Ivan Bogachev

Recently, I witnessed an interesting discussion about natural selection. The vast majority of participants supported an idea that depression provides benefits to our species. We were selected to be able to have it from time to time.

The main argument was that an organism in depression saves energy and reduces risks by not participating in dangerous endeavors and interactions. It's a simple survival strategy.

There are bits of evidence that support that story. It seems convincing. However, if we interpret it from the perspective of my work, we may come to a different conclusion.

Complexity of systems increases with time. Combinations. Mutations. You know the drill. It's a long process. We get our 16 patterns of behavior eventually. We can do various things and can work efficiently in different circumstances.

Flexibility of behavior may or may not be beneficial on its own, but it becomes extremely important when we build the next levels of complexity. Groups. Societies. Civilization. We need all our patterns of behavior to construct the world we know.

There is an issue, or course. Sophisticated system of patterns requires switches. Small and fragile. They can be destroyed by force. They can get stuck or start to wobble. This is where we get a variety of malfunctions, depression included.

Psychiatric diseases are inevitable at our level. We weren't selected to have one disease or another because it's cool to be sick. We just became too complex to avoid them.

Species with simple designs, with one pattern to follow, if any, would be immune to depression. No switches. No problems. However, their civilization will require symbiotic connections between many species with different default patterns.

Technically, it should be possible, but these species will have to share their communication protocols and synchronize their long-term goals. It's a tricky task, especially for biological systems that depend on random mutations in their evolution. Chances won't be in their favor.

I think we should be careful when speculating about natural selection and the benefits of having diseases. It's easy to convince ourselves of something because it sounds good, but completely miss the engineering aspects of that phenomenon.

It's much more interesting to design different species from scratch and see all the technical limitations. It becomes obvious that sometimes systems are vulnerable by design.

We suffer from a 99 languages problem. Let's take free will for instance. One word. But. Psychologists may say that you use it to change your life. Physicists say it's impossible. Politics say it exists, but we don't want you to have it. Priests argue about freedom from god and mortal sins. Philosophers... you know, philosophers. It's a kindergarten. Every boy says that he is the real man and knows the truth.

In every field people look at the same universe. They just have different coordinate systems. We should be able to use geometric transformations to move all data into one system.

It's not just a simple linguistic translation word to word, but a projection, system to system. We can keep most of the relationships between data points and make a coherent picture using data from several fields simultaneously.

All coordinate systems should be interchangeable in our context. We can make a choice using our aesthetic preferences alone, but some options will be more convenient in practice.

For example, in physics, we have an axis from determinism towards randomness. It's hard to work with it. Data tends to be stretched between two extremes. It's either "pretty sure it's determined" or "pretty sure it's not". Our computers don't have enough precision to work with things in between.

It looks like you need free will to get away from determinism, but then you are immediately thrown into randomness. We can't work efficiently with complex models of reality in the middle.

If we get some inspiration from pagans, we may choose another axis, from order to chaos. It's similar, but it's not the same one. Data appears on our screens in a different shape.

You need the same free will to get away from order, but instead of two extremes we clearly see a spectrum. Some things can be more structured or more chaotic. We can work with that.

Wills look like proper forces now. They push you along the axis, free will in one direction and will to live in the opposite one. We see how they affect our society, how do you use them to make choices, how do you actually build them, why people may see them differently, etc. Everything suddenly works. We can compare our notes and make new theories.

Of course, every boy in the kindergarten will say that this is not the real free will and chaos is not true randomness. Exactly! That's the whole point. This approach is a cosmic compromise. It moves everything in one place and helps to see the big picture. We need it to build new things. Then you can project data back to your home field and use it in the "right" way.

The tree of evolution is gigantic. How do we work with it? We choose a place to start, and travel along the edges from there.

There are two distinct ways of traveling that may show us the process of evolution of matter from different perspectives.

We can choose some place and just walk around. This is what biologists do. They choose some organism and follow it. Mutation happened? We go that way. New environment? Turn over there! Predators ate your test subject? Ouch. Next one!

We may see increasing complexity or decreasing one. We can walk in circles. We observe minor mutations, gradual changes, and collect data with great precision.

