A Deeper Pattern, Part III- Agency
Making Moves
Adam Anthony’s Architecture Argument: An Advantageous Abductive Assessment that the Agent in the Arena exercises their Agency with Affordances, Artifacts, and Assemblages; through Attention, Appreciation, and Action, all of which Aggregate nonlinearly into Attunement, ultimately Augmenting their Agility, Adaptability, Acumen, Alignment, Acceptance, and optimizing Arousal, Appraisal, Awakening, Altruism, Awe, Aesthetics, and Authenticity, in an Age of Arduous Actuality; defined as preparation for the Apocalypse, while properly balancing Attachment, Aversion, and Affect to mitigate Ambiguity, Alienation, Anxiety, and Animosity.
Source: Midjourney
This is part III of this three part series. Part I and II can be found here and here, respectively.
This A Frame model is a framework, a scaffolding by which to examine how humans move in the world. This is my initial attempt to articulate it, so there will be some growing pains as I think in written form here. Protosynthesis, people!
Coyne and Boyd’s Answers to the Arena
Now that we’ve laid out the Agent, and the Arena, how then should Agents conduct themselves? I am going to build on two visionary thinkers— one from the realm of storytelling, the other from the military, to try and see a deeper pattern. I cover both these gentlemen in an essay here, so the following is a brief summary of their own templates.
The Story Grid Five Commandments
For Coyne, the Five Commandments of Story scale fractally at the Global, Act, and Scene level. The flow of a story is describing a template with which a human or group of humans can either successfully (prescriptive tale) or unsuccessfully (cautionary tale) navigate reality.
Inciting Interaction—The event which disturbs the status quo and begins a block of narrative.
Turning Point Progressive Complication—When the primary character realizes their tactic is not working.
Crisis—The dramatic question.
Climax—Actually making the crisis choice.
Resolution—The outcome of the choice, which lays the conditions for the next set of commandments.
The OODA Loop
For Boyd, observation, orientation, and action are continuous flows, with new decisions made only as circumstances dictate. The entire cycle feeds forward and backward. The OODA loop is articulating a process by which humans can increase their capacity for free and independent action, through identifying mismatches in observed reality and acting on those mismatches faster than their adversaries.
Observation—Sensory inputs.
Orientation—Sense-Making within the mind.
Decision—What to do.
Action—Enacting that decision in the world.
The A Frame
Now, I am going to take both of their concepts and map them together, adding the A Frame inside.
As shown above, Attention corresponds to the “Observation” portion of the OODA loop and both the Inciting Interaction and Resolution of the 5 C’s. It’s the point at which you are devoting a high degree of focus/bandwidth to monitoring and exploring the outside world. Appreciation maps to Orientation and Decision in the OODA loop and the Turning Point and Crisis steps of the 5 C’s. This is a period when we make sense of what the Arena presents to us— we fit it into our meaning-making framework. Finally Action in the A Frame aligns to Action in the OODA loop, as well as the Climax in the 5 C’s. As Agents, we exercise our Agency in the Arena.
This idea— that there is a three part process (Attention, Appreciation, Action) that is nonlinearly, recursively combining to describe how humans move in the world is commonly known as the Perception Cognition Action model, or PCA in the neurobiology world1. What’s different is that I’m highlighting something called Attunement, which is the ultimate goal of the A Frame.
Below, I’m using the Red/Green/Blue color model to denote various parts of the process, how they blend together and connect. In this view, Perception is the bridge between Attention and Appreciation, Discernment is the bridge between Appreciation and Action, and Intuition is the bridge between Attention and Action. All of this is to align the process of coming into proper correspondence with reality— or Attunement. As with the OODA loop, this process feeds recursively forward and backward— Actions create new Appreciation and highlight new directions for our Attention to go.
Attention
“In a wealth of information, There is a poverty of attention.” — Herbert Simon
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” — William James
“Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.” — Ortega Gasset
“The ability to sort noise from signal, to reconfigure the cognitive accumulation & being open to navigating ambiguity, whilst under pressure, requires consistency & focus, with intensity, on one’s own attending.” — Cliff Kimber
This is a famous experiment revealing something psychologists call “inattentional blindness.” When experimenters directed participants to put their focus on counting the number of basketball passes, a majority of people missed the entrance of the gorilla into the center of the group. How do we know what to “pay” attention to?
