The Human OS

The Invisible Process of How We Unconsciously Pick Our Goals in Life, What Reinforces Them, Where We Get Our Beliefs and How We Can Change Them (Sometimes)

As many as 12 million Americans believe lizards disguised as people secretly run the world.

You've probably seen dozens of variants of the lizard people conspiracy.  Maybe you saw the hilarious take on Inside Job a riff on conspiracy theorist David Icke, who manages to mash up the death of princess Diana and JFK, 9/11, Illuminati, the global elites, and transdimensional lizard aliens into a single unified crackpot theory of the world.

Homer Simpson once unmasked Clinton and Bob Dole as hideous space aliens on Tree House of Horror:

In a horrifying twist, the alien Dole says "It's a two party system, you have to vote for one of us" and the crowd whispers "he's right, we have to. It is a two party system" and they proceed to vote in their own enslavement by the aliens.

If you grew up in the 1980s you might remember “V”, the thinly disguised cold war/anti-immigrant conspiracy miniseries, about an alien lizard invasion. 

The heroes had to figure out who was a real person and who was a hideous monster in disguise. 

But nobody really believes that nonsense right?

Wrong. People do believe it.

12 million people is a lot of people walking around believing in shapeshifting lizards.  How do we make sense of a figure like that?  That number is really hard to understand when we look at it through the lens of traditional psychology.

Even if the 2013 Public Policy poll on conspiracies is wildly off base and the people taking the call were just having the pollsters on and only 6 million people or even 1 million people believe it, that's still a lot of people.

Shouldn't the number be zero or so vanishingly small that it barely registers?

Unfortunately, if you look deeply into what makes people tick the answer is no. 

Not only is believing bat shit crazy stuff commonplace, it's part of people's default programming at every level.  

Just ask Davíð Oddsson, who managed to crash Iceland's entire economy in 2008 due to utter mismanagement as central bank governor but who still believed he knew exactly what he was doing and that everyone else was wrong.

As the 2008 financial crisis ripped though the world, Iceland got hit incredibly hard. According to, Adam Grant, in the book "Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know", “all three of its major private commercial banks defaulted and its currency collapsed. Relative to the size of its economy, the country faced the worst financial meltdown in human history."

Oddsson was responsible for much of the crisis. Grant goes on:

"When an economist was asked to name the three people most responsible for Iceland’s bankruptcy, she nominated Davíð Oddsson for all three spots. As Iceland’s prime minister from 1991 to 2004, Oddsson put the country’s banks in jeopardy by privatizing them. Then, as governor of Iceland’s central bank from 2005 to 2009, he allowed the banks’ balance sheets to balloon to more than ten times the national GDP. When the people protested his mismanagement, Oddsson refused to resign and had to be forced out by Parliament."

How did Oddsson get into one of the most powerful economic positions in the country? Did he study economics in depth? Had he run some of the largest companies in the world?

Nope.

Before getting into politics he had a comedy show on the radio, went to law school and wrote short stories. Yet somehow he managed to get appointed as governor of Iceland's central bank and prime minister.

And what did he believe after he managed to crash the economy and get forced out by Parliament?

No matter how much reality failed to match what was in his head, he kept right on believing he knew exactly what he was doing.

That's why in 2016, he announced his candidacy for president of Iceland and Grant quotes him as saying:

“My experience and knowledge, which is considerable, could go well with this office.”

If you've ever wondered why people think truly crazy things, believe it with all their heart and can warp anything they see or hear as further confirmation that they were right all along, then keep reading.

To understand why you just have to understand a little about how we're wired, how we make meaning for ourselves and how we respond to joy and pain.

The Mechanisms of the Mind

The very same mechanisms that causes one person to believe in lizard people is the same mechanism at work in who you love, what you think about yourself and others, who you vote for, what you would die for, how you spend your Saturdays, and whether you believe you should work tremendously hard and make a lot of money or travel the world.

Statistically, you're probably not one of the people who believe in the lizard people conspiracy. Your brain intuitively recognizes it as something that doesn't make any sense. You may have joked about the lizard people taking over but you don't seriously believe it's real.

But what do we say about the 12 million people who do believe it real? 

Are they crazy? Stupid? Evil? Just kidding? All of the above?

