Consistency Maintenance Ability: Characteristics of Life and Intelligence
When considering the behavior of life and intelligence, we notice that they possess the characteristic of maintaining consistency.
For example, when moving to escape predators or search for food, there are numerous options on which direction to proceed.
Even if the initial movement is to the right, there will still be many options for the next move. However, if the organism keeps choosing to move back and forth without any consistency, it won’t be able to escape the predator or find food.
Additionally, if the organism suddenly prioritizes finding food or chooses to rest while being chased by a predator, it would fail to achieve the initial goal of escaping the predator. Moreover, if an organism is cornered while fleeing, it may need to switch its short-term behavior to a more aggressive one, such as attacking the predator, in order to survive.
This means that organisms can act with consistency to achieve the overarching goal of survival. Intelligent organisms can maintain consistency in more sophisticated ways, even in actions like play, which may not be directly related to survival.
On the contrary, the characteristic of maintaining consistency in actions toward self-determined goals can be considered a feature that is not found in non-living or non-intelligent entities. Of course, physical laws themselves exhibit consistency, but it’s not actively maintained; it’s merely a given. Based on this view, maintaining consistency can be seen as a feature of life and intelligence.
In this article, I will delve deeper into the characteristic of maintaining consistency, which life and intelligence possess.
Context and Consistency
Intelligence behaves intelligently by maintaining consistency within its context. Similarly, living organisms maintain life by preserving consistency in their context.
Context includes the history of thoughts or activities, along with the intentions, goals, plans, and strategies inherent in them.
Consistency means maintaining this background and deciding the next thought or activity in a way that complements the history toward achieving the goal.
Living organisms live by maintaining consistency in their context, and intelligence exists by doing the same within its own context.
Multilayered Structure and Inertia
Intentions and goals are subdivided according to plans and strategies. These subdivided intentions and goals also have a multilayered structure.
Moreover, intentions and goals are not physically predetermined. Sometimes, they are determined reflexively based on past patterns or happenstance, forming part of the contextual background.
Through this reflexive or coincidental background, inertia operates, enabling life and intelligence to maintain consistency in their context.
Bottom-Up and Top-Down
The fact that the background has a multilayered structure and is formed through reflexive or accidental decisions means that a long-term background is built bottom-up.
On the other hand, in order to maintain consistency with the long-term background determined bottom-up, it is necessary to break it down into short-term contexts top-down.
The ability to maintain consistency in context forms this multilayered background on its own.
Individual and Species
Individual organisms can be seen as systems that maintain contextual consistency.
For example, a plant that blooms in spring doesn’t simply bloom as soon as the temperature rises. It counts the number of consecutive days where the temperature exceeds a certain threshold, and only blooms after this condition is met.
This counting of days is a very simple yet context-driven activity.
When the flowers bloom at the appropriate time, it becomes easier for pollination to occur, and the plant can mature its fruit during the right season.
All of this is crucial for reproduction. In other words, a consistent context is maintained with reproduction as the background goal.
Likewise, species that share DNA between individuals can be viewed as systems that maintain contextual consistency as a whole. Furthermore, ecosystems can also be seen as systems maintaining contextual consistency.
Individuals hold a context with the purpose of their own survival while simultaneously participating in a context for the continuation of their species. Species, in turn, are positioned within the context of the prosperity of ecosystems.
Elements of Consistency
There are three elements that make up contextual consistency.
The first is the inertia of the context. Without inertia in the background or goals, consistency cannot be established.
The second is adaptability to change. If consistency cannot be maintained when changes occur, it becomes impossible to preserve consistency.
The third element is trial and error. This means actively altering the approach to find the path that accomplishes the goal.
Example of Cooking a Delicious Dish
For example, let’s say you want to cook a delicious meal.
First, it’s necessary to consistently maintain the goal of making a delicious meal. This is inertia.
The ingredients available will vary each time, and various factors like ingredient differences and room temperature will change with each cooking session.
In response to such changes, you need to adjust the recipe, cooking time, or the amount of seasoning. This is adaptability.
Furthermore, gathering information on recipes and tips or being creative on your own to make an even better dish is important. This is trial and error.
Without inertia working in the context, adaptability to changes won’t function effectively.
If the goal of making a delicious meal is not maintained, it will be difficult to make proper adjustments in cooking or seasoning to match changes in ingredients or temperature.
Additionally, without adaptability, trial and error cannot be efficient.
While trial and error involves actively making changes, random changes can result in outcomes far removed from the context, making improvement impossible.
If adaptability serves as the foundation, even when intentional changes are made through trial and error, the system can adapt to those changes.
Someone without the ability to adapt to cooking won’t be able to make a delicious dish, no matter how much they experiment. It’s only those with a high adaptability to cooking who can successfully create new and delicious dishes through trial and error.
Bootstrap and Feedback
As in the previous example, inertia serves as the foundation for adaptability, and adaptability forms the basis for trial and error, creating a bootstrap structure.
Furthermore, the ability to cook a delicious dish brings about positive feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction, which act as feedback. This positive feedback provides motivation to continue pursuing the goal of making a delicious dish.
In other words, the strengthening of adaptability and the success of trial and error feed back into strengthening inertia.
Thus, inertia, adaptability, and trial and error have a bootstrap and feedback structure.
When such a structural relationship is established, contextual consistency is maintained.
Conclusion
In this article, I have explored the characteristic of maintaining consistency as a feature of life and intelligence from various perspectives.
The key point is that the center of consistency is the context. The context reflects external events of life and intelligence, but the context itself is maintained internally. Moreover, even for the same external event, different contexts can form depending on the life or intelligence involved.
The ability to maintain this context is the most fundamental capability required for a system that maintains consistency. However, at this stage, it cannot yet be called a system that actively maintains consistency. Simply having the ability to record or remember doesn’t mean consistency is maintained.
The basic ability of a system that actively maintains consistency is inertia — the ability to maintain direction and flow in actions and thoughts with respect to the internalized context. On top of this, the abilities to adapt to change and actively introduce change through trial and error bootstrap the system’s enhancement. Through this, feedback that strengthens contextual consistency occurs.
Building on these abilities, life and intelligence may sometimes redirect new contexts through reflexive or random selections based on the situation. The new contextual direction is strengthened through inertia, adaptability, and trial and error.
In this process, macro-contexts are formed bottom-up by creating or absorbing larger directions of context. Conversely, macro-contexts correct or suppress micro-contexts top-down.
Through this, the reflexes and decisions of micro-contexts become macro, and the influence of macro-contexts becomes micro, characterizing context as a complex hierarchical structure.
In living organisms, this complex hierarchical structure of context forms individuals, species, and ecosystems. In intelligence, especially human intelligence, it forms the complex contexts of everyday actions, mid-to-long-term goals, and life’s overarching purpose.
The mechanisms of consistency — sensitivity, adaptability, and trial and error — are essential for forming, maintaining, and evolving such complex contexts. It is this consistency that distinguishes life and intelligence from other systems, which is the core claim of this article.
