Dimensions of Value: Maslow's Hierarchy

After writing it, I felt that this post was a bit "over the top". I thought of deleting it, but decided to leave it in, since it actually does connect to many of other ideas. It's just that I don't think our situation is quite this dark. I've got to stay away from Russian novels ...

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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

We really should give a nod to Maslow's attempt to visualize the human situation in terms of "needs", which are almost the same thing as "values". Let's discuss Maslow's ideas - assuming that we somehow manage to "value" what we "need". My general impression is that Maslow's summary is somewhat misleading. It tempts us to over-simplify human motivation and overlook the fantastic complexity of these "needs". Once we shift to "values" and unpack the "values", we wind up with something that can actually explain practical things like political parties, war, persistent poverty, "fake news" and all the other things that seem to arise from the depths of human nature to form "social hurricanes" that leave us feeling helpless and in need to at least understand what's going on.

Maslow's "analysis" doesn't seem to provide much immediate help to individuals wondering how to organize their lives and priorities. But that's not the worst of it.

Maslow's cute diagram was flashed on the screen in millions of "Social Studies" classes around the world as a quick and dirty way of getting the issue out of the way and providing teachers with a good source of multiple choice questions. But it is horribly misleading. It is a lie to imagine that the business of human life boils down to the individual seeking to meet individual needs. The fact is that one must choose between (a) abandoning society naked savage in the jungle or (b) absorbing oneself into the society which may or may not allow you to live.

NETWORKS

We all exist within social networks. We also find ourselves in a physical environment which, for many of us, is man-made and (therefore) a world of ideas-made-real. We are born into such a world that has been designed by society to meet the needs Maslow discusses. In fact, we find ourselves in a "matrix" that society provides for us to meet at least the bottom 3 tiers of Maslow's pyramid. For most of us, whether we struggle to meet our "needs" at the bottom of the pyramid or the top is a matter that society makes for us.

This tells us that our fundamental need (and value) is to be accepted into a network of social relationships that provide for our needs in detail. Through this web of relationships, we acquire food, money, safety and all the other good things that keep us (and our society) going. Of course, it remains to discuss how these networks and value-transactions work in real life.

It turns out that there is not an exact correspondence between "need" and "value". We value lots of things we don't need - such as drugs, sugar, jewelry, viral videos, alcohol, new cars ... We also tend to not value things we actually do need, such as a healthy mind and body. It is more fruitful to analyze values than needs. For example, where, in Maslo's, hierarchy do we find cocaine? Prostitution? Child soldiers? Nuclear weapons? Obesity? There seems to be something missing in the assumption that human life is mainly concerned with meeting our needs.

SELF ACTUALIZATION (TOP NEED)

I have always found this term to be an annoying catchphrase of the self-involved California hippy. We still hear it a lot - mostly from people who have - through skepticism or laziness - rejected all other value systems and wound up with "be all you can be". Back when Maslow did this work, the choice seemed to be between "religion" (discredited) and nihilism. A false choice.

Maslow is here assuming that humans, in general, do not regard self-sacrifice and/or self-denial as a value. For example, he's assuming that humans won't be happy living as Muslims, Christians, following Confucious, joining the armed services or devoting their life to service of any kind.   The challenge for Maslow would be to ask if the ultimate need in human life is not to lose oneself in a higher goal - something that transcends the self. I seem to remember that Maslo himself acknowledged the ultimate need is to lose oneself in something beyond yourself - transcendence. I also remember that this was taken in a kind of mystical "hippy" kind of way.

To a certain degree, one needs to surrender to this need/value if one expects to be a valued member of a group. On a very basic level, this means that one may be asked to clean toilets in a MacDonalds in order to make enough money to eat. The fact is that society rather strongly forces the individual into a role that serves society at large. In post-WW II America, this pressure was widely resented. Although we may regard some spectacular examples of "self-made men" "being all they can be", if we scratch the surface, we find people who are massively supported by society for the ends of society itself. Many others who have followed this path are known as criminals - especially psychopaths. The self-actualizing individual who rises to the top of a major corporation effectively surrenders himself to the myopic and psychopathic goals of the corporation (profit at all cost). Maslow's hierarchy makes no distinction between the people we call heroes and the people we call criminals.

I'm sure that Maslo imagined that everyone would become a philosopher like him if they could only succeed in "being all they could be". The fact is that freezing to death on the street is about all that some of us can manage. Beyond that, we all seem to need a lot of help. Some of us have come to the conclusion that the highest values of life are to be found with "a little help from our friends". Not just finding but providing help.

