Happiness is a Tautology
Dear friends,
1) Introduction
There are very many aspects, levels, perspectives to a discussion that
deserves its name. We all work on understanding a system of highly complex
phenomena, which we call life. A part of it is, or it does, information, a
part of it is, or does, communication. We do not yet know, how to draw a
picture of a working mechanism that lives and contains – or does or
experiences, etc. – communication, and within this – or parallel to that? –
transmits information. The picture is not design-ready yet.
That there is an interdependent system of particular parts which produce
particular effects is maybe a formulation of the idea in a sufficiently
common way, one the partners can basically agree to.
Now here comes a proposal to establish an idea about what this system
produces. The system is in terms of sociology a Betrieb (place of
production), as described by Max Weber. The organisational idea of a
nervous system is brought close to an interested person by C. Northcote
Parkinson’s acute observations about organisations of humans.
We have a complex together of subsystems visualised before ourselves. The
goal is to find the engine which fuels the system and keeps it running,
specifically in view of the need to have a common unit for reasons of
necessary cooperation among the sub-systems. The accountant wishes also for
units of used up fuel, waste, of de-cooperation and de-communalism, but we
shall at first introduce a common currency for the travails of the
different sub-systems while running like they should. This satisfactory,
good, maybe optimal performance level is effortlessly running, in the case
of a healthy individual. We disregard at first the niceties of which kind
and how much of communication and/or information are produced, transmitted,
digested, acted on or learned from. We wish to find the organisational
equivalent of one unit of reinforcement over all kinds of differentiated
activities. The advantages the sub-system derives from doing something well
must be accessible to a reasoned abstraction. The organisational unit
receives one unit of reinforcement for having done one task well: the
reward will serve as a bonus to keep doing that what one does well.
Usually, one calls this self-gratification of the nervous system one shot
of endorphins, but here no attempt is made to speak about things of
Chemistry, here of numbers and men is the song.
2) The Unit of Fulfilment
The satisfaction we experience if we have resolved something well: this
experience is what we propose to use as unit of consistency in systems that
mimic the central nervous system. The tension release in the moment of lust
when we realise that the task has been done, all went well, it is all
right, we got it, we got away, we got in, etc. is followed by a douche of
enzymes which are usually referred to as endorphins: the intersubjective
existence of the concept is well accessible to all of us.
It is obvious that the brain is an optimising device. Animals and small
children show that they are out to maximise the output within their system
which we refer to as endorphins. Any person in any experiment can be
assumed to optimise something in their brain which they consider in that
moment, under those circumstances the optimal solution to achieve the best
variant among the available variants. Humans evidently optimise something
by using their brain. Let us give this something the brain tries to
optimise the production of, the name Lust. The term Lebenslust corresponds
to the terms lust of life, soif de vie; Lebensfreude to joy of life, joie
de vivre.
The proposal is to define the unit of lust as one unit of expectation
fulfilment. Then, the system would try to optimise the proportion of
winning bets among all bets it closes with itself. Overdoing it would cause
problems, because either there is no check on the proportion becoming 100%:
then the system could just ossify, become vegetative and drift towards the
borders that segregate the living from the non-living. If there is a
counter-valve in existence, then it does not pay to use trivial solutions,
because the system degenerates and does not produce bets at all, therefore
within fewer bets over all, there are fewer such that could be won.
Cheating is a short-term strategy in the search for inner balance.
The interplay between Sollwert and Istwert, target value and actual value,
can be best demonstrated by the cycle of breathing. Drawing in, one
corrects an actual state towards a target state: in the actual state there
was too much CO2 and not enough O2, so the inhaling got started; at the end
of the inhaling process, there will be too much of O2 and not enough of CO2
in the lungs, therefore that what was heretofore the target state is now
the actual state and the opposite is now the target to reach. There exist
two ideal states and the system never reaches either of them, but
oscillates between opposed sets of values. What remains over all
oscillations, is the collection of deviations between the two sets of
extreme values, in many dimensions. Although the system makes the
appearance of trying to minimise the overall discordance, it cannot find an
ideal state, as there is no ideal state: the system can break down but it
cannot stand still, like a person cannot cease breathing half-ways breathed
in, saying: this now is the ideal compromise between in and out.
