Dandelion and Caterpillar

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!

Kobayashi Issa

Achilles and Tortoise

According to the Free Energy Principle, our brain builds and maintains an internal model of the world to anticipate what will happen next. These predictive modeling skills are not unique to humans. Every living thing is exposed to a changing environment and subject to the same imperative. A squirrel burying thousands of seeds across the forest in autumn, a sunflower tracking the sun from east to west during the day and swinging its head back to the east during the night in anticipation, an immune system archiving the pathogen information it has already encountered – those are all examples of the internal models being built and refined.

Every open dissipative system faces two problems that must be solved simultaneously. It must build a robust internal model, which relies on prior knowledge — repeating and further optimizing existing processes, conserving energy, staying reliable. And the model must remain flexible to incorporate new information, reacting to changes in the environment, learning from the new data.

Both capabilities are essential. Pure repetition leads to stagnation — the system becomes rigid and inflexible. Pure variation is equally dangerous. The more complex a system grows, the more energy it needs to update itself. New knowledge cannot simply be appended to the existing model — it must be made consistent with it. A system that fails to consolidate its experience into its inner model will keep generating prediction errors. In our brain, that sustained error is arguably what we feel as anxiety and exhaustion.

A company that only relies on repetition of its existing model gradually loses its ability to adapt to changing market conditions. Kodak invented the digital camera and buried it. Blockbuster had every opportunity to become Netflix. In both cases the model was optimized for a static picture of the world, not anticipating the dynamics of its development.

The opposite is equally dangerous. Companies that only chase variation — entering unfamiliar markets, constantly reinventing the strategy, launching insufficiently tested products — risk becoming disorganized and ineffective. Their energy goes into starting new initiatives rather than finishing the existing ones.

Countries follow the same pattern across longer timescales. Institutions, traditions, and legal frameworks represent the muscle memory trained on repetition — compressed knowledge about what has worked. Societies that only rely on the past eliminate variation through authoritarian compression. They become rigid; their internal model is based on an outdated version of the world. Societies in permanent reformation destroy the accumulated complexity, destabilizing their inner model.

This pattern holds at many scales, from bacteria to humanity as a whole, because the underlying problem is always the same: how to remain stable enough to function and open enough to adapt. Too much repetition and the system cannot respond when conditions shift. Too much variation and the system cannot consolidate what it learns.

Existence favors cadence and pace.

Nature has developed two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, to reward the creation of reliable and flexible internal models. Dopamine is responsible for learning. When we experience surprise, we try to fine-tune the existing model to better explain reality. That incremental model adjustment is rewarded by a tiny burst of dopamine, which feels pleasant. Serotonin operates on a different time horizon, closer to how good the environment is on average, sustaining the willingness to wait for a delayed reward. Low serotonin discounts the future steeply and pushes towards impulsivity, towards abandoning a working model in favor of testing a new hypothesis immediately.

Together they form an elegant system of dual control: one neurotransmitter rewards revision where the model fails, the other rewards trust in the model where it holds. Evolution has effectively hard-wired a utility function and a discount rate into the nervous system.

The pace of substrate transitions was never uniform. The history of the Universe contains vast plateaus punctuated by sudden leaps. But in systems where each new level becomes the tool for creating the next, a general tendency toward acceleration emerges. This is a property of positive feedback: as the substrate grows richer, it builds faster.

The history of humanity illustrates this. The pace of progress increased steadily, following an exponential trajectory — whether measured by global patent applications, scientific publications, drug discoveries, or the growth of computational power. Each generation of tools enables the next, faster than the one before. This is why the transition we are now living through may unfold faster than any that preceded it.