A system primitive is the building block for all higher level functions and processes.

The core of the human experience is fundamentally relational, defined by relationship with self and others.

If you look at the world with people as your primitives, what does it look like to augment your brain’s capacity to make meaning of this? To create higher level functions and processes? And to capture changes over time?

From first principles, let’s start with self - whoever the “I am” is for you. While we’re calling self / self-concept the most basic unit in your higher level relational system, it is of course anything but. Roughly, let’s say the self-concept is made up of thoughts, actions, and habits.

Next, you have person A. Your access to Person A’s self-concept is limited to the facts about them that you have observed or trust in, the actions/experiences they’ve had that you know of, and your shared experiences.

Across the two primitives of self and person A, the first higher level function is “who is person A to me?”

Ah, there are shades to this. Who someone is to you is ever-changing, as your self-concept and your understanding of Person A changes over time. And so our system starts to look like:

Where each higher level function is affected by the past, with a naive penalty for how much time has passed. Other features here can include significant relational events like stark moments of trust or betrayal.

Say we do achieve this time-series system of capturing relational ties, what next? Well how might a system interpret Who is Person A to B?

Ok… this is starting to get complicated. Ultimately, I know people and relationships compose my lived experience. But so what. Within this system, what’s important is Who is meaningful to me today?

If I trust my system can capture this, is there any higher order function we can get to? Given my self-concept, what matters is what I can think, act, and habituate.

We end with the highest level output of this system being "what relational actions should I take today?”. I don’t actually need to understand the complexity of the system. I need to trust that the system understands my self-concept and helps me act in alignment with that.

And so, to augment the brain’s capacity to make meaning of a my relational system with people as the primitives ultimately looks like abstracting away complexity and focusing on taking the right relational actions at the right time to achieve alignment with self-concept.

The next-level could be relying on other cooperative people’s higher level relational action steps to support mine - like asking for a hiring referral, getting feedback on this thread, or calling my grandmother.

For 200,000-300,000 years, the human brain has been this system. What does the evolution of our relational system looks like? 🔥