What do we think about David Icke, who's now in his 70s and who's been espousing conspiracy theories for 30 plus years?  He's traveled the world and given talks in 25 countries. People show up to these talks.  If we eliminate a percentage of those people who show up for laughs, we have to assume that many of the people showing up or buying his books take his ideas seriously.  Why else do you spend $20 of your hard earned money on a book or $50 to go hear someone speak? From Wikipedia:

"According to Lewis and Kahn, Icke...books sold 140,000 copies between 1998 and 2011, at a value of over £2 million.  His book tour for _Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More_ (2010) included a sold-out talk to 2,100 in New York City and £83,000 worth of ticket sales in Melbourne. In October 2012, he spoke for eleven hours to 6,000 people at London's Wembley Arena."

Are all these people crazy too?

The short answer is yes.

Fucking batshit crazy.

Are they stupid?

Yes. That too. If you buy the lizard people conspiracy, it's safe to say that you can proudly count yourself among the stupidest people on the planet, somewhere near the absolute bottom of the Bell curve of intelligence. Congratulations, that's a real achievement!

But the reason these folks are nuts is what's really interesting here.

And all of that crazy comes from one little, invisible thing, at work in the mind of every single person on Earth that determines how we figure out what's "real" and what's "fake," what we believe and don't believe, and what we should do and why.

The human reward function.

Reward Functions

The idea of reward functions comes to us from reinforcement learning (RL) in the world of artificial intelligence. Basically, you give a machine a goal along with rewards or punishments for getting closer or farther away from that goal.

Think of an AI system learning to play chess and getting penalties for losing and rewards for winning and you've got it.

Humans have a reward function too. That's not much of a surprise, since the basic inspiration for reward functions came from behavioral psychology in the early 1900s. Those psychology ideas were based at least partly on animal behaviorism, like rewarding a dog with a treat when he's a good boy and punishing him with a scolding when he's not. 

There's one big difference between us and machines though. Machines are given their goals.

We pick our own goals in life, whether consciously or unconsciously or both.

And that's where things start to get weird. The reason is because we're an open platform and we live in an open system. We can choose whatever we want. We can go in any direction, believe anything, pick any way forward, do anything.

If you want to believe that carrots rule the world, that the sky is made of cheese and plants are telepathically communicating with you, there is nothing inherent in your internal operating system to stop you.

We like to believe that the goal we've consciously or unconsciously chosen is "true." But there is no guarantee that what we've picked is right at all. We pick a goal, based on trillions of inputs and factors but that goal may be incredibly deranged or totally sound or anywhere in between.

You can be rock star, a guru, a model, a serial killer, a politician, a gangster, a garbage collector, a junkie, a painter, a poet, and a million other things in life. You can be good or evil or anything in between. You choose believe climate change is a real problem or a hoax. You can believe the problem is everyone on the left or everyone on the right. You can believe that gravity doesn't exist and that Gremlins are real and that oranges are actually blueberries in disguise.

Not only that, but you will find all kinds of "evidence" to support whatever it is you believe retroactively, as part of your default programming. We like to think that we weigh all the evidence in life and then carefully select what we believe but we don't.

It actually works like this instead:

We hear something, make a near instantaneous judgement based on what we already believe and then filter everything else to fit that belief as quickly as possible.

Here's how author and strategist Anne Duke lays it out in her fantastic book Thinking in Bets:

"This is how we think we form abstract beliefs:

• We hear something;

• We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false;

• only after that We form our belief.

"It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way:

• We hear something;

• We believe it to be true;

• Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false."

That "sometimes" is actually very, very rare. Usually only if we are faced with something truly belief smashing like cancer do we take a look at our beliefs at all.

And yet, even that is often not enough. My aunt smoked and drank her whole life and got throat cancer. She still smokes and drinks.

So, how do we know whether we've chosen something totally insane? How do we figure out we're wrong.

Unfortunately, usually we don't.

We spend so much time defending what we think we know that we never stop long enough to ask questions or expose our beliefs to the light of day.

We might have a basic sanity check filter running as a sub-process in our minds, which develops over time through our life experience, but it only filters the most crazy beliefs at the moment we come across them. The vast majority of us might be able to eliminate something truly insane like believing in lizard people in disguise running the world. But there is no guarantee that even this basic filter develops in our open learning mental model or the number of people who believe in lizard people would be effectively zero.

Even if we do have this baseline filter it doesn't mean most people are good at eliminating all insane paths, just a small number of them. It's basically a brute force filter, not an in depth analyzer of new information. That's because thinking is hard and it costs a lot of energy so we develop lots of low cost shortcuts and heuristics to get through the day without having to burn millions of calories on every single idea that comes across our radar.

