One of the goals of this project is to get a better understanding of how behavior works from a pure physiological perspective, such that we have the ability to optimize social inputs for an individuals particular preferences (or “strengths and weaknesses”). This is also meant to provide a consistent basis to the testing like competitive activities or standardized formulations of everything from education to personality typing, which try to derive these properties based on “magic” principles.
If you’re a fan of role playing games, then you’re familiar with the concept of character attributes, and how parties of characters with attributes of various levels provide a much more consistent range of response to whatever arbitrariness a particular campaign can throw at them (and the more truly “random”/realistically the ruleset of the game universe models the actual universe, the more critical this becomes).
Under this conceit, imagine a game world where all characters are generated with core attributes and traits completely hidden from them for the most part. Other than significant outliers with regard to specific traits or attributes, the overwhelming attitude of the game world is that these things are completely black box and unknowable, infused by a metaphysical “tie that binds them all”.
From the individual and local “societal” perspective, the game world provides no obvious mechanism to even determine what constitutes an attribute or trait, let alone having any type of granular insight into what defines a trait or attribute.
In this game world, a significant portion of the early mechanics involve simply trying to figure out what the character can and cannot do. There are some individuals with attributes in the outlier range which makes determining those particular attributes easier by comparison, and some with traits that present enough divergence from typical abilities to be aware that it may represent part of an actual trait.
However because traits modify abilities and abilities modify traits, in the game world, there’s no real sense of delineation between them, there’s just a hodgepodge of outlier characteristics extrapolated backward based on what local customs determine are important enough to reify.
These game world societies have built their entire understanding of individual function around these reified social quantities, and build all of their interactions and knowledge around them, unwittingly reinforcing the belief in them being literal descriptions of function rather than blind abstractions.
And this overly on the nose metaphor (lol, metaphors as adjectives of metaphors are fun), is where we find ourselves today.
I’ve been kind of obsessing (as much as is possible for me anyway) the last few months over what the quanta of behavior is. Behavior, in it’s most primary form is one of the requirements of life as we currently define it. Behavior does not require a nervous system, it does not require neurons, it does not require any particular signalling mechanism. Behavior in life only requires an internally sustained/discrete metabolic/catalytic process which allows adaptive response to external conditions.
Simply, behavior is the interaction between discrete systems. All behavior, including “emergent” behavior like “consciousness”, are complexifications of this discrete metabolic process. Whether human SES mechanics or battery chemistry we measure interaction results as behavior, and from the human reference frame, it all derives from the same underlying principles.
It’s my current conceit that by getting a more consistent understanding of these interaction quanta (since, the universe itself appears to be really consistent, or at least far more consistent than any other offered mechanic), we can use these to more clearly understand what the hidden properties from our “game world” are.
As an example, I’d argue that “intelligence” (and “g“) is clearly a flawed concept. Nearly every bit of evidence I’ve seen clearly demonstrates it as a calcified SES artifact, and the overwhelming majority of research regarding the topic is entirely based around SES constructs. Literally the only way to answer “what does intelligence mean?” requires introducing some comparative SES mechanic, and descriptors like “IQ” are explicitly SES constructs.
Even the assumptions about what things like “IQ” can tell us about anything are vague and culturally biased even when bound to SES measures like “outcomes”. It’s a construct that serves nothing other than to reify cultural assumptions.
Do differences in metabolic performance exist between systems? OF COURSE. Does “intelligence” measure those differences in a useful or create a predictive generalization of those differences? Absolutely not. For all of our assumptions about our core “stats”, none provide anything other than vague predictions about SES related “outcomes”, and even those are demonstrably weaker than other SES “stats” like “wealth” or “social status”.
And so if we are going to build our “society” around people instead of coercing people into our “society”, understanding these interactions, in a framework independent of that “society” is a must.
Writing this makes me realize just how profoundly those underlying system interactions shape and guide outputted behavior, even on the level of “consciousness”. Dorsal dominant processing biases toward interaction vs. object based processing, and here I am trying to quantify the interactions while trying to abstract away the objects.
It makes me think that these things may not be as completely invisible to us as I’m assuming, with greater understanding of the mechanics it may absolutely be possible to gain greater control over ourselves.