Understanding The World Through The Lens Of Responsiveness

In this article I’m going to explain the concept of responsiveness and how it can be used to understand the human experience. I’m going to touch on topics like happiness, social relationships, anger issues, and just how navigating the basic interactions of life happens. How the mind works.

A saying goes that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference. I agree. The spectrum there is the spectrum of responsiveness. There will be two parts to this: what we expect and perceive the world to be responsive to, and what we ourselves are responsive to. As always, the foundation here will be my theory, The Theory of the Mechanical Mind. For a short recap, the theory states that humans are deterministic systems that always do what makes them happiest (not always happy but happiest) in the immediate moment and what makes humans happy is the activation of modes with the highest amount of go-signals and lowest amount of stop-signals. Modes are like the executable programs of a computer, if you want to walk then you have to activate the mode of walking, if you believe in genetic evolution then you have the mode of believing in genetic evolution, and so on. You are a decentralized network of these modes. The go-signals and stop-signals are positive emotional associations and negative emotional associations, respectively. They are accumulated in the modes throughout your life. As a human being you will then go through life constantly wanting to activate the modes that give you the best possible combination of these associations, sometimes that leads to a successful life, sometimes it doesn’t, the principle is followed all the same. A major source of go-signals for humans is impacting other humans emotionally, therefore making our minds socially programmed.

Responsiveness connects to this foundation by being a source of go-signals and the lack of it being a source of stop-signals. In its simplest terms, responsiveness is something like you asking a person a question and that person provides you an answer that gives you exactly the information you wanted to find out. You could consider that high responsiveness. If the person misunderstands your question, but still tries to give you an answer, then you could still perceive the person as a little responsive, but not enough to be a satisfying experience, it would likely give you stop-signals. The lowest amount of responsiveness would of course be to receive no response at all, to be ignored. Other examples: if you tell a joke and someone finds it funny and laughs, it means they were responsive to the joke. If you wanted to annoy someone, and they became annoyed then they were responsive to your annoyance efforts. A computer is responsive when you press a button to open a program and the program opens, a door is responsive when you turn the handle and the door opens, and so on. Simple stuff.

When I was creating my theory I wondered why I would sometimes feel compelled to respond when someone would say something to me. If someone would ask a question I would feel like I have to respond to it. I could prevent myself from answering, but it would feel at least slightly uncomfortable. Like I had to put in some energy to prevent the response from coming out. I’ve always thought of humans as biological robots, so this process did make sense to me. My thinking was that my mind clearly has these preset responses for different events that would get triggered when my mind would perceive certain conditions being met. The responses obviously aren’t as simple as saying exact sentences, like a primitive chatbot might do, but instead it’s deeper principles, which then prune the possible responses. A simple idea of this would be like incoming hostile communication activates different communication patterns than what pleasant communication would, and then the response would be further tailored according to who you’re talking to and on what topic. My thinking on this has been that essentially every part of your mind casts a vote on how you should respond, with the majority winning. If the majority votes to not respond to something, there might still be minority voting to respond, and that conflict would explain the unpleasant feeling I mentioned before.

To illustrate this, let’s say person A asks me the time. I have modes relating to wanting to be helpful, so those modes would activate with their go-signals and essentially vote yes in favor of responding. But let’s say that I don’t like person A, and so I have modes that relate to not wanting to be helpful to this person in particular. This would show up as a mode of “help person A” and it contains stop-signals. Helping person A would activate this mode, therefore activating the stop-signals, and it would be a vote in favor of stopping. If there are more stop-signals in that mode than there are go-signals in the helping mode then I wouldn’t tell person A the time. These sorts of mental events determine all human actions.

That was about what you as a person are responsive to. Then the other side: what you expect the world to be responsive to. Let’s consider a classic anger issue: A person is trying to open a container, and when they fail to do so, they become so angry that they throw the container at the wall. Let’s examine what is going on there. The person expected responsiveness and the container wasn’t responsive to their efforts. This meant that their system was getting stop-signals. This felt unpleasant to the person, and so they wanted to decrease the weight that these stop-signals had by rejecting the container. This is the idea of the “sour grapes” phenomenon, people want to decrease the meaningfulness of their failures in order to avoid the stop-signals. Most people of course don’t get angry so easily that they will throw away containers, that is only something that would happen if a person already had a low amount of go-signals, meaning, they had low responsiveness in their life. If the person feels a bit crazy, meaning, the world doesn’t respond to them in the way that they expect, then the container not responding as expected can add to this. Most likely this will mean that their social setting doesn’t respond to them positively, and then a container goes and does the same.

