Here’s the most important piece of wisdom I can pass along to you.  Remember what I said back in the Introduction about taking over the world?  There is nothing anyone can do to stop me.  It’s so easy that you can do it too, and no one can stop you either.  Here’s how:

As I’ve said, you build a civilization by founding it on ideas that people are willing to cooperate with.  If you come up with ideas that the people of a town are willing to cooperate with, you build a civilization the size of a town.  If you come up with ideas that the people of an area are willing to cooperate with, you can make yourself governor of a province.  If you come up with ideas that at least 51% of voting Americans are willing to cooperate with, you can be elected president.  Everyone knows that.

As my friend Klee of Blackfire puts it, “The only thing holding up a wall is the people who aren’t tearing it down.”  If you tear down a wall that’s separating two groups of people and replace it with a bridge that connects them, by coming up with ideas that both groups of people are willing to cooperate with, you can build a civilization that’s twice as big as you had before.

The rest is obvious.  Whoever tears down all the walls and builds bridges among all the groups of people, rules the world. To do that, all I had to do was to make the interests of the world my own interests.  I’m “conquering” the world by not trying to conquer it. I’m “conquering” the world by uniting it.

It’s easy.  All I have to do is to accept everyone and everything in the world into my global “empire”, including all the people who try to stop me.  By accepting those people and their efforts to stop me as an inherent part of my “empire”, I absorb them and prevent them from stopping me.

Anyone can do this.  If you accept everything in your world as an inherent part of your world, including all of your problems and your ability to overcome them, then you out-maneuver your problems and unite everything under the category of “things in your life”.  By out-maneuvering all the  problems in your own world you make yourself ruler of your own world.  And no one can stop you. Pretty cool, huh?

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

An obvious place to start an investigation into what makes us human in any sense is to ask what makes us human in a biological sense.  An even better place to start is to ask what makes us alive in the first place.

There are five signs of life that scientists look for to determine if something is alive.  These are particularly important in space exploration and the development of artificial intelligence, because the real determining factors in an entity’s status as a living being can’t be confined to biology as we know it.

In order to qualify as a life form, a thing must: behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation; grow and reproduce; transfer energy systematically; react to stimuli; and be distinctly different from its surrounding environment.

Could something qualify as life without meeting all of those five criteria?  I’m sure it’s possible.  What about a race of alien spirits that have learned to exist as disembodied consciousnesses?  They meet things like that on Star Trek all the time.  For the sake of argument, something like that wouldn’t need to behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation if nothing could threaten it, it wouldn’t need to grow and reproduce, it wouldn’t need to transfer energy systematically, it could ignore stimuli, and it might not be distinctly different from its surrounding environment.

However, something like that would behave in a manner conducive to self preservation if something could  threaten its survival, and that would be a reaction to stimuli.  The being would still transfer energy even if it didn’t need to absorb energy from elsewhere to stay alive, simply because thought requires energy, and for thought to be created energy must change form somehow.  Unless this consciousness filled up the entire universe, at some point the consciousness must end and the rest of the universe begin, and even if the entire universe was a life form, at some point it must end and nothingness must begin, even if that place was unmeasurable or even physically inconceivable to humans.  Finally, growth and reproduction might be a quaint biological tradition, but it can be said that, like the physical boundaries of a creature, at some point in time the thing must not have existed, even if that point in time is unmeasurable or even inconceivable to humans.  Even if the being itself can’t reproduce, it must’ve come into existence somehow.

Obviously, there are some practical limitations to science’s search for life, but obviously scientists can’t “search for life” that they don’t have the science to detect, now can they?  As of 2005, disembodied consciousnesses can’t be detected by science.  They can be hypothesized at and even detected by non-scientifically reproducible means according to some people.  That doesn’t prove that ghosts don’t exist, that only proves that if they do exist they can’t be detected by modern science.  Obviously, if they don’t exist they can’t be detected by modern science either; so modern science’s inability to detect them doesn’t prove their existence one way or the other.

Anyway, back to life in the physical world. I think the distinct difference between the life form and the surrounding environment can be taken as understood—in life forms as they are known on Earth, all life has a physical body.

The reaction to stimuli is another self-evident distinction for the purposes of this book.  You, a walrus, a tree, a mushroom, a bacterium, and a virus all react to stimuli somehow.  Congratulations.  Actually, this entire book is a study of how humans react to stimuli, so I can hardly condense the entire book into one paragraph before you’ve finished reading the book, can I?

With the systematic transfer of energy life begins to get interesting.  As Albert Einstein and his colleagues discovered, all matter is very highly concentrated energy, which is why breaking atoms makes such a potent source of energy for generating electricity or vaporizing cities. All life forms react to stimuli by transferring energy systematically. All stimulations of a life form cause some form of reaction, and most all reactions require energy.  Even if the stimulus originates within the creature, say, that the creature feels tired so it decides to take a nap, that stimulus causes the creature to react and that reaction requires energy.  Even if all the creature has to do to take the nap is to shift its position from sitting on a couch to lying down on the couch, shifting its position requires energy.  About the only exception to this would be if the creature could fall asleep without having to move.

Alternately, if some stimulus affects the creature but the creature chooses to ignore it, that decision to ignore the stimulus is still a reaction, and making the decision still requires the expenditure of energy.  Have you ever had a really stressful job where you have to spend all day at work forcing yourself not to kill your boss, and you come home every night completely exhausted?  Then you know what I’m talking about.

Growth is caused by energy and matter (which is itself a form of energy) being transferred from one place to another, generally from food into body mass.  Humans grow at some point in their lives, but eventually they stop.  That doesn’t mean that adults cease to live when they stop growing.  Adults can still grow fat, but that isn’t a necessity.  Adults can also lose weight, but that doesn’t make them undead.

