse situations. Herein lays an important paradox. To train the algorithm against the adverse situations, which do not exist in the base primal functionalities, we need to go through those experiences. However, the very purpose of the algorithm is to reduce those negative experiences that are required for learning. We end in a fallacy of circular logic.
How it solves for this paradox is by magnifying the effect of our regrets, to ensure that every adverse situation leads to a proper learning curve for future predictions. It helps minimise the future losses by magnifying the ones in the past. However, just like any algorithm, our brain isn’t perfect at doing that (although much better than any algorithm), which leads to hyper fixation on our past regrets, indecision due to the fear of unknown, traumas, etc. Each of these experiences, obviously develop their nuanced logic, where multiple evolutionary forces compete to find the most optimal solution, which would require another newsletter in itself. What we want to talk about here is how to act, in a world of infinite variability, and with all these paradoxes, how can one even take a rational decision?
So let’s return to Kierkegaard’s original quote, the essence of which seems to be that regret is inevitable. What was Kierkegaard trying to imply here? Does he leave us with an assertion about the absurdity of existence, with no path forward? Well, no. In Either/Or, from where the quote has been taken, Kierkegaard is trying to draw the parallels between one who lives the life of an aesthete (a life solely for pleasure), and the one who lives life in the ethical realm (based on certain principles of ethics). In his opinion, to live the life of an aesthete is to give into inevitable regret. No matter what choices you take, you will always miss on the choice you did not take. However, when you let certain ethical principles guide you, you will have clear demarcations between right and wrong, so even if you do think about the choice you left behind, you can still hold onto the faith that the choice you took was the better one or more meaningful one. Kierkegaard was also a believer of Christianity, and his work offers a great perspective of faith and the necessity of it. However, the assumption it takes is that one needs to have a very stable ethical system or a belief system, to truly outdo the absurdity of choices. Kierkegaard’s dictum to take the leap of faith does seem like what most of us seem to be doing, however it’s not a concrete explanation. It’s a bridge we have built against the absurdity of the world, and towards our need for certainty. The two important questions that we are left with, after this is: How do we define these principles which animate our choices? Isn’t the very “choice” of principles the beginning of regret? A sceptic might also add another question—Why should I believe that Kierkegaard’s solution is the right solution?
Hence, before we try to answer these questions, let’s try to understand the problem in more detail. Before all this talk about evolution and Kierkegaard and information flow, let’s talk about the problem in its simplest possible term. We have all been plagued by choice. I still dread going to Subway, because of the number of choices one has to make to get a sub. The easy way, all Subway veterans tell me, is to choose 2 or 3 combinations which you have tested in the past and keep oscillating between them. Similarly, to choose what to wear to a party, we have all ended up trying our entire wardrobe and then either choosing not to go to the party because nothing looks good and we need to buy new clothes, or choosing the combination that looks the best on us. We can call these problems limited sets isolated problems. We pick a specific problem in isolation; have a clearly defined set of choices (which can mostly be computed with our limited resources) and come to an ideal solution. Now assume, if I said that you had to choose the sub based on what you ate in the morning, and how you body reacts to certain food items, and how the person you are on a date with might not like your choice of ingredients and your future relationship is dependent on the sauce you choose to get in this very moment. In addition to that, there is a kid coming at an unknown speed towards you, and based on the time you take to make the choice, he will crash into you. Since you do not know the speed, you cannot know the time of impact so you have to make the best guess possible. As the variability increases, the set of choices increases, and in addition to that there is information or variables you are not even aware of which impact the ideal choice. The limited set isolated problem becomes an infinite set open problem. Most of life is an infinite set open problem, and a lot of life decisions aren’t as insignificant as ordering a sub. Now, if with all this information and the knowledge of variability, how does one take a decision? Are we all just blindly guessing through our lives? Yes and no. Yes, because a better word for blindly guessing is often probabilistically predicting, which isn’t necessarily “blindly” guessing, but computing the most optimum solution based on the information at hand, and no because millions of years of evolution has given us various tools to strive through the unpredictability of life.
Now, to answer the sceptic’s question of why should we believe Kierkegaard has something important to offer us, we try to combine philosophy and biology. Kierkegaard’s advice to us is to have a set of principles or rules through which we can define our choices. Well fortunately, we have these set of principles already built within ourselves (for certain experiences) through years of evolution. The brain has a built in relative scale, which tries to remain in a balanced state (called homeostasis). If we get overexcited, it tries to calm us down. If we get too lethargic, it asks us to energise ourselves. We have taste buds to taste things we like and dislike, eyes to see things around us and have the brain react automatically at the first sign of threat, so on and so forth. The homeostasis can be affected by long bouts of depression, or by drugs which make us feel a sense of euphoria, however it still acts as a reliable guiding principle along with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. However, you might say all of this primal evolutionary instincts are pretty neat, but it still does not help me with a lot of higher cognitive functions, like what career path should I choose? If the woman I am marrying, is the right person for me or not?
