Every darn thing is a kekulean loop if you notice it

I keep mistaking the kekulean loop, for a line.

I see a thing called a “problem”, and another thing called a “solution”, and I imagine the first one comes before the second. I see a person called “religious”, and a set of rituals called “practice”, and I imagine the belief came first and the practice merely expressed it. I see “aging” and “disease”, and I imagine aging as the background condition, while diseases are the foreground enemies we are meant to defeat.

In this essay, I will try to chalk out three such examples, to illustrate the point. By the end of this essay, I want the reader to think, if they have any such kekulean loops, they are mistaking for a linear line?

• the problem and solution co-creative loop
• the belief and practise co creative loop
• the aging and disease co-creative loop

the problem and solution co-creative loop

In my first career arc of being an inexperienced product practitioner, I used to think of the problem and the solution as a traditional waterfall.

You think of the problem, define the constraints, check. Head to explore solutions. Check. Finalise the solution. Check. And then pass it on, and move on to the next problem <> solution. It was supposed to always point right —>

It took me that entire decade and a Masters education in design methodology to help me realise that it seldom works that way, in reality. Problem and solution pairs are having a kekulean dance with each other, eating each others tail, biting and pouncing at each other until they end up with a better problem and solution pair.

There is a co evolution which we miss noticing. In retrospect, it felt fairly obvious and I was scrutinising myself as to why I needed a masters education in design theory for me to realise this trivial aspect of life.

the belief and practise co creative loop

After all, life is nothing but problem solving right? How can I get this all wrong for something so fundamental?!

I also then realised that I make the same mistake in other aspects too. I have been mistaking bidirectional pairs for unidirectional pairs the whole time.

I’ll give another example of such a mistake from my most recent reading of the book review of Tanya Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real by Michael Nielsen:

Tanya explores the relationship between belief and practise in this book. I used to think that people who are “religious” by spirit, also do practise a lot of rituals because they’re religious. Atleast that was the notion I was used to hearing. However, Tanya explores a different dynamic where she suggests that practise itself by virtue of practise — practise instils belief.

Tanya M. Luhrmann has written a beautiful book exploring this question, “How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others”. The book explores the idea that much of the purpose of religious practice is to help practitioners believe. This inverts conventional wisdom, with Luhrmann taking seriously the possibility that sometimes people aren’t worshipping because they believe, but rather believing because they worship. More generally: Luhrmann makes a compelling case that there is a much more complex relationship between belief and religious practice than you might naively suppose, and she explores some of that relationship.

Personally, I come from the other side of the spectrum where I want to be religious for some reason, and I lack embedding some rituals in my day to day. This thought that religion and practise are a co-evolutionary loop gives me great hope. I’ve envied my mom, and my sister in the way they have cultivated their faith through practise: which involves chanting Hanuman chalisa, Vishnu sahasranaamam, Lalitha sahasranaamam etc and various other mantras in the evenings as a part of their daily/weekly/occasional puja rituals.

Right now, It’s 6:15 PM at dusk, an auspicious time usually meant for evening prayers, and here I am talking about the process of Bhakti (practise of worship), rather than doing the practise itself. Religious belief isn’t something that’s easily attained or endowed with, and it’s hard to tilt towards a religious worshipper from a somewhat-agnostic mode:

Let me review a few of the moves Luhrmann makes in setting up her project. She points out, convincingly, that religious belief usually isn’t something easily attained, despite the fact that many theories of religion “presume that belief is direct and unproblematic – that in most cultures, people simply take spirit and the supernatural to be there. That doesn’t make sense. Gods and spirits cannot be seen. You cannot shake their hands, look them in the eye, or hear their voice when they speak. It seems odd to assume that people just take for granted that they are present.”

I find it weird when I say this, but knowing this theory has actually made me more religious. It has given me more meaning to what’s interpreted as practise.

From the day I read this book review article on the co-evolutionary loop phenomenon exhibited by religion and practise, I am not able to unsee these patterns applied across everywhere. And there are more..

the aging and disease co-creative loop

I sometimes wonder if it’s a cognitive psychology flaw where we mistake such systemic effects.

Aging is considered from the ancient ages to be a linear line. We grow old, we age, and we die. However, in the recent past, this notion has been contested, with the bet that aging is a disease which can be treated. We now have scientists trying to reverse the age of human cells, and we now have clinical trials trying to prove this more recently. Newlimit is one such company, working in this bleeding edge of longevity with the same thesis that aging is the root cause of most major diseases (resulting in loss of function in our cells).

if you’re under 50, cellular reprogramming drugs are how you’ll live to 150.

even if we cure every disease on Earth, that still wouldn’t get you there on its own.

the oldest person who ever lived, jeanne calment, made it to 122, and in almost 30 years nobody has come close to beating her.

120 is just the natural human limit.

so while curing diseases can keep you healthy right up to that limit, it can’t actually extend the limit.

but what if you treated aging itself as a disease, and cured that?

that’s exactly what brian armstrong’s company just raised $435M to do.

NewLimit is working on something called cellular reprogramming.

in plain terms, every cell carries a set of instructions that decide how young or old it behaves

NewLimit uses RNA to switch on the combinations that make an old cell start acting young again.

they already have a prototype that does this to human liver cells, healing the liver faster after injury and speeding up recovery from alcohol damage.

the first human trial is set for 2027.

now, to be clear, solving aging is unfathomably hard.

this first liver drug is one cell type in one organ, and reversing aging across an entire body is a much bigger problem than repairing the liver.

but the reason it’s even on the table now is AI.

there are more possible combinations of those cellular instructions than any human could test by hand in a billion years

but machine learning is what lets you search that space and find the few that actually make a cell young again.

that’s the bet NewLimit is built on.

so the liver is the proving ground. once you can safely reset the age of human cells there, 120 stops being a fixed ceiling.

cellular reprogramming is the real path to 150, and if you can keep resetting the clock, there’s no obvious reason it has to stop there…

• From anon, Twitter

question and answer is also a co-creative loop

This is also one of the most obvious.

closing thoughts

It’s all in an ultimate evolutionary loop. And we fail to realise the systemic complexity hidden underneath the everyday narratives.

Most of us are primed to think linearly with “X causes Y” logic, but we have to adopt a systems thinking lens, and I’m trying to train myself here with the notion that everything is a system (X causes Y, which feedback’s into X again..), and it’s not easy..

I will keep hunting for more such co-creative systemic loops. And I hope to find more.