That leaves survival and reproduction.  As it so happens, survival and reproduction are the two instincts that all life forms must follow in order to keep their species from dying out.  This is a simple matter of Darwinian evolution—instincts for survival and reproduction are evolutionary necessities for any life form to survive as a species.  Out of animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses, only animals and bacteria are capable of independent motion.  Bacteria are monocellular organisms, and therefore can’t do terribly much as individuals in terms of reacting to stimuli, transferring energy, growing, reproducing, and surviving, and certainly not enough to make them much use to our discussion of humanity.

In the case of animals, however, all animals have the instincts to survive and to reproduce, and the ability to take direct action to satisfy those instincts.  Consequently it is instinctive to take direct action to satisfy those instincts.  In addition to being the only type of life capable of complex physical motion, of the five types of life only animals have central nervous systems.  (That is not to say that all animals have central nervous systems, but it is to say that all life forms that have central nervous systems are animals.)  Therefore, direct action that animals can take in reaction to stimuli can include mental reaction, physical reaction, or both.  All animals, and consequently all humans, have the instincts to transfer energy to react mentally and/or physically to stimuli that affect their survival or reproductive instincts.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

Now that we know what things all animals have in common, the next question becomes:  What things do all humans have in common that separate them from all other animals?

The most obvious answer to that question is:  Intellect, or “higher intelligence”.  What is intellect?  Is it a quantitative measurement of higher intelligence? I possess more human intellect than the great majority of people.  Does that make me more human?  Biologically speaking and legally speaking, it doesn’t.  There isn’t jury in the land who would let me off of a murder charge because I proved that I had a higher IQ than my victim!

I think we can all agree that a differentiation between animals and humans based on intellect should be defined as the capacity  for human intellect.  That raises the question:  What is the source of human intellect?  There are three basic mental abilities in which humans have a clear advantage over all other animals.  Humans can formulate abstract thought, they can perceive time as a dimension, and they can communicate those ideas with other humans. Those three things formed the foundation for the development of the intelligence that allowed humans to become the dominant species of the world despite the fact that prior to the development of those abilities humans were neither the strongest nor the most numerous animals in the world.

Abstract thought allows humans to imagine possibilities that don’t exist around them.  Animals can only react to their surroundings and their instincts.  There are some animals that figure out how to use tools to help them serve their instincts—otters use stones to break open shell fish, monkeys use rocks to break open nuts, monkeys and birds use sticks and grass stems to collect ants out of holes in trees, and so on.  All tool use requires the creature to be able to imagine what he could do with a tool that he couldn’t do with his own body.  Therefore, abstract thought is not the sole domain of humans, but I think we can all agree that humans have a great advantage in their capacity for abstract thought over other animals.  Obviously, humans have invented a lot more tools than any other animal species.

Humans can also think only in the abstract, with little or no relevance to their immediate surroundings or animal instincts. I have never heard of any non-human animals inventing algebra or geometry, for instance, or studying laws of gravity or electricity.  Therefore, I think it’s fairly safe to conclude that humans have a far greater capacity for imagining possibilities than even the best tool-using animal.

Humans can perceive time as a dimension.  I have heard all kinds of statements by various New-Age type people to the effect of “Dude, but what  is time, really?  I  mean, like, it  all  exists  within  your  mind, man.”  Bullsh*t. (And I’m saying that scientifically.)  Let me ask you this:  What were you doing at this time yesterday?  What day were you born?  What day was Pearl Harbor attacked?  What day was Abraham Lincoln sworn in as president?  What day did Columbus discover America?   Are those dates and times that were objectively observable and that everyone can agree upon?

That’s my point:  Animals can’t do that, or even anything close to that.  Animals can remember things that have happened in their past, which allows them to learn from previous experiences, and they can anticipate things they expect to happen in the near future based on those experiences.  Dr. Pavlov proved both of those with his experiment ringing a bell before he fed his dogs.  The dogs were able to remember that the bell was rung before they were given food previously, so when they heard the bell they learned to expect to be given food within the near future.  But do you think any of those dogs could remember their puppies’ birthdays a year after the puppies were born?  I think that it’s reasonable to say that although the ability to perceive time is not the sole domain of humans, humans have a great advantage over other animals in their the ability to perceive time and to measure its passage.

Finally, the ability to communicate thought with other members of the species is another area where humans have a clear advantage over other animals.  Other animals can communicate with members of their own species, and they can even communicate basic ideas.  Dogs bark and birds sing, for instance, to communicate with other dogs and birds.  Dogs bark to let other dogs know that if they come any closer they’ll get hurt.  Birds sing to attract other birds to mate with.  Other animals make noises, stand in certain postures, move in certain ways, or give off scents to communicate with members of their own species.

The ability for humans to communicate immediate instinctive ideas with each other doesn’t really prove anything. However, what humans can do that other animals can’t is to communicate their ideas of abstract thought and dimensional time to each other.  When Dr. Pavlov introduced new dogs in his experiment to dogs that had been there a while, do you think the older dogs could teach the newer dogs to expect food when the bell was rung?

It is true that humans have succeeded in teaching sign language to chimpanzees to allow scientists to communicate with the chimpanzees, and even to allow chimpanzees to communicate with each other.  It is also true that scientists have succeeded in teaching chimpanzees some abstract ideas through sign language.  There are some abstract ideas that scientists can’t teach to chimpanzees, but that could either be because of the chimps’ inability to learn the abstract thought through communication, or it could be because the chimps can’t grasp the abstract thought in the first place.  I’ve never heard of scientists teaching sign language to two chimps, conditioning one chimp like a Pavlov’s dog, and then putting the two chimps together to see if the one could teach the other to expect food when the bell was rung.  I wonder what would happen.

