The Architecture of Commitment
Humanity's Special Ability to Transform Possibility into Reality
Introduction
"We're almost there," I said to my wife as we passed yet another tourist gasping for air.
We'd taken a month away from work to complete a thru-hike of the Superior Hiking Trail. A commitment we made was to use any remaining time for a trip abroad. It gave us the motivation to finish ahead of schedule. Our destination? One of our most happy places: Paris, France.
Imagine our situation. We'd spent three weeks and hundreds of miles hiking up and down the countless teeth of the Sawtooth Mountains only to arrive at Abbesses, the deepest metro station in the city, to find the only way up was a 118ft spiral staircase. Any other time we may have balked but after twenty two days of hiking you build a tolerance against inclines. You accept what's before you and take it one step at a time.
The depth of the metro is explained by its position beneath Montmartre. the towering hill in the 18th arrondissement that crowns the Parisian skyline. At its summit stands the Sacré-Cœur, a dazzlingly bright white travertine basilica. It's the second most visited attraction in the city and it's easy to understand why. With the sacred heart at your back, Paris unfolds before you—a breathtaking panorama of the city of lights, love, art, and culture.
I'm obsessed with cities.
While I appreciate the energy, the opportunity, and the people, my obsession lies mostly with the architecture. And while buildings impress me, it's the social architecture that gets my gears turning. Cities represent society's most complex creation yet operate with minimal conflict. Only raw natural beauty rivals the feeling of wonder I get when pondering a large city. How do millions of people wake up, go about their day, and return home every night without devolving into abject chaos?
The answer, it turns out, is quite simple. Everything we've created, cities included, stand testament to humanity's most special power: our capacity to create, pursue, and satisfy commitments.
Physical architecture exists because architects commit to designs, engineers commit to refining them, and workers commit to showing up until it's built. Social architecture exists because citizens commit to following laws, shopkeepers commit to opening their doors, and maintenance workers commit to keeping things working. These commitments—both spoken and unspoken, formal and intuitive—interweave into an invisible scaffold upon which our entire civilization rests.
It's astonishing.
What gives us this remarkable capability?
What makes us so special?
On Systems
Before we can answer that question, we need to ask and answer another.
What are we comparing humans to?
How does everything sound!
A little daunting, I'll admit, but we'll get through it together.
Humans are systems. So is everything else. A system is a group of related parts working together as a whole. Reality is a system, the universe is a system, the planet is a system, oceans, mountains, rivers, cities, traffic, cars, computers, animals, cells—all systems.
Even a rock is a system. What appears static is a dynamic set of relationships. We call them rocks.
We know rocks can't make commitments. But can other systems?
On Commitments
Before we can answer that question, we need to ask and answer another.
What's a commitment?
A commitment is an agreement regarding action. Actions require intent and intent is concerned with outcomes—possible realities. This definition highlights that commitments are an active orientation towards a specific outcome and an agreement to pursue it.
I don't have time and you don't have the attention to compare humans to every other system, so let's bucket them into four categories: natural, biological, mechanical, and computational.
Natural systems cover not only rocks but storms, rivers, mountains, deserts, planets, and the universe. These are fascinating and complex systems that are fully capable of creating new outcomes but they don't possess intent. A river doesn't intend to erode a hill and a storm doesn't intend to knock down a tree.
That leads us to biological systems. These arose from natural processes but represent something entirely different. The most relevant categories of life are the kingdoms of plants, fungi, and animals.
Let's begin with plants. At first glance it's easy to think that plants are not capable of intent. One might say a fruit tree's system is coded from day one to grow fruit. Yet fruit represents a future reality. I'm willing to concede that plants can take actions and possess intent. What they don't appear to have is the ability to agree to an outcome.
Next up, fungi. We've come to understand that these seemingly simple organisms are in fact connected through vast underground networks called mycelia. These networks are used to transfer nutrients and transmit chemical signals. Plants have even demonstrated the ability to use these networks to "warn" neighbors of threats. There is also indication that fungi are capable of making decisions based on their environment.
Fungi definitely seem capable of intent. Their mentality is different than ours but it's functional in ways we don't quite understand. But there's no way of knowing if they can commit until we can figure out a way to talk to them. They are a step up from plants but still operate on a prescribed set of rules. It doesn't appear that any individual fungus or the network at large has agency. It's wired for a set of goals but they can't choose to pursue their own.
