Ivan Bogachev

If we take a group of people and make them vote for a single leader, what pattern of behavior would they choose? Is this election even fair, or is the winner always predetermined?

Let's be honest. Would you like a lazy customer (11+14) to be the president? I doubt that he would work hard for society. Adaptive victim (9+15) perhaps? Let's ignore problems and cry together! No? Maybe we should try something more proactive? Obsessed gladiator (2+5) is an excellent choice. We haven't seen enough guillotines on the streets recently. No again? Interesting.

Following your logic, we'll discard helpless conformists (10+16) for being full of fear and incapable of ruling, fools (13) for wasting resources, invisible prisoners (1+7) for bringing uncontrollable aggression, genius philosophers (3+8) for following forbidden desires and provocations...

Wait, wait, wait. You lead us to a bizarre conclusion. Out of 16 patterns, only three seem to be more or less acceptable to the majority. Artist (6), recidivist (4), and apologetic one (12).

And they're not equal yet. Artist requires an environment that will ignore him. We can find examples of local governors who create beautiful places to live out of small towns in the middle of nowhere, but the moment we get into big politics with its publicity and pressure, this choice practically disappears.

This leaves us with two candidates. Recidivist destroys things to protect something. Apologetic one mirrors that, and invests in reconstruction. And they can succeed each other in a cycle.

Dangerous events happen. People need protection and vote for a recidivist. His precise destruction is welcomed at first, but he can't stop. People get frustrated and choose the opposite. Something bad happens eventually, and history repeats itself.

Naturally, two mirrored patterns create the same conflict of logic that we see in schizophrenia. Executive organs that try to cheat and use them simultaneously always work awkwardly.

Since recidivist is the only proactive pattern in the pair, we expect to see more annoying marketing from that side. Have you noticed how these guys on TV constantly talk about protecting you from something that you never saw? It's not a coincidence.

To put the final nail in the coffin, none of the patterns in the last column of our table, including these two, utilize long-term memory. If you feel like the chosen politicians have a memory of a goldfish, they do. This is how patterns work.

Democracy. What can I say? Does it really depend on your vote?

Consciousness and self-awareness. They affect our behavior. But how do you technically recognize yourself in data?

I see a system as conscious if it saves and extracts data in real time. If you stop all data flows, the consciousness goes away. Complex systems may have many data channels connected to their memory. We can see different levels of consciousness, depending on which set of channels is active at the moment.

If you have a memory, a bunch of sensors, and data channels to connect everything, you may start to react to things in a structured manner. On the lower levels of evolution, where random mutations affect everything, we would expect to see all sorts of odd reactions. They don't have to make any logical sense to us. Natural selection will take care of them.

If your system is functionally independent from other things, it would be very convenient to mark sensors or channels as internal or external. You get that mutation, sooner or later.

These are simple binary flags. It definitely works on the level of bacteria. They don't necessarily have enough brains to understand what they're doing in detail, but they collect data and use it to guide their behavior in the environment.

At this moment your system is aware of the fact that there is you and there is an environment. And it's not the same. This is the most primal version of self-awareness that you can get.

You would probably say that this is far from our human self-awareness. Yes. But we add more internal sensors and connect data channels in loops. This is where the real magic begins.

You may observe data extraction from your memory. Now you're aware that you're aware. You can clearly see your selfies being used. Some people would probably argue that this is where you get the "real" consciousness and self-awareness.

If you have intelligence and work with rules, you may observe their creation. You make your own decisions! This data comes from your internal channels. It's yours! It's your will! Philosophers may call this an illusion, in the sense that this will is not free from prior causes, but it's a functional part of the system anyway. You won't be a human without it.

New sensors. More loops. More data. More rules. More bizarre effects. Eventually you pass the mirror test. But. It's not a functional self-awareness test. It's an IQ test. It's not enough to distinguish yourself from the environment. That's easy. You need to work with Euclidean relations in your data to pass the mirror test. We have to be aware of that.

P.S.: I would expect biological organisms to get self-awareness first, acquire all the abilities to guide their behavior, and then gradually evolve to the level of complex reasoning. However, in an artificial environment, we can design a program that will make all the required computations to formally pass the mirror test with no internal sensors and related self-interpretations. It'll never survive natural selection, but it can make us misinterpret the test results.