Humans are the only animals to have invented means of communicating complicated and/or purely abstract ideas to one another.  To figure out how to do that is partly an abstract idea in itself.  By itself, I can’t say that it constitutes a third advantage that humans have over other animals.  Obviously, the ability to communicate abstract ideas wouldn’t do anyone any good if no one had any abstract ideas to communicate, would it?  However, the ability to learn abstractions through a second abstraction is an important ability.  It is the ability that allows people to learn about the world not just from their own life experiences but also from other  people’s life experiences.  Those life experiences can be passed through any number of people, and as long as the content of that learning remains uncorrupted in the process, there is no limit to the number of times people can learn the same things by passing the information around to each other.  As a result, I think we can all agree that collectively humans have a far greater knowledge base available to them from which to learn than does any other animal species.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

All activity requires energy.  All animals require energy to live.  Basic, vital physiological processes require energy to continue.  Therefore, all animal life is a struggle to ingest more energy before the animal’s current supply expires and ceases to maintain the animals’ physiology.  In other words, animals need to eat food to get energy, and they need that energy both to live and to find more food to keep them alive.

Therefore, it would contradict an animal’s survival instinct to expend energy for no reason.  To do nothing requires no expenditure of energy (or minimal expenditure, anyway).  Therefore, given the choice between doing something that would not advance the instinctive interests of the animal or doing nothing, it will always be more beneficial to do nothing and conserve energy. Life depends on energy, and energy efficiency is the most fundamental survival instinct.

If an animal has a choice between two courses of action that could potentially satisfy his survival instincts, which will he choose?  Each possibility must offer some sort of perceivable benefit that the animal either needs or wants in order to make the animal consider it in the first place.  Each possibility might also have risks and/or drawbacks to it, but for any decision an animal is willing to make, the animal must perceive that the true benefits outweigh the negative “benefits” in some way or another.  Otherwise the animal wouldn’t consider that course of action, because it wouldn’t seem to be beneficial to the animal.  If the animal perceives that the negative benefits outweigh the positive benefits, then pursuing that course of action would be detrimental to the animal’s interests, so why would it choose to do it?

Just for one simple example, suppose you own a cat and your neighbor owns a big dog that likes to chase your cat.   Your cat would probably love to kick the dog’s ass.  Unfortunately, your cat knows the he can’t kick the dog’s ass, and if he stands and fights the dog is going to eat him for lunch.  Therefore, your cat is going to continue to run from the dog, because that advances his survival interests, while fighting the dog doesn’t.

Each possibility must also have an amount of effort the animal expects the achievement of that benefit to require.  Each of these amounts exists only within the animal’s perception.  At any time, the effort required to achieve some benefit might be greater or less than the animal expected it to be, and likewise the actual benefit might be greater or less than the animal expected.  The animal could very well be mistaken in its assessment of the ratios of the actual values of benefit to effort required, but it will always act according to its perceptions, for better or worse.  How much energy is the animal willing to expend to achieve the benefits, and what other benefits could the animal achieve with that energy instead?

The animal will always choose the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required.  To do otherwise would contradict the animal’s survival instinct by causing the animal to waste energy.  In a food-finding situation, for instance, this can be measured quite directly by the calories of food the animal thinks it will have to expend to catch food compared to the calories of food it could catch by expending that energy.  For example, why do predators who hunt herd animals always try to single out the old and the lame?  Because those are the easiest ones to catch.  The prey can’t run as fast or as long, so the predator will be able to catch up to it the easiest.  If the prey puts up a fight, it won’t be able to put up as much of a fight as a healthy adult could, which means it will require less energy for the predator to win the fight and less energy for the predator to heal any injuries it suffers in the fight.  If the predator catches the prey and the prey puts up more of a fight than the predator was expecting, the predator can choose to break off the attack once it decides that the effort required to bring the prey down will be more effort than eating the prey will be worth after all.  This could result from the prey making the energy cost for the predator to bring it down greater than the energy value of eating the prey, or it could simply make that ratio of energy required to energy consumed seem less profitable to the predator than hunting for food elsewhere.

Instinctive drives create forces within the animal by affecting its psychology.  That change in psychology will make the animal feel that fulfilling the instinct is the right thing to do, and without human intellect, it won’t be aware of any other choice.  To contradict the instinct would require energy.  If following the instinct would require more energy, the animal will ignore that instinct to follow the most basic instinct of energy efficiency. Instincts that remain unsatisfied often continue to be felt, and can either drive the animal to satisfy those instincts once more powerful instincts are satisfied, or will grow to exert more force on the animal’s decision making process until the animal acts upon the instinct..

For instance, a deer’s survival instinct drives it to find food.  The deer’s survival instinct also drives it to avoid humans.  Ordinarily, the deer can satisfy both instincts simultaneously by finding food in the forest.  For the sake of discussion, suppose that the deer’s human-avoidance instinct is usually stronger than its food-finding instinct.  That means that if there was a famine in the forest, the deer would sooner go hungry than venture into a human settlement.  However, over time, as the deer continues to go hungry, at some point he will be driven to venture into human lands to search for food.  That happens when the deer’s food-finding drive has grown so strong that contradicting it begins to require more effort on the deer’s part than the effort required to contradict its human-avoidance instinct—or, more simply put, the food finding instinct becomes stronger than the human avoidance instinct.  When the famine ends, the deer will go back to finding food in the forest and will stop venturing into human lands now that it’s no longer necessary.

The same is true for animals whose survival and reproductive instincts come into conflict.  In mating season, if two male animals come into competition over a female, often the males will be driven by their reproductive instinct to fight each other.  Usually, one will beat the other badly enough that the other animal’s survival instinct will overcome his reproductive instinct, and he will give up his courtship of the female rather than be killed in the attempt.