On to animals. Numerous animals demonstrate intent. A bird intends to build a nest. A monkey intends to scratch its back. A cat intends to catch a mouse. But can they agree? Can they commit?
Let's take two cats, one black and one tabby. Might the black cat communicate to the tabby, "I will catch us a mouse" and, if so, could the tabby understand what the black cat is getting at? That requires not only communication, which cats clearly possess, but a form of communication complicated enough to discuss, understand, and reason about the future.
This is what makes us special—we can tell stories.
How'd we get that?
Our ability to tell stories arises from our capacity to recursively communicate.
Stay with me!
Recursion is a concept most commonly associated with software development. It's when a process depends on a simpler version of itself. Nesting dolls are a common example. Recursion is the primary reason I've had to define so many words. Our language is inherently recursive and every concept builds on others.
Let's go back to the black cat. His communication to the tabby requires multiple concepts put together recursively. Let's cut them some slack and say they can communicate concepts to each other. The tabby notices a mouse, and communicates a single concept to the black cat: MOUSE. The black cat, before springing into action, wants to communicate that the tabby can sit this hunt out.
He's got this.
To make a commitment, even to him self, he needs a concept of self: I, the concept of agreement: WILL, and the concept of the outcome: CATCH. Then he needs to put it together: I WILL CATCH. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he can do that. But when it comes to the tabby, does their "cat language" have the ability to communicate recursively? And is there a shared enough understanding for the tabby to believe that the black cat commits to the task?
It's hard to imagine that this is the case.
Cats, while clever, aren't the most intelligent animals we know. There is research that has demonstrated recursive abilities in various birds. One study even put crows on par with small children in their ability to think recursively. Non-human primates have demonstrated the capability to recursively vocalize. Whales also seem capable of this special trick. Yet there is no solid evidence any of them use their abilities to communicate.
I've been careful not to say that humans are unique. I'm willing to welcome crows, primates, and whales into the fold of systems that are able to create, pursue, and satisfy commitments. It's possible they're even doing it right now. But the difference between humans and animals is clear and the evidence is everywhere.
We've told countless stories, made countless commitments, and created the world as we know it. We built the pyramids, split the atom, went to the moon, and developed the internet. All remarkable testaments to our ability to transform possibility into reality.
That leaves us with mechanical and computational systems. These are products of our own commitments. It was our intent that created them and our intent behind how they are used. Until recently there would be no argument that computers are much the same as machines. But the world is getting weird. With modern generative artificial intelligence (e.g. ChatGPT) the lines are blurring on whether computational systems are capable of commitments.
While it appears that they can, these systems are still programmed. They simulate commitments through the intent of the humans that developed them. They do not possess agency in the same way that biological systems do. They do not have a sense of self, the ability to model reality, or the capability to predict changes to reality in the same way that we do. I don't mean to make a philosophical argument against artificial intelligence. We may one day develop a system that is capable of commitments.
That would only serve to strengthen my claim that we are special.
Conclusion
If commitments were the only thing that made us special, it alone would be profound. But that's just the start. Our strength lies in a constellation of capacity—physical, mental, and social. We can run, climb, and swim. We can ponder, question, and design. We can socialize, collaborate, and trust. We can adapt. We can grow.
The opportunities provided to us by our predecessors gives each of us an unprecedented scope of creation. Whether it's starting a new enterprise or sitting quietly by a campfire—we can tell our self a story, agree to pursue it, and make it a reality.
That's what makes us special.
That's what makes us human.
But, like any powerful tool, commitments come with drawbacks. There are dangers that lie in our special ability. Commitments can burn us out—they can bind us. They can create a reality we never intended. It is something we will explore further in the future, but for now I leave you with this:
You have a special gift, enhanced by the commitments of those that came before you.
What story are you telling your self?
What commitments are driving you?
What reality are you creating?
> The opportunities provided to us by our predecessors gives each of us an unprecedented scope of creation.
This is one of the most astonishing things to reflect upon. How, just by being here and alive today, we are the latest link in a chain that spans back millennia.