We can study non-living systems in the same way. And produce never-ending debates about the borders between life and not life. Technically, the biological evolution, as we know it, is a special case. There are identical processes in different fields. We just may have a personal interest in this one.

Alternatively, we can travel from the center in a straight line. We'll have a constantly increasing complexity, evolution in a general sense, but no good subjects to follow. It's more like a theoretical travel across our data.

Subatomic particles. Self-replication. Single-celled organisms. Don't forget the big things. Stars. Planets. Ocean here. Volcano there. We get ecosystems. Predators eat prey. Machines collect data. And, eventually, we meet an alien civilization with nuclear reactors, space rockets, holy wars, and toilet humor.

This process is the same travel across the same tree, as with biological evolution. We fly at the speed of light in one direction, instead of passively orbiting around some particular subject, but we look at the same universe.

Since we have to travel fast to cover everything, we lose precision. We don't see species-specific details, but get the opportunity to study the universal patterns instead.

Major physical limitations. Logic. Energy conversion cycles. Inevitable structural parts in various systems. Invariants in behavior. Predefined sets of diseases. The longer you look, the weirder it gets. Patterns are literally everywhere.

There is no right or wrong here. Both ways of traveling have their roles in the development of the theory of everything. We need both the big picture and the fine details. Our knowledge is an organism in the same tree at the end. Combine it. Mutate it. Just don't lead it to extinction.

Religious texts are often full of metaphors and oversimplified for the sake of a good story. It's ok. Literature is an art. But these books include insane amounts of information about human psychology. I'll give you a few examples.

Structural parts of the psyche. The id, ego, and superego that we know from psychoanalysis. Actually, they've been with us for millennia. Socrates used to talk about them. Shoulder angel and shoulder devil. Order and chaos. Preservation and change. Will to live and free will. Two forces. Two wills. Two whispering creatures. And "you", stuck in the middle.

Sensory rooms to help people with psychological problems were invented in the 70s, but you can trace them back at least to the time of witch hunts. Most likely they were with us much longer. I'm just not motivated enough to find the origins.

Art therapy? The idea that warriors can neutralize their destructive mindsets by making art when going home to family is not new. Many old pagan rituals look exactly like combinations of art therapy with gestalt therapy. We don't call them like that, but the working principles are identical.

Modern therapists use the same tricks that men of religion used for centuries. They deny this, of course, to look more serious, which is funny, but it's kind of true. And no, I'm not here to criticize. I'm here to whisper.

The knowledge is there. In the books. Our ancestors collected some data for us. We can use it. We just need to translate everything into the modern language of science. Don't make conflicts between science and religion. Make translations. Poets and scholars look at the same world at the end.

In physics, we've made a lot of progress in the last few centuries. When everybody around us is getting magical skin burns, we borrow a Geiger counter from radiology and check everything. We don't blame the invisible evil anymore. Old stories are like outdated theories now. Good enough for a cave man, but not to get the GPS on your phone working. We have better stories now, with more precision.

But in psychology, we still exist on the level of protoscience. We live in the cave. We need to build a stable basement for the field. In our position, it's not wise to discard data just because the authors don't have a PhD.

Read old books. Listen to folks out there. Test their claims. Combine old approaches with fresh observations. Utilize every bit of knowledge we have. It doesn't guarantee success, but it's better than reinventing everything on your own.

The existence of the basic impulses from my theory should be obvious for every person who ever looked at the real people outside. The four parts of the psyche are more of a game of language, rather than a game of logic. They're there to create the right mindset. To show that there are four functional roles to begin with. However, when we connect everything, it may not be obvious why the processes end where they end. Why don't we reconnect them in a different fashion?

The thing is, the processes start exactly where we placed them, according to their roles, but they end where they have to. It may sound counterintuitive, but they just don't have any options here. It feels like everything should be connected to everything, but every process has its requirements. Their directions are already incorporated in their meanings.

We need the environment to ignore it. We need somebody out there to call for help. We need to find the supplies in order to exhaust them. We need space to create new things in it. We need the world of things to annihilate them in various ways. Every process here requires an environment. We can make compromises in some other things, but not here.

