The Basics Of The Theory Of The Mechanical Mind
Why do we think and feel the way we do? In this article I will be giving a brief explanation of it. I have an hour long video on my theory but this will be a shorter version to give a quick understanding. I am going to start by giving the main ideas of the theory, then I will address a few of the more common objections to the theory, and then I will state some of the benefits of the theory. The main benefit of course is that this theory is the first true explanation of the human mind, and it’s good to understand the mind, but those other benefits will be more specific ones.
A possibly helpful note for those who want to learn this, but struggle: it can be easier to first imagine that I am describing an artificial intelligence instead of a human mind. Most people will have a lot of cultural baggage about their human self image, free will, and all the rest, and while everything that I am about to proclaim should seem logical it can feel hard to integrate into your existing belief system, there will be pushback from the old beliefs. When I was getting into this I encountered this problem to some degree, so I would pretend like I was figuring out how an artificial intelligence functioned and then at the end I would just swap in that this is actually about the human mind. And now, onwards.
The basic tenets of the theory:
Humans are essentially biological robots that always do what makes them the happiest in the present moment.
What causes happiness is a high amount of go-signals and a low amount of stop-signals in the person’s active mental modes.
Mental modes are like executable programs in a computer and they include everything you ever do or believe, you have action modes and belief modes. If you do something then you have activated an action mode related to that activity. For example, if you want to speak then you must activate the mode of speaking, much like if you wanted to do something on a computer you would first have to activate that program. If you believe something then you will have that belief mode active. If you believe the sky is blue then the mode of that belief will be active. Your mind contains thousands and thousands of different modes and multiple will be active at any given time.
Go-signals are positive emotional associations and stop-signals are negative emotional associations. Your modes will contain these signals to different degrees depending on what has happened to you throughout your life. The amounts are constantly changing as you get new positive or negative emotional experiences, and as your modes transfer signals between them. The signals will mainly attach to the active modes, which helps the system be self-correcting.
Your mind always tries to maximize the amount of active go-signals and minimize the amount of active stop-signals. This is the same principle as number one, but now expressed more so in the language of the theory. This means that your mind, also known as “you”, will always try to activate the combination of modes that contain the highest number of go-signals, subtracted by the amount of stop-signals in those modes.
These tenets describe everything that a mind needs to function, assuming that the overall unconscious framework, like the creation, allocation, and transfer of signals, is working. There is no central operator needed, all your mind needs is a way to detect what signals different modes contain and then activate the ones with the best signals. That then causes all of your actions. This also leads to a kind of evolutionary process inside your mind, where if a mode tends to gather positive emotional experiences while active then it will get activated more and more until it reaches a point of diminishing returns, and then its activation frequency won’t be increased, it will have reached an equilibrium with the available go-signals of your environment. And the opposite happens if it gathers negative experiences, it will get activated less and less. The signals can also be transferred between modes, which happens constantly as your mind tries to become more uniform. This process is needed so that a person will be willing to engage in activities that don’t offer go-signals in themselves, but will lead to activities that do, such as preparation for a hobby.
Another important claim of the theory is the main source of go-signals: emotional impact on other humans. Our minds are therefore mainly programmed by other people. Humans are known to be social animals, but the true purpose of that socialising has not been widely realized. The purpose of it is the construction and then the maintenance of the mind. Since the theory posits that our minds will always choose the beliefs and actions that contain the most go-signals, and that those go-signals mainly come from other humans, it follows that socialising happens for the purpose of that maintenance. A lot of behavior that gets called “ego behavior”, like caring about what others think or caring about social status, which is often seen as unnecessary or even destructive, can actually be important for maintaining the mental modes. This is not to say that a person couldn’t be selective on whose feedback they focus on, or that the person couldn’t have a bad social strategy, it just shows that there can be understandable reasons for such behavior. It’s like if a person had a bad plan for getting food, you wouldn’t then tell them stop seeking food, you would instead suggest a better plan. Our minds are relationship machines, both in their primary needs and their primary purpose, as figuring out cooperation has historically been the greatest asset of humans.
I will now address some of the more common objections to this theory, and after that I will list some of the benefits of the theory.
“I don’t always do what makes me happy, sometimes I have to do what is responsible.”