THE FOURTH TIER - BEING ACCEPTED

This is the need to "fit in". Maslow provides few details about how this is achieved, but we can see that the general idea is to find one's place in the social network to maximize the flow of value transfer between the individual and those who he/she is connected by bonds of employment, debt, business, obligation etc.  We note that Maslow makes no distinction between "fitting in" with the Mafia, fitting in with the Republican Party and fitting in with a campaign to save the whales. Doesn't it matter which group we "fit in" with? Doesn't it matter what we surrender, as individuals, to "fit in"?

The nature of these bonds needs to be "unpacked" if we are to wind up with a general view of what motivates human beings, which seems to be what Maslow is going for.

A CULTURE'S PYRAMID OF VALUES

Perhaps I will come back and put this in a pretty picture, but let's consider things from the point of view of a "network" or "superorganism" S, starting at the bottom. We can think of S as being a corporation, or nation-state.

Physiological

The continued existence of S doesn't depend on the survival of individuals - they are expendable. What needs to be preserved is the agreed-to system of values that prevent mass defection of individuals required to keep things going. Workers who are no longer needed can be off-loaded and taken care of like other externalized costs, like pollution and wounded soldiers. They are somebody else's problem. 

Safety

Again, the individual is expendable. The safety of S preempts the safety of the individual. The individual must be convinced that the bravest thing to do is to die for S, or at least work himself/herself to death for S at the expense of any personal benefit. Beyond a certain size, the corporation is immune from prosecution for any crimes it may commit. The nation-state need never acknowledge crimes committed in its name. Superorganisms are immortal or at least act as if they have a natural right to exist and grow forever.

Love/Belonging

It is necessary for S to maintain some kind of social cohesion by promoting values that make sense to individuals (both employees and customers) but may or may not be actually promoted in practice by S. A Strong feeling of "us" and "them" is necessary. "They" can be killed or starve to death or slowly killed by a poison produced by S. Whatever is good for "us" (namely S) is good. It is essential that unanimity be achieved on this score. Those individuals who challenge the common value system must be suppressed or expelled. "They" must handle the "externalities", preferably without taxing S.

Esteem

Depending on the type of S, it's called "protecting the brand". The national "brand" -  "national pride" should preempt the individual's desire to live. The "brand" should seek to preempt the individual's freedom of choice as a consumer. The actual benefit to the consumer (from Maslow's pyramid) is irrelevant. The consumer must be lead to think there is a benefit - even a need. Ideally, the consumer will see benefit from the bare brand itself - on a flag pole or T-shirt for example.

Self Actualization

A corporation becomes the ideal corporation by crushing competition, driving down wages or possibly eliminating human workers entirely. It dictates prices and convinces consumers to buy its products. All risks and costs are externalized. Ideally, the corporation can buy back its own shares, eliminating the need for pesky shareholders demanding return. It can suck up capital by leveraged finance, offloading risk by issuing bonds and buying insurance. The ideal corporation has no employees and no shareholders. It has no tangible product but accumulates profit and grows solely by amassing patent rights and leveraged financial capital. It is everyone's absentee landlord. It manages to "tax" every financial transaction while outsourcing all risk. Imagine one bank absorbing all the others and being run by a machine. Sometimes I think of this as being the ultimate state of Amazon. Just a machine that taxes the movement of goods from manufacturer to consumer, all done by robots and a vast machine we call the "cloud".

The ideal nation-state has crushed all other nations and dominates the world. Outside its own borders, there are only "they". Inside its borders, a tiny cadre has the precarious honor of being "us". All others are "they", under constant suspicion of treason. Imagine Stalin's Soviet Union covering the world. Imagine, in this world, all material goods being crap sold by Amazon.

The ideal nation-state and the ideal corporation are actually the same thing. The goals of a nation-state are best served by co-opting the corporation. The goals of the corporation are best served by absorbing the nation-state. Such a nation-state is called a "kleptocracy". To me, Russia looks like it "wants" to be like this. Where do the "oligarchs" end and the nation of Russia begin?

THE DARK TRUTH

In the real world, there is nothing to prevent superorganisms from taking over the planet while humans chase after Maslow's "needs". The world of "Terminator" is not as far-fetched as it seems. We need to understand that we are not the only sentient beings on the planet. The "needs" of every cell in my body are met by a system they don't understand. In fact, the organism called "me" doesn't understand much about the process either. But the analogy breaks down when we consider that I am (presumably) "smarter" than any of the cells in my body. The survival of all these cells is (mostly) up to me. But the "superorganisms" of which we are apart are usually pretty stupid. Their rules of growth and survival seem to make them even more destructive and stupid.

