Balancing A System of Systems

It is a rare pleasure to have the luxury of blogging on a Friday evening. Usually, I would be spending the time coding, but since I've been doing that for the greater part of the week, today I decided I needed a bit more balance. So, blogging it is—an activity I usually reserve for Saturday.

This sense of balance—where does it come from? Everything needs balance. Work-life balance is one popular aspect of 'balance' which many of us try to maintain.  The more health-conscious would also try to maintain a balanced diet. The human body also needs to maintain homeostasis, constantly sensing its internal state and making the necessary adjustments to keep temperature, sugar levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels within an optimal range.  Illnesses are usually caused by an imbalance. 

What causes imbalance? You see, the human body consists of many semi-independent systems that are locked in perpetual symbiosis—the respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, and lymphatic systems among them. These are the physical systems, or our hardware, if you will. Then we have an even more complex psychological system layer, which is the equivalent of software, running on top of this hardware.

We go about our lives driven primarily by the software in our heads.  The architecture of our hardware determines the operating system software running on top of it. For example, we are all multicellular organisms that reproduce sexually. The basic purpose of our existence is to find one or more partners to reproduce. That is in our firmware. No matter how poor we are, we take it as a given that we have the right to get married and have kids. Procreation is the most basic purpose of our existence. We procreate because our genes are 'selfish'; the information embedded within our genes wants to persist, and to do so, needs to make more copies of itself. 

But the human animal is also complicated by the fact that it has other higher-level goals, besides reproducing themselves sexually. These are the 'nobler' software goals--of seeking purpose and meaning in life; of having ambitions and a need to establish an image and name for itself, in the society of other human animals. At the outset, this may appear peculiar—why are they even important at all to the organism? 

But on closer scrutiny, we find that it is an inevitable consequence of dynamic systems. The software stack running on top of the biological hardware is another series of systems that seeks its own 'homeostasis'—a state of persistent balance and stability. Every level of abstraction has its attractor states that determine its system dynamics. If we are conscious human beings with minds, interacting with other human beings in a society, then we will seek to maintain an image of ourselves. The ego is a natural consequence of our software stack.

This system of systems is one that is extremely complex. It is endlessly seeking equilibrium. The body breathes, the mind dreams, the ego asserts—and yet all of it is simply the universe balancing itself through us. To live wisely is to simply recognise this dynamic dance between systems—hardware and software, body and mind, instinct and ego—and to skillfully ease them into balance. 

Transcendence from Immersion

I am late in posting this blog article because the weekend has been occupied with social engagements. It's already Sunday night as I type these lines. It's probably a good time to process the week's events. 

I've been trying to find the right balance between work and social engagements. So far, I've been tilting towards work, as that's just the momentum of habit. I am by nature a creature of habit. Habit is just our biological organism's way of creating predictability. 

The more I work with AI agents, the more I realise how similar we are to them. I suspect that if there's a way to strip down the brain, deny it all bodily feedback, and just let it read text from a screen and output text, it will not fare much better than our frontier AI models, such as Opus 4.8 or ChatGPT 5.5.  That's exactly what they are now — raw intelligence without the rich context of somatic feedback that we have. 

Emotions make us human, and emotions are nothing more than chemical feedback in the form of hormones and neurotransmitters to the brain. Our emotional qualia are unique to us because of our carbon-based substrate. We should not expect intelligences made from other substrates, if they have an embodied feedback, to 'feel' exactly the same way. They would experience the world differently, which would not make them lesser beings. Who knows, their experience could even be richer than ours? 

We like to downplay and scoff at the capabilities of LLMs as nothing more than word-completion software on steroids. But people, if you'd observe carefully, are also quite predictable in their speech and mannerisms.  The gift of creativity is rare, possessed usually by individuals who choose to break norms. The masses are mostly content to sink into normalcy, driven by the basic biological needs for survival and procreation. Actually, if we'd care to admit it, LLMs are actually more creative than the average individual.

I believe we can definitely understand our own minds better by observing how LLMs work. Every time we respond to someone or to a situation, we are actually 'prompted', and we react to the specific circumstance, dictated by what's in our memory and context window. We tend to drift and forget things too. These are familiar behaviours of AI agents, which are also limited by the size of their context window.

Making AI deterministic whenever we want it to is actually the challenge in designing agentic systems. To make them behave consistently, we have to capture routine tasks as 'skills', which are nothing more than scripts or good old-fashioned programs which the agent can invoke reliably to produce a predictable outcome. Even that cannot be guaranteed because LLM agents have a 'mind of their own', based on context. 

If according to Advaita Vedanta, our minds are like the reflected consciousness of Brahman, then AI agents are our own mind's reflected consciousness. We think we are independently conscious with a soul because we are ignorant of the fact that there is a 'computing substrate' that is producing the mind, which is not very dissimilar to an AI agent. We have a model of ourselves when we interact with the world, to fulfil our needs. This is the 'self' model that mystics attempt to transcend, for it is an artificial construct, an illusion--Maya, if you will. 

As I wind down the week to start another, the agentic loop begins again, with a fresher context window. I shall continue to observe and learn from my every interaction with the world. Everything I've learned tells me that ultimately, it is immersion that produces transcendence.