Saturday 15 January 2011

Some tidbits about emotions....

I know that many will say that emotions have nothing to do with my theory and I should leave them out... They reside in a different hemisphere in the brain (or at least that's what I've heard House say :) and have nothing to do with reasoning and abstract thoughts.
I don't know, they may be right. I'm also not really interested in explaining emotions (although the fact that they are still there means that evolution has left then intact for a reason, so they might hold value) but I have made a remark that I would like to share. Emotion can be (partially) explained by this mechanism:

When the Selector notices something that is out-of-context, i.e. very different from what we expected/know then it reinforces these signals to be able to cross deeper into our neural paths and agitate the Driving Forces to create Driving Pockets (standard theory up until now). If the current from this or these DPs has nowhere to go towards the action endpoints to solve this thing, then the Capacity of the Battery is somehow enlarged, somewhat like a defense mechanism of our organism. Since with the current capacity of the battery (a specific amount of Amps it can give to the DPs) our brain is unable to resolve this out-of-context situation, our brain pushes harder! It tries to give out more signal, just in case this extra signal is enough to forge though the unknown pathways into something known and resolve this ambiguity/out-of-contextness :)

I can explain anger very well with the aforementioned mechanism...

You want to unscrew a cap from your soda bottle. You've done this many times, you know the amount of strength needed, so when you get the DP for a soda, you let your Snail mechanism guide you through this action... you don't even notice it / register it / remember it, if it goes as planned. But if the cap won't unscrew with the usual force applied to it, then... you have something out of context! The selector with enforce this signal, so it will create a greater DP. The DP will now "steal" more signal from the Battery and thus it will be able to send more signal towards the action endpoints and flex your muscles more. But if this damn cap still won't go off, you have a situation as described above: an out-of-context situation where your brain is not able to resolve it and deactivate the DP. So, if the cap still won't come off, you become angry!! The capacity of the Battery is magically increased for a short amount of time and you are able to push even more signal towards the action endpoints and to the muscles. This might be enough to finally unscrew the damn thing ;)

The sideeffect of this capacity increase of the Battery is that it won't wear off instantaneously. It will need a few moments/minutes/hours (depends on the situation, on person and on biology, so not interested) to go back to normal, so if you get other DPs activated in the meantime, they will get more signal than they usual got, so your reactions will seem over-the-top, too-much, or... driven-by-anger ;)
So if one asks you something when in the middle of unscrewing that cap, you might yell at him where in other cases you might not have.
When we are angry, we have reactions/actions with more signal that needed, which may be useful for the one DP that we are trying to resolve/deactivate, but is not useful for all others. Thus, our reactions are unmannered, our body movements are large and forceful, and all this because they are "fuelled" by a pumped-up Battery. This type of reactions is extremely common for angry people, and the fact that it can be explained via my mechanism is strong proof in my opinion that, out of all the emotions, anger can actually be modelled by this mechanism accurately.

-Other examples is like when you are driving on the road, on a one-way lane and there is someone in front of you who is driving on, let's say, 60% of your usual driving speed. This is out-of-context and will be strengthened by your Selector. If you also have a need to go somewhere quickly (i.e. if this strengthened signal that will now travel deeper into your brain will hit a DF hard), then a big DP will be activated. But since this is a one-way lane, you do not have the means to resolve this DP by a simple overtake.
The anger pattern is complete: you have something out-of-context that creates a sizable DP and you have no constructed pathways towards the action endpoints to do something and deactivate this DP... So, what do you do? You get angry!!

-Another example: someone you care for tells you something offensive about yourself. His offensive words are the out-of-context part, i.e. the signal that will be pushed deeper by your Selector. The fact that you care about this person means that you have communion (I really don't like this word, it's nowhere near the greek "ταύτιση" which is what I actually mean) with him, so you view him as an extension of yourself, so there are strong pathways that link him and you, so this deep traversal of your neurons will reach from the "him" part to the "you" part very easily, i.e. it will be like something that you have said to yourself, and you know that what you say is your representation of reality, i.e. to your knowledge it is true, so it will appear as very true to you! Now this is seriously out-of-context (you telling something bad about yourself) and it will activate a big DP, and the worst part is that you won't have the means to deactivate it! If you're not skilled at words to argue about it, or if you've never been told about it again, you won't have strong pathways from the DP to the action endpoints to resolve it, and you'll get angry... And since you act in an over-the-top manner with strong muscle movements and loud words (actually it's the same, strong muscle movements :), you may swear at him or even hit him...

That is also why little kids, who have many out-of-context situations and very few constructed paths from the DPs to the action endpoints tend to be very emotional... Because the pattern that I have described is very likely to happen.



On the other hand, grief and worry as emotions can be explained by the Battery reducing its capacity!
You cannot resolve this out-of-context situation and instead of strengthening your battery capacity, your brain reduces it! This means that there is less signal for everything, the DPs that get formed get less signal from the battery and push less signal towards the action endpoints, so the signal might not even make it to the end, or your actions might be weak. You need MORE motivation to get up and do something, you are not in the mood of acting as you normally would, all your thinking energy (this less battery capacity) is absorbed by this active (worrysome) DP that has no constructed pathways to resolve it, make it in-context, and all other DPs get almost no signal. Nothing can be acted upon when you're into so much grief. It needs time (the out-of-context will become in-context by itself over time), or counselling (forge pathways in the inner loop to connect this unfamiliar stimuli with other familiar contexts and thus make it expected and in-context) or getting force-fed by other pleasures (to create large DPs and steal a lot of battery signal from the other, woryying DP and get you out of this vicious circle), to make this effect go away.

(I know I haven't analyzed it as fully as the anger, but I've written too much for one blog post... I'm tired :)
Btw, tiredness can also be explained by reduced Battery capacity!! :D (ouf, I'm done talking :)

Friday 7 January 2011

Explaining curiosity

As we have already said (have we? At least I've known it for over a year), the driving pockets "steal" energy (current, amperes?) from the Battery with an amount proportional to their relative amount of activation vs all the other currently active driving pockets. So two equally active DPs get 50-50 of the Battery's capacity.
The thing is that the battery does not really turn off (except in order to sleep, but then it probably fires off again when dreaming?), so even in circumstances where all our basic (& secondary & tertiary etc) needs are fulfilled and there are no active driving pockets,

(on a side note: it is very funny, but this is what we call happiness!! The non-existence of needs and the non-existence of stimuli that will trigger/remind-us-of needs! A situation where we have no will to do anything... Just lie peacefully still. And that is why nature has protected us and deprived us from the ability to achieve true, long-lasting happiness; because it is a condition that causes inaction and it counter-evolutionary and does not promote survival. And that is why we can also reach happiness for a few seconds at a time and soon enough something comes along and raises driving pockets again.
Sorry Buddha, evolution won't give in without a fight! :D)

the battery is still able to push signals towards the stimuli endpoints (and don't forget the inner loop!). This means that even a small DP, if left alone without competition, will capture the battery's signal and cause us to act in order to diminish it.
And this is curiosity! Even things that are not important, even when they are remotely relevant to something pleasurable from our past will cause us to act upon them, "if we have nothing better to do", i.e. if there are no bigger needs in our body to steal the current from the battery.

Simple, isn't it? Our mechanism that pushes us into action (and thinking), the battery, does not turn off, so when we have nothing better to do we put as much effort in the little things as we would put for the bigger things.


That is also one of the reasons why humans have developed so advanced thinking constructs, speech, writing, math, etc... (ok, one other reason is that they have to brain capacity to do it). It is because they have managed to easily solve their feeding and breeding issues and still have spare time.
So once they got past that point, the growth of our thinking process was exponential!
That is why philosophers were rich (or had other means of getting fed). That is why in the times of human history where survival was not given the progress of thought and science was minimal or non-existent.
And that is also why I need a relatively simple (repetitive, uninteresting) life in order to continue developing my theory... Because the driving pocket that drives me into thinking about it is fueled by a veeery distant promise of reward, and every pleasure potential of the "here and now" kind distracts me. If I had a life full of trips, ups-and-downs, pleasures etc, I would be able to devote thinking time to my small in activation DP of the cognition theory. And if I don't devote time, the theory is not going to be thought of by itself...

Anywayz, we started with curiosity and explained the golden age of Perikles, the advantages of slavery and my "prison".