Emotions are a signaling part of the self-diagnosing system. Normally, you connect it to the decision-making unit and pass data to it. If that unit doesn't use this data, some will call it an intellectualization. It's like a defense, but the symptoms aren't specific. The causes can be different.

First situation. Your system works fine, but your resources are limited. You need to be efficient. In this case, you may play with priorities and mark some data as not important.

This is what they teach you to do in traditional martial arts. You're aware of your status, but you don't use that data to make decisions at the moment. Good news or bad ones. It doesn't matter. Keep the balance. You need intelligence here.

Second situation. You got an overamplified signal in the system. It can easily fry your decision-making unit. Your fuses stop it automatically. No intelligence. Just a fuse.

You lose all data from some part of your system. It's not because you created a logical rule to ignore it, but because your safety system got triggered. Your data can still be there, but you can't get to it until your fuses reset. You may measure tension in the system and feel isolated in some sense.

Third situation. Your system lost energy. This is what we expect to see in schizophrenia, when the completely opposite processes annihilate each other and constantly waste energy.

You have to cut power in some places. Self-monitoring system is optional, so you can safely shut it down and keep the main system running. Your fuses are intact. You don't have any rules to ignore data. You just don't have any data for now.

Interestingly enough, sick people, who understand that some system doesn't work and adapt their rules in advance, can be suspiciously stable in catastrophic environments. Everybody around is getting overloaded and confused and they don't.

Also, there is a fourth scenario, where the physical damage to data channels prevents you from using information. It's a whole new level of problems, but it gives us similar results.

These situations look almost identical from the outside. You use your upper brain and you don't get unbalanced by data of the specific type. It's easy to accidentally see them as one.

Next time you blame somebody for being not emotional enough, pay attention to details. Not every person is identical, and the most popular second scenario for intellectualization doesn't require intelligence at all. Keep that in mind.

People in different groups may have conflicting values, but in all cases we create rules to preserve what's important for us. Also, we need resources. We have to protect our society from direct destruction, but keep it refueled at the same time.

For every danger, we're trying to find a counterbalance that would be strong enough to stop it, but not too strong. We need to keep access to our resources. It's a tricky balance.

If you build a village in the middle of a desert to protect it from fire, your folks will have problems with hunting and foraging. If you put everybody in prison for minor violations, you'll have no workers to run your factories. If you reject all scary technologies, you'll likely have to spend more time doing your job in an old-fashioned way.

In management, we have to choose between weak control with more resources and strict control with fewer resources. In many cases you'll have a tempting choice to do things against the rules, off the record, to get something inaccessible.

Determinists often reference the experiment with judges. If they eat well, they are more likely to vote for minor punishments, and vice versa. More resources come together with less control.

But all these rules for preservation and trials have nothing to do with human agency, or whatever you'll call it. We easily create rules for other species, for machines, for everything we have. When we evaluate the danger that comes from some subject, we think about our preservation, but not metaphysics.

What we can do, if a subject has intelligence, is to check the rules in his memory. If he has the rules to violate our rules, we get rid of him. If he doesn't have any rules to violate our rules, we may have a discussion. We can use his resources for our own benefit. Or not. We may have a rule to not negotiate.

You don't need an absolute god-like free will that violates all laws of physics to work with rules and order. Even in the world of machines, they may have tasks for self-preservation and resources to manage. There is nothing supernatural here.

However, free will in a more grounded sense, like the mechanism that mutates data in memory, is important. A subject that possesses the ability to change his own behavior has a great risk of becoming a rebel and destroying our system from the inside. And it doesn't matter if he uses his own agency or has some predetermined instructions to bring the cosmic chaos on our heads. He has enough freedom to cause problems anyway.

Will you vote to lock him away in advance to protect the order?

Scientific theories tend to be much simpler than IT systems. On the frontiers of science, demons hide themselves in novelty, but not in complexity. We use Occam's razor and appreciate elegant solutions for our problems.

In contrast, programmers rarely create completely new things these days, but the complexity of our systems can be overwhelming. We constantly work on the methods to decrease it. This is one of the main topics for debates in the field.

