Iterative Loops: Life, Culture, and Consciousness

Humans love a good narrative arc. A true artist anchors the arc in a relatable setting to captivate you with surprise and drama before depositing you back into a state of timelessness. Cinderella lives "happily ever after" while Romeo and Juliet resolve into pure tragedy. Our hero gets the girl in the end while the villain seethes. Naturally we picture ourselves similarly; our life appears as an extended arc that takes as us as the main character from birth to death with a bit of work and fun along the way with others.

This view of life—as a narrative arc—is delusional and filled with hidden distortion.

Your arrival into consciousness was a chaotic experience without a precise starting moment that is easy to pinpoint. Your birth day (and first breath) came later, but in order for these to happen, many thousands of repeating loops had to be orchestrated. Cycles had to align to physically create your genetic material, and before that many millions of breaths had to be taken to sustain the processes that would get your parents to the very first point in time where your conception was physically possible. And we haven't even gotten to the intricacies of human courtship or the recurring thought processes that brought your parents to collaborate on the adventure of parenthood.

Upon arrival, you did not possess a roadmap showing how you would be arriving from birth to the fall of 2024. Your limited communication abilities meant you often found yourself repeating the same activities again and again, not unlike Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day. Now and then something novel would appear in your loop, and sometimes you might notice a new loop had formed and become incorporated into your consciousness.

Above all else, everything that formed you (and evolves your experience) is looped.

Your character was formed by experiences that repeated over and over punctuated by singularities that only later could you fully appreciate as meaningful. Your sleep cycles dictate the basic cadence of your life, dividing up the fully conscious part of your day from the part where you re-integrate the day's new patterns into the loops that form your memory. Your work day tends to follow predictable patterns of activity that others can use to coordinate efforts with you. Your pastimes and social life may be more varied but still tend to find a repeating cadence over time. Each loop advanced you to the present moment and there are so many going on that most of them rarely surface into your conscious thought patterns. Yet you can comfortably allow your heart to beat on, breathing cycles continue, and billions of cellular activities continue to maintain homeostasis with little conscious intervention required on your part.

Moreover, these loops are iterated, meaning that each new loop picks up with the state that completed the last. In general there's no reset switch in life; we have to work with whatever made it through to the present moment—we don't get to change the starting conditions. You were born out of an iterated sequence of loops and your life consists mainly of iterated loops that will in some ways outlive you. Your conscious experience is made out of feedback loops that allow you to construct shared social delusions (like the narrative arcs we started with, or the value of money, or abstract notions like science, religion and a thousand other entities driven by their own iterated narrative loops), or simply to focus your attention and engagement on a specific intention.

Why should you stop treating your life (and the lives of others) as narrative arcs?

Look, we all do it. We engage the world and everything in it as if we could reduce each piece to a simple narrative. We find a label that seems to fit, and keep applying it to ourselves and others (notice that labelling itself form an iteration loop that way). We make up stories about our behaviour that advance the narrative arc we want others to see. We even picture ourselves in that future state of "happily ever after" that never quite seems to arrive because it was always delusional to begin with. Life doesn't actually work that way, it's more like a loosely orchestrated set of repeated patterns that ultimately bring us whatever our attention is pointed to.

But narrative arcs are fundamentally artifice; they can only be used to direct attention. Narrative arcs can't serve as accurate models for reality. And not even the most inspiring narrative can provide accurate maps for the future.

For accurate maps or models, you need tools based on iterated loops.

Show me anything fundamentally present in life and I will show you a loop. Can life exist without a lifecycle and an ecosystem? Often narratives overlook them or treat them as fixed. When this happens, they diverge from reality in consequential ways that we easily miss (look carefully at these questions of lifecycle and ecosystem if you want to understand precisely what makes any popular film fantasy with neither plausible history nor realistic future). Your identity is more like a loop than an arc, and the same is true of the culture produced by entities around you that give you a sense of place and language and purpose.

Iterated loops produce structures that our brain can recognise.

Plant life that branches and grows root systems are perhaps the most simple examples of these iterated fractals. Patterns in the growth of ice crystals and cauliflower, or in the colouring patterns of a leopard or zebra result from different forms of iterated loops. Many of these form self-similar patterns in which smaller pieces appear identical to the whole. These fractal properties frequently result in something powerful: scale invariance. For now think of them as equally applicable from micro-scale to global-scale. In future posts I'll explain why this rare and valuable property is what gives these iterative fractals genuine superpowers.

So, we recognise our own life as iterated loops...and profit?

OK so here's the fun part: we will still need to come back to those narratives (nobody ever produced a profit without them, seriously). But we're going to completely blow up the idea that the narrative came first and start with the loops instead. We're going to study the loops before we assemble any narratives. And we're going to test our narratives against the predictive behaviour of these narrative loops. And yes, at that point open the doors of perception needed to make a profit or accomplish any other narrative that focuses our attention and engagement.

This is the simple idea behind everything that I've been working on while researching the techniques and technologies that will soon be launching more broadly in the form of Phracta. But more importantly, it's a simple idea that anyone can apply for themselves that will allow them to better focus their attention and engagement on the loops that matter in life. Especially those that produce joy and accomplishment as we share them with others.

Don't be fooled by its simplicity - the power of iterated loop is found in the way it can amplify anything that captures our attention and engagement. So while we cannot escape flawed narratives, we can apply our narrative loops to choose narratives that allow us to understand what we need out of life. Over and over.

In the end the loops always win.