This has been a fairly common misconception of the first tenet. The wording is specifically “happiest” instead of “happy”, because sometimes even the happiest option isn’t a happy one. Sometimes responsible actions are the happiest ones, and this is because doing them can avoid the activation of stop-signals. Let’s say a person has to do some work, even though they would like to do something fun instead. If the person decided to avoid the work then it would activate the mode of “avoiding work”. Let’s say the person has done this before, and they got in trouble for it, and as they were dealing with that trouble they had acquired a bunch of stop-signals which then were allocated in the mode of “avoiding work”. Now, even if the mode of “work” might contain some stop-signals, the mode of “avoiding work” would contain even more, which would feel like anxiety to the person, and the person would avoid these stop-signals by choosing to work instead. It would be the happiest choice available. A similar situation would be if you had to dodge a car coming at you, since the belief mode of “about to get hit by a car” would most likely contain stop-signals and its activation would be avoided, which is why you would take action.
“Everything here makes logical sense, but it just feels like there should be something more to humans.”
This is the most common objection I have heard. Such a feeling is most likely caused by the person having some sort of conception of humans or specifically of themselves that runs counter to this theory. This conception could of course have no proof behind it, but it could have go-signals behind, perhaps even a lot of them. Maybe everyone around the person espouses that belief, so there’s a lot of social connection with it. Current human cultures feature a lot of beliefs about human exceptionalism, be it religious or secular, beliefs about souls, free will, magical consciousnesses, and even a person who wouldn’t consciously endorse these is still likely to have been affected by them. Obviously it can feel good to believe one is special in a cosmic sense, so these beliefs exist. However, the good feeling of that will pale in comparison to the maximized go-signals and the functionality of an interconnected belief system which my theory can provide.
“Humans aren’t robots, we can do things that computers can’t.”
This is partially the same objection as the previous one, often made by people who want to believe there is something more to humans. This objection is mainly about how people feel, so logical arguments don’t necessarily work for it, but just to address the logic of it: the limitations of current technology do not mean that a mechanical system couldn’t do all the things that humans do, and that conversely human minds couldn’t be mechanical in their operations. Otherwise it would be like someone in the past looking at an abacus and claiming that a mechanical being could never beat a human in chess. Limits of the present do not cap the potential of the technology.
“Humans have free will, the sensation of it is undeniable.”
We do have this sensation of will, and that has posed a philosophical problem since we can see everything else in the universe is apparently just reacting to prior causes, with no ability to change course, so why wouldn’t our fates be similarly predetermined by prior causes? How to reconcile our sensation of “will” with that? The answer has commonly been that you don’t get to choose what you want, your desires are predetermined so you have no choice. But this often makes people feel like their “will” isn’t real, which feels incomprehensible. My solution for this is to propose that this sensation of will is something that I call “universal will”. The universal will is the expression of the totality of the laws of physics. The same force that moves everything else in the universe also moves you, everything entropies, and the way that the universe entropies in your form is the way you act. You are not some separate entity pushed around by the universe, you are part of the universe. This is just logical. In your brain the electrical charges take the paths of least resistance and then you do whatever you do. You can imagine this by looking at some water flowing in the direction of gravity, and imagining that the water would have a sensation of will and the water is thinking that it wants to flow down. It has the urge to do so. From our perspective this could seem silly because we could see that the water was simply reacting to outside forces and then acted according to the laws of physics. These are the same thing. You could then imagine a hyper-intelligent alien asking a human why they did what they did, and the human would just say they wanted to do it, while the alien could clearly see that the human was only doing what the laws of physics inside their brain compelled them to do. Same thing. Everything in the universe “wants” to follow the laws of the universe. So that is a way to get around this supposed problem of free will.
“Unhappiness is caused by chemical imbalances, not social interactions.”
This is a very popular idea in the general culture, perhaps because it removes responsibility from the individual. It is like the bad spirits of past times. People often believe this to be the scientific perspective when in fact it is not verified by science. Specifically the causal factor has not been verified. Depressed individuals have been detected to have different levels of some neurochemicals, but what is causing what is unclear. My claim is that it is the social interactions that cause the different levels of the neurochemicals. A person might be very attached to this idea of chemical imbalances as the primary cause of emotional problems, but it should be recognized that there is no reason to believe that it must be true. Something going wrong in the brain can explain a small portion of emotionally troubled people but in a majority of cases the problems can be traced to social interactions or the lack of them. Genetics will also play a part to some degree, like a person can detect negativity more easily.