Temptation to violate the rules, as well as justification, bending the rules, requires intelligence. We need to work with rules to do these things. Diagnosing and dread require us to operate with rules and consequences. To understand that the environment gives us things we don't deserve, or stops our actions, we have to work with logical rules as well. Every road leads us to the same intelligence. These processes won't work without it.

The helping environment gives us free energy for new unnecessary actions, while danger suggests us to change our course. Counterbalance, protection, and reconstruction are the ways to go against the naturally happening events. Inaction is a change in some indefinitely working program. Everything here pushed us to other ways of doing things. Again, the processes start differently, but they lead to the same place.

Adaptation and goal-oriented destruction are two sides of the same blade, pointed in opposite directions. Both can hurt us. Inflexibility leads to conflicts. Indifferent environment means that there is something wrong. These impulses trigger the self-preservation mechanism. The rest of them are on the other side of the coin. They are notifications that there is a pause in action. It's time to heal and recover. The destination is the same.

We will need to perform some adjustments eventually, polish the wordings to make everything sound better, and grasp the right meanings. Nobody invented all these words to be used in this sort of system. It's a hard linguistic problem, and even the detailed descriptions in the book are not silver bullets, but I hope this explanation will help others to improve this system or build similar models for different processes. Just throw an apple and look where it lands naturally. It shouldn't have a choice.

To eat, or not to eat? That is the question. Or not. Not really, isn't it? The law of conservation of energy suggests that you cannot get energy from nothing, which means that every organism has to include an energy conversion subsystem in it. Every human has to eat. Every mammal. Every living thing. Every alien. Every robot. Every zombie. Everybody. The ways of converting energy can be different, but the process itself has to be there.

In the context of behavior, we have lots of subsystems and actions to keep in mind. It's overwhelming. However, most of them are universal. They're everywhere. Sometimes they're absolutely necessary for every system in our field. Sometimes they're specific for different species, but every individual in the species does the same thing. We can subtract them from every part of the equation. It allows us to concentrate on the things that actually make the difference.

This is the reason why I don't include some systems and actions in my work. They're not specific enough. Right now I'm mapping the data from my theory to the human brain, and it looks like the reward system is everywhere. It works in the same way in every pattern of behavior. It cannot explain any choices. It seems to not be connected to any disease in my list. It's just there. Like a universal artifact of human biology. Should we exclude it from the equations? I'm not sure. Probably.

I would argue that even such an important phenomenon as qualia can be completely irrelevant to the psychology of behavior, because it's all about choices, and the qualia, as we understand it, is a universal artifact.

It would be interesting to notice that all these things are not really under our subjective control. We don't control our hunger and digestion. We cannot choose to not have qualia.

In some cases we can disrupt these universal subsystems and processes. This leads to the diseases that we normally treat as non-psychiatric. They can make you less efficient in whatever you do, or completely prevent you from doing things, but you'll not end up in a nuthouse.

This leads me to thinking that in order to speed things up in the field of psychiatry, we can not only pay more attention to the inevitable, but we can cut. We can cut everything that seems to be everywhere. Mercilessly. Cut. Cut. Cut. There are many things in our brains, but only a small amount of them have something to do with choices and psychiatric diseases. Most of them are just there. It's hard to put away something that you have invested in, but maybe it's time.

Usually, when psychologists talk about the internet and social networks, they ask questions about the changes in our lives. How do all these technologies affect our relationships? How do they affect our IQ? Mental health? Whatever. There are many questions to ask, lots of things to worry about. But there is another side of this coin that seems to be underrepresented in discussions:

How do social networks change the science itself?

Psychologists are whining about a crisis in the field for decades now. No good theories. No good models. Old ones fall apart. We'll never understand the mind. It's way too complex. But. What do you need to make a good model of something? You need data. Good quality data. With all sorts of edge cases, rare cases, exceptions, etc. You need to know what can happen. Even if it happens once in a billion. You don't need statistics. You need proof of existence.

A century ago people were spending their whole lives looking for those rare cases. It's hard work. Most old theories were based on very limited datasets. They just don't cover the whole variety of possible behaviors. But these days, with all our technologies, we can collect everything we need to build good models. We just need our computers and a stable internet connection. People all around the world have smartphones with cameras. They film everything for us. Especially if something looks unusual, we can be sure that somebody will film it and post it online to get likes and subscribers.