There we arrive at our most fundamental unit of logic in human behavior:  energy.  We have also identified two logical processes that affect the expenditure of energy:  perception and instinct.  We have identified five evolutionary traits that all humans have in common: the survival instinct, the reproductive instinct, the ability to think in the abstract, the ability to measure time, and the ability to communicate abstract ideas.  How do those five things combine to affect that fundamental unit of logic and the two basic logical processes?  Well, you see this giant book in your hands?…

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

As I said earlier, animal instincts for survival and reproduction are genetic evolutions.  How were Charles Darwin and his colleagues able to conclude this?  Because quite simply, if animals of a species didn’t have survival and reproductive instincts, the species wouldn’t survive.  If individuals didn’t have survival and reproductive instincts, those individuals would either die out or fail to reproduce, and either way their genes wouldn’t get passed on to future generations of the species.  After, say, a million years of evolution, it’s a safe bet that any animals of a species that don’t have those instincts are gone (and even if some of those animals could survive by some chance, there would be so few that their numbers would be mathematically meaningless).  In other words, genetic survival and reproductive instincts must be shared by every individual member of a species, and even if they haven’t always been, for all intents and purposes they are by now.

A physically visible example of this general evolutionary trend is in giraffes.  If at some point in history all giraffes didn’t have long legs and long necks, it didn’t matter as long as there was plenty of food to be found.  If a drought struck, the shorter giraffes would’ve run out of food first, because they wouldn’t be able to reach food high up in trees.

This most likely didn’t happen overnight.  Giraffes might’ve looked like large horses once upon a time, and a gradual change in the climate where they lived could’ve made food increasingly scarce.   Over time, that would give giraffes that were slightly taller than others the Darwinian survival/reproduction advantage.  As tall genes continued to be passed down over the generations, the giraffes that were slightly taller than the rest of their generation would get the survival/ reproduction advantage at passing their genes down to the next generation.

Alternately, most giraffes could’ve been short at one time, except for a few mutants that were very tall.  If a sudden drought completely destroyed their normal habitat, all the short giraffes could’ve starved at once, and the few mutants suddenly would’ve become the only giraffes to pass their genes on to the next generation.

Changes in the environment don’t usually happen that abruptly, but they can and have.  The extinction of the dinosaurs is a perfect example.  The accepted theory of their extinction is that a meteorite impacted the Earth and raised a dust cloud that blotted out the sunlight, which caused the surface temperature of the Earth to drop for many years—a nuclear winter, essentially.  Suddenly, all the large reptiles of the formerly-warm world were completely unequipped to survive in the new environment.  They died out.  The mammals could adapt to the new environmental conditions, and now that the giant reptiles that had once been their primary source of competition for survival were gone, the population of mammals on the planet expanded to fill the void.

Either way evolution takes place, it is the only scientific explanation for all animals of a species to possess the same genetic traits.  One way or another, all the animals that didn’t have those traits either died or were unable to reproduce.  Either way, their genes weren’t passed on to future generations.

Why do ravens collect shiny objects?  All of them do it, so it must be a Darwinian requirement.  Presumably it doesn’t help them survive, so it must help them reproduce.  It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that it must be part of their mating ritual (which is the case for many species of birds) that mates are attracted to one another at least in part by the way the other decorates its nest.

For a trait to un-evolve, the conditions that required that evolutionary step must cease to affect the species.  If, for instance, the raven population of the world became so scarce that ravens no longer had a choice of mates, then ravens would mate with each other regardless of the amount of shiny things the other had collected.  That would cause the shiny-object-collecting gene to diversify, as the strongest shiny-object-collecting gene would no longer be the most likely to be passed from one generation to the next—ravens with weak shiny-object-collecting genes would be able to reproduce just as well as ones with stronger versions of the gene.  However, unless the trait becomes detrimental to the Darwinian interests of the species, the trait won’t disappear or automatically return to its previous average level.  In the case of the ravens, all ravens will still have the shiny-object-collecting instinct, even though none of them need it any more.  The instinct won’t disappear unless something happens to give the ravens who have the best genes and instincts for collecting shiny objects a disadvantage at survival and reproduction, such as the presence of shiny objects in their nests making the ravens who collect the most shiny objects the easiest for predators to find, and consequently tips the balance out of their favor.

As long as a species shares traits and instinctive behaviors, those traits and behaviors will define that species, because all members of that species will have those traits and behaviors—no member of the species will not have them.  Evolution determines the traits that survive within the species, and the traits determine the individuals of the species that survive and pass their genetic traits on to the next generation of the species.  A raven does not need to collect shiny things to remain a biological raven, but because all ravens have the genes to make them collect shiny things, it is the biological nature of all ravens to collect shiny things.  Part of what makes a raven a raven is its drive to collect shiny things, and for the raven not to collect shiny things would contradict its “raven-ness”.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

The ancient Greeks had a word for perfect happiness that doesn’t translate into English.  The word embodies the idea that complete spiritual fulfillment can be found through the full realization of one’s abilities.  To those Greek philosophers, happiness was an objective state, and was independent of emotion—the state of happiness defined the subjective emotion felt, the emotion did not define the state of happiness. It was to this that Thomas Jefferson referred when he wrote the statement in the Declaration of Independence that every American is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  As you can see, since the Greek word doesn’t translate perfectly into English, he had to improvise, and now two centuries later, the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” has lost its intended meaning.

Christianity has a similar idea.  They explain it in a story of three men.  Their god gave the first man ten abilities, the second man five abilities, and the third man only one ability.  The first man decided not to use any of his abilities.  The second man decided he would only use two.  The third man decided that even though he only had one ability, he was going to use it all he could.  The third man had the richest, fullest life (I don’t remember exactly how the Christians word it).  It wasn’t because he had the most abilities, and it wasn’t because he used the most abilities.  It was because he used all the abilities he had.