We use all sorts of design patterns to organize large amounts of code. They help a lot. No need to keep the whole project in your head all the time. But also we have discussions on how to write instructions that would be easy to understand.

If you have millions of lines of code in the project, the last thing you want is to read every one of them several times to get the logic. You don't write code for machines, you write it for people. By writing simple code you help your colleagues to spend their resources on actual development, instead of solving your puzzles with zero business value.

When you increase cognitive complexity with no reason, you create technical debt. It gradually slows down the development process. Increases the costs. It can kill the project eventually. There are rare exceptions where we accept dirty code in some utils to get better performance, but they're write-only things. Once they start to work, you leave them alone and never get back.

Some people used to argue that complex tasks require complex code, or that precision in algorithms makes code dense, or that abstract concepts are hard to understand by their nature, and that you need to grow as a professional to get it. None of this is true.

The moment we started to introduce the tools for static code analysis, to automatically prevent the obfuscated code from entering our projects, we realized that complex systems can be written in simple language. Of course, you need to learn the basics. You need to know the words. But the code can be easy to understand. When you write intricate code, it's likely not because you actually need it, it's because you choose it.

When I look at the language in academic publications, I feel like it's much more complex than it should be. Often, I have to read the same sentence many times to understand it. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the language.

It seems like people use the same arguments to protect this obscure language that programmers used back in the days to protect their bad code. But why?

Evolution is all about the increasing complexity of the systems. How do we increase complexity? We combine things. And mutate them. Combine. Mutate. Combine. Mutate. Combine. Mutate. Etc.

There is a confusing saying, "evolution by natural selection". It sounds almost like "complexity increases because of destruction". It does not. It increases because of combinations and mutations. Destruction can create the alternative paths to follow within the tree of combinations, but it does not create the combinations themselves.

If we imagine the world without destruction, the architect's playground, and we wait for eons, we will see all the possible systems being created. But. Not everything can be created within the universe. There are limits. There are rules. There is a natural order. We cannot deny physics.

This means not only that some things cannot be technically constructed, but also that some existing systems can have only one possible architecture. When we study a complex system that we don't understand, we can ask an important question: how to design this thing, and is there any other way to do that?

We can dive into a black-box penetration testing of sorts. We collect data from inputs and outputs of the system, we learn about the limitations, we make educated guesses on how it is being constructed inside, and then we crack it. This approach can be applied to the psyche of the living organisms, not only to the IT systems. Although I expect that some psychologists would say that this idea is borderline insane.

Let's say we observe some behavior. What parts and processes are the necessary ingredients to build it? Are there many ways to build it? Or maybe not? Some things cannot happen simultaneously. Some things require other things. Some things have inevitable consequences. We may have different brain chemistry, different environments, different ways to convert energy, but these are ripples on the water. The options in the very core of the psyche are limited.

I believe that understanding the inevitable parts of the tree of combinations, the universal modules and processes in the psyche, that do not depend on anything except basic physics and logic, is the way to resolve the current theory crisis in psychology.

In the fields of psychiatry and psychology, we have a lot of problems right now. Causes of the diseases are not really determined. Symptoms are vague and hard to differentiate. Treatments often look like an alchemy. Maybe it will work. Maybe not. Who knows. Maybe another will work. Or not. Psychological theories allow some very loose interpretations, where the chemical processes behind the processes in the psyche should be very precise. In the world of neurochemistry, we have a lot of scattered pieces of information, but they don't explain how all these things work together.

We definitely need some fresh eyes. So I started the project that is supposed to bring new approaches, new ways to interpret the collected information in the world of psychiatry. I use the ideas from the completely different fields, from ancient philosophy to modern computer science and engineering, to shake things up a bit.

The first part of the project was published as the evolutionary theory of behavior. This is a theory that connects parts of the psyche, basic impulses, observable patterns of behavior, diseases, and effects in social groups, attaching everything to one purely mechanical model.

The second part of the project is the search for this model, or a similar one, in the field of neurochemistry. Instead of trying to explain every little fact on its own, I look for a similar graph of connections between things. My main hypothesis is that if we can connect things from the outside, a similar graph of connections should be somewhere on the inside. If we find it, it will show us the exact places where the diseases begin. This is a long shot. I know. But it is worth trying.