Consider the Hydra

The hydra (ὕδρα) is a polycephalic reptile native to Lake Lerna in Greece. The number of heads common to this species has been variously reported as five, seven, nine, or a hundred (the last known sighting of a hydra occurred more than three milennia ago, by a certain Heracles (a notable wildlife enthusiast of the day) so any knowledge we have of this creature has suffered from the Chinese whispers of time). Nonetheless, all accounts agree that the hydra regrows two heads for each one cut off, and has poisonous breath and blood.

Due to the overcompensatory nature of its response to trauma, Nassim Taleb has elected the hydra as the symbolic beast of antifragility. It roams the sands of Extremistan indifferent to danger, impervious to harm. The one known Black Swan for the hydra is cauterisation, so it seems the hydra has no natural predators. Yet it is not even sure that the hydra will survive the Blank Swan of my writing.

The hydra's main claim to fame is its slaying at the hands of Heracles. The hydra would have its revenge by way of Heracles' arrows poisoned by its blood and hence killing the centaur Nessus, whose now-poisoned blood was on his tunic, which was given to Heracles by his wife Deianira. By this chain of events is the hydra metamorphosed into an ouroboros.

Heracles' Second Labour proved to be a hydrafication of the hydra, which now sprung several heads into the halls of legend each time its heads were sung off by a bard. Ramifying and probing, these heads have burrowed their way to the present, where their dissonant hiss provides the ominous counterpoint to our modernist symphony. For these are the whispers of the post-apocalypse we hear; immortal hydra will outlive us all. The future is populated by naught but hydras.

If longue durée is truly the theatre of the hydra, and what stands at the end of history is not democratic capitalist Man but omnivorous Hydra, then we ought to be witnessing their proliferation presently. Two hydras which have battling before us for a while now are Science and Religion. Scientific theories are notoriously fragile, subject to falsification and paradigm shifts. Falsified theories are replaced by more and more robust ones. Yet science as a whole is antifragile, with new and mostly better theories growing out of disproved ones.

Religion qua theology is similarly a hydra. Chop off one theological argument and two more of the same ilk arise, for they can be more easily modified without loss of explanatory essence than scientific theories. And religion qua faith is yet another hydra, for each challenge to faith is at the same time a chance to reaffirm that faith. So although both science and religion are hydras, they are cybernetically different. Science adapts to the environment such that less adaptation will be needed in the future. Religion adapts to the environment so that homeostasis is maintained. Science is a cold-blooded hydra, and religion is a warm-blooded hydra.

The modification of a variable necessitates the modification of other variables to values which are compossible with it. Variables in scientific theories have high levels of interdependency and hence limited room for variation - vary too much and the whole theory needs to be discarded. Variables which are not exercised are soon impinged upon by the needs of other variables. Thus, science adapts as much as the environment dictates. It is the reproduction of the world itself.

Variables in religion know no bounds. Even when unexercised variability ossifies into dogma, it is still open to the variation that gives rise to internecine schisms and heresies. Religion is always-already more adaptable than the environment requires. It is our access into another world altogether.

So religion is the superior hydra. What form will this hydra ultimately take? A syncretisation of the three Abrahamic religions? A cult of Gaia? Mammon of the $? Dworkin's Religion Without God? A post-Singularity superhuman AI? The Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin? Or even the Divine Inexistence of Meillassoux? For now, one can only worship the hydra, creative destruction personified, the eternal principle of growth of the cosmos itself!

There are two hydras which define our daily lives, yet which exist at completely different scales (no pun intended). These are the hydras of Love and the Economy. The hydra of love is an implacable beast that grows from each of our hearts, it will fight all the heroes on a thousand ships to get to its intended. Each head it loses but strengthens its resolve, each head it regrows homes again on its target. It is the most ferocious of all hydras, though also the most short-lived.

