The Intractability of Perfection

The perfect action

Always just beyond our reach

Keep moving towards it

Define knowledge to be the information an individual has about their objectives at a given point in time gathered through observation. And define wisdom to be the information the individual has about the expected change in the order potential when a given action is taken. Wisdom is gathered from past actions and their resulting impacts to order potential which allow an individual to predict the effect of a given cause. Define understanding as the awareness of the relationship between the human mind and the universe which is necessary to successfully and efficiently actualize.

Perfect optimization of actualization potential would involve making the perfect choice in every moment. Doing so would require perfect and complete knowledge of universal order, the wisdom of all possible attainable future moments, and a complete understanding of the evaluation framework. Optimization fallacies can easily arise due to an imperfect understanding of what the individual is trying to optimize.

A common fallacy occurs when we try to optimize present time actualization. Another fallacy, which is even worse, is to evaluation of actualization on our past decisions. Beyond these mistakes, we can even attempt to evaluate actualization on alternative timelines we do not even occupy.

The perfect optimization of actualization potential would require perfect knowledge of the universe, all possible events, the actualization function of every individual, and the ability to predict the result of any given action. In other words, the optimization of actualization potential is computationally intractable since it would imply that an individual's experience contained perfect information concerning cause and effect and perfect prediction of the outcome of any choice.

We strive for perfect information in order to optimize, however perfect optimization is not achievable. Because of this, you may think that the evaluation framework is not useful, but in fact studying the negation of these requirements is what enables us to understand how we fail to self-actualize. It is through an understanding of the axioms that we can derive one of the foundational insights of Phenomenal Perfectionism:

Self actualization is not the attainment of any particular state but is the continuous movement toward states of higher actualization potential.

The Axioms >>>