And that means many crazy paths will still look like golden roads to us if we're not careful.

But why? Shouldn't it be easy to develop a basic reasoning and bullshit filer? Shouldn't that be a basic feature of our education and our growth? Shouldn't a healthy society be looking to instill that in every kid at a very young age?

Yes but as Jed McKenna writes in Spiritual Warfare:

"If we lived in a society conducive to healthy, normal development, everyone would outgrow childhood in the personality structure at the same time we outgrow it in the physical structure, but there is no such society, and no reason to think there ever will be. We are trapped in a state of self-aware simian consciousness. That is the human condition."

In other words, there is no fully sane society on Earth because every group is made up of a range of people, some of whom haven't developed those sanity heuristics and they go on to teach or influence others who haven’t fully developed yet and the cycle continues indefinitely.

But why is it so hard in general? Shouldn't it be easier to develop better reasoning and sanity checks about the basics of the world? It should but it's not for one big reason:

Uncertainty.

We're faced with a massive amount of uncertainty in this game called life. It's chaos. There’s an infinite number of inputs at any given moment. Trillions upon trillions of colors and sounds and screaming children and movement in every direction.

And we only have limited processing.

Our brain is a magical wetware marvel of evolution but it's still very limited.

Brains filter the massive amount of inputs around us and make decisions and create goals but there is simply no way to process all that information so our brain makes trade offs.

It uses heuristics to cut our information and fills in what it thinks it sees and happens, while focusing our attention on what it believes to be important, which is constantly shifting.

My wife and I were out walking the other day and we saw three different Sharpe dogs after seeing a Sharpe puppy and talking about how cute it was. She was surprised that there were so many Sharpe dogs out that day but the truth was, there weren't any more than there normally are. We just didn't see them before because we weren't on the lookout for them. Our brains simply filtered that information out so they could focus on other things that they thought were more important at the time, a constantly updating algorithm of attention.

When you're faced with the sheer tsunami of information that is life there is no right answer or right belief in any given situation. There's only probability. We're probability machines. We pick the best path forward at any given time and it might be right or wrong and only the outcomes will tell us.

Unlike a simple game of chess, where winning is right and losing is wrong, there is no right choice for picking our goals in life.

If you're lucky in life and you've mistakenly chosen something truly crazy or horrible, you have enough time to course correct and change directions but sometimes you don't. You might decide that drinking gives you meaning in life as a young teenager and that being the biggest drinker at a party is a status symbol, that makes you feel good about yourself. Then you get in a car. If you're lucky you don't crash. But if you do crash and seriously injure yourself or die, it's game over for you. You have no more iterations, no more feedback other than the feedback that you were dead wrong in your choices and now it's too late.

So if there are no right decisions is everything hopeless? Does that mean it doesn't matter what we do or which way we go? At one level, yes, but at a higher level there are better or worse choices in life.

Generally, whatever leads to more personal misery for you and others is a bad choice and whatever leads to more joy and happiness is a better choice.

So we can understand our choices better by their outputs.

But from the standpoint of life itself there are no "right" choices and no choices you are absolutely forced to make. That means you can make bad, dumb, evil, idiotic or foolish decisions as easily as good, sound, sane decisions.

A person can choose to murder and kill and the Universe will not stop them from making that decision if they are determined to do it (don’t do that though). Just like in the open world video game GTA V, you can go on a mass murder spree and there is no peremptory kill switch on your terrible decision. You may face real repercussions afterwards like going to jail for life or getting shot in the head yourself in response to your horrific decision but there is no mechanism in your brain to automatically shut down this terrible impulse before you make those decisions which is why we sometimes get the horror of mass shootings or worse in life.

(Source: Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto V)

We live in a true open world where anything is possible.

That is both terrifying to consider and wonderful too.

Nothing is inherently prevented. Our brains have to find a way to deal with that and to make decisions where nearly anything is possible at any given point in time.

Picking from the Infinite

So how do our brains pick one of those infinite pathways open to us? How do we pick what's "right" for us and wrong in the first place?

This is where it gets really weird.

What causes one person to become obsessed with lizard people controlling us and another one to choose a simple life with a family, driving their kids to school and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunches? What drives one person to become a champion body builder and another person to sit on the couch all day and never go the gym?

When it comes to an AI model, the creators of the model decide its goal and then develop reward and punishment feedback to get it to move towards that goal. 

But nobody defined your goal in life.  Nobody sat down and said, you're going to be an astronaut and I'm going to set up your feedback loop to make sure that happens.