The economy is the largest hydra of all. Spanning from one end of the globe to the other, it follows superlinear scaling laws, and hence has accelerating metabolic rates (although the larger the animal, the lower the metabolic rate, the larger the city, the faster the pace of life). Its size predisposes it to longevity, but its accelerating growth means it hurtles towards its death, saved only by new leases of life from continuous cycles of innovation that shift across S-curves. Each failed economic venture opens up the way for several more, leading to greater dimensionality and hence opportunities for innovation. Each derivative written and traded may itself become the underlying for higher order derivatives. In this mythos, it is not the idle dragons (like Fáfnir or Smaug) that hoard gold, but the industrious hydra that earns it.

Do you feel in peril, now that I have unveiled the dread serpents who are our bedfellows? Do you stifle your trembles to avoid attracting the hydras' hungry, panoptic eyes? For it seems one cannot live without feeding at least one of those hydras that bestow meaning upon us. Perhaps Victor Hugo glimpsed this truth when he wrote,

Hommes, plus bas que vous, dans le nadir livide,
Dans cette plénitude horrible qu'on croit vide,
Le mal, qui par la chair, hélas! vous asservit,
Dégorge une vapeur monstrueuse qui vit!
Là, sombre et s'engloutit, dans des flots de désastres,
L'hydre Univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres;

Men, lower than you, in the livid nadir,
In the horrible plenitude you believe to be empty,
Evil, which is the flesh, alas! enslaves you,
Disgorging a monstrous vapour that lives!
There, dark and engulfed in floods of disasters,
The hydra Universe writhes its star-scaled body;

But despair is premature. The legend of Heracles shows that hydras are not invincible. Even if we are unable to defeat them, we can fight hydra with hydra, or else learn to tame and ride them. Let us turn now to hydraology, and establish a rudimentary science of the hydra.

A few questions head (again, no pun intended) our investigation. How many heads do hydras really have (in the normative sense of Philippa Foot saying that humans have thirty-two teeth, even if most of us don't)? Will we ever find a five-headed hydra in the wild? Should they not all have grown extra heads by now? And what is the natural diet of the hydra? It is not certain that hydraology is a subset of biology as we know it, given its alternative physics and chemistry.

The first axiom of hydraology is that there is only one metric, which is the number of heads the hydra has. This means that we hydraologists take as our concern only those events which alter the number of heads a hydra has. The first proposition follows of necessity, that the number of heads each hydra has can only increase or stay the same. Thus, in a closed system where the number of hydras is constant, i.e. no deaths or births, the number of hydra heads can only increase or stay the same. This draws an interesting parallel with entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

There are four classes of objects in hydraology. Class I comprises all objects which regrow more than one head for each head lost, and as such includes all hydras. Class II objects regrow one head for each head lost, like phoenixes. Class III objects regrow zero heads for each head lost, i.e. they do not experience regrowth. Humans fall under Class III. Finally, Class IV objects are those which regrow negative numbers of heads for each head lost, i.e. the loss of one head leads to the loss of further heads, like a chain of dominos. These objects are doomed to eventual catastrophic death.

Each hydra can be located in hydra phase space by the coordinates (h,y,d,r,a), where h stands for the number of heads, y for the length of each head, d for the duration needed for regrowth, r for the ratio of heads grown to heads lost, and a for the appetite of the hydra given as the time that must pass after a meal before it can eat again. Classical hydras as described by the Greeks have r = 2. Note that from hereon in, all mathematical notations refer to classical hydras unless otherwise stated.

The hydra is the modulus operator which converts Δh from -1 to +1. Thus, all events of classical hydraology are composable by binary 0s and 1s. Any event can thus be represented by a handy single-row matrix, with each column corresponding to the nth head, and with 0 representing no change and 1 representing the demise of that head and subsequent regrowth of 2 heads in its position. The number of columns in the matrices increase in chronological order. The observant reader will have noted that this formalisation becomes ambiguous for any events involving more than two hydras. Nonetheless, this matrix algebra suffices for our purposes, and any further mathematisation will be left to future computational hydraologists and hydraolic engineers.

Should the hydra seek to maximise its number of heads? Perhaps the only reason why the hydra might desire that is to triumph in competition against other hydras. Not that the penalty for failure is death, but the alpha hydra does get his pick of territory and mates. To that end, should not the hydra actively seek out heroes to further its personal growth? Heroes who, in chopping off the hydra's heads, find that they are doing no more than pruning a bonsai, which always foils their efforts by arborescing into a jungle?

Each hero is potentially a Black Swan. All hydras would have learned by now that cauterisation makes them mortal, and in a fight would take out the sidekick with the flame first. What if the hero attempted to cleave off heads only from one side of the hydra, in a bid to unbalance and neutralise it? The hydra would have to realise this quickly, and manoeuvre to prevent a focused attack. It has to constantly keep the hero busy by representing attacks within the hero's OODA (observation-orientation-decision-action) loop, so that before the hero can come to a decision and act, the circumstances will have changed and he is forced to reorient himself. The hydra has to engage the hero in feints and retreats with some of its heads, trading heads for a positional and tempo advantage even, while mustering its other heads to attack from the flanks or behind.

All this requires precise coordination, and involves a considerable risk for the hydra. The risk is even greater nowadays that most heroes form parties. This is further complicated by the fact of flying heroes, such as Perseus with the sandals of Hermes (not the designer ones) and Bellerophon riding Pegasus. These heroes can provide close air support and air superiority in dogfights, and are tricky to engage. It seems that after all, it is safest for the hydra to avoid direct confrontations altogether, and engage in guerilla warfare and shadow ops, buying time for R&D to win the arms race.

The status quo is not a friendly one for the hydra. The one commandment for the hydra is to multiply, and the most efficient way of doing so is for the hydra is to bite its own heads off. This is the reproductive strategy of choice for the hydra, a fecund masturbation. Each hydra is itself a hydramachy, a war by itself against itself. But does it make sense to speak of the hydra as a single agent?

The time has come to make a decision as to the unity of the hydra. Does the hydra possess a single amalgamated consciousness, or does each head possess its own? Given that the hydra has no central brain to which all the other brains report (or else Heracles could have simply taken this out and watch the heads descend into chaos), the consensus among hydraologists is the latter position. This leaves us free now to consider the ecological dynamics of the hydra.

In the flattened ecosystem of a hydra, each head is both prey and predator. What are the rules governing this head-eat-head world? The payoff from each encounter is not food, but the ability to reproduce. One head eating another is like a bee pollinating a flower, but a bee which wants to be pollinated in return. Thus, stable dyads of cooperation will emerge, suicide pacts in essence, where one head will eat another, and the regenerated heads will eat the first in return. Defecting from the bargain means having to find a new partner. Clans will be the outcome of these pairings. Hydra kinship means that it is the father who eats the mother, unlike in some mantises and spiders. The mother experiences the most painful childbirth possible. Of course, this is assuming that the regenerated heads aren't considered resurrections or clones.

The astute budding (nope, no pun) hydraologists among you will have noted that in this string, denoted as {... 1 0 ...} {... 0 0 1 ...}, one of the newly grown heads is potentially unoccupied in the second stage. This offers a lot of room for play in the social dynamics of hydra heads, for this head could potentially go off and bite off another head, or be eaten by another head, thus forming new relationships. Note that these heads need not even be on the same hydra.

If there are minor variations between parent heads and offspring heads due to somatic mutations, then selection and evolutionary pressures quickly take over. One obvious adaptation is coloured pigments for the attraction of mates. Very soon, the hydra will become a vibrant, vibgyoric congregation, each head vying for the attention of others. The careful hydra-keeper (careful to choose the right colours and to keep a safe distance), by artificial selection of the desired shades, can create some very artful bouquets to compete in hydra shows.

