6  Experiment

We are going to observe the Earth from 3rd person point of view in our theory. We can view the Earth as a 3D space filled with matter.

An object is an identifiable collection of matter, which may be constrained by an identifiable boundary, and may move as a unit by translation or rotation, in 3-dimensional space. In the 3D space the boundaries of two objects may not overlap at any point in time.

We are classifying objects into 3 types for easier discussion - resource, data, agent. These terms are familiar for the reader so will be easier to explain future concepts.

Agents are some object which are making changes in the Earth. Agents can actively make decisions (eg humans) or influenced by other active agents (eg a human throwing a rock to hit another human, in this context that rock is acting as a passive agent).

Data is a special kind of object that supports 3 operations - storage, computation, and transfer.

Every data must be physically stored somewhere in the Earth. Based on existing data, agents can compute and produce new data. And data can be transferred to other storages. All active agents are making decisions based on the data stored in their database. A computation is happening, and they can transfer some data to other databases of other agents to affect how they act.

In an objective sense, we only care about the changes in the physical world, and to make changes in the physical world, agents have tools like hands and legs which can change the position of other matters.

Resource is an object that has some value in context of the survival of the agents.

Objects can’t jump through space without traversing physically, hence movement speed is an essential parameter in the computations.

6.1 Evolution as our fundamental scientific theory

From an evolutionary standpoint, the primary goal of every living agent is to ensure their survival, and for that, they are trying to maintain a resource threshold Rmin sufficient for survival. For that, they are gathering new resources, improving existing resources, and protecting existing ones. More weightage is given towards protecting existing resources than gathering new ones, which is usually known as status quo bias.

Goal of having these resources in storage is to gain something in the future. The dilemma of exploration vs exploitation - explore more resources (that too takes resources without immediate usage) or exploit what you already have.

Resources are spent during decision making due to computation of data or when using tools like hands and legs to make changes in the physical world. The agents want to save resources as much as possible so they want certainty before taking any action. They want trusted resources at cheap cost.

So for decision making, we have two very important factors - trust and cost. Trust gets more weightage than cost, as survival is more important. So agents want to save resources and want trusted resources, so they prefer abstractions as much as possible. Abstraction is like cached value, some agent computed something and verified the usefulness of that value, and we are using that to save doing the same computation again. Abstraction can be from others or can be discovered by ourselves, like saving our own habits for future usage. For the same reason, both positive and negative habits can persist over a long time (status quo bias), because we prefer trusting existing working patterns than taking risks to figure out new habits, and those habits are encoded in the neurons so hard to ignore.

  1. Point 1: When using these abstractions, we are using binary thinking. During System 1 thinking, we only care about whether that abstraction is useful or non-useful for us. At that moment, we don’t try to validate that. When we are trying to validate that, we call that self-reflection, but that takes System 2 thinking.

  2. Point 2: Now, agents want certainty. For that, hope is very important, and we don’t want to waste computation on chasing something we can’t get. When we are unsure about potential resource loss in the future from outside attacks, that makes us uncertain and anxious.

    When we are uncertain about our survival, we only focus on immediate goals because if we are not surviving in the long term, then why save the resources for future? It makes us too defensive; we only spend everything on defense.

That means we are not accumulating new resources and losing what we already have, but we can’t go beyond that shell, and that starts the negative spiral. Defenses are net negative in general in an ideal world without competition and better to reduce as much as possible.

Now, evolutionarily speaking, our minds have trained to focus on scarce resources, and what is abundant we ignore because we know we can get that anytime. So it is impossible to stay satisfied with what we have, and that leads to the arms race. Everyone is focusing on what is scarce, and that leads to the competition.

For this competition, vying for resources leads to conflicts, and emotions are the indicator to tell us whether we are winning or losing the conflict over gaining that resource. If we are winning, you get positive emotions; if we are losing, we get negative emotions.

Coming from Scrivener natural editing

  1. (Planning horizon) Resource abundance compared to Rmin? Trust on available resources (both self and others) getting more if needed?

    Planning for how long? Plan long only if I will survive long, else why waste resource on something that I will never live to utilize? Employ system 1 or system 2 thinking?

  2. (Recon) Available actions to take next? Which resources needs to be defended? Which resources can we target? Explore or exploit?

  3. (System 1 estimation) How much resources is needed to take the next action? Means gathering, improving, or protecting the resource in consideration.

The next section is a demonstration of native Scrivener list feature

  1. Hey world: First paragraph.
  2. Hi: Resource abundance compared to the trust. Resource abundance compared to the trust. Hey world next paragraph. You have to put a line between the Then another line. Continuing this. Continuing this.
  3. Next item: How much resources is needed to take an extraction?

Hey world, continue.