Iain McGilchrist has a series with Perspectiva titled “Attention as a Moral Act,” devoted to talking with other thinkers about how to make sense of reality— how to find a balance between the Linear, Analytical, Reductionist Left Hemisphere (The Emmissary), and the Nonlinear, Synthetic, Holistic Right Hemisphere (The Master). Both are required to sucessfully be in the world, but at present we are Left Hemisphere/Emmisary heavy.
Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke has a concept he calls “Recursive Relevance Realization.” During this process, the Agent is identifying the important bits within a “Salience Landscape” (The things we decide we should be Attending to).
The individual abilities of the Agent will determine how much you Attend in a given situation. As we talked about in the previous Arena essay, in a physical altercation, an MMA fighter is going to Attend to more details of the situation— posture, handedness, readiness, distances, than an Agent untrained in martial arts/combatives. Some parents have a depth of sophisticated attention to every nuance of their child in a way different than others.
I wrote about Attention here. The Center for Humane Technology publishes a podcast devoted to this topic. It represents the entry point for information from the Arena to make its way into our cognition. It is malleable, meaning we can move and shift our attention to different parts of the Arena and Agent, as required.
We speak of the “Attention Economy,” and harnessing Attention to given corporate/consumer ends. In the same way that today is an age of Nonlinearity, it is also an age of Attention. Barring some Elon Musk style brain interface that makes it possible to simultaneously watch three different Netflix shows while shitposting on Twitter, assembling IKEA furniture, and making dinner for your kids, Attention is a finite metric. Humans have limited Attention, just like the Earth has a finite amount of materials feed an economic system with an imbedded growth obligation.2
Appreciation
“Appreciation is a logical process of reasoning, the object of which is to determine, from facts known or assumed, the best or better course of action to take in any given circumstance.” — Australian Army Publication
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.— Victor Frankl
“Appreciation includes the recognition of worth or value and the idea of clear perception as well as the ability to monitor.” — John Boyd
“We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.” — Helen Keller
Appreciation is the the point where we as Agents process what we’ve gathered from Attention. We weigh the various inputs, going through the Vervaekian recursive relevance realization. Based on our background, experience, intelligence, and understanding of context, we sift the wheat from the proverbial chaff in making sense of the world. This process can take time, so there are other pathways to action if the Agent is moving in a time-constrained environment.
In the Free Energy Principle, this is where interior model sits. Humans model the environment in their minds in order to minimize surprise and maximize fittedness to a given environmental niche. In this framing, surprise is a difference between what the Agent expects in the Arena, and what she actually encounters.
In the military, we speak of “terrain appreciation.” This is the analysis of an area to determine the effect that the specific terrain features have on likely military operations by friendly and enemy forces. Having good appreciation of the terrain allows for “best fit” solutions to emerge from the process.
Action
“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.” ― Carl Gustav Jung
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James
“All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.” ― Aristotle, Selected Works
“Action expresses priorities.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
Action is the enactment, the actualization of our conduct in the Arena. Without Action, we are simply watching (Attending) and thinking (Appreciating). Acting can be useful for both achieving our objectives and for obtaining new information about the Arena. The latter is key— Embodied Cognition, Participatory Knowing are potent and sometimes overlooked within a Descartian dualist mind/body paradigm.
When I went through sniper school, we had to pass an evolution called “stalking.” This entailed moved in an undetected fashion over several kilometers of woods and fields, preparing a firing position for your weapons system, and firing undetected. All while maintaining a visual on the judges, who were armed with telescopic lenses, an elevated position, and radio contact with “walkers” — instructors in on the field who they could direct onto potential hiding spots.