A variation of this objection would go something like saying it is already known that neurochemicals (what I generalize as go- and stop-signals) make us feel things, and therefore this theory is nothing new. That sort of a response overlooks the importance of the mode idea. Plenty of people talk about how they just need to trigger some dopamine or serotonin, but they overlook that it isn’t about the raw numbers of pleasant experiences, but instead about the pleasant experiences associated with the active modes. In terms of happiness it will be much more valuable to get 10 good experiences for a single mode that you can then activate consistently, than to get 20 good experiences for different modes that you will have a harder time of reactivating. This is what the theory immediately implies.
That is indeed one of the big benefits of this theory: explaining what happiness is. Plenty of people in the world are puzzled by their lack of happiness, since they think that they have what they should need for happiness, and yet it isn’t there. Not that the happy people would understand happiness either: most have just fallen into it by luck. In short, happiness is about a large amount of go-signals in your active modes, and most likely those go-signals have gotten there by impacting other humans, most often through social relationships. The impact that matters the most is the one you can see; this isn’t about donating money to charity, but instead about social interaction. And then it’s important to have these go-signals being consistently allocated in the same modes. If a person was duplicitous and gained go-signals when expressing two directly opposing view points then these would cancel out. So the more consistent a person can be while accruing go-signals the happier they will be. The key to a happy life therefore isn’t necessarily just blindly seeking good experiences, but instead seeking good experiences that will nurture the right mental modes.
I mentioned before that I would list some of the most prominent benefits of this theory, and now that I’ve already gotten started, I’ll list some more. The overall benefit is still the fact that this is the true explanation of the human mind, so you can then understand yourself and others, but I’ll mention some more specific things.
This gives a practical answer for what is “meaningful”. Plenty of philosophies try give an answer for what is meaningful, but this theory undercuts all of them by instead giving a deeper answer by answering what makes anything feel meaningful. Something feeling “meaningful” is of course just a large amount of go-signals in an active mode. I find this important because plenty of people in the world make claims about what is meaningful, while neglecting the factors that have caused them to feel that meaning, or what has caused them to feel a lack of meaning. Some people think they feel a lack of meaning because they have realized some truth about the world, or they believe that they need to think their way to something meaningful. My theory immediately shows the folly of this. If you feel a sense of meaninglessness then you are simply sensing the lack of go-signals in your modes.
Before my theory I had an interest in “being present in the moment” as I believed that that could be the way to be happy. The idea has some merit, but it has its problems too; you can ignore worries and be happier, much like you can ignore the beeping of a smoke alarm, problems then just come later. There can also be unwarranted worries, although then there are better ways to deal with those, but that’s a longer topic. I do still believe that the purpose of life is to feel good in the present moment and that there can’t be anything else to focus on, but the problem I saw before was that how could I justify working for the future if it causes my present moment to be worse. But if I don’t work for the future then my future becomes worse, which will one day be my present moment, but not currently. Focusing on the present seemed sensible but also not sensible. This problem was ultimately solved by my theory, another benefit of it. Now I manage to do both at the same time, I focus on the present and I also work for the future. I used to wonder: why don’t I just eat unhealthy food all the time? Then I realized that when I make the decision of what to eat I don’t yet get to eat anything, all I feel in that moment is either the activation of a mode to “eat healthy food” or “eat unhealthy food” and it makes sense for me to choose the mode which immediately makes me feel better, which in my case was to eat healthy. This was in fact what made me realize this idea of modes. So now I want to feel the best that I can in the present, and sometimes that means activating some future-oriented mode. This causes me to do the necessary actions for the future, but I don’t do those things for the future, I do them to have the best possible experience in the present because I have realized that the most important thing for happiness isn’t experiences but instead the activation and cultivation of the right modes. The experiences are just fuel for the modes.
The last benefit I want to mention is societal. The way I see society currently is that there is a lot of wasted potential. A lot of human happiness is being left on the table. My theory is meant to represent the optimal human operating system. That’s what a belief system is, an operating system. If humans could understand each other better, if humans had the same agreed upon ideas about human nature, then everyone could impact each other more, it would be safer to be open to that impact, and this would result in a lot more go-signals for everyone, instead of the currently existing chaos. You could kind of say the same about any belief system, that if everyone believed the same things then there would be more harmony in the world, but this particular belief system also aligns with actual human nature. The idea here isn’t just a general “let’s all be kind to each other” but instead to recognize what actually generates happiness and then focus on that. If I talk with people about their lives then what they tell me just automatically affirms my views, since my theory predicts accurately how people will feel and behave. Every person could feel that way. Currently humans fundamentally do not understand themselves nor others because the most basic assumptions are wrong. Just fixing that would go a long way.