Directed Inquiry Pumps

Thomas Schindler
1 min readOct 8, 2021

Tightening the loop between System One and System Two leads to coherence and therefor congruent action towards the intention of System Two. Maybe it is the closest approximation of free will humans are capable of.

The core drive that leads to such a tightening of the loop is curiosity. Some curiosity is driven intrinsically, most of it is driven by extrinsic factors — often crises — turning it into forced curiosity: finding a way out of the crisis.

More often than not, humans tend to loose intrinsic curiosity once their comfort bubble has been established. Only forced curiosity will bring them to move into uncomfort and expand or displace their zone of comfort.

It follows that in times of crisis, curiosity has a definite direction: solving the issue at hand, moving back into comfort. While intrinsic curiosity is not only rare, but also inherently undirected (which is good).

A mode of intrinsic curiosity that does not stop in the next zone of comfort, but continues the exploration in a direction of a greater good could be called: “Directed Inquiry Pump”.

--

--