We had several “practice” stalks that did not count towards our final grade. One of my classmates took it upon himself to sprint onto the stalk field, heading straight towards a firing position, then diving into the bushes before either the judges or the walkers could find him. He failed, getting caught several times, but one time he shaved off hours of tedious, sometimes crawling movement by this unconventional move. While I am not endorsing this technique, his actions revealed valuable information about the boundary conditions of the domain, places he could shave the odds in his favor.
Quick Stop on Affordances
According to Don Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things”, an Affordance can be defined as “the relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of an Agent that determine just how the object could possibly by used and interacted with.” Jason Frasca and Iain Kerr at Emergent Futures Lab talk about them at length as well in their writing (Here is a recent post discussing it). Affordances are also mentioned by David Snowden in his recent work as a critical component to how we should think about the world. An example is the hand/fingers of a human agent gripping the handle of a coffee mug. That’s a two-way, relational thing that gets created between the Agent and the object — the abilities of the Agent and the qualities of the object. Affordances determine the realm of the possible for what we’re trying to accomplish in the world.
Get a(n Optimal) Grip
Vervaeke discusses the concept of "Optimal Grip," which comes primarily from the works of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It refers to the idea that our perception and action are intimately connected, and our cognitive processes are tailored to enable a skillful and effective interaction with the world. Attention, Appreciation, and Action are working together recursively to obtain this grip. Here are some characteristics of the concept:
1. Perception-Action Coupling: Tightly intertwined, perception is not just about passively receiving sensory input; it is an active engagement with the environment that is shaped by our goals, intentions, and physical abilities. Our perceptual systems are well tuned to pick up relevant information that supports our actions and goals.
2. Skillful Engagement: Our cognitive processes are attuned to achieve skillful engagement with the world. They are not solely focused on representing the world accurately but are optimized to enable effective action. They are tuned to highlight relevant affordances, allowing us to interact with the environment in an efficient, context dependent, and adaptive manner based on the body we have.
3. Embodied and Situated Cognition: The concept of optimal grip is rooted in the ideas of embodied cognition, emphasizing the role of the body and its interactions with the environment. It recognizes that our cognitive processes are shaped by our bodily experiences, physical and sensory abilities, and the situational context.
The concept of optimal grip works on several levels. On the physical level, it is getting a firm grasp, say on a tool, or a pull up bar. Mentally, it is conveys mastery of a discipline, such as “Do you have a good grip on the accounting numbers for last month?” And spiritually, it can refer to the connectedness I am trying to convey— like the concept of “losing your grip on reality.” In this framing, Optimal Grip comes before Attunement. In the end, you have to let go to in order to achieve the final connectness — to cease your grasping and go with the flow.
Attunement
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” — Carl Sagan
“What opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife.” — Heraclitus
“Connection, the ability to feel connected, is neuro-biologically wired— that’s why we’re here!” — Brene Brown
Now we come to the crux of it. The concept of Attunement has a connotation from the new age community that is not necessarily the way I am envisioning it here. Cognitive scientist Vervaeke discusses it in his “Awakening From the Meaning Crisis” series. He mentions it 15 times in his book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century Crisis, 11 times with the phrase “Worldview Attunement. Editor and creator of Story Grid, Shawn Coyne talks at length about the “Misattunement” of beats when writing scenes (Story Grid defines a beat as a back and forth, stimulus and response between two Agents in a scene, or one Agent and the Arena). Philosopher and renaissance man Matthew Crawford discusses it in his book “The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual in an Age of Distraction” as the manner in which a human connected closely to a domain. Another philosopher and renaissance man, Forrest Landry, discusses the concept at length in several podcasts, notably here.
As humans makes sense of the world and move in it, our aim is something like Attunement — whether we are getting into a flow state with teammates on the basketball court, seeking mastery of a more cerebral skill, or grounding ourselves in a connected manner to reality. In the video below, Vervaeke concludes (spoilers!) by asserting that humans are ultimately searching for Belonging, Orientation, and Transcendence.
So What?
Now that we’ve taken this long journey, what are the actual takeaways? What are the implications? Who freaking cares? All good questions. We began with the work of two really interesting thinkers. Shawn Coyne, who is describing how humans craft a depiction of reality so that it will transmit timeless truths in order to help others on their path — to aid other Agents to survive, thrive, and derive meaning from the world. John Boyd is describing a framework for moving through reality which will allow for Agents to prevail against others in a competitive environment.
