Local Optima - When a Belief Works Too Well

When Words Begin to Trap Us

Perhaps it is relatively easy to recognize a belief as a prison when it produces suffering.

It is harder to notice when it works.

When it explains our past.

When it anticipates what we expect from others.

When it organizes who we are.

When it gives us allies.

When it reduces uncertainty.

When it produces belonging.

When it even helps us feel pleasure, indignation, hope, safety, or transcendence.

Perhaps we do not become trapped only in bad places.

Sometimes we remain because we have found a region in which words, memories, expectations, relationships, and feelings have learned to work very well together.

Borrowing a metaphor from evolutionary computation, we can call this region a semantic-affective local optimum.

The question in this text is not simply how to abandon a mistaken belief.

It is more difficult:

How do we leave a place that continues to work very well?

A local optimum does not need to be completely wrong

In evolutionary computation, a search system may find a very good solution within a particular region without that solution being the best one available across the entire search space. This is why evolutionary algorithms use strategies involving diversity, exploration, and mutation to reduce the risk of premature convergence. Contemporary research continues to develop ways of balancing the exploration of new regions with the exploitation of solutions that have already been found.

We are not saying that the brain is an evolutionary algorithm.

We are using the image to observe something in ourselves.

A belief may contain many true things.

It may have protected our lives.

It may have worked for decades.

It may explain a large number of events sufficiently well.

Perhaps the problem begins when it works so well that the new already arrives interpreted.

Instead of encountering a situation and then asking what it means, we begin to encounter the meaning before we have finished encountering the situation.

belief -> expectation -> perception -> interpretation -> feeling -> confirmation

At that point, the belief does not necessarily prevent movement.

It begins to organize movement.

We can feel a great deal without leaving the same place

This point matters.

A local optimum does not mean an absence of emotional diversity.

Within the same architecture of beliefs, we can love.

Suffer.

Fear.

Feel pride.

Celebrate.

Experience anger.

Belong.

Feel compassion.

We can even change some opinions and learn new information.

And yet we may still be moving mainly within the same interpretive region.

In the language of the 5D Consciousness model we are developing at BrainLatam, we can imagine spaces of representation occurring within the living three-dimensional organism, gaining Movement and receiving different intensities of Qualia. This is our own conceptual proposal, not an established model in neuroscience.

The point is that a local optimum can remain full of Movement and Qualia.

We are not necessarily standing still.

We may be moving extremely well inside a territory we already know.

It is possible to feel many things without necessarily perceiving something genuinely new.

The group can remain inside our perception

Danilo Silva Guimarães draws attention precisely to the fact that our perceptions are not neutral.

When discussing ambiguities in color perception, socio-environmental belonging, and conformity, he observes that coexistence, environmental exposure, and social context participate in our capacity to distinguish and name experiences. Different people and communities may therefore develop different "sensitive worlds." (Jornal da USP)

An EEG study published in 2024 offers a small experimental window into this question. After participants received social evaluations concerning the attractiveness of faces, their explicit judgments changed. More interestingly, changes also appeared in spontaneous neural representations of those faces when social influence was no longer explicitly present. The effect was particularly evident among participants who perceived social norms as more rigid. The authors themselves warn about the limits of the paradigm and do not allow direct generalization to politics or ideology. (Communications Biology)

Even so, we can preserve a question:

How often does what we call "my perception" already arrive accompanied by the people with whom we learned to perceive?

The group may leave the room.

But some of the paths we built together may remain.

Relief can also reinforce a belief

Now we can add another dimension.

A belief does not need to produce pleasure directly.

It may produce a reduction in tension.

Imagine a difficult situation:

"Why did this happen to me?"

There are still many possibilities.

We do not know.

Then an explanation appears:

"It happened because of this."

Perhaps the tension decreases.

The narrative now has a cause.

A past.

Someone responsible.

A prediction.

We may feel relief.

But relief does not necessarily demonstrate that we have found the best explanation of reality.

Perhaps we have simply found an explanation efficient enough to stop the search.

This becomes especially important when a Body-Territory lives under intense material restrictions.

A meta-analysis published in 2024 combined 256 effect sizes from 29 datasets, totaling more than 111,000 participants, and found a negative association between financial scarcity and cognitive performance. The effect decreased substantially when factors such as education were taken into account, showing that the relationship is meaningful but also complex and context-dependent. (Journal of Economic Psychology)

Perhaps this helps us avoid a common cruelty:

asking for unlimited openness from someone who is trying to work out how to eat tomorrow.

Some local optima are also material

A bubble of belonging may not be maintained only because its ideas seem convincing.

Inside it there may also be:

support networks;

employment;

food;

care;

protection;

credit;

friendship;

identity;

the possibility of survival.

Leaving a particular belief may also mean putting all of this at risk.

The local optimum is no longer only semantic-affective.

It may be:

semantic + affective + social + material.

And this changes our idea of freedom.

Perhaps it is very difficult to tolerate "maybe" when nearly all available attention is being used to secure the minimum conditions necessary for existence.

Semantic freedom may also require material conditions for exploration.

What if the economy is also inside a local optimum?

We can now shift the question from the individual to society.

Words such as:

"market,"

"productivity,"

"growth,"

"merit,"

"wealth,"

"income"

have become so familiar that we may forget they are also categories.

They are enormously useful for organizing economic life.

But do they describe the entire possible space of value?

