Freedom of Thought

Exploring the Depths of Thoughts and Society.

Thoughts and the Social Experience

Thought is essential for humans to live sanely. It facilitates the birth and death of ideas in a risk-free environment. I believe we developed language in large part to be able to think such that the ideas we spread have at least participated in some rudimentary testing before being displayed to the rest of society. Indeed as individuals, we are deeply concerned, whether we like to think so or not, with our image from the viewpoint of the rest of society. Thus we are hesitant to express raw ideas and require thought to alleviate some of that concern. However, it is important to voice our thoughts, such that they can be criticised thoroughly by society. One cannot live with their thoughts forever, what is the point of that? Our ideas must, in large part, conform to societal expectations and facilitate the innovation and development of civilization. However, any meaningful thought should deviate slightly from the norm to introduce perspective and promote change. It is with this intention that I have created a substack, such that I can more broadly test my ideas. It is only through testing ideas that their flaws are exposed.

Moreover, thoughts fuel our actions, and actions fuel our thoughts. By articulating thoughts we are motivated to take action to probe our environment in ways to verify, test or execute our thoughts. Similarly, we observe the consequences of actions to postulate and hypothesise. This is formulated in the active inference framework proposed by Karl Friston. Active inference states that agentic organisms take actions to minimise their expected surprise. That is, agentic organisms possess a world model that makes predictions about the implications of actions executed in their environments. Through observing their environment, agentic agents can refine their generative model of the world, and through taking actions they can test explicit predictions from their generative model.

Freedom of Thought is Freedom of Speech

I was recently listening to Lex Fridman’s podcast with Guillaume Verdon, who reminisced on his time thinking behind his internet facade of Beff Jezos. Guillaume is a founder of the effective accelerationism movement and attributed his role in pioneering this philosophy to his ability to think freely behind the anonymity of his X account, BasedBeffJezos. Guillaume stated that freedom of speech backpropagates to freedom of thought, and so argues that to have the capacity to fully explore your ideas, one needs to have freedom of speech. In a world which often focuses on the individual rather than the idea, Guillaume felt that to achieve freedom of speech he needed to detach himself from his identity and pronounce his ideas behind anonymity. I have some reservations about this approach. I understand the sense of freedom one feels behind anonymity and see how this would be beneficial when expressing thoughts publicly. However, I think it is a slippery slope to becoming reckless and not sufficiently testing your ideas before you share them. It suppresses the effectiveness of the consequences we experience when our thoughts are criticised. Potentially, requiring many more iterations of testing for thoughts to become fully refined.

One of the benefits of free speech is it helps identify fringe views. If we can identify these views with individuals, then through societal pressures, we can elevate or suppress these views, depending on the proportion of society that agrees with such views. I am cautious that anonymity allows for the misrepresentation of ideas in society by disproportionately elevating or suppressing them. Leading to a space of ideas that is not truly reflective of society, and misleads societal innovation. Unfortunately, this has caused echo chambers to span the digital space of ideas, restricting the flow of ideas that is necessary to refine our thoughts.

Echo chambers arise subtly, many do not realise they are part of one. I think this is a consequence of the lack of identity present in social media profiles. Detaching the human from the profiles, for me, introduces a generality to the ideas relayed by the profile. Thus portraying the ideas as more representative of society’s beliefs than they are. Consequently, social media users are allured into believing that they are being exposed to the full scope of opinions. Users then become dismissive of the possibility that they are locked in an echo chamber of ideas. Therefore, I have become a prominent listener of long-form podcasts, where individuals iron out their thoughts through unmediated discussions. More often than not, the individuals have overlapping ideas and resolve misconstrued perceptions they have developed virtually.

Are my Thoughts my Thoughts?

Where do my thoughts come from? There is no clear region of my brain from where I can feel my thoughts emerge. My thoughts arise in provoked and unprovoked manners. Novel thoughts cannot be my thoughts, as otherwise I would have already thought of it which violates its novelty. Instead, it must emerge from my previous thoughts. Perhaps a novel thought is just a consequence of connecting the dots between pre-existing thoughts. Are my thoughts then the connections or the product of the connections? Some thoughts must truly be novel as otherwise what there is to be thought has already been thought, and society could not continue to innovate as we are. However, it is unlikely that any one of someone’s thoughts is truly novel, as humans are inherently social and so many of our actions are inspired by others. Thus our thoughts, although seeming novel, are probably just a manifestation of another idea that we have mistakenly taken as our own. That is not to say that there is no utility in our thinking. It is precisely in these alternative representations of ideas that novelty lies.

Consider the field of mathematics, which is founded upon the abstract contemplation of ideas and prides itself upon deep thought and creativity. However, when studying mathematics one consistently encounters theorems that are attributed to multiple individuals. It is not usually the case that these individuals collaborated on such ideas, instead, it is often the case that the results were derived independently at the same time. From the space of all possible thoughts and all possible time scales, how can it be that specific theorems are derived simultaneously? Humanity at these points in time did not suddenly receive extra cognitive capacities to state these results. Instead, pre-existing thoughts at that time cumulated to a point where the derivation of the theorem was the inevitable next step. Indeed, there is a certain level of ingenuity and awareness of the pre-existing thoughts required to make this step inevitable, however, taking the step becomes far more likely in these circumstances.

We could say that there is a space of thoughts, in which a manifold of pre-existing thoughts is defined. Each individual occupies a region of the space determined by the region of the pre-existing thoughts manifold they are aware of, and the neighbourhood of the region they can access using their level of ingenuity. Any thought that that individual has is just a traversal through thought space. More often than not their ingenuity will keep them on the manifold defined by pre-existing thought. However, sometimes they may diverge slightly and occupy a region of thought space that is not occupied by the pre-existing thought manifold. At this point, they achieve novelty and expand the manifold of pre-existing thoughts. With this view, thoughts form an inherent fabric of the universe that individuals traverse to discover, rather than create, ideas.