Reasoning: The Human Machine

 (This post is part of series of posts, beginning here. It is recommended they be read collectively, and in order.) 

Speaking of models, it is useful to model the human as a machine – specifically a computing machine, such as the one you may be using to read this, be it a personal computer, a laptop/tablet, or a phone.

 

There are three components in particular, which are useful to consider in this model:

1. The Hardware
2. The Operating System
3. The Applications

All three of these components are necessary, however, you are generally only vaguely aware of the first two, and then, usually only when they are malfunctioning. It the applications – chrome/firefox/edge, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. which you spend your time in, and which you interact directly with - give your focus to.

But let's begin at the bottom and work our way up…

 

The Hardware:

The hardware is the physical, tangible part of the system – the part that gets the actual work done. It comes in an array of shapes and sizes, and each has its particular benefits and drawbacks.

A phone is tiny and portable. It is incredibly convenient for ‘on-the-go’ activities; great for listening to music while you work out, or quickly looking up some information, or connecting with friends while you are out and about. The screen is tiny however, making it less effective for reviewing large amounts of data in a spreadsheet, or typing up a document, or enjoying a movie in the ‘theater experience’.

The personal computer is much bigger. It gives you plenty of viewing space for large documents, or vision-filling videos. It can have considerably more computing power, and other capabilities as well. It is definitely not portable, however.

The laptop or tablet occupies a space in between these two, providing some of the benefits of both, though not as well as either.

Apart from the specific features which meet your specific needs, however, you don’t actually care about the particular design, nearly as much as you think you do. You’ve been conditioned – by your peers, by advertising propaganda – to have preferences for specific colors, lines, curves, etc… But in reality these aesthetic characteristics do little (or nothing) to impact how the system works, and your preferences can change over time, based on the marketing and peer influences you are exposed to, and by your inaccurate association of performance issues to those aesthetics.

Your human hardware was not selected by you. It was designed primarily by genetics, with some epigenetic influences. We tamper with it some; we have some ability to fix certain performance issues (fix damaged heart valves, replace failing kidneys, remove cancerous cells…). We also perform alterations which are strictly aesthetic in nature (tattoos, piercings, face-lifts, etc...). There are limits to what we can do, and most of these alterations come with certain consequences, which we should carefully consider.

 

The Operating system:

The operating system provides the interface between the hardware and the applications. When working properly, it is virtually invisible to you. You use an application, called a Graphical User Interface (or GUI), which sits on top of the operating system, and hides it form you. And you use that application only just to launch the applications you are actually interested in.

The operating system then, just sits in the background, collecting, storing, and presenting information for you, and making sure the various components keep ticking along.

There are different Operating Systems, but apart from socialized or marketed preferences, or a comfort level which comes from prior use, you don’t really care whether the operating system is Windows, Android, Apple. Linux, or something else altogether, as long as your applications are there, and function the way you expect them to. With experience, the right peer influences, and/or marketing propaganda, your preferences can be altered, and you can adjust and adapt.

Like your human hardware, your human operating system was not of your choosing. It came preloaded, via genetics and epigenetics. And for most everyone, it has roughly the same key functionality and priorities. Keep in mind, the Human Operating System is the part that ‘just works’ in the background.

It is reasonable to model the top three priorities for this operating system as:

1.       Seek pleasure – which in this case refers to ‘feel good’ chemicals which are released in your brain when you engage in activities which meet basic system needs (eat, sleep, reproduce…)

2.       Avoid pain – Which refers to removing yourself from situations which are triggering various sensors in your body, which you registers are discomfort (too hot, too cold, too stabby, etc…), and avoiding situations which we believe will trigger those sensors.

3.       Conserve energy – do the above without expending unnecessary effort.

(It is difficult to assign a specific priority to these, as we will in some instances endure certain pains for pleasure (running a marathon, for instance), and forgo certain pleasures to avoid pain.)

There are also some built-in tendencies, which are common across the board as well, though individual degree of expression of these tendencies may vary from barely there, to detrimentally present:

 

Filtering – There is too much information coming at us for us to be able to process and comprehend it all. It would overload us. For this reason, our operating system develops filtering techniques in order to ‘ignore’ information which it deems as not presently relevant. To see an example of this. Try telling your kids to go do the dishes, right in the middle of a climactic moment of a movie they are watching.

Grouping/Discriminating – With so much information available to us, it is necessary to group things together based on certain characteristics, to make keeping track of them more manageable. A simple example; a child who had had a traumatic experience with a Doberman, will also fear a golden retriever, a poodle, or any other dog, because they recognize a dog as a dog, regardless of breed or present behavior. A dog happily waging its tail is no less frightening than a dog which is barking and growling. 

We use this capability to avoid experiencing every possible type of pain, by recognizing an unfamiliar item as 'similar to' an object with which we are familiar. We can then use that past experience to guide our interaction with this new object (i.e. “It hurt when I touched the candle flame, so I will avoid touching the campfire flame.”)

 Pattern-seeking – We innately look for patterns – look for the familiar. This is useful as it allows us to make s_nse of inc_mpl_te information (see what I did there?). It allows us to perceive and model things which we cannot fully see, or physically comprehend. Gravitational force, for instance – we can’t see it, but we have repeatedly observed the pattern of released objects falling to the ground and are thus able to draw conclusions about it, and even develop equations defining its observed behavior, allowing us to predict the outcomes of activities where gravity has influence (i.e. launching a rocket into space…)

 

 

The Applications:

This is the part you actually care about; the things that do the specific things, that you want to do. You don’t open your phone to stare at the Apple or Android operating system, you open your phone to stare at the Tik Tok video, or Facebook post, or Instagram reel, or the web page of funny memes, or the YouTube video of cats, or….

An interesting thing about your human applications – YOU wrote them.

That’s right, you didn’t come preloaded with applications. You wrote them – are writing them as you go.

For instance, you wrote the walking application many years ago, when you were still in diapers.

First, you had to write the sitting and balancing applications. Perhaps you don’t remember the many times you tipped over as you focused intently on learning how to decode the information from your muscle, eye, and inner-ear sensors, to understand in which direction and by how much you were tipping. You’ve likely forgotten the countless hours you spent focused on learning how to communicate the commands to the appropriate muscles, to expand or contract with the appropriate amount of force, to counteract that tipping.

Once you mastered that, you worked on the standing application, which required refinements to the balancing application, as new appendages (your legs) were introduced to the equation – a whole new set of muscles to include in the balance-adjustment process.

Then you finally began working on shifting balance between one leg and the other, allowing you to raise, move, then lower one leg at a time to propel you forward (ish. Once again, the balancing application required updating and refining).

As you grew older, this application became stable enough that you stopped paying attention to the details, and now you mainly let it run in the background, while you do other things (like watch videos on your phone). Occasionally as a result of this multi-tasking, you may encounter errors with your walking application, such as running into closed doors, or bumping into other people...

This is, of course, a model. It simplifies some things, it filters, groups, discriminates.... But the ideas presented here are universal enough to be generally applicable to every human machine, in making observations and predictions about their behavior. Generally speaking.