stress

Stress as the glue of agency

Tell me what you are stressed about and I will know a lot about your cognitive sophistication. Local glucose concentration? Limb too short? Rival is encroaching on your territory? Your limited lifespan? Global disparities in quality of life on Earth? The scope of states that an agent can possibly be stressed by, in effect, defines their degree of cognitive capacity. Stress is a systemic response to a difference between current state and a desired setpoint; it is an essential component to scaling of Selves because it enables different modules (which sense and act on things at different scales and in distributed locations) to be bound together in one global homeostatic loop (toward a larger purpose). Systemic stress occurs when one sub-agent is not satisfied about its local conditions, and propagates its unhappiness outward as hard-to-ignore signals. In this process, stress pathways serve the same function as hidden layers in a network, enabling the system to be more adaptive by connecting diverse modular inputs and outputs to the same basic stress minimization loop. Such networks scale stress, but stress is also what helps the network scale up its agency – a bidirectional positive feedback loop.
The key is that this stress signal is unpleasant to the other sub-agents, closely mimicking their own stress machinery (genetic conservation: my internal stress molecule is the same as your stress molecule, which contributes to the same “wiping of ownership” that is implemented by gap junctional connections). By propagating unhappiness in this way (in effect, turning up the global system “energy” which facilitates tendency for moving in various spaces), this process recruits distant sub-agents to act, to reduce their own perception of stress. For example, if an organ primordium is in the wrong location and needs to move, the surrounding cells are more willing to get out of the way if by doing so they reduce the amount of stress signal they receive. It may be a process akin to run-and-tumble for bacteria, with stress as the indicator of when to move and when to stop moving, in physiological, transcriptional, or morphogenetic space. Another example is compensatory hypertrophy, in which damage in one organ induces other cells to take up
its workload, growing or taking on new functions if need be. In this way, stress causes other agents to work toward the same goal, serving as an influence that binds subunits across space into a coherent higher Self and resists the “struggle of the parts”. Interestingly, stress spreads not only horizontally in space (across cell fields) but also vertically, in time: stress response is one of the things most easily transferred by transgenerational inheritance. — TAME

Common stress-inducing fears

fear of the messy unknown
fear of the first step
fear of being judged
fear of losing control

Being under stress strongly negatively impacts creative cognitive abilities.