Your brain has a model of reality running inside it, a reality structure, making predictions of how different things will respond, and when the predictions come true they reinforce that specific model, and when they don’t come true the model is weakened. So you get go-signals or stop-signals. This becomes a kind of evolutionary process inside your mind, the survival of the fittest models, through responsiveness. The predictions will cover everything, from the trajectories of flying objects, to the outcomes of human social situations. It is important to understand that for humans not all feedback is weighted the same. I mentioned before that the major source of the signals is emotional impact, so it isn’t just about finding the models that fit observable reality, but more so about finding the models that will fit the person’s social reality – that social reality being what models allow the person to generate that emotional impact – and this can override any models that would be based in simple observable reality. Social reality will mostly be what others will agree to be reality, but that won’t be all of it, for example, a person might successfully annoy others with some particular belief, so while they don’t get agreement they do still get emotional impact, which then reinforces the belief. This reliance on social reality is one reason why humans can seem so irrational at times; we care more about the responsiveness in other humans than how the rest of reality will respond. Even people who have a high attachment to the observable reality will usually have that attachment because they have lived in a social setting where others will be responsive to arguments that are based in the observable reality, so it always comes back to the human element.

So that is the basics of responsiveness. To go deeper on this concept, consider how pieces of your reality structure will have different confidence values attached to them. The confidence value is essentially going to be the number of go-signals (this will be assuming that any stop-signals have already been subtracted from that amount) in any given belief, it will tell you how strong the belief is. These are the different modes of your being. Having a negative confidence value in an active belief feels bad, whereas the high confidence value feels good, it feels bad when you are engaged in an action that you think will fail, and you feel good when you think you will succeed. That might sound rather simple, but I want to make the connections clear. You always do what makes you the happiest in the immediate moment, which is determined by the associations in your modes. So if having high confidence feels good, and you always want to feel good, why doesn’t your mind just have high confidence in everything? The reason is that you need to be able to correct your behavior, and we can assume that evolution would have pruned away individuals who weren’t able to do that. Imagine you had an infinite amount of confidence in the belief that a specific door will open, but it wasn’t even a door, it’s a painting of a door on a wall. You would then try to open the door, and fail, but because the mode of opening this door had an infinite amount of go-signals it would always get chosen as your plan of action, and you would keep trying to open this door until your body would wither and decay away, never stopping the effort to get to the other side. And logically you could be thinking “what if it just takes one more try?” which is how life sometimes goes. Imagine that you encounter a door that would take you 6 attempts to open it, but your confidence value in opening the door is equal to 5 attempts, after 5 attempts the mode switches off and you give up. This would be like you had 5 go-signals in the mode, every failed attempt added a stop-signal to the mode, until they equalized and you had no more go-signals available. A situation like that might seem rather unfortunate, just being one attempt away from success, but your mind has to have a way to assess the probability of success and change its course, otherwise you could end up wasting away on non-existent doors, real or metaphorical. Having low confidence isn’t bad in itself, if it’s for a plan that won’t work then it’s necessary.

Imagine that in any social interaction you have certain go-signal amounts for things you could say. Maybe you are hoping to convince someone to do something. You will then use the arguments that have previously accrued go-signals, most likely because they made people responsive before, which is reflected in the confidence values of the arguments. That part might seem obvious because it affirms basic expectations of rationality: people do what worked before. However, as I explained before, humans following basic rationality is more so a coincidence than a rule. Where this theory really shows its power is in explaining the situations where the expectation of rationality fails. Why do people say things that don’t seem to advance their goals? The true principle is following the highest go-signal amounts, not anything else. Let’s consider an example of a person who has spent a lot of their life on the defense in social situations. They’re used to people attacking them on points of vulnerability, and have grown to using the so-called best defense: offense. The person takes opportunities for throwing insults back whenever possible. This mode would then have a lot of go-signals. Then let’s say this person wants to have a more cordial interaction with someone, maybe they want to have a friendship or romance, but this person will find themselves making prickly comments before they can stop themselves. Why does this happen? It happens because inside the person’s mind their modes are just being mechanically activated according to their go-signals.

Going back to the example of opening a door, let’s look at some other reasons for why the mind has to function like this. I mentioned the thought experiment of an infinite confidence value, which would cause the person to waste their life, but let’s look at a slightly more realistic thought experiment, although still impossible to happen in real life. Let’s say the person has a confidence value of 5 in opening the door but for some reason they would be able to keep trying after depleting all of that confidence. Modes are able to pull in go-signals from adjacent modes because our minds always try to stay uniform, so we could imagine that happens to an extraordinary degree. Let’s say every failed attempt adds one more stop-signal to the mode. The person tries to open the door 10000 times, failing every time. The person now has accumulated 9995 stop-signals in that mode. I mentioned that the associations of modes will blend together as the mind tries to stay uniform, and that’s what would come next. 9995 stop-signals would be unleashed on the person’s other modes, annihilating every go-signal on their path, rendering the person to a catatonic state. Realistically a person like that would then try to take steps to pause the blending process by acquiring new stimuli since the process of allocating new stop- and go-signals takes precedence over the blending of existing stop- and go-signals. This is why we can see people with trauma engage in behavior that provides them with any kind of stimulus. A trauma is a mode with a high amount of stop-signals, and those stop-signals then start blending into the adjacent modes, then to the adjacent modes of those modes, and so on. This feels bad and it will start to destroy the person’s functionality. A trauma could be a single event, a few events, or multiple small events over a long period of time, like how a stress fracture can develop in bones. Only thing that matters is that stop-signals have been accrued. A person with a recent trauma has this one point of pain in their mind, while the rest of their mind could be happy and functional (assuming that the person had such a mind in the first place) whereas a person who has been “processing” their trauma for a long time will have had the stop-signals diluted into the entire structure of their mind, rendering all of them low-energy and somewhat unhappy, but the single point of pain doesn’t feel as bad as it used to. This blending process can also explain OCD behavior, where a person has seemingly random fears.

So that was the explanation for how it makes sense for the confidence value to be limited and to deplete: it works as a backstop for the accumulation of stop-signals that could at their worst jeopardize the larger structure. It’s important to keep in mind that nothing you do gets done without having a go-signal attached to it, so they have to be safeguarded. Your life doesn’t really revolve around doing things. Whatever you do could more so be called incidental. The real goal is having active go-signals. I’ll illustrate this with one more door example. Let’s say the door could actually open, but it will take 10001 attempts. Ten thousand and one. Let’s also say that you know this to be the case, you know the door will open, but it will take that many tries. Every single attempt will be one added stop-signal. Let’s say you really want to get past that door, it’s all you have ever wanted in life, but it happens to be that all of your available go-signals amount to 10000. And the true goal of your mind isn’t to get anything done, the true goal is to pursue the go-signals. So you would start going through your attempts, and it would start whittling away your mind. You would first just try to open the door, not thinking about it that much, until the go-signals of that mode depleted. Then you start pulling in the go-signals from elsewhere. Your mind would be flooded with thoughts of your principles, of the people who taught you them, the memories associated with those people and why you cared about them in the first place. Attempt by attempt another go-signal would be annihilated. To you this would start appearing as starting to question why you cared about those people. The emotions attached would start to turn sour, as their go-signals got replaced with stop-signals. What if the people that you respected as wise were just fools? What if these principles aren’t really as valuable as you thought? More and more go-signals pulled away from them. But surely there is a point to it all, you have seen it with your own eyes that this makes sense, the logic is undeniable. That would be your foundational reality structure now being engaged, go-signals being pulled from that itself. And as the go-signals depleted you would start to question it too, questioning being the process of the structure weakening. Maybe you saw things incorrectly? Maybe you didn’t understand? Maybe you remember it wrong? Maybe it didn’t even happen? Can any of this really be trusted? You would get to attempt 10000 and it would end up being your final attempt, despite previously knowing that only one more attempt would be needed, but there are no more go-signals left to activate the mode. Your entire perception of reality would have gone into question, you would see no point. Just one more try needed and it would’ve validated the entire endeavour, massive go-signals gone amiss. The example of opening a door might seem a little silly, but this sort of thing happens all the time in life with business ventures or romantic relationships, for example. But sometimes they are also just the proverbial paintings of doors.

This principle can also explain what gets called the “sunk cost fallacy” where a person keeps doing something just because they’ve been doing it for so long. Essentially the person wants to justify the previous effort. This is because the person wants feel like their actions matter, that the world is responsive to them. This won’t be the only reason why this fallacy can occur, but it is one reason. If the person gives up then they will have to retroactively consider all of their prior actions wasted, which would reflect badly on their ability to make sensible decisions. They would acquire stop-signals for their decision making. Then when the person would face new situations they could reasonably wonder if they’re making a similar mistake again, their confidence has gone down. The goal is to retain the confidence. This creates an emotional incentive to keep trying. If you tried to open a door that is just a painting then you could justifiably feel silly, a feeling that you would want to avoid. Giving up on something would be like acknowledging that the door was never there, and instead of you making shrewd decisions and making steady progress, it amounted to nothing. From the emotional perspective it can be understandable why a person would want to gamble further in order to avoid facing the embarrassment.

Furthermore, this explains why people can want to avoid actions in favor of fantasies. Like I’ve stated, the goal of the mind isn’t to have a successful, functional life, the goal is to have the go-signals active. Let’s consider a classic example, a boy who doesn’t dare to ask a girl out on a date. As long as the boy doesn’t ask the girl out then the boy is able to imagine that the girl will say yes, regardless of what the real outcome would be. If we believe that we are going to have a pleasant future then that already gives us some go-signals, much like a person would feel happy when they hear they have won the lottery, even though they haven’t gotten any of the money yet. This is indeed also the reason why some people like to play the lottery. If the boy then asks the girl out and gets a no then he will lose the go-signals of the imaginary pleasant future, and acquires stop-signals from the rejection instead. If the boy is confident that the girl will say yes then he will surely ask her out, but if there is doubt then the boy can end up protecting the signals instead. The boy can either live in a reality where it feels like there’s a 25% chance the girl will say yes or a reality where there is a 0% chance for a yes because the answer was no. Either 25% responsiveness or 0% responsiveness, the mind would rather retain the more responsive idea of reality. The same principle will apply for any scenario that people like to fantasize about but not act on.

I have been using the example of a-particularly-hard-to-open-door, but the more applicable example will be human relationships. How other humans will respond is of great concern for us, those responses being such a strong and abundant source of go-signals and stop-signals. The way we feel about most things is therefore mostly about how other humans have responded, so a person hating or loving something about themselves will mostly be about how others have responded to it. A person will have different confidence values for different communication strategies, even just different phrasings, depending on what has gathered the go-signals. Then the hope is that the confidence values will match the actual responsiveness that could be found in the person’s environment. How responsive will people be to a specific joke? How responsive will people be to a specific intellectual argument? Are you overshooting it or are you undershooting it? If a person has a joke that they find makes people laugh every time then they will keep making that joke, and if they suddenly find themselves in a new environment where people don’t like that joke then they will gradually stop making that joke, unless they get responsiveness in the form of other people’s annoyance, and that happens to be suitable for them. A person could be making an intellectual argument, like appealing to the theory of evolution, because they’ve grown accustomed to other people knowing it and agreeing with it, so it generates responsiveness. Or a person could appeal to the bible for the same reasons. It is important to remember again though, that activating the go-signals is the primary goal, not predicting people’s responsiveness (unless the person has developed a mode of doing that and it has a lot of go-signals), so if a person really enjoys some specific argument then they can very well make it, despite nobody agreeing with them in that moment. But if that process keeps repeating then the stop-signals will become too much.

I think about this the most when it comes to more emotional topics, like how willing is someone to reach out for help? How willing is someone to be open about their feelings? I mention this because I often see people talking about this as if a lack of emotional vulnerability would be just some immaturity or human irrationality, something to just get over. There can be good reasons to not be open, or if not, it can at least be understood. A person who hasn’t had good responses to vulnerability obviously would have stop-signals in the mode of openness, and so they wouldn’t want to activate that mode, simple stuff. But let’s go a little deeper on this. I mentioned before that the feeling of value will mainly come from the responsiveness you get from the outside world. The way a person feels about their feelings is going to be extremely important for how they feel about themselves as a whole. Does a person feel that their feelings are valid or not? A person could obviously have insane feelings, so there can be feelings that aren’t valid. A person could overreact or underreact. So there is great significance for how a person feels about their feelings, and there can be great reason to safeguard the go-signals of those feelings. These signals are more significant since the modes relating to feelings will be active constantly, so the signals will keep affecting the person constantly, which wouldn’t be the case with most modes. If a person tells someone how they feel, and they don’t get good responsiveness, then they will attach stop-signals to those feelings. Depending on how central the confessed feeling is to the person, this can be like attaching stop-signals right in the center of the entire system that is their personality. Conversely, if the person gets good responsiveness, then the go-signals gained from this can be extremely powerful. That is where responsiveness can matter the most.