What I’m looking for with this model is not instrumental or reductionist. I’m trying to depict what humans do on the physical, mental, and moral planes as they move in the world. Attend, Appreciate, Act — all in service of Attuning to the world. How specifically, does each human do that? Each of us are perceiving and modeling reality in different fashions — See the “dress” incident of 2015, or the “Yanny/Laurel” audio clip. But over time, we will be more successful if we can gain a closer connection to the world. We reach for Attunement as individuals, as pairs, and as groups. The Socratic concept of “dialogos” — a conversation between Agents where were strive for a collective correspondence with reality together. Not subjective or objective, but transjective— cutting across both categories.
Things are afoot. We are living through a period of great change. There is an arrogance to saying that — we are alive in this time, and it’s special, etc. There are a multitude of factors that allow me to assert that this really is a time of great transition and change — greater than normal. Epochal, even.
But whether or not the change we’re going through is out of the norm for humankind or not, Attuning ourselves to reality — finding a proper relationship as both individual and collectives, will foster the flourishing of our societies. As my grandmother would say, “we need all hands on deck!”
Glossary of Terms
Architecture— Unifying or coherent form or structure.
Argument— Coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts intended to support or establish a viewpoint.
Advantageous— Favorable; beneficial; profitable.
Abductive— Forming a conclusion from the information that is known.
Assessment— Act of judging or deciding the value, quality, important, or amount of something.
Affordances— Action defined in the relation between the Agent and the object.
Artifacts— Characteristic of and or resulting from particular human institution, period, trend, or individual.
Assemblages–- Combination or pattern of elements that produce effects in the world.
Agent— One that acts or has the power or authority to act.
Arena— Place or scene where forces contend, or events unfold.
Agency— Mode of exerting power; means of producing effects.
Attention— Act of close or careful observing or listening; ability or power to keep the mind on something.
Appreciation— Recognition of quality, value, significance, understanding, or magnitude of people/things.
Action— State or process of acting or doing; something that is done or accomplished; deed.
Aggregate— Collect or gather into a mass or whole.
Attunement— Bring into harmony or accord, related to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of Optimal Grip.
Augment— Make greater, more numerous, larger, or more intense.
Agility– Moving quickly/easily; nimbleness; Ability to think/draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity.
Adaptability— The ability to change (or be changed) to fit changed circumstances; suitability; fittedness.
Acumen— Exceptional discernment and judgment, especially in practical matters.
Alignment— Arrangement of groups or forces in relation to one another.
Acceptance—Non-judgmental awareness and embracing of thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they occur.
Arousal— State of physiological alertness and readiness for action.
Appraisal– Act of estimating or judging the nature or value of something or someone.
Awakening— Coming into awareness.
Altruism— Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.
Awe— Emotion combining veneration and wonder that is inspired by the sacred or sublime.
Aesthetics— Dealing with the nature, expression, and perception of beauty, as in the fine arts.
Authenticity— Fidelity to one's own personality, spirit, or character
Age— Period of time dominated by a central figure or prominent feature.
Arduous— Hard to accomplish or achieve; marked by great labor or effort; strenuous.
Actuality— Fact; reality.
Apocalypse— Revelation, disclosure; uncover, disclose, reveal; insight, vision; hallucination.
Attachment– Feeling that binds one to a person, thing, cause, ideal, or the like; devotion; regard.
Aversion— Avoidance of thing, situation, or behavior due to association with unpleasant/painful stimulus.
Affect– Produce an emotional response in (someone).
Ambiguity— Doubtfulness or uncertainty; capable of being understood in multiple senses or ways.
Alienation— Emotional isolation or dissociation; estrangement.
Anxiety— Uncertainty/fear resulting from anticipation of a real or imaginary threatening event/situation.
Animosity— Bitter hostility or open enmity.
It is also listed in robotics literature as a “Sense-Decide-Act” loop.”