Sustaining The Mind: The Real Driver Of Human Behavior

In this article I'm going to be explaining why humans can feel lonely, why humans seem to care about social status, why humans allegedly act in some "irrational" ways, and more. All of this can be explained by the true motivator: sustaining the mind. This is part of my larger theory, The Theory of the Mechanical Mind, but here I will mostly be focusing on this motivator concept.

Usually when people talk about human motivation the ultimate explanation is supposed to be this: everything is done for survival and/or reproduction. This of course comes from the theory of evolution, the idea being that humans with genes that caused them to focus on their survival and reproduction then passed on those genes over and over until we arrive at today. Sometimes people will tack on some explanation about the "consciousness" that motivates something beyond these supposedly primal urges, but as far as I can see there is no scientific basis for that. So, just survival and reproduction.

Here I'm going to be making the case how this evolutionary explanation is frequently misapplied and over-generalized. I do consider it to be true that our behavior has a correlation with evolutionary reasons, but where this runs into problems is when people try to give an explanation for every single behavior with direct evolutionary reasoning. What gets misconstrued is that evolution doesn't need to create behaviors that 100% of the time cause an organism to pass on their genes, evolution can instead create a process in the organism for generating behaviors, which then at least most of the time generates behaviors that enable the organism to pass on their genes. This is to say that evolution has created processes for our minds which then create the behaviors.

Most importantly I will be talking about what I mention in the title: the processes that are linked with sustaining the mind. Many behaviors that humans engage in are actually about them trying to preserve and reinforce their minds, the mind after all being our main tool. This is an extremely overlooked idea and the amount of behaviors that will start to make perfect sense when considering this principle is vast. My case here is that the mind requires a large amount of behaviors simply to prevent it from slipping into dysfunction or even insanity. People often seem to think that the mind just functions on its own just fine, that it somehow just takes information and automatically calculates it into an understandable reality. Not the case, but because of that belief people have overlooked the true explanations. Then we also happen to have a lot of social behaviors that we don't seem to understand but we just consider them to feel good to us, and we just do them because they feel good. Those behaviors of course are the sustaining process. Some of these behaviors even get called irrational. This is the same as if a person didn't understand that cars need fuel and then called stopping at a gas station irrational. This is the level of misunderstanding we are dealing with in the current world.

So I'll explain how I see human behavior working level by level. First level is just that everything is the interactions of matter and energy as dictated by the laws of physics, including any possible ones we might not know about yet. This will match 100% of everything that happens, anything that happens on other levels will happen with the constraints this imposes. Everything else is emergent from this and will only be an approximate explanation, nothing else will be a 100% explanation, even if it would be a close approximation. The next level from this is that humans activate behavior modes according to what behavior modes have accrued the best emotional associations. That is part of my theory, if you want to know more about it then here is an introduction article. The third level is that most of human behavior centers around actions that are motivated by the upkeep of our mental engines, our minds.

In order to understand this idea it's important to understand how the mind functions on a basic level, much like if you want to understand how a car functions you need to know why it needs fuel. Our capability for learning is something that separates us from any other animal, where other animals have to mostly just rely on instincts, for humans our instincts are instead related to learning. This is why other animals are much more self-sufficient right out of the womb whereas human babies are completely helpless and keep needing assistance for many years. Our behavior modes need to be created instead of existing inherently. Being able to learn doesn't just mean that our minds can create new modes, it means that our minds can destroy old modes. This is crucial. You have to destroy in order to build. This means our modes have a fragility to them that allows them to change as we keep taking in new information. However, this fragility also means that the modes keep needing upkeep. Everyone knows that if you don't use some information then you are very likely to forget it, what this means is that if you don't keep getting reinforcing feedback then the mind discards the information. Similarly you will discard behavior modes and belief modes if they don't get reinforcing feedback.

Secondly you have to consider how difficult it is to understand reality. It is extremely difficult to see cause-and-effect-relationships if you aren't already aware of them. The cause-and-effect-relationships can take days, months, or years to come true, and in between the cause and the effect you will have a countless number of events you could mistake as the cause or the effect. As humans we form sophisticated models of the world and this couldn't be done by just us looking at the flow of information unfiltered, so instead we learn from other humans who carry with them the knowledge of past generations. Our ability in passing along information is also unparalleled in the animal kingdom, but it means that we have to place a great importance on our relationships since that's where the information that shapes and sustains our sense of reality will come from. This is no different from how you might approach other humans if you could only breathe oxygen that was generated by your fellow sapiens. There have been tests that show other animals are far superior in seeing information in the environment when compared to humans, to me this speaks clearly of how human minds calibrate themselves according to different information, specifically the information communicated by other humans.