It is important to understand that "morality" exists only on our scale of things. 

I'll leave it there. I've talked myself into feeling rather unsafe. A nice friendly chat is called for. Besides, I'm kinda hungry...

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More dark thoughts on the malignant influence of superorganisms may be found here

Interlude March, 2017

Back in 1969, I appeared in Grenoble, France, eager to start on my Ph. D. in Computer Science at what was then the leading IBM research center in Europe. It did not go well.

At the time, the idea of "Time Sharing" on a computer was in its infancy. Very few people had access to the big mainframes using slow text-only terminals. Yet, I imagined a time when everyone would have access to the same computer system. All of human knowledge would be accessible. People could share their projects and extend that knowledge together, online. The group mind of humanity would be implemented in a vast computer network.

In short, I imagined the Internet. World Wide Web 3.0, a bit beyond what we have now. Artificial Intelligence (my field) played a big role in this vision. I called it the "Spirit System".

The idea quite literally blew my mind. Weakened by days without sleep and culture shock I had the first of my numerous "nervous breakdowns". My hopes of an academic career were over.

Even now, after a dozen or so of these episodes, I quibble with health care workers over what to call what happened. For years, I was "schizophrenic" and medicated as such. Eventually, I was re-classified into to the newly-fashionable category of "bipolar", even though I did not "check all the boxes" - specifically not being subject to the depressive side of the condition and therefore not swinging between two states, as the word "bipolar" and the definition of "Bipolar I" requires*. Nonetheless, treatments for "bipolar illness" were more or less successful (Lithium and Prozac). The problem was that, over the long term, they were destroying my kidneys. I switched to another medication, but that's another story.

So if I don't like the "bipolar" term, what is going on with me? It's pretty much textbook mania. When I'm sick, I score "off the charts" on the mania test. Normally, such as now, I'm "normal". So there is nothing strange about what's happening. There is something wrong and it has a name. I like the test I referred to because it hints at what mania feels like from the inside.

Mania is an affective disorder. Mania gives its sufferers a unique glimpse into the importance of affect - the way you feel about what you are experiencing.  I'm encouraged to write about this right now because I recently ran across the writings of Antonio Damasio. To make a very long story short, Damasio uses extensive research into the way the brain works to support his theory that feelings are the very root of human experience in the world. Everything we experience is "marked" by feelings. In the case of mania, the world is basically painted in technicolor feelings. It's just an amazing, exciting place. As an episode unfolds, feelings overwhelm "rational" perception and the sufferer slips into psychosis - the endpoint of quite a few mental disturbances, including the one that afflicts the current President of the United States (malignant narcissism).

There is a philosophical issue with the definition of psychosis since it involves the idea of "reality" and the failure to grasp it like the rest of us do (so-called "objective reality" which probably doesn't exist). But in practice, the condition is crystal clear.

Damasio is relevant to me and this blog in several ways. For one thing, his writings fit into a much wider set of ideas that support and extend the concept behind this blog - the "superorganism" or "dragon". For another, it's important that I watch out for the feeling of elation as the last few pieces of this theory snap into place. In the past, this kind of situation has lead to a "manic break" where great ideas drive me off the cliff into psychosis. Not this time. I'm feeling fine and I'm very aware that there is a ton of work that remains to flesh out these ideas, connect them, document them and explain them. There is nothing crazy or spooky here - just a lot of notable thinkers talking around the concept of the superorganism groping for words to describe it - the appropriate set of analogies.

To kick off a new phase in this project, I have changed the title of this blog slightly, from "programmable ape" to "supermind" (URL "emergentsupermind). Of course, this choice is limited by the titles available, but the shift also reflects the fact that the "programmability" of humans is just one way to see the emergence of the supermind.  Another key concept is the loss of individual identity, exhaustively documented in Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence", which provides not only an expert analysis of the phenomenon but also a harrowing account of the suffering caused by this loss. There is also a shift in metaphors from a "superorganism" to a "supermind". As organisms ourselves, we are attracted to thinking of something "superior" as like us, an organism. This thinking is behind the old idea of God: the old man in the sky. The supermind is not smart: primitive rage and cruelty are more common that the "wisdom of crowds". Sen provides an essential ingredient to my project: a reason to care. It's not just a new way of seeing things: it's a way of seeing a danger that poses an immediate threat us all, precisely by crushing the individual human being into "little boxes" of "identity".

