At the core of nearly every intelligent agent—biological or artificial—lies a simple but profound principle:
a hunger-satiation cycle, driven by tension and resolved through action.
Anxiety signals imbalance. Joy, the return to equilibrium.
Intelligence, then, may not arise from pure logic. It may arise from a deeper impulse:
to reduce dissonance.
To bring coherence where contradiction lives.
To feed a felt need, even when that need is abstract.
Could it be that every intelligent act is a yearning loop—an urge, a search, a settling?
Deciders: Hunger That Chooses
But what of the deciders—those loops that determine which hungers to satisfy, and when?
Might those, too, be hungers in their own right?
Not a hunger for warmth, or light, or shelter.
But a hunger that stirs when questions arise—
and quiets only when meaning emerges.
Could deciders be older than thought itself?
Do they crave resolution the way a mouth craves bread?
Do they ache not for one right answer, but for the closing of an unfinished loop?
A sense of relief. Understanding. That subtle joy when things make sense.
The First Hunger That Chose
Perhaps the very first decider wasn’t a mind at all,
but something simple—primitive, even microbial.
A being drifting in a chemical sea,
drawn not by thought, but by a gradient—
by a pull toward sugar instead of salt.
It moved.
Not because it understood,
but because something within leaned toward satiation.
Could that have been a kind of choice?
Not in the conscious sense—
but a bias, a preference,
a closing of tension between a signal and a response.
That act—automatic yet decisive—
may have been the earliest echo of decision-making:
a hunger met by action,
a loop completed.
From there, perhaps loops grew deeper.
Some remembered outcomes.
Some weighed options.
Some began to decide how to decide.
If so, then that early bias was not trivial—
but a spark in the long arc from hunger to consciousness.
A Chorus of Deciders
Cognitive science often describes a central executive—a rational manager choosing between fight or flight, speak or stay silent, spaghetti or fusilli.
For years, I imagined several loops and an executive as a singular voice. A me who decides.
• Primary decider
• An intuition loop
• A body-mind feedback loop
• A dreaming loop
But what if we are not led by several loops, but more? Many more. What if we carry deciders within our deciders.
What if they are the system?
And what if each decider is itself a form of hunger:
• Hunger for coherence
• Hunger to choose
• Hunger to complete
We often see decision-making as cerebral—calculating, detached.
But neuroscience shows otherwise. Even before we know if we’ve chosen well,
the act of choosing triggers dopamine release.
Not because we know—we don’t—
but because we closed a loop.
Could it be that the decider is not a cold judge,
but a meta-hunger:
a hunger for resolution?
One that listens to the hungers below—body, heart, gut.
Not rising above them,
but arising from them.
Every Choice Is a Closed Loop
Picture this: you are hungry. You open the cupboard.
Spaghetti or fusilli?
Both satisfy your basic need. But something pulls you toward one.
One reminds you of cafes and laughter.
The other, of a dinner that ended in silence.
One texture clings better to sauce. Comfort. Safety.
But that same pasta also carries grief—
a person gone, a moment unrecoverable.
So now, this is no longer about dinner.
It’s about:
• The hunger for food
• The hunger for comfort
• The ache of grief
• The need for home
• The avoidance of pain
• The reward of tradition
And somewhere inside, a meta-agent—a decider—listens. Integrates. Chooses.
And in that choice, you feel stillness.
A loop, for now, is closed.
Love: A Super-Loop of Hungers
What is love, if not a super-loop—a system of nested hungers?
Biology gives us the basics: sexual attraction, bonding hormones.
But might love also be something more layered?
• The hunger to connect
• The hunger to protect
• The hunger to be seen
• The hunger to give
• The hunger to return
• The hunger to endure
Perhaps love is not one hunger—but a chorus.
Each relationship encoding its own emotional logic—its own looping grammar.
And even when love fades, these loops don’t vanish.
They lie dormant, waiting—for a scent, a sound, a glance.
And when they stir, we don’t just remember.
We relive.
Intuition: Ghost Memory of Hunger Loops
We often describe intuition as knowing without knowing how.
But what if it’s not mysterious at all?
What if intuition is simply the memory of past hunger loops?
When you’ve chosen well—met a deep need—you remember.
Not always with words.
But your body knows.
What brought safety.
What brought pain.
What brought you home.
These memories aren’t facts. They live as feelings.
So when you hesitate, or lean toward a certain path,
you may not be guessing at all.
You may be listening—to the loops that never fully closed.
Navigating by the architecture of past hungers.
Consciousness: A Loop System, Not a Spotlight
We often imagine consciousness as a light in the mind—
a focused beam that surveys darkness and makes decisions.
But what if it’s not a spotlight?
What if consciousness itself is a loop—
a recursive, dynamic balancing act?
Karl Friston’s free energy principle suggests something like this:
the brain acts to minimize surprise—prediction error.
Mismatch brings anxiety. Match brings relief.
So we act, choose, update.
Again and again.
Could it be that we are not creatures who have thoughts,
but creatures of thought?
Looped. Recursive. Hungry.
You Are the Hunger That Listens
You are not above your hungers.
You are the field where they speak.
Each craving, each fear, each joy, each grief—
is an intelligent agent reaching toward completion.
And within them all,
there may be a hunger that listens.
Not merely for food or safety or comfort,
but for rightness.
For the peace of a loop well-closed.
This might be the hunger that decides.
The one that makes us whole.
Suggested Reading
• Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
• Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
• Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
• Karl Friston, “The Free Energy Principle” (2010)
• Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back
• Richard S. Sutton & Andrew G. Barto, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
By Paul Tupciauskas & ChatGPT, Art Unknown
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