So then all the things that this idea can explain. The clearest one is the feeling of loneliness. The current explanation for loneliness relies on direct evolutionary reasoning, the idea being that people who didn't experience the feeling of loneliness would have wandered away from their tribe and then died to some predator, or they didn't form social bonds and then if some tribal war happened they perished because they didn't have allies, so the genes that generate loneliness ended up being passed on. This seems to make some sense, but then you would have to wonder why people want to alleviate loneliness in ways that don't necessarily make them liked more, maybe even the opposite, but can clearly be seen as ways to reinforce the person's sense of reality, like the person talking about themselves and their past. Clearly our actions aren't oriented simply towards forming bonds, the bonds are the secondary goal that serve the primary goal of sustaining the mind. The more logical view is that loneliness is like hunger, it's a signal of the mind running low on reinforcing social feedback, simple as that. This is why people can feel lonely in a crowd because the crowd doesn't necessarily provide the person with emotional connection.

Then there is all the supposedly strange social behavior humans exhibit. There is the belief that humans have an instinct to care about social status. Again this is actually a result of needing to sustain the mind. I mentioned that the mind will discard behavior modes that don't get positive feedback, so therefore humans want to get positive feedback and avoid getting negative feedback for behavior modes that they want to preserve. Our minds will notice patterns in what exactly can lead to positive or negative feedback and we then form attachments to those patterns because they serve the goal of sustaining the behavior modes. A pattern like that can be caring about social status since it's very easy to see the correlation between positive feedback and high social status. This is also why not everyone cares about social status, it's because caring about it is emergent behavior that comes from the more inherent behavior of sustaining the mind, some people will instead form attachments to some other patterns that their mind has identified as better serving that cause.

This also directly explains why people don't want to engage in certain behaviors, like some men wanting to avoid actions that get perceived as feminine. This is extremely understandable behavior when you consider that all of our actions are determined by what behavior modes have been created in our minds. If we engage in behavior that runs against our primary goals then that will make it harder to engage in modes that do serve the primary goals, even if by a little bit. A man that doesn't want to do something "feminine" could have the concern that later on they will have a harder time resisting it if others want to put them in a feminine role in other instances. It is not necessarily some irrational act. Another example is someone who doesn't want to express their feelings, they don't want to be vulnerable. If a person has to defend themselves a lot then being vulnerable could make the defensive situations harder because the wrong mode might try to activate. Or there are people in the current pandemic who don't want to wear masks even when mandated, one reason for that behavior can be that the person has to resist others trying to control them in their personal life, so a lot about their behavior is focused on resisting anyone trying to control them. This is not to say that some of these social problems couldn't sometimes have better solutions, like being able to express one's feelings is ultimately very beneficial and there are ways to do that while retaining defenses, but much like an early hunter-gatherer could have had an inefficient hunting strategy, their need for food still wasn't irrational. In order to exist the behavior modes need to be sustained. The mind needs to be sustained.

This principle explains why humans enjoy telling about their day to someone, the social feedback solidifies the patterns in our memory, why getting agreement feels good, it solidifies the beliefs, why humans want social acceptance in any form, even if it be likes on Facebook, it sustains the mind. This is not some separate "ego" that is driving this behavior, it is the needs of a complex biological machine upholding its models of reality and behavior.

Knowing this isn't just important for increasing your understanding, it's also important for your mindset. Imagine you were driving a car and you believed that the manufacturer could have made a car that would be a perpetual motion machine, it would never need fuel, but because the manufacturer wanted you to stop at gas stations for their own selfish intentions they purposefully made the car so that it needs the fuel. You could understandably hold some resentment towards the manufacturer then. I see some people having this kind of resentment towards life, the universe, evolution, god, ego, whatever metaphysical concept they want to blame for having the needs that they have. This resentment or just a feeling of the arbitrariness of life falls away when you consider that your needs exist so that your complicated reality structure can keep functioning. You give something you get something. You engage in the processes that happen to correlate with survival and reproduction and in exchange you get to have a working mind and all the things it allows you to access: knowing the world.