This takes us back to the open system problem again. If I can choose any path in life then it means that from the perspective of the system, there is no inherent right and wrong, no actual meaning. It's a void. Nothingness. The Universe has no default stance. It does not force you in any direction. It lays out all options to you and lets you choose and that means that it has no moral or meaning at a base level.

In other words, life is inherently meaningless. It has no default meaning that is true for all the actors in the game of life at all times.

If you don't believe me, that's alright but let's play a little game to see if what I said is right.

The Meaning of Things

What does the sea mean?

What does a tree mean?

What does a fire mean?

What does a bird meaning?

What does an ant mean?

What does a skyscraper mean?

Go ahead and think about it for a moment.

Think about those things by themselves, without anything else around them as if they were images on a blank background, with nothing else in the Universe to observe them or interact with them.

Think about a skyscraper on a blank background with nothing else around it and nobody else to see it. What meaning does it have?

Do the same for an ant or the sea. If you're finding meaning inherent in the sea, it's because you're inserting yourself as an observer and your own experiences into the picture.

You give it meaning but it has no inherent meaning by itself.

Things mean absolutely nothing in isolation. Without an observer there's no inherent meaning there.

So how is meaning created?

Put two things together and suddenly you have meaning through their interaction.

Light means nothing without dark. It can't exist without the other as contrast and it has no meaning by itself. In reverse, dark means nothing without light.

The skyscraper means nothing by itself and neither does the ant, but as soon as the ant tries to climb the skyscraper the ant has meaning and so does the skyscraper. The skyscraper becomes the obstacle that the ant has to overcome.

A fire is meaningless on its own but a fire sure means something to the tiny creatures trying to escape that fire as it rips through their forest home.

Meaning is created in pairs, by contrast.

(Source: Midjourney 6)

And all this is leading us to how we create our goals in life. We pick our own goals by trying to create that meaning out of nothingness. We have a blank slate to work with and the mind abhors a vacuum and so it inserts meaning into the space. It begins to sift and sort and separate. This is good, this is bad, this is what I want, this is what I don't, this is important, this is not, this has value, this has no value. We're value creators because we project value onto things that have no inherent value on their own.

And that's how we create our goals. As we assign values to something we start to create our prime directive in life, and our sub-directives. We begin to live in service of those values and ideas.

Many factors influence how we ascribe value to anything but ultimately as we give value we start to create our goals.

You pick what's valuable and your goals based on your wiring, your disposition, your chemical makeup, what works and what fails, where you suffer and where people praise you, what's easy and hard and a thousand other factors that lead to your search for meaning in life.

And that leaves us with two basic functions of the human operating system (OS)

1. Our search for meaning

2. Status

The search for meaning is our primary goal and it drives all of our sub-goals like owning a house or painting a picture or trying to make a billion dollars or trying to get laid. Usually this search is entirely unconscious and people are entirely unaware of it.

Now once we have that drive, that goal, we start to build reinforcement for that goal in our minds. Because it has no independent status of its own, no real concrete status, except in our minds, we need to keep finding ways to shore it up and validate it.

Enter the status game.

The status game is our reinforcement learning.

Status in the Open World

We seek status from everything around us for our values and beliefs.

We seek out people who share our beliefs and we signal those beliefs to the world when we talk, walk, act, work, play, search for a partner and everything else we do.

We get feedback from the other players in the game in the form of status, either positive status or negative status. Reward or loss.

The idea is detailed brilliantly in the book, The Status Game, by Wil Stor.

There's also a third kind of status that's negative but that we interpret as positive. It's negative status that we invert in our mind, converting into a positive push to reinforce our goals. Think of getting beat up in school and then using that as fuel in our workouts as we lift weights or learn Kung Fu so we can fight back.

Status applies an invisible reward function to our goals. We get status from other players in the game and from life itself. The taste of a finely cooked meal rewards us with a delightful sensation of pleasure in our mouth and that is status. The look of joy on our friends or partner's face as they eat our food may magnify that reward 10x.

On the flip-side a look of boredom or disgust on our partner's face is a negative reward that may drive us to do better next time we cook or to give up altogether.

These two overlapping features of our base OS create our reward function from the infinite sea of possibilities, narrowing it down to the one possibility in any given situation that we follow until something causes us to change how we derive meaning and get that status hit.

We differ from AIs drastically in this. Current AIs don't alter their goals. The model trainers define the goal and it stays static forever. The reward and punishment lead them towards that goal like a bull by the nose.

