System Zero
I had the fascinating experience of taking semaglutide (a.k.a. Ozempic/Wegovy, a GLP-1 receptor agonist) for weight loss. The drug viscerally changed my relationship with food, at least while taking it. But it also profoundly changed my relationship with myself. I was struck by the degree to which my overeating behavior was chemically controllable. If literal milligrams per week could alter my behavior in one area of life so profoundly, what else is possible?
Puberty works by shifting the balance of specific hormones in the body. Claude estimated that it takes only about seven grams of testosterone to go through natural male puberty over the course of six years.
Consider how puberty usually triggers the installation or activation of a sex drive into unsuspecting hosts. This is not due to a person “learning” in the traditional sense. If you thought of boys as reinforcement learners, it’s not that they are happening upon a new strategy that earns them more reward. I mean, there’s some of that, but that’s typically after the effects of puberty have started to take hold.
Instead, it’s more like the ground shifted beneath their feet. Their minds were changed because of changes in their brains.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the human mind as being made of two distinct systems. “System 1 is fast, intuitive1, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.” The book isn’t claiming that there are two separable chunks of brain anatomy. Rather it’s trying to paint a picture.
This nomenclature has always bugged me. It’s like calling your variables “variable_1” and “variable_2”. There’s no obvious structure for the reader to latch onto to remember which is which. Well, today I’d like to make that problem worse, but also maybe better.
Let’s extend this ontology. I want to coin “System 0” to refer to the idea of the underlying, innate, architecture that System 1 is built on top of. System 2 is itself further built out of the fast, single step mental motions of System 1.
System 0 includes all the inductive biases that are built into our low-level neural nets as they train. System 0 is why babies are quick to learn to recognize faces and facial expressions.
What else is System 0 doing? Does it maintain an active role in adulthood? Is there a God-shaped hole in all of us?
How often are other things like puberty? Are there instincts built in for grieving a death? Are those instincts triggered by hardwired concept detectors that are built in? Are they triggered by chemicals that are released by a corpse?
How does this all interact with responsibility? Might there be things lurking within us that are biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to seize resources? If human males shift along the r/K selection spectrum depending on environmental factors, then there might be a drug that would literally cause fathers to invest in their offspring more.
Further, what would be System 3? Perhaps writing would qualify. Putting words to paper, reading them later, having even more time to consider and reflect. Perhaps System 4 should be some aspect of the social world, many minds linked together. Social epistemology or Science.
I suggest these terms to broaden the discourse when System 1 and System 2 would otherwise be on stage alone. Let’s consider the entire tower of human cognition from the foundations to the collective agency of civilization.
Footnotes
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The very astute reader will notice that Wikipedia misquotes the book on this single key word. At time of writing, Wikipedia says "instinctive", while the book says "intuitive". The difference actually shifts the emphasis between System 0 and System 1 in my ontology. ↩