3) Some examples
The steady murmur of the system: {(now you will breathe in; fine; now you
will breathe out; fine), (now you open; now you close), (push blood; suck
blood;), (turn head; expect visual picture to follow), (look for word; find
word), (know, how to …; do … well), etc.} provides 99.9% of the endorphins
necessary to keep the system running. The stricter the predictions are, the
greater the proportion of winning bets in the next moment, if one is on
autopilot and the autopilot works correctly. Healthy animals and healthy
children show how the autopilot manages the maximal harvest of lust
irrespective of circumstances. One meets the autopilot during the process
of sexual release, as the sequence of contractions in the different muscles
is deeply archaic and therefore implicates many smaller congruences between
target values and actual values in the processes higher up in the hierarchy
of accessibility.
Symptoms of anancastic disturbances show a trade-off between predictions
and fulfilments similar to some poor fellow who became a prey of credit
sharks. Near the end of the month he can either starve or apply for a
credit at the shark, even though the short-term solution of his immediate
problem costs him dear. The anancastic ritual is predicted extremely well
into the detail: no big deal then to collect kudos for doing it according
to expectations. The kudos are maximised, but they come at a steep cost as
they are immediately impounded to pay deficits caused previously. Too much
uniformity carries a cost.
4) Proposal for the bonus to be awarded if an organisational unit
meets its goals: lust
We have to find a way to imagine the system to be egotistic, narcissistic
and self-interested. It has to be able to reap benefits from doing
procedures in a specific way. The specific way can well be a running
comparison between two grammatical ways of depicting possible states of the
system and choosing that one of the available alternatives in the other
language which will be true the next step and will eventually cause this
starting state to re-appear. Life is then a conditional, translational
tautology, where the same state of the world, understood as a deep
structure, is represented by two surface structures, which can well be two
logical languages (one of them place-based, one of them object-based). The
states that are common to both surface representations are contained in
both, but among some alternatives. It is possible to choose the wrong
alternative, and the decision of which alternative is the wrong one, can be
subject to external, and also to self-induced changes. The novelty is that
tautologies used to be global and here we meet them only under some
conditions. It is always true that person X has genetic sequence x, but we
meet this tautology only in that case if person X is well-fed, healthy,
alive and well. The framework, within which the tautology of organism X =
sequence x can exist, is by far not a tautology. There is a
self-stabilising module in the system and it seems reasonable to assume
that the self-stabilising has to do with translating one not-state into one
yes-state. The cloud of alternatives necessarily contains also the false
alternatives; having chosen among all of the alternatives that one which
allows continuing the chain of events is obviously rewarded, otherwise it
would not be possible to perpetuate the strategy and in later phases, to
bring it in an optimised form.
5) Organisational
Comparing the bang the neo-Sumerian algorithm will cause to the impressive
consequences on big research and concentration of science capacity caused
by the quantum idea is well reasoned. Great industries from little garden
peas grow.
To understand the principle, it is sufficient to gather a few students and
ask them to build a tautomat. That is a simple collection of databases
which contain the ways objects and their places can be in existence. Its
contents are based on a+b=c and not much of a programming capability is
needed to set up the tables and start drawing diagrams with the data. While
one explains the principle and the mechanism of sorting, enumerating and
consolidating resulting conflicts, one cannot help understanding how
sequences and commutative states interact; in other words: where is what
and when and what kind and how much of it. This all based on a+b=c.
Use of the invention appears to be worth investigating for lexicographs.
The terms “semantic marker”, “association”, “synonym” come as a feature of
the system. By its ability to remember, the system can learn. Specifically,
it can learn private dialects with each of its communication partners,
paving the way to a communication language that appears to everyone else as
an encryption. Shared experiences make good pals. Good pals understand
each other by half-words and hints. The common history provides a common
landscape, where for each new word a context is generated by rules that
only people freshly in love can explain in scientific words, who sometimes
understand each other even without much spelling out. The boundaries
between information and communication can well be clarified during the
development of local variants and dialects of a language.
There was an article somewhere about the Go playing machine that has learnt
to play the game against himself and got rewarded for each good move. It is
now a far better player than any human. The company that programmed AlphaGo
would be a competent partner to do the engineering part of the algorithm.
One needs about 11-15 computers that run parallel, proposing alternatives
and 1 that consolidates and learns.
Thank you for the interesting discussion.
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