But when it comes to humans, our goals update multiple times as we get hit with positive and negative feedback from life.

Maybe you found an early love for singing early in school and you kept practicing and got a part in your grade school play but you messed it up and all the kids laughed at you and booed. You run from the stage crying about that barrage of negative feedback, facing the withering punishment of the crowd and its negative status hit. You go home and bury your head in your hands and decide you'll never sing again, updating your goal in real time.

Suddenly, your goal changes in an instant. It reboots and now you're on a new search for what gives meaning to your life, starting from scratch, adrift on the wind in the sea of the endless possibilities of life.

We're also a little weird in that we don't always respond to negative feedback by altering our course. We might actually embrace the pain and suffering and lean into it. If part of the meaning we choose for ourselves is our ability to stand up to suffering and pain and keep going, then we take that negative feedback and feed on it, using it to fuel us and drive ourselves harder towards our goal.

Take someone like tennis star Daniil Medvedev, who seems to thrive on hatred. Watch him shush the crowd when they boo him, something he's done a bunch of times in different tournaments. Medvedev relishes taking on the booing crowd defiantly, playing the role of the villain, converting that pain into joy to further his chosen goal to be the best at tennis in the world at any cost.

Instead of cowering or quitting, he doubles down on his original goal, determined to be successful at it in spite of the hatred, the hatred making him harder and more angry and that anger in turn fueling long hours on the court practicing to show them all that he'll never quit.

But through all of this, it's safe to say that the very vast majority of people are completely and totally unaware of this process happening inside of them. Instead of seeing themselves as a constantly updating and learning system, they see themselves as complete.

In a way, people are characters in a play, taking on personality traits and goals as they move through life, always staying in character. But unlike an actor, people don't see that they're a character. Instead they identify fully and completely with their character, as if their character is the only way to see life and to see the world. They don't observe the observer. They never look inside and see how they tick. If you ask them to do it, they might even react with rage that you are trying to undo them or make them crazy.

As their meaning develops they begin to see the meaning they've made as "the meaning" or "universal meaning" and they imagine that everyone shares that same meaning and the beliefs that accompany it. Their beliefs are like cement. Where once they were loose and liquid, they harden as they age and pick up experience that determines their character.

In other words, they identify with their character in the game of life completely.

They cannot see outside of it and don't know there is anything beyond it, like the famous thought experiment of Plato where a man is strapped down and staring at shadows on a cave wall. He believes those shadows are all there is to life and he has no idea there is a totally different life outside the cave.

Instead of seeing themselves as a changeable system that can learn new things and update over time, people see themselves as fully static and complete. Their views and opinions congeal into beliefs. Those beliefs solidify and they come to view those beliefs as absolutely sacred. If you want to quickly take someone from reasonable to nuclear, question their beliefs. Most people identify so strongly with their beliefs that they would rather die than give them up.

(Source: Inside Out, by Pixar: “Oh no, all these facts and opinions got all mixed up. Don’t worry, it happens all the time.”)

This is a curious characteristic of the human OS. In AI systems the rules that a model learns are written to their weights but they remain changeable if training starts again. But in humans we don't just write our rules to our brains and our long term memory, we come to believe that set of assumptions and views and ideas are fact. It doesn't matter if reality radically differs from those "facts," we continue to hold those beliefs sacred. This strength of beliefs function is fantastic for making a hardy, long term system that persists in its goals. Our beliefs take on a kind of messianic, God like feeling in our consciousness, as if they are base truth, even though they are nothing more than the accumulated ideas and experiences we've been exposed to over the course of our life compressed into an internal mental world model.

Where this goes wrong is when those beliefs are crazy or do tremendous damage to the people and the world around us. Still we persist in those beliefs and press forward. How else could Mao preside over the mass murder or starvation of 100s of millions of people if not for a particularly virulent strain of belief strength?

But there is another factor at work here. The strength of people's beliefs is directly correlated to another factor.

• Self-awareness

Without self-awareness, people are largely driven by their hidden programming.

Self-awareness acts as a kind of interrupt on your basic programming. It allows you to peer inside and see your own deterministic decision making at work. There is no guarantee that just because you can see clearly you will always be able to override your default programming but without self-awareness there is absolutely no chance at all.

Thinking About Thinking

We think that we think but most people have never actually done any real thinking at all. 

Most people's thoughts are a pre-programmed stream of data from their experience and environment that drives their personality and behavior as reliably as the gears of a watch drive its hands.