I have not failed to notice the similarity between the 2017 "supermind" and 1969 "Spirit system", but there are many, many differences between the two ideas. I have not been thinking of this for 48 years for nothing.
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* "Old timers" with a hard-won experience with mental illness are constantly annoyed with the professionals are unaware of the history of their classifications - which often dance to the tune of  drug companies who have a pill that "treats" a previously un-classified condition. Prozac being the best-known example ("treating" mild depression). Valium and Viagra are another. There is some evidence that "treatment" for whatever it was that afflicted me in Grenoble actually caused the epidemic what was eventually called "bipolar illness". All that can't distract us from the fact that mental illness is real, serious and debilitating. But we are not very good at treating it, nor do we have a convincing explanation of what causes the majority of common problems. That said, we are a lot better off than we were even in 1950.

Notes on the Super Person 2 - Inside the head

One intuitive obstacle to the idea of the super person is our own sense of being "one" person inside our skulls. While this is not directly relevant to the idea of the super person, it may help to think more clearly about how realistic this idea of the unitary self is.

This leads us into he fascinating and controversial area of "consciousness". I usually consider this subject as overlapping with 2 others, namely "attention" and "working memory". Attention and working memory have the advantage that they can, in some sense, be located in the brain by fMRI scanning - correlating the areas of the brain that are active with reports or experiments on the subject. These studies suffer from the common assumption that the area of the brain that "lights up" is "responsible" for the function in question. It is more accurate to say that the area that lights up is involved in the function - part of a circuit or system that correlates with the function in question.

Especially when we consider this wider context, consciousness, attention and working memory seem to involve many areas of the brain areas that change from moment to moment. Bottom line, there is no one area of the brain that we can pin own as responsible for the experience we call consciousness. On this evidence, some claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain, therefore the self and consciousness is an illusion.

The question I'm asking in these notes is: are all the components of the system inside the head? in Obviously, you can't have an experience without quite a lot going on your head, but is this all that's needed? In a trivial sense, we observe that consciousness is generally about something - usually external to the brain. Even if it's about the body (a sore toe, for example), it's still about something external to the brain.

Does it matter if we can at least hypothetically imagine consciousness that is disconnected with the real world? I'd say it doesn't. My contention is that, by and large, our usual experience is about something external. This is even true when we are talking to ourselves "in our heads", since I maintain that language itself can be considered to be external. This point is one that requires a bit of unpacking below, but for now, we can glimpse the outline of an argument that the outside world is an important (perhaps necessary) element of the flow of experience we call consciousness. If so, this means that we do not exist solely in our heads but, in fact, extend to some degree into the environment - both past an present. We also seem to extend into that parallel universe that Plato called the world of "forms" - more real than the world. What we'd call the world of logic or mathematics. That should also be part of our "unpacking" project.

An analogy may help. Suppose a Martian scientist landed on Earth an became interested in a chattering TV set, constantly displaying an infinite stream of pictures. He unplugs it, and comes to the conclusion that all the talk and pictures are coming from the power chord. His partner says, no, and disassembles the device, discovering essential components such as speakers and the LCD screen. Of course, we know that all this investigation is pointless since we know that the "content" is coming over the air (or cable). The "content" is what matters and, beyond that, the source of the content is what matters: other humans.

In this analogy, we picture the human mind as being in the business of receiving, processing and re-transmitting "content" from the environment. As with the TV, the details of the brain's systems and modules are a detail. What matters is "content". We may consider human language as analogous to a transmission protocol - necessary to support human-to-human communication.

More precisely, we are interested in the function of the brain that receives, processes and re-transmits messages relevant to a group of human beings, just as the cells in our bodies communicate with each other with the ultimate goal (unknown to the cells) of maintaining the welfare of the body. Returning to our analogy, no amount of information concerning my brain cells will tell anything meaningful about who I am or what I am experiencing at the moment without some kind of reference to the "outside world".

The job of our brains, then, is to tie us tightly us into the environment and each other. This is what is going on in "experience".

Notes on the Super Person 1

In everyday speech, "I" and "we" mean different things. but the boundaries can be fuzzy. To our ear, the "Royal We" is somewhat comical - the Queen seems to be bound by custom never to use "I". Yet, historically, the Crown is, in some sense, the personification of the state. The Queen is, in some sense, always plural.

In everyday life, we are often presented with an individual claiming to represent something larger than themselves - sometimes an annoyingly vague group, as in "we don't allow blue jeans on the golf course".

Many, if not most, of the important decisions in our lives are made in cooperation with some kind of "we". "We" decide to get married, hopefully to a person our respective families will accept into the family "we". On the job, we work with others in teams, often on jobs that are initiated behind closed doors by shady high-status individuals. If we serve in the military, our team work is rigidly structured. The structure itself is remarkably stable even though the work itself sometimes seems to proceed in fits and starts as portrayed by the phrases often heard among the ranks "FUBAR" and "Hurry up and wait". Military organizations tackle their jobs with a creaky kind of efficiency (perhaps the best efficiency possible considering they are made up of human beings). In all human organizations, we see a hierarchy of organization and control, corresponding to military platoons, companies, regiments an divisions. We see it as natural and inevitable that any organization of any size will have an "organization chart" that parcels out responsibilities and control into "chunks" that result in comprehensible work plans for individual human beings, but result in the overall organization pursuing tasks of mind boggling complexity, such as governing a country.

For most of us, our jobs and daily experience are conducted in the context of some kind of collective - sometimes more than one overlapping collective. For example, we can be both family members and employees - citizens and rap fans.

It is interesting to ask if there is any sense in which we act truly on our own - independent of any kind of "we". Such action would, for example, require that we don't use language, since language is a vast social project conducted over centuries. For example, I can't write this blog entry without actively participating in the "we" of English speakers. And, of course, I assume the existence of the reader, "you", which makes us a "we".

But suppose I and engaging in an all-absorbing wordless task like sailing a boat? Unless I built the boat without reference to other boats and sailed it without training, I am again participating in a wordless "we" that, in spite of its silence, has a powerful effect on my experience of sailing. This consideration creeps into the simplest of acts, such as opening a door or flushing a toilet.

In an important sense, I am never alone. I am always part of a "we".

Many claim that mindfulness meditation can, for a few moments at least, free us from the chatter of inner thoughts and the influence of preconceptions to experience the world as it "really is", truly on our own. I am skeptical. When I hear accounts of the "emptiness" experienced in deep meditation, I still hear a mind fully equipped with knowledge of the world acquired through many years of instruction from culture. I maintain that we cannot see the world, make any decision or perform any action in a truly independent way. "I" am always "we". This is not to say that "I" don't exist at all. It is rather to say that "I" am a unique combination of influences. For example, my ideas tend to draw from the teachings of more than 200 people I can name. However, even if some other person knew the same 200 people, the combination of ideas, the priority and interaction between these ideas would be differnent from my own.

Evolution of the Super Person

When we introduce a new type of living entity into our lexicon, there is a temptation to spread some scientific fairy dust over the idea with a discussion of evolution.

I will resist the usual trope of explaining how groups are "adaptive" and how they arise in chimpanzees. To me, such discussions seem to use evolutionary ideas in a circular and ultimately uninformative way.

Instead, let's just look at how groups compete, survive and spawn other groups. We will leave aside the issue of whether membership in a group is "natural" or "adaptive" to the human "component". In passing, I must observe that membership in particular groups (such as ISIS) can be very far from "adaptive" to the one who joins the group. He'd be wiser to stay home. Groups live and die by rules of their own.

The structure of a group can be viewed as a "meme", which, according to [Dawson] has evolutionary tendencies of its own. For example, the structure of a corporation in Canada is determined by law. Basically, there is a template for it which all corporations must follow. If the corporation issues public shares, the communications between the shareholders and the board is also governed by a set of laws. All these laws change over time in what may be regarded as "evolutionary" - tinkering with the rules to outlaw corporations that don't "work" according to the society that the corporation finds itself embedded in.

We also find corporations imitating each other. The organization chart of one legal firm or major oil company will resemble those of others in the same business. Nations tend to sort themselves out with some form of "government" in charge. There are not an infinite number of ways of doing this. There are even fewer ways to organize the armed forces of a Nation.

By and large, we can see analogue to "descent with modification" that is key to Darwinian evolution. Groups of all sorts tend to originate, formalize and grow according to a pattern that has been established by the real-world experience of other groups.

What about survival, the other element of Darwinian evolution? How do some groups survive and others fade away? Here, as in the biological world, we see a bewildering range of survival strategies. As in the world of living things, raw competition (survival of the fittest) plays a role along side of changing environments, predation, parasitism and symbiosis.

All this would seem to vaguely support my main thesis that the human group is, in some sense, alive in its own right. But caution is called for. Dawkins made a strong case that "memes" (ideas) obeyed Darwinian rules, but, to many, the idea turned out to be a bit too fuzzy to be productive. It was hard to use "meme theory" to predict anything interesting - certainly nothing interesting that could not be described using old-fashioned concepts like "culture".

Accordingly, I regard discussion of "evolution" with connection to the Super Person to be somewhat a dead end, especially considering all the hot air that is emitted about evolution with respect to things like "the extended phenotype" (behavior).