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Traveling from point A to point B sounds like elementary geometry. Draw an arrow, right?
Wrong. Think of how you really travel. Many roads are possible. And what is a road? It’s not an arrow but a breadth, a narrowed or constrained range of possible pathways. Roads afford you leeway to move side to side so long as you don’t get too close to danger on either side.
Looking back on a trip, you could map it as a curvy arrow, but that’s not how you traveled, you wheeled left and right staying within the road’s narrow constraints.
The difference between arrowing and narrowing may seem pointless. It’s not. The biggest remaining scientific mysteries – the origin of life, the solution to the free will vs. determinism debate, the unpredictability of human behavior – become solvable when we recognize that the solution can’t be found through arrowing but through narrowing. Traveling through traffic is a great way to start to understand the difference.
Driving next to someone drunk or distracted, your options narrow. The tolerances get tighter. You have to steer clear of this new constraint. The same is so when traffic gets congested. Driving an empty four-lane highway, you can relax, change lanes without signaling, whatever, since you’ve got a wide berth. When traffic becomes stop and go, you have to pay more attention. The narrowing gets narrower. Sometimes the congestion gets so bad you have to take the next best road.
When resistance grows on your path of least resistance, you take the next best road. In other words, resistance or narrowing can change and when it does, you’re shunted onto another path. It’s not a forked arrow you’re shunted onto automatically, it’s a product of relative narrowing. When one narrowing gets narrower, another narrowing becomes relatively less narrowed, just as when Plan A becomes less likely, you can switch to Plan B.
In your personal life, you might declare that you’re single-mindedly beelining from point A to B, but that’s not really how you live day to day. Day to day, you’ve got to get by, keeping yourself alive today so you can continue day-to-daying. To do so, you navigate through relative constraints. Some of them are immediate life-and-death constraints. The road you travel has clear boundaries with respect to breathing. Don’t dare stop breathing.
Not all of the boundaries are as life-and-death immediate. Don’t show up to work with food between your teeth, don’t snap at your partner, don’t get fat, don’t delay responding to promising openings or deadlines, don’t neglect the kids, don’t make enemies or at least not those who could impose further constraints on you.
Don’t enter debates (ideological congestion) that will add to drama (more constraints), don’t get diverted into bad friendships and partnerships, don’t go on binges that will constrain you.
And then there are grand, looming macro-constraints: Don’t forsake your faith, don’t contribute to the climate crisis, don’t let injustice go unpunished.
No wonder we crave freedom, the psychological equivalent of that empty four-lane highway. Navigating so many constraints can feel claustrophobic, our paths so narrowed that it feels like there’s no path forward, no way you’re going to satisfy all the constraining standards.
Vacations are funny this way. We imagine them to be like a relief from constraint. More often, they're just a new set of more-complicated constraints: Satisfy the family, get to all of those chores you’ve put off, get going on your side project, and constrain yourself to unconstrained time chilling out.
It’s just a different to-do list likely to yield FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out, like you’re not getting around to something. To do what you're doing, you're veering off through some other constraint. Chilling out takes time, which means you're not constrained to getting around to your side project. Though you may dread going back to work, part of you might welcome it. At work, the constraints are simpler.
How do we end up so constrained or narrowed?
Actually, that’s a good scientific question. Constraints accumulate by a process much like addiction. You want to keep something going (most basically, staying alive). Something handy to that purpose chances along. You come to rely upon it, addicted, losing the means to do without it. Though there are costs, they’re outweighed by the benefits. Now you’re constrained by the handy thing’s costs.
Of course, addiction implies a bad outcome. But the process is different from the outcomes. Sure, heroin is handy only in the very short term and exorbitant in the long term, but plenty of addictions are happy constraints. Setting aside whether an addiction will turn out to be good or bad, we can focus on the process.
To keep his spirits up, John got into alcohol. Now he’s addicted. He can no longer do without it, which means he’s under the constraints that alcohol imposes. He has to find money, make excuses at home, listen to his wife nag, take liver meds, and take Uber since his license was revoked.
To keep from feeling lonely, April got married. Now she’s addicted but in a good way. She can’t imagine being without her partner, even though it means working within her partner’s constraints, for example, the pressure to do things that wouldn’t be her first priority.
Shifts in society overall are also the product of shifting addictions to new constraints.
People used to farm and garden more than they do now. When grocery stores arrived, we got addicted to them, losing the necessity to farm and garden. Now we navigate the constraints groceries impose, for example, having a car for carrying and an income to paying for groceries.
People used to read the newspaper and watch network TV more. When cable and online news became available, people got addicted to them which imposed constraints – keeping the cable and internet bills paid and even staying loyal to their favorite news sources, a constraint on how they think.
Psychology is still too arrow-obsessed for its own good. Go to a psych conference and you’ll find most theories expressed in the form of points and arrows. Narrowing instead would improve our understanding of the leeway we have and the complicated constraints we’re under.
And origins of life? We struggle to keep ourselves alive and yet nothing we do violates the laws of physical science. Our striving struggle for existence is, therefore, something different from nothing but physical chemistry. What?
The promising new answer is narrowing, the way organisms are self-constraining, the way our chemistry prevents us from just petering out and falling apart.
Our internal chemical dynamics are mutually constraining, chemistry keeping chemistry in check, preventing us from dying.
We’re just chemistry, but not just any chemistry. We’re chemistry that prevents itself from ending through self-repair, self-protection, and self-reproduction, chemistry constrained such that it prevents and protects against degradation and passes these capabilities on to offspring. We’re constraints that prevent the constraints from falling apart. We’re each a self-regenerative, self-narrowing system. The struggle for existence is our self-narrowing prevention of our non-existence.
We aren’t computers or robots which are engineered to be as arrow-like in their interactions as possible. And we’re not magic, some invisible supernatural ghostly something pumped into matter. Neither ghost nor machine what are we?
We’re systems that narrow or limit what happens, a little like how a road’s boundaries limit your path, only in our case, the narrowings are internal, the checks and balances that limit what can happen such that our degeneration is prevented over our lifetimes (and beyond) through reproduction of our narrowing. It’s this narrowing that has sustained itself over the 3.8 billion years of life’s existence.
Each organism is a little like the healthy organization you work at if you’re lucky, each department addicted to, dependent upon and constrained by each other in ways that keep the whole organization from falling apart.
Though your job may well feel controlling such that sometimes you feel like a deterministic cog in a machine, your job doesn’t impose complete control over your workday. You have some leeway within the constraints. You may be highly narrowed, but you're not arrowed.
Here’s a video intro to the narrowing approach to origins of life research.
References
Sherman, Jeremy (2017) Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, NYC: Columbia University Press.