I came up with the same explanation on my own, before I’d heard about these other two versions of the idea.  I have a very low tolerance for hanging out and enjoying myself.  I have no problem with hanging out and accomplishing something, in fact, I enjoy hanging out and accomplishing something.  I can even enjoy hanging out and doing nothing when I know that there’s nothing to do, but in that case I’m doing  nothing, not just “not doing anything”.  Zen has a teaching that explains that idea as “when you eat, eat”: to do nothing is to live in the moment as you do at any other time, but now you are living in a moment when there is nothing to do.  I can almost always think of something that needs to be done, or something that I could be doing, so for me to have the opportunity to do nothing is rare, which is what keeps it enjoyable.

I know that the sum total of my abilities is greater than the sum total of most people’s abilities. I also know that to live to your fullest potential is a hell of a lot of work.  Say that everyone around me has 10 abilities and they content themselves with only using 5 because they decide it would be too much hassle to use all 10.  Say that I have 20 abilities.  I can’t possibly be happy only using 5 of my abilities like everyone else, which causes everyone else to wonder why I seem so bored and irritable and can’t just have fun hanging out with them.  But not only can I not be happy using 5 of my abilities the way they use 5 of their abilities, I can’t be happy only using 10 abilities, which would make me equal to any of their fullest potentials.  I can’t even be happy using 15 of my abilities either, which would be greater than any of their fullest potentials.  Perfect happiness is all or nothing.

What can I say?  I come from a family of engineers.  That is, I come from a family of people who make it a habit of seeing that important things are done perfectly, and who can think of all kinds of ways that things can be done more perfectly than they’re being done already.  Happiness is one of the most important things in life.  Anybody disagree?

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

Animals always use all of their abilities to their fullest extent.  How can that be, when a stray cat and a cat that is kept indoors all the time live such different lifestyles?  Simple:  They both use all of their abilities to the fullest extent necessary to deal with the situations that present themselves.  Both are members of the same species, so both have the same natural instincts.  An indoor cat can’t imagine what it would be like to be a stray cat, and a stray cat can’t imagine what it would be like to be an indoor cat.  However, if an indoor cat ran away, it could adapt to being a stray cat, and if a stray cat was adopted by someone it could adapt to being an indoor cat.  The same set of natural instincts would serve both cats equally well in either situation, and the cats would use them to make the most of whichever situation they found themselves in.

Animals also possess some intellectual capacity.  That capacity varies depending on the type of animal we’re talking about.  In general though, animals can learn new skills to help them achieve their instinctive goals, they can learn from their experiences, and they can learn to anticipate events in the immediate future based on their experiences.  Certain animals can learn even more specialized things.

For instance, animals can learn new ways to find food and shelter.  If the indoor cat ran away he would still understand the importance of food and be able to recognize food that he could eat, so he would look for food until he found some.  If he found some in a trash can, he would learn that food could be found in trash cans. If the stray cat was given food by a person, the stray would learn that people could be a source of food.

I had a cat once who learned a very creative skill for getting food and shelter.  First let me ask you, if you go to somebody’s house and knock on the door, how many times in a row do you usually knock before waiting for someone to answer the door?  Three?  That’s what most people seem to do.  My cat needed to be able to get through the door to the house to get to the food and shelter inside, so he learned what seemed to him the best way to get through the door:  He would scratch briefly, three times in succession, scratch-scratch-scratch,  then wait.   He was knocking!  (And if that didn’t work, he’d try sharpening his toenails on the expensive weather stripping, because that always got somebody to come running to the door…)

As far as anticipating events of the future goes, Dr. Pavlov demonstrated that by ringing the bell before he fed his dogs.  Eventually, the dogs would begin to salivate as soon as they heard the bell, before they’d even seen the food.  For another example, if you own cats and feed them every morning when you get up, and you usually get up when it gets light outside, the cats are going to expect to be fed when it gets light outside.  If you get up at the same time every day by the clock, the cats won’t understand that.  In the summer when it gets light earlier, they’ll come wake you up demanding to know where their food is, but in the winter when it gets light later, they won’t bother you until they hear you get up.

Why do some birds migrate thousands of miles over the course of the year and individuals always return to the same nesting grounds year after year?  Why do some species of fish return to mate in the same streams where they were born?  I have no idea, and I’m not sure anyone really does. One thing I think is pretty well agreed upon is that it must be some natural instinct of those animals, because it can’t be anything else.  It’s not like fish are issued birth certificates to tell where they were born, and I’m pretty sure birds don’t get their mail forwarded to them when they fly south for the winter. Why they do it isn’t the point, the point is that they do do it.  It must be important for some reason that is contained entirely within their own being.

Not only do animals possess instincts and the ability to learn new skills, they can even learn to adapt their instincts. For instance, if you go to a national park, you see signs everywhere saying “Don’t Feed the Animals”.  That’s because it interferes with their natural instincts.  The animals’ natural survival instincts include:  find food, and avoid humans.  If humans give the animals food, then the animals’ instinctive aversion to humans will be replaced with an attraction to them, because humans help satisfy the animals’ food-finding instinct.  The animals don’t realize they’re protected by the federal government while in the national park, and they probably can’t tell the difference between a tourist and a hunter.  Also, it causes their wilderness food-finding skills to slip out of practice as they learn to find food just by looking cute.

In the opposite direction, dogs and cats that were abused by previous owners come to associate people who look like their owners with threats to their safety.  For the sake of their survival instincts, they come to associate people with a certain set of characteristics with danger, and the animals react unfavorably to those people.  This is different from learning skills to help the animal serve their instincts, because it doesn’t cause them to act in a specific way, rather, it changes their general attitude to a certain situation.  However, with that change in attitude the animal’s psychology is still being affected, and the animal is still reacting in the way that it perceives to best satisfy its survival instinct.

Animals always act to satisfy their instincts.  If their needs are not being fulfilled, they will do whatever is within their power to change their situation to fulfill their needs.  If a cougar feels hungry, it will begin hunting prey.  The need itself is not fulfilled until the cougar finds food, but the instinct to fulfill the need is fulfilled when the cougar begins hunting.  The cougar satisfies its instincts by using its abilities to fulfill its needs.