In its 2025 Integrity Review of Brazil, the OECD explicitly analyzes risks of public-policy capture and undue influence by interest groups, recommending greater transparency around lobbying, political financing, and participation in public decision-making. This does not prove that the state is simply "captured" by economic interests, but it does show that inequalities in the capacity to influence decisions are recognized institutional problems. (OECD)

Perhaps the question is:

Do all Body-Territories have the same capacity to define the words through which a society describes what has value?

Citizen DREX: introducing another possibility

This is where we can treat Citizen DREX as an exploration hypothesis rather than a solution already demonstrated.

In the 2026 BrainLatam formulation, the proposal asks whether a digital monetary infrastructure could periodically distribute public credit directly to citizens, linking money to belonging and minimum conditions of existence rather than allowing citizens to appear only afterward as workers, consumers, beneficiaries, or debtors. (BrainLatam)

We must clearly distinguish this proposal from the official Drex project of the Central Bank of Brazil, whose current purpose is to develop infrastructure for financial transactions and digital assets. The Drex Pilot is not a universal-income program and is not equivalent to the Citizen DREX proposed by BrainLatam. (Central Bank of Brazil)

The value of the hypothesis for this text lies in changing the question.

Not only:

"How does someone obtain money?"

But:

"What minimum monetary condition would allow a Body-Territory to participate in society's space of possibilities?"

Perhaps a new economic architecture can also function like a mutation in our semantic search space.

Biome Income: what if preserving is also producing?

We can make another shift with Biome Income.

In the BrainLatam formulation, forests, water, soil, and biodiversity no longer appear merely as "the environment," as though they were scenery external to production.

The hypothesis asks whether sustaining the ecological conditions that allow life to continue should itself be recognized as the production of collective value, with part of that value returning to the territory, its people, and the regeneration of the biome. (BrainLatam)

Contemporary Amazonian archaeology offers an important provocation for this discussion.

Miguel Aparício, Claide de Paula Moraes, Anne Rapp Py-Daniel, and Eduardo Góes Neves showed in 2024 how archaeology, ecology, ethnology, and Indigenous knowledge are making it increasingly difficult to maintain a simple separation between "nature" and "culture" in Amazonia. Landscapes long imagined as purely natural carry deep histories of human interaction, management, and transformation. (Estudos Avançados)

Perhaps, then, a question such as:

"How much does this forest produce?"

already carries a local optimum within it.

Produces for whom?

Over what timescale?

Does it produce only what enters the market?

Is maintained water production?

Living soil?

Ecological stability?

Conditions that allow communities to continue existing?

New words can change what we are able to account for.

Non-WEIRD also applies to economics

The same movement appears in science.

Marcus Maia, Daniela Cid de Garcia, and Juliana Novo Gomes showed in research with Karajá speakers published in 2023 that genuinely Non-WEIRD science cannot simply take categories produced within WEIRD populations to other peoples and check whether they fit. The authors advocate greater Indigenous participation not only as research participants, but also in the construction of questions and interpretations. (LinguíStica)

Perhaps we can extend that provocation beyond psycholinguistics:

Who participates in constructing the economic categories that we later use to measure everyone's life?

A Decolonial Neuroscience, a decolonial economy, or a decolonial democracy may need to share the same movement:

not merely including new bodies within old structures.

But allowing other Body-Territories to modify the structures themselves.

Leaving without destroying the place where we were

Perhaps we can now answer our original question differently.

How do we leave a place that continues to work very well?

Perhaps we do not need to destroy it.

We can recognize:

"This works."

And add:

"But perhaps it is not the entire space of possibilities."

We can introduce diversity.

Another word.

Another people.

Another experience.

Another way of measuring value.

Another system of belonging.

Another experiment.

Perhaps a local optimum stops being a prison when we can inhabit it without confusing it with the entire territory.

And perhaps a genuinely open society is not one that has found the final best answer.

It is one that has preserved enough material, cultural, and cognitive conditions for its Body-Territories to keep searching.

Because it is not enough to tell people to think outside the bubble when almost all their available energy is being used simply to survive inside it.

And perhaps this is one of the deepest political questions in When Words Begin to Trap Us:

What conditions must we create so that saying "perhaps there is another path" is not a privilege reserved for those who can already afford to survive while they search?

References

DE ALMEIDA, Filipa et al. Financial scarcity and cognitive performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 2024.

CHEN, Danni et al. Social conformity updates the neural representation of facial attractiveness. Communications Biology, 2024.

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. Ambiguidades e ambivalências na percepção do mundo e das pessoas. Jornal da USP, 2025.

MAIA, Marcus; GARCIA, Daniela Cid de; GOMES, Juliana Novo. Non-weird (psycho)linguistic endeavors: theoretical and metacognitive research with the Karajá of Central Brazil. LinguíStica, 2023.

APARÍCIO, Miguel; MORAES, Claide de Paula; PY-DANIEL, Anne Rapp; NEVES, Eduardo Góes. Amazônia em simbiose: marcas de humanidades que enfrentam o Antropoceno. Estudos Avançados, 2024.

OECD. OECD Integrity Review of Brazil 2025: Consolidating Progress on Public Integrity. OECD Publishing, 2025.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex - Digital Brazilian Real and Drex Pilot. Institutional sources used to distinguish the official Central Bank project from the Citizen DREX hypothesis.

CIONEK, Jackson. DREX Cidadão: dinheiro como metabolismo do território. BrainLatam, 2026. BrainLatam hypothesis of a monetary architecture linked to citizen belonging.

CIONEK, Jackson. Que Estado aparece quando começamos pelo Corpo-Território? BrainLatam, 2026. Source for the BrainLatam hypothesis of Biome Income.