Most people are pushed along entirely unconsciously by the construct of their personality that was shaped by the early goals and their rewards and punishments throughout their early life. People tend to form the vast majority of their personality early and it congeals and hardens into beliefs by around the age of 12 or 13. After that they barely change. They're adults in body and name only. Their minds are set in virtual concrete and every experience after that is quickly truncated and shoehorned into their existing goals and beliefs. Think of a 60 year old man in age who is 12 in development and you've got it. Actual adults are vanishingly rare in life.

Self-awareness is only one way to rise above this automaton like existence.

It's a bit like the The Dunning-Kruger effect which causes a person with low skill and knowledge to vastly overestimate their capabilities. That's the official definition. What it actually means is that someone is so lacking in self-awareness that they can't even see the very thing they need to change to get smarter and more competent.

As John Cleese said "the problem is that some people are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. If you're very, very stupid, how would you realize that you're very stupid? You'd need to be relatively intelligent to see that you’re stupid...If you're absolutely no good at something you lack the very skill you need to recognize that you're absolutely no good at it.":

Cleese is a comedian and he's calling it stupidly. That's partially it. He's also calling it intelligence but it's not really that either. If you lack the necessary mental horsepower at a biological level to think clearly and to develop self awareness then you have a vanishingly low chance of developing it. But many people have a ton of mental horsepower and tremendous cleverness and lots of trivia knowledge and yet they never develop any self awareness at all.

So what does it take to develop self-awareness? Where does that spark come from?

To be honest with you I don't know. I don't know what it is that causes someone to "wake up" and develop a sense that they're a program/construct in a wider program. I mean this metaphorically here, not "we live in a simulation" but that we are a kind of system that learns and builds a world model in a wider system that is infinitely vast and chaotic. Life is a system. Life is a game. If we understand the system we can alter the game and how we play it. That's self awareness.

I don't know what it is that causes self-awareness to develop seemingly out of nowhere but I do know that it does not come from innate intelligence or many more people would have it. I have no idea how someone even gets the idea to look inside themselves and think "maybe this isn't all there is?" or "how do I work?" or "what makes me tick?" and "can I change any of it?"

It seems to either happen spontaneously at the individual level or not at all.

Self-awareness is a vanishingly small trait among people. It's so rare that it's even possible to delude yourself that you're incredibly self-aware when you're not remotely self-reflecting. This happens if you come to value self-awareness as a prime directive that gives you meaning in life. It then becomes a belief structure and a status game to pretend that you have self awareness or secret knowledge that nobody else has and yet you have no self-awareness whatsoever and you have to deny anything that would show you that you don't really have it.

People who imagine they have self-awareness are often the most dangerous and delusional of people in the world because as a consequence they imagine that they're more clear than everyone else, know best for everyone else and that everyone else is a kind of sub-human who doesn't mean anything and can be used like a board or a chair.

Think of Davíð Oddsson again, who despite life showing him that he has absolutely no idea how to run an economy or the banking system, still believes that he is more than qualified to lead a country to a better place.

So what is true self-awareness? 

It's the ability to modify our operating system. 

It's means we know we are a mental construct that is created by a random set of toggle switches flipped by our experience in an open world, along with our circumstances, upbringing, biology, where we were born, how we look to ourselves and how other people perceive us, our parents, friends, society and what we're exposed to along the way.

It means we can see our thoughts as nothing particularly important other then a way to process what's happening in our life and environment and then step back from them and realize they're a byproduct of what we experienced or saw or heard in life, not a sacred stream of real truths. We see ourselves and our thoughts as fallible or limited. And it means we can then alter that stream of thoughts permanently if it produces a better life or outcome for us or others.

In practice that boils down to intercepting our usually subconscious thought streams, subjecting them to criticism and finding ways to modify them.

I look at thought modification with an analogy to the computer world:

What thoughts are software, firmware or hardware? 

Software is easy to change, as are some thoughts.  Some thought are more like firmware, much harder to change, though doable.  Other thoughts are hardware and impossible to change. 

The look that we're attracted to in our romantic partners is hardware.  It's written early based on our chemical makeup, our early experiences, sex drive and a thousand other factors. It resists all change, which is why bizarre "pray the gay away" camps that try to change sexual attraction do absolutely nothing and at best achieve self-repression through a series of humiliations and mobilizing fear and self-loathing.

All of these functions work together to create the people we are and they're directly responsible for how society goes crazy from time to time. When you find crazed mobs and crazed ideