Only Human.

Much as we would like to retain the God-like status of 'created in his image' we should perhaps become more familliar, in these times of ever-tightening conflict, to what we really are, the better to rule ourselves.

Some suggested parameters to being human, not meant to be exhaustive:

* Twin cores to everyone: themselves as individuals, and their children, extant or yet to be. Both influences, without fail, colour our behaviour, consciously, unconsciously, savagely.

* We are creatures who function through addiction; each behaviour we find subjectively to be rewarding, becomes an addiction, an itch scrathed without thought. Change is hard, and recidivism will always be tempting if the opportunity to indulge in old habits remains available.

In this the biggest tool to widespread change is external, stemming from altered social/enviromental conditions, rather than internal, through individual will. A person placed in a location where 'good' behavioural patterns are naturally rewarded, and less altruistic habits penalized, will become 'good'. Goodness with a gun to its head is the only stable method.

* Hume: Reason has no force of its own, to be effective it must pit appetites against eachother. Reason alone, however elegant, will move no-one.

* Our cognitive devices to estimate reward are biased very heavily toward proximity, both physical and temporal, rather than simple objective worth - all our birds are in the hand. Which means we are ant-like in our perspective, in that a reward, as it closes upon our senses, is vizualized, anticipated to the point where, whatever its 'real' worth, it eclipses the sight of others, much larger. The twig pressed against our nose looms larger than the Redwood a mile distant.

The trick of will is to bundle opposing urges against this unreasoned compulsion, until they reach such heights that they always remain visable in the mind's eye as greater, or to arrange things such that the ant of appetite never comes close enough to the shadow of unwanted fulfillment that it should blot out the sun.

* Socially, the human operating-system may perhaps best be described in terms of game-theory. Game theory imagines an undefined number of potentially co-operative events occuring between groups/individuals. The outcomes, cooperative or defective, and the subjective estimates of rewards/penalties recieved after each consecutive itteration remembered by both.

The most successful strategy found so far in simulations is one in which any particular individual is inclined to cooperate as a default, then, even should they be betrayed, forgive their betrayer once before retaliating. A population of this type prospers, and more importantly, is fairly immune to invasion by more selfish strategies.

I would propose that each and every human is running what they call the above: "a tit for two tats" - with one proviso, that they only run this strategy when they identify the individual(s) they are with as "one of us".

This us/them distinction wells from not any particular instinct toward racisim, though racial/linguistic markers are certainly the most obvious dividers of people, but from instinctive estimations of "wether or not we are likely to encounter this person, or this type of person, again." This estimation is critical, because in a one-off encounter, reward-wise, it is always more rewarding to back-stab, and always safer to instinctively believe your opponent will back-stab you.

ie: this instinctive mutual mistrust between two individuals of markedly different races or groups is an adaptive trait - bred into us right to the bone.

* Engineered then, to be co-operative, but in an instinctively biased fashion: the degree of cooperation mediated by -

I: Kin-selection, nepotism: the amount of shared genes.
II: The degree to which individuals count themselves as included in eachother's groups.
III: Sexes of group members.
IV: Past histories between group members.
V: Positions of social hierarchy: how much we believe an individual, aided now, will be able to return the favour later.

* The maximum number of people we can easily relate ourselves to, and the maximum self-policing size of a group, according to Dunbar's corelation of brain-capacity to social grouping in primates is somewhere between 100-200 people, a figure born out through history as the managable number of Centurians, or squads of modern soldiers, also in the groupings of some of the calmer religious sects existing today, and in some of the more novel company management systems.

* Any society participating within a material economy will, in times of peace, be driven to become isolate, selfish and ignorant of consequence in order to support that economy, else that society will become fodder for a greater. In hardship we are required to become adult; in plenty, we are forced to remain children.

* Any form of fairly elected government of short duration cannot move overtly against its largest demographic and remain in power. This almost inevitably creates a tyranny of the weak. And of course, that power must corrupt us, is too hackneyed a phrase almost to even mention: Power protects and nurtures at once both self and progeny, it cannot help but corrupt us.

As I see it, throughout our lives we build in our heads a 'country of the mind'. The topography of this country shifts and alters as we travel through life and experience the outcomes of many, many events, both good and bad, ecstatic or agonising.




This dynamic, ever-changing model we hold is in a great many aspects, ourselves: the elusive self we have built up over the years. We become living cyphers for every experience we have ever had, and thus the path between 'what we want' and 'what we achieve', as you can see in the (extremely simplified) illustration above becomes different, sometimes wildly, from individual to individual, because each individual's country of the mind is different, indeed unique in detail.

Each 'desire-marble' dropped, however mundane and common in nature - 'speak to that girl over there' for example, something everyone does - follows a different path over the ground, depending onto which person it is dropped, and produces a different behavioural end-point, unique to the person in question.

However, some drives, attractive or repulsive - sex and death for example, but also a great many more - remain points of commonality between individuals, whatever cultural or ethnic factors may divide them.

It is these points, these common attractors and aversions, that we must locate, identify and use, to alter ourselves and eachother.

...Continued...