Animals always act naturally in their circumstances, because it is impossible for them to do otherwise.  Even if they contract rabies or are shot with a tranquillizer, they still act naturally for an animal of that type that has contracted rabies or been tranquilized.  Animals don’t know any other way to act than on their instincts.  Do you think game wardens ever try to arrest cougars for killing deer?   Have you ever been watching Nature on PBS and heard your host, Marty Stouffer, say, “Here in the Serengeti Desert, we can see the wild elephant herds, where the elephants are beginning their annual… Wait a second!  What the…?  Why is that elephant jumping up and down on one foot?”

That brings me to another point:  Animals can be trained to act un-naturally by humans who teach them specific skills, like balancing a ball on their nose for a circus act.   Those animals learn those skills because they serve their survival instincts—the animals get rewarded with food or some other instinctive need for performing the tricks.

No matter how you look at it, all animal behavior is motivated by their genetic instincts for survival and reproduction.  To turn that logic around, every genetic instinct of every animal must serve either survival or reproduction (or both).  Otherwise, that particular instinct wouldn’t exist within that species at the genetic level.  If individual animals act a certain way, that’s a unique charateristic to that individual animal, or to some animals of that species.  When an instinct exists among all animals of a species, it’s proof of an evolutionary necessity, because the only way for all the animals of a certain species to possess a certain trait is for all the animals that didn’t have that trait to have died out as a result of not having it.  So no matter how unusual an instinct is, if an entire animal species possesses it, they must depend on it for their survival or reproduction, or at least their species must’ve depended on it for survival or reproduction at some point in history.

By Thomas Jefferson’s Greek definition of happiness, all animals are always happy, because all animals always use their abilities to best satisfy their instincts in any situation, whether you talk about post-apocalyptic ravens collecting shiny things even though they don’t need to anymore, or squirrels spending so much time learning to be cute so they can get food from tourists that they forget how to find food on their own, or hungry cougars hunting prey.  (To the extent that animals are able to feel  happy, all animals do not always feel happy any more than humans always feel happy, but that’s a topic for the next two sections.)  By Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, all animal behavior revolves around survival and reproduction.  By the universal ratio of statistical survival interests, all animals always pursue the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefits to effort required.  Thereby, we have arrived at the formula for Greek animal happiness: all animals always use their abilities to pursue the greatest ratio of perceivable benefits to effort required to fulfill their survival and reproduction instincts, and that equates to Greek happiness.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

Humans also use their abilities to make the most of their situations, but all humans are not happy by the Greek definition. Why is that?

Here we return to the three human abilities that constitute the capacity for human intellect: to formulate abstract thought, to conceptualize time as a dimension, and to communicate those thoughts to each other.

All humans have survival and reproductive instincts.  All humans have the capacity for human intellect.  All humans are driven by their survival instinct to satisfy their survival and reproductive instincts as efficiently as possible.  Therefore, in order to satisfy their instincts as efficiently as possible, humans must use their capacity for human intellect.  To do otherwise would contradict their instincts.

The capacity for human intellect is a trait shared by exactly 100% of people.  All humans possess the instinctive genetic behavioral traits of conceptualizing time as a dimension, of formulating abstract thought, and of communicating those thoughts with other humans. Because all humans possess those traits at the genetic level, obviously the survival and reproduction of our species has depended on them.  Because all humans possess the capacity for human intellect, it is instinctive  for all humans to use their human intellect to satisfy their survival and reproductive instincts.

Emotion serves a perfectly obvious evolutionary role:  It adjusts the psychology of the human to act in his best interests toward his survival and reproduction, by exerting instinctive forces upon him to adjust his decision making process to drive him to find the ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required that will best serve the survival of his genetic material.

In addition to adjusting the human’s psychology, emotion also adjusts the human’s physiology to respond to any situation as efficiently as possible.  For one example, when you feel fearful of something you feel cold—”your blood runs cold”, as the saying goes.  That’s because your body diverts your blood flow into your legs so you can run better.  For another example, when you feel angry the blood flow to your hands and arms increases so you can solve problems by force of muscle better.  And so on.

For instance, if you are walking through a forest and you know that grizzly bears live there, you will be alert for grizzly bears or signs of grizzly bears.  You will have some adrenaline flowing through your blood already, and if you see a bear, you will dump a lot more adrenaline into your blood for the classic “fight or flight” reaction.

Humans are motivated to live by their instincts, even if their instincts no longer serve any practical purpose, just as ravens would still be motivated to collect shiny things even if their mating rituals no longer depended on it.  For a raven to cease collecting shiny things would contradict his raven-ness, and in the same way, for a human to neglect to use his capacity for human intellect would contradict his humanity.  While an animal’s instincts only work within the scope of his immediate surroundings and his immediate future, a human’s instinctive capacity for human intellect motivates the human to use his other instincts through  time and in  the  abstract.  That is, a human can remember how his instincts motivated him at some point in history, he can imagine how his instincts will motivate him in the future, and he can imagine how they would motivate him in some hypothetical situation, either of his own imagination or in a situation he hears about from another human.

The human walking through the forest where the bears live feels fear because he can remember seeing what a bear did to another human, or he has heard from another human what bears do to people, or both.  Therefore, he can imagine what a bear would do to him.  He can imagine that bears might be present, so he will be ready to react if he sees one.  He can also imagine that any signal that might indicate the presence of a bear actually does indicate the presence of a bear, and he can react to that as though it was a bear, whether it actually was a bear or not.  If the human hears something moving in the bushes, runs for dear life, and survives as a result, his genetic material survives and can still be passed down to the next generation.  If it really was a bear in the bushes, his instinct served him perfectly.  If it was a squirrel in the bushes, his genetic material survives anyway.  As the saying goes, better safe than sorry.