I believe Kierkegaard’s advice still holds true here. We do not need ethical principles to guide our lives, but we can still use preferences to develop a scale relative to which we gauge our choices. Over the course of our lives, as we experience life, we learn things about our likes and dislikes and based on that, at some point we develop a threshold mechanism to take choices. The things I want in my partner are say, x, y and z. We define a minimum threshold, which along with our evolutionary primal instincts (sometimes helping each other, sometimes opposing each other) helps us take decisions. So till this point, what we have concluded is that there are built in mechanisms, that help us reduce the variability and automate choices or at least guide us in the right direction. We build our own cognitive models against the unpredictability of the world, or we adhere to models that already exist. Kierkegaard’s solution seems to have some credence to it.
The true complexity emerges at the level when we attempt to answer the question—How do we define these principles that animate our choices? The evolutionary instincts don’t always hold true in the modern world, which has moved past the hunter gatherer ecosystem. We are capable of higher cognitive functions, which can build ideologies, and also critique them. Also, in a world rife with information and our biases, in a discourse on building the ethical principles (as Kierkegaard would have put it) seems more and more difficult, often nearing impossible. In most cases I believe we should start from the biological, and build up to the cultural and sociological. The belief stems from the fact, that we are still very much primal as we were hundreds of years ago. Even though the world has progressed quite rapidly, most of the forces that control or guide us rely on manipulating or channelizing the same instincts that helped us survive in the jungles years ago. To negate the biological, is to build a theory which will never stand the test of reality. It is also important to realise that our instincts are results of millions of years of optimisation. Even though error prone, they are still quite adept at guiding us through most of life. In fact, in certain situations, relying on this million year old optimised machine is far better than trying to come to a rational conclusion. Imagine you are being chased by a lion. In such a situation, it would be better for you to run as fast as you can, than probably calculate the best possible route and the relative speed between the lion and you. If this seems like a non representative sample of the choices we talk about, then we talk about over thinking, which no matter how glorified and romanticised is a waste of precious resources which leads to action paralysis. In machine learning, we have a concept called over fitting, where we try to fit a predictive curve to a large number of variables. What is observed is that general solution trained with lesser variables is often better than specific graphs trained over a large number of variables (I understand that quantifying less and more is a broader problem, that is dealt by experimenting and validating the predictive power of these models against validation and test datasets, but that is a larger discussion, which we will not delve in here). What over fitting teaches us is that, firstly, the world is filled with noise (complexity we can’t account for) and hence general solutions might be more optimal than highly specific ones, and secondly, not all variables are equally important and it is through continued experimentation that we build an optimal algorithm. Evolution is an experiment that has been running for over millions of years, and has been constantly updating itself; hence the next time you have an instinct, it can help you in making a choice. However, that does not mean that all instincts are correct. We have higher cognitive functions as a safeguard, or a higher evolutionary layer against the primal survival based mechanisms. Knowing that we need to run from a lion is important, but if we could build an exit door right near all points of attack, and be aware of it at all points we are in the vicinity of the lion is even better. Higher cognitive functions or what can be loosely called abstract thinking can help us learn from our experiences. Being attentive to the things that give us pleasure and the things that don’t, we can develop a baseline against which we weigh every choice. The key here is to be attentive and have as many experiences as one can. This leads us to the explore exploit dilemma, which basically states the paradox between knowing when to stop exploring. Most of us don’t know when to stop. The best thing could be right ahead, and the fear of missing out on it always looms over us. However, if we do not stop, we might miss out on the best thing and it might not be there when we return. What does one do in such a situation? It is important to realize the balance, to keep exploring till one is quite certain of having a stable relative scale and then to exploit the knowledge we have gathered through this exploring. The final layer is always the higher abstract thinking or ideologies (similar to Kierkegaard’s ethical realm). Throughout our lives, we find resonance with various ideologies which add a higher meaning to our lives. To place our choices in the hands of well thought out ideologies, which we can subscribe to as individuals after carefully thinking about the ideologies themselves and why we subscribe to them (the second layer of whether this thought gives me pleasure? Do I like this ideology as an individual or a group member whose base biological fear of being excluded from a group is being used as a manipulation tactic?) can help us in taking some crucial choices about the work we want to do, the people we want to spend our lives with and what it means to exist as an individual in a society.
Once we have traversed through the three levels, the universal sorrow of indecision will still not disappear. We are still burdened with information, maybe even more now. But what it might do is offer us a path, a hope to put our lives in perspectives and have a way to make choices, to know that we need to know when to stop and act, and when to not act and keep exploring. Even without all this theorising, we are always building our own baseline models, updating our likes and dislikes, getting trapped in indecision and regrets of things that could have been. However, now we understand why. We understand that indecision can be helpful, that it is time you are taking to make the right choices, and that most of life is trying its best to help you make those choices.
And even if we can’t find the final Truth, we are still searching for the optimal solution, and just like us even if our choices are not perfect, they are always striving to be. Understanding the distinction can help us against the absurdity of this universal sorrow.
The ideas mentioned throughout this essay, have been borrowed from multiple books all of which I am indebted to and want to mention here:
Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer
Either/Or Part 1&2 by Søren Kierkegaard
Projections by Karl Diesseroth
Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky
Reminds me of quote by clair lousie bennett -
“ Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.”
nice bro