Do you know that a dog and a goose can be friends? Monkeys use plants as medicine? Ants farm other insects? There are videos out there, waiting to be studied.

And people... Oh. They do all sorts of things as well. Beautiful. Odd. Terrifying. You can see everything now. If you're not afraid to gaze into the abyss, of course.

We have videos of all sorts of behaviors of humans and animals in their natural habitats. Pure. Raw. No rules. No limits. We have uncensored materials with the people from the darkest criminal corners of society. We have bloggers in the war zones. We have diaries of patients with various psychiatric diseases, who share their first-hand experiences. We have interviews with chiefs of the remote tribes who still live in the Stone Age. All sorts of cultures, religions, professions. Everything. All this data just waits for us there. Social networks became the literal heaven for psychologists.

It's time to stop whining. Go create something.

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.

Let's imagine we're architects. We have a task to design a machine, a replicant, that will mimic human behavior. Or some animal. Let's say we have a "free will" module. We can plug it into the replicant. But. What is the functional role of this module?

The average answer to this question in my environment is that this module gives the replicant the ability to rebel. To give a finger. To go outside the path that was prepared for him. Burn the bridges. Do things in his own way. If you provide him a 50/50 choice to press a left or right button, he will give you a finger and he will not press any of them. Without this module, he will be a robotic slave, repeating the same instructions over and over. Following the master's orders. With it, the replicant will always have the alternative options to consider in his decision-making unit.

To perform its role, the module has to be connected to the memory mechanism. It is supposed to extend or override the saved instructions, how to behave, with something outside of that memory.

First, this means that the "free will" module can work only with the systems of specific complexity. You need a memory mechanism to be present and filled with instructions. At least a read-only memory. Atoms don't have it. Stars don't have it. Human has. Dog has. Replicant will have.

Second, the "free will" module, by its design, leads to the alternative contradictory processes inside the replicant. They will be destructive either to his memory, or some other parts, including the complete self-destruction, or to his environment. The additional self-preservation module will help to balance things out in the long run. Also, this "free will" module is not the one that will make the replicant follow the same rules for a long period of time. Including the moral rules. We will have to add another module for that.

From the perspective of the architects, it doesn't really matter how exactly this module will work inside, as long as it fulfills its functional role. We can put the true randomness inside. It can be some determined but unpredictable system. It can be an antenna that receives a stream of data from the other side of the universe. Engineers will provide us options. As long as this mechanism is not being controlled directly from the memory of the replicant, it will work. It will make the replicant rebel.

The point of this passage is not to talk about the free will specifically, but to point a finger at the mindset that seems to be lacking in the western field of philosophy. Think like an architect. Think about systems. Modules. Functional roles. Connections. Use cases. Generalized patterns. This is the way to see the big picture, even if you don't possess the final engineering details. This mindset helps to bring different concepts together and to guide the further research, instead of producing all these endless debates that don't lead to any new information whatsoever.

Right now I'm working on the second part of my crazy project. I use my theory of behavior as a guide to reinterpret and reconnect the available data from the worlds of neuroscience and psychiatry.

Everything looks promising so far. Various facts are being attached to the central model of the theory without any conflicts. But it's a long run. The model still can be wrong. And I worry, that even if everything works as expected, we will hit the wall at some moment. The available data is not unending. It's too soon to say anything.

Meanwhile, I got a question in my head. Is this science? The project itself. Or it's more like an alchemy of sorts. Playing dice with the devil, looking for the ancient wisdom lying in the plain sight, with a goal to find the cure to all diseases?

On the one hand, I make observations, use the information from the scientific journals, make hypothesis, test them, set up experiments, use all sorts of data analysis techniques, and get other professionals to review things. At the current second stage the project looks more and more like a "proper science".

On the other hand, it's like a house of cards. The basement of it, the theory of behavior itself, is essentially derived from the highly subjective observations from the mental patients and priests from various religions. Of course, it's not only that, but still. A lot of things in the very core of it cannot be properly measured at this moment. We need them to construct the mechanical model that connects the patterns of behavior and diseases, and it kind of works, but we have to assume some things without any solid proof. This makes the whole thing not 100% scientific. Or, better to say, 0% scientific. It's quite an interesting situation.