A deer walking through the same forest has only his natural skittishness—his “natural fear of everything”—to protect him.  He will react with fear if he sees a grizzly bear, but he can’t react with fear until  he sees a grizzly bear.  If he hears something moving in the bushes, to him it’s only “something moving in the bushes”; it’s not a “grizzly bear”.  If the thing moving in the bushes stops moving, the deer will wait momentarily to see if something happens, and then will ignore it.  It’s safe to assume that he is instinctively afraid of bears more than he is of squirrels, but he can only learn to be more afraid of bears than his instincts dictate by surviving an attack by one.
Simply put, the deer can only fear the grizzly bear.  The human fears the idea  of the grizzly bear.

Any other emotion follows the same model—a human can be motivated by instincts to react to ideas.  There we arrive at the formula for human emotion:  the product of animal instincts and the capacity for human intellect.  That product of the two instincts and the three parts of intellect affects both the psychology and the physiology of the individual.  That affect on physiology in turn affects his psychology further, because not only does he feel that a certain course of action is the best idea in the first place, he also feels physically primed for that course of action.

That total effect on the psychology of the individual causes him to favor certain ratios of benefits to effort required according to the instincts of his genetic evolution.  If the individual lives in the conditions of his genetic evolution, that response will work perfectly.  If, as in the case of the post-apocalyptic ravens, the living conditions of the individual are not the same as the conditions of his genetic evolution, there is no guarantee that the natural evolutionary course of action will be appropriate.

So here’s some bad news:  Nobody who can read this book lives in the natural conditions of their evolution.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

Like all other animals, humans can only act upon what they perceive to be their greatest interests.  There is the obstacle:  Humans have the ability to perceive far more about the world than animals do.  Humans have the capacity to imagine situations other than their immediate real-life situation.  They have the capacity to remember clearly what situations they have had at other times and what has led them from there to their current situation.  They have the ability to learn about other situations from other humans.  Animals can do none of those things.

In other words, the same intellect that has given humans such an advantage over other animals at satisfying their instincts, also allows humans to imagine satisfying their instincts better than they are, and can cause them to feel disappointed as a result.   Animals don’t suffer that problem.

If we follow the formula for Greek animal happiness, all humans always have Greek animal happiness.  Even a housewife who gets beaten by her husband frequently but refuses to leave him has Greek animal happiness.  She is acting on the belief that remaining in the relationship is giving her the most advantageous ratio of benefit to effort required for her survival and reproduction.  She doesn’t feel emotionally happy, and with good reason:  She has learned at some point that other husbands don’t beat their wives, she can (possibly) remember clearly a time in her life when she wasn’t beaten regularly, and she can imagine what life could be like if she wasn’t beaten.  All of those things turn her Greek animal happiness into Greek human unhappiness.
As you can see, the capacity for human intellect is the source of the difference. If a human could achieve objective Greek human happiness the way animals always possess Greek animal happiness, then the human would have to be emotionally happy, because all other possibilities would’ve been eliminated—the human could not be unhappy, because there would be no obstacles to his happiness.

Is emotional happiness proof of Greek human happiness?  Given that all animals always possess Greek animal happiness, and all humans always  possess Greek animal happiness, if a human can combine that Greek animal happiness with feelings of happiness, that must mean that the human is fulfilling his survival and reproductive instincts by the most efficient ratio of perceived benefit to effort required, and within the scope of his capacity to perceive time as a dimension, to think in the abstract, and to communicate ideas with other humans, he feels satisfied with the results.  Therefore, emotional happiness combined with Greek animal happiness must equal Greek human happiness.

Here again we hit upon the definition of emotion as the synthesis of animal instinct with human intellect.  All animals possess instincts, all animals always pursue their instincts, and that always yields Greek animal happiness.  All humans always have Greek animal happiness, and when combined with their capacity for human intellect in a manner that is satisfactory to the person, produce emotional happiness.  Emotional happiness therefore is the product of human intellect.
Other emotional responses include relaxation in non-stressful situations, friendship toward other humans, and sexual arousal in reproductive-type situations.  Emotions are human instincts, and all humans are instinctively motivated by only two goals—survival and reproduction—combined with the three parts of human intellect.

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »

Now that I’ve gone to such great lengths to insist that all human behavior is motivated by exactly two instincts, let’s see how that theory holds up against some other people’s studies of human motivation.

In education, you learn about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, which has five levels. In small business management you learn a different hierarchy of five human motivators.  Disaster!

Or is it?

Both are very valuable for outlining human priorities, which gives us a context in which to compare the causes and effects of priorities to each other.   The first relates to short-term goals, which is why it’s used in education, the second relates to long-term goals, which is why it’s used in business and marketing.

In the Maslow Hierarchy, beginning with the highest priority they are:  Survival, Safety, Social Acceptance, Self Actualization (or Ego), and Self Fulfillment.  The five human motivators are similar in many respects.  Beginning with the highest priority again, they are:  Survival, Reproduction, Social Acceptance, Self Gratification, and Self Fulfillment.

In a day-to-day setting, safety is a part of survival.  If you break that down from overall goals to short-term goals, physiological survival is a greater motivator than danger, because survival is a guarantee of life or death, but safety is only a risk of life or death.  People who are hungry will risk their safety to find food, for instance, just like the deer that wander into human settlements in search of food during a food shortage.

Supposedly, students aren’t thinking about reproduction during the course of a lesson, or at least, if they are it can’t usually be worked into a lesson, so we don’t bother with in the Maslow Hierarchy.  On the long term, however, since it is the evolutionary goal of all life to survive and reproduce itself, instincts for reproduction activities are second only to personal survival.
Social acceptance is always important, because people are social animals just like every other species of primate.  That’s the basis for tribalism, and I devote an entire chapter to it.

On the long term, recreational pleasure comes next, and the pursuit of one’s highest abilities comes last.  In the short-term (classroom setting), people first need to feel like they’ve accomplished something, then need to feel like they’ve accomplished everything they possibly can.   Pleasure is covered in the Emotion chapter, and the rest is covered in the Journey of Life chapter.

