In the platonic space of essences, there is room for everything. To think about all that could ever be, I find it useful—if obviously imperfect—to imagine a very high-dimensional vector space of vibes, ideas, and concepts. One element of this space could be “apple,” another “green,” another “rotten.” Much of what follows is intentionally simplified and not meant as strict mathematics.
Imagine a human being as something of a multilayered neural network. (A groundbreaking analogy, I know.) Let’s take a vector from this platonic space—say, one encoding “taking a bite out of a rotten green apple.” To see how a particular human would react to actually experiencing (or even just imagining) this, we can perform a forward pass through their network; that is, feed that input vector through successive layers, allowing the information to flow and change as it progresses. At each layer, the inputs are multiplied by that person’s unique weights and passed through activation functions, until we eventually arrive at an output: a reaction vector encoding their emotional, physical, and behavioural response.
Viewed this way, a human being at a singular point in time is defined by the full collection of these weights—their unique configuration of persuasions, their entire weight matrix. Thus, given different matrices for different people, input A may lead to response B for person C because of weights D, E, and F, but leads to response G for person H because their D, E, and F have different values.
So let’s try to understand why a human ever reacts the way they do, and where these weights come from.
Many of the weights fall into what I’ll call the nurture category. These are the tunable parameters in our brains—pliable clay we’re born with so that we can continue to adapt to our environment. For these nurture weights, repetition, habit forming, and feedback loops can increase or decrease preferences and aversions. With patience and consistency, it’s relatively easy to nudge these weights up or down to change outcomes.
Then there are weights—or clusters of weights—that tend to be relatively fixed, at least from a certain age onwards. I’ll call these nature weights. Some of them are easy to explain through straightforward cause and effect. Hunger reliably makes food evoke a positive response. Fear, being so useful for survival, reliably makes predators evoke a negative one. These weights live in the body, you were born with them, and trying to change them usually doesn’t make much sense because they’re trying to keep you alive. Nature weights also encode one’s physical attributes—like height—which influence how we navigate the world. Plenty of creatures make nearly all their decisions based on these deeply ingrained mappings from inputs to outputs.
But humans seem to have an additional set of unchangeable “nature” pulls layered on top of these biological, instinctual ones—pulls that don’t reduce cleanly to survival or comfort. This extra component encoded in our weights is what people often refer to as the soul: an idiosyncratic, unchosen essence that meaningfully shapes how a person responds to the world.
What I want to propose is that this “soul” smattering constitutes a portion of the unchangeable nature weights within our overall weight structure, existing alongside—and interacting with—unchangeable bodily weights and changeable nurture weights. The totality of these weights, applied over time to a stream of inputs from reality (with each output influencing future inputs), produces the trajectory of a person across a lifetime.
I’ve read books about past lives and the space between lives, often accessed through hypnosis. I’m not especially interested in litigating whether those accounts contain literal truth. What sticks with me is the recurring structure: a soul is paired with a body, the soul forgets itself, and then spends a lifetime trying to remember. Whether metaphorical or not, that understanding has persisted for a reason.
It often feels as though the soul is constantly calling out to itself in the world. It wants to recognize itself and to be surrounded by the things that make those particular connections in the network sing. That’s why affinities can feel disproportionate to their apparent utility. Yes, strawberries and apples both matter to me for calories. I don’t even think I prefer the taste of one over the other. But strawberries feel like me in a way apples do not. Only one triggers the internal “!” of recognition rather than the indifferent “.” My soul—those unchanging emergent weights that don’t seem grounded in rational necessity—has contributed something extra to the concept of “strawberry,” amplifying my response far beyond bodily need. I don’t even need to think about eating a strawberry; I’m simply glad they exist.
It’s worth saying that the boundary between nature and nurture is rarely clean. I’m not suggesting that my affinity for strawberries emerged fully formed, untouched by upbringing or chance. Of course it was shaped by countless small experiences—availability, repetition, context, memory. But what feels undeniable to me now is that, through the process of living and paying attention, something stable has emerged: a persistent self-identification with strawberries as a concept that (1) I don’t think I could do anything about if I tried, and (2) itself seems terribly happy that I know about it.
The “goal” of the soul, if I’m allowed to speak teleologically for a moment, seems to be at least partially self-recognition. Those seemingly frivolous extra units of importance feel desperate to be noticed in a way other kinds of weights are not. There is something about the very existence of these parts of your weight structure that sparkles. Hot pink produces a “!” for me in a way canary yellow does not. Surrounding myself with hot pink doesn’t just feel decorative; it feels aligning. And noticing that “!”—recognizing that here, my soul sees itself—feels almost like the whole point.
This is partly why exploratory mirroring matters. Sitting in the presence of different people, ideas, aesthetics, and sensations, and watching for the “!” allows you to discover parts of your weights that are undeniably you, even if they don’t make much sense.
This might seem wholly self-interested, but it also has clear social and evolutionary advantages. Because the bulk of people’s nature weights are distributed differently across individuals (and are honed by circumstance), different people are suited to different environments. They thrive in different jobs, different relationships, different ways of living. This diversity is not a flaw; it’s the reason a complex social system can function at all.
An accurate self-concept helps you find environments where effort feels sustainable and life feels coherent. Without that sparkly pull toward self-knowledge—toward understanding your oddly scattered preferences—self-actualization would seldomly happen. And without these strange, self-interested soul perturbations across the population, we wouldn’t have the diversity necessary for our thriving, resilient, chaotic, interesting mess of human creatures.
So if that’s the case, then the job of being alive is something like this: update your weights—at least the nurture weights you can change—through experience, expression, exploration, and feedback loops, in such a way that two things happen.
First, the parts of your weight structure that want to know themselves actually get the chance to. Since we’re all self-obsessed little creatures, this process is luckily pleasurable and self-motivating once it gets going, even when it leads through discomfort. As you get to know your nature, continue updating your changeable weights in ways that honour the weird preferences and aversions that are your birthright. Unmasking these parts of ourselves is what our inner-guidance systems are always trying to move us toward.
Second, once you have a clearer sense of what lights you up—what floats your boat, stirs your coffee, fills your cup—follow that scent out into the world. Once you recognize the “!” of a soul connection, you can begin to sense it behind closed doors and amid uncertainty. By following your “!”, by scraping up against your own peak experiences, and by taking risks on behalf of what your unchangeable weights are trying to communicate, you’ll find that there really are pockets of this world built for people with a soul configuration just like yours.
BRONZE FROG 
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