Unchecked, the population of hydra heads will be dominated by the fastest growing heads, and the population as a whole will evolve to reproduce and evolve faster, accelerating towards an evolutionary singularity. As the h increases, d and a decrease. Any mutations leading to an increase in r will be rapidly selected for, and after a large number of generations a hydra will regrow hundreds of heads for each head lost. This forms a pool of evolvability waiting to be exploited by any environmental perturbances. The hydra will be to the hydra what the hydra is to the snake. The adder simply adds, since two snakes become three, whereas the hydra multiplies, with two heads becoming four, or even four thousand, then sixteen million, and then higher powers still. It is the duality of difference, a fractal that is differentiated infinitesimally. The hydra becomes pure Becoming; it is what Deleuze called a full body without organs, full of virtual potentials constantly being actualised. The hydra is its own surpassing - it is itself the Über-hydra!

As the number of heads increases, the gravitational field draws them closer and makes it harder for the heads to move and function. Stronger musculature in the necks is evolved at this stage. Some may be able to achieve escape velocity and travel to other hydras. At still greater masses, some of the heads may become protostars, where the thermal energy of their gravitational collapse drives nuclear fusion. It is not unthinkable that some civilisations of hydras may wittingly trigger such processes in order to harness solar energy. But eventually the whole mass of heads reaches the Chandrasekhar limit, and supernova into neutron stars or black holes. The blast of the supernova may even propel some of the heads into other parts of the galaxy, seeding other worlds with life. Possibly the Big Bang itself came out of a hydra. The hydra Universe indeed!

Many interesting things happen long before hydra astrophysics comes into play. How will hydra society evolve? It seems that, starting from a position of equality, communism would be the most likely form of resource management practised. But as differences between the heads get wider, private property may become acceptable. And capitalism is born when private capital is able to buy free labour.

What of hydra politics? Should there be joint rule by all the heads (pun intended)? But democracy may not work, since what is best for the heads might not be best for the hydra. And tough choices need to be made, such as the choice to use the political underclass as raw materials and nuclear fuel. It is unlikely that the public would want to dirty their hands on such a decision, and they would rather leave it to a dictator to damn the Preterite to their fates. At a higher level, decisions concerning the species could be made by a council of the United Hydras.

The hydra is a creature made for manipulation. Small loads can be gripped in the jaws of each head. As for heavier burdens, its opposable heads are like fingers on a hand, and the hydra will not long remain unaware of this fact. The hydra can move mountains. Thus it is that the mining industry is started among hydras. From there, it is just a small step to metallurgy and technology.

Once the hydra enters the technological age, all bets are off. Who can predict the technological innovations of the hydra, when we can scarcely even predict our own, even though we are vastly more acquainted with Homo sapiens? After all, to be able to predict a new technology accurately is to be able to create that technology, and hence there would be no need to predict it. But I will say one thing - humanity must be very wary of hydras on a plane.

But what if the hydras come in peace? Perhaps they wish to trade. After all, the fine workmanship of human tools is probably beyond them. Or perhaps they wish to share the fruits of their culture, their wisdoms and their follies. One can imagine a hydra Oedipus Rex, where the child does not wish to return the favour and bite off the father. Or a hydra Romeo and Juliet, where one head is in love with another from a rival clan. But possibly their highest achievements will be musical, with each hydra a massive choir on its own.

Given the track record of humanity, it is most likely we would only seek to exploit the hydras. That may even be the best thing to do with them. After all, once you cook the hydra properly, taking care to denature the poisons, it is a most nutritious and protein-rich treat. Presumably it tastes like snake, which tastes like chicken. Best of all, hydra heads are an inexhaustible food source, like the horn of Amalthea, and could solve world hunger all on their own. And what we cannot eat, we can always convert into biofuel.

It seems that in chronicling the life and times of the hydra, my imagination ended up method-acting the hydra, each rejected idea facilitating the growth of two more. Little wonder then that this piece too takes the form of a hydra, its premises battling each other, with new ones sprouting from the bloodbath. So it is that the mythical beast has devoured even this myth that was written as its museum. Hopefully, as you battled your way through this jungle of heads, each sentence you cut off spawned many more thoughts bursting from the surface of words into the depths of your mind. For although I have written of the hydra, this is truly about thinking, like everything else I ever write. So let your thinking be hydra, and behold the world through the eyes of infinity.