³The three problems or challenges could be seen from two different viewpoints: either as properties of our natural world (at least if unsatisfactoriness is seen from a more general perspective) or as properties of information-processing in any sufficiently complex world. Here I take the latter view; the three problems are problems of information processing. However, they are in fact created by those properties of the natural world which are given in the magenta left-hand column in the figure. These three problems are a rough analogue of what is called the three characteristics of existence in early Buddhist philosophy: impermanence (anicca), no-self (anattā), and unsatisfactoriness/suffering (dukkha). Impermanence is to some extent a special case of uncertainty, as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 16  (precise link 🡽). Uncontrollability is an important aspect of no-self philosophy (see Chapter 13) and may have been its original meaning in the earliest layers of Buddhist philosophy. The Buddhist concept of dukkha has the broadest definition of them all, simply meaning “suffering” in one interpretation; thus our concepts of insatiability and evolutionary obsessions are only some of its aspects, as will be discussed in Chapter 16. We could have added another blue box depicting “emptiness”, a widely used concept in later Buddhist philosophy; a discussion on emptiness is postponed to Chapter 16, where it will be introduced as an umbrella term for fuzziness, subjectivity, and contextuality, and related properties. Alternatively, we could have added another box giving distributed processing and possible lack of central executive (discussed in Chapter 13) as a necessary computational consequence of the root causes on the left; now distributed processing is not explicitly mentioned in the graph, although several boxes are related to it. One more possibility would have been to introduce nonstationarity (discussed later in footnote 9 in Chapter 16) as a root cause, but it can be simply seen as a special case of the complexity of the world, even if a particularly important one.