If we compile the two lists, it gives us one list with seven items:  Survival, safety, reproduction, social needs, self-gratification, self actualization, and self fulfillment.  Survival is first on the five human motivators list, and it includes physical and safety needs, the first two items on the Maslow list.  Because those two items are separated on the Maslow list, they’re worth listing separately here.  Reproduction is the second of the five human motivators, and every biologist alive today would have to agree with that.  Both lists give social needs as the third item.  That is followed by self actualization and self gratification on the two lists, so there is no obvious way to prioritize one over the other on the compiled list.  Personally, I would have to guess that either could come first, depending on the individual.  As you shall see in a moment, self actualization produces a form of self gratification, so I think it’s safest to list self gratification first.

Self-fulfillment is the last item on both lists, so it is last item on the compiled list.
How can I be so sure that all human motivations can fit into just seven categories?   Simple.  I live in America in 2005.  If there was anything else in life that people felt was important, marketers would’ve found it by now, wouldn’t they?

How can there be seven items on the compiled list of human motivators when all human behavior is motivated by only two instincts?

The first two items on the compiled lists represent immediate and short-term physical survival; so let me assume those need no further explanation.  Any person in the world could be killed on any given day, but on any given day, the vast majority of people in the world are not  killed.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that isn’t simply by coincidence.

Reproduction covers all romantic and sexual behavior.  I cover this in depth in the Relationships chapter, but for now suffice it to say that any of those behaviors are motivated by the urge to procreate.   Recreational/non-reproductive sex is still motivated by reproduction, for the simple reason that sex has to be enjoyable to ensure that all the members of a species will keep having it and thereby continue to reproduce.  Asking someone for a date is motivated by reproduction, because theoretically it could lead to reproduction, or at least to recreational sex.  Checking out girls or boys at a shopping mall is even motivated by reproduction, because you are identifying desirable mates.  Bearing and raising children is motivated by the reproductive instinct, so is adopting children, taking care of grandchildren, and so on.  Anything involving having sex, bringing children into the world, or keeping family members alive and healthy (especially younger generations) is motivated by the reproductive instinct.

Social needs follow reproduction needs.  As I will explain in detail in the Tribalism chapter, tribalism—the social interaction of humans—is a long-term survival instinct.  People feel safer when they belong to a tribe than when they don’t, because in hunter-gatherer society, belonging to a tribe benefits the survival interests of the individual.  Monkeys in the wild are social animals for the same reason.

Self-gratification is the physiological reward for the satisfaction of any instinct.  If your cat can lie sprawled in a patch of sunlight in the middle of your living room floor, it means that he doesn’t need to be hunting for food, searching for shelter, or running from a dog.  If a human can enjoy going to a baseball game or a ballet or an expensive restaurant, it means that he has made enough money to survive on and has some left over.  Alternately, it could mean that he has a good enough credit rating to be able to afford to those things.  The point is, one way or another he feels secure enough in his survival to be able to relax and enjoy himself.

Self-gratification is any physiological reaction that makes a person feel good.  To follow the list to this point, staying warm, dry, well fed, and safe all make people feel good, so does having sex and making friends.  All of those things satisfy instincts of the person. There are other activities that make people feel good that don’t fall into the four lower levels of the hierarchy, but as you will see, those things all fall into the next two levels of the hierarchy.

Drugs and alcohol produce self-gratification artificially, without satisfying any other instincts, by directly altering the physio-chemical makeup of the individual.  Any form of self-gratification that results from anything other than direct artificial physio-chemical stimulation occurs through the satisfaction of some instinct. If you don’t believe me, scientists have even studied the evolutionary significance of religion and art and connected those to the satisfaction of instincts.  I’m not kidding.  Religion gets the next three whole chapters, plus a large part of the Rituals chapter.  I’ll explain the evolutionary significance of art in the Emotions chapter.

Self-actualization and self-fulfillment both relate to the uses of human potential.  Self-fulfillment is the ultimate extension of self-actualization. All humans have potentials.  All humans have instincts.  All humans are motivated by their instincts to use their potentials to their fullest extent, in the same way that every other animal is motivated by their instincts to use their potentials to their fullest extents.  Each individual human’s potentials are unique, but all humans are motivated by their survival instinct to use whatever potentials they have to satisfy their instincts.  Therefore, regardless of what potentials a person has, it is instinctive for that person to use them.

Humans can remember how they have used their abilities, plan how they will use their abilities, and contemplate how they could use their abilities. They can remember how their instincts have been satisfied, they can plan how to satisfy their instincts, and they can imagine how their instincts could be satisfied. The use of abilities to the furthest extents of their potentials is the definition of Greek human happiness.  Therefore, self-fulfillment is synonymous with the achievement of Greek human happiness in any given ability, and self-actualization is a partial form of Greek human happiness.  Using abilities and using them to their fullest extent makes people feel satisfied—makes them feel good inside—and that yields self-gratification.
If people feel unhappy about being unable to satisfy their instincts with their abilities, it can be caused by one of two things.  First of all, it can be a sign that the person isn’t using their abilities to their fullest potential.  That will motivate the person to use their abilities more and/or to figure out how to use their abilities more, and that will cause them to satisfy their instincts in the end.  Alternately, it can be caused by the person over-projecting their instincts beyond their abilities to satisfy their instincts.  I cover this in greater detail elsewhere.  For now, just remember the hungry cougar hunting the deer:  His hunger isn’t satisfied until he catches the deer, but his survival instinct is satisfied as soon as he begins hunting.  Or as the Rolling Stones put it:  “You can’t always get what you want/ But if you try sometimes/ You just might find/ You get what you need.”

Filed under: w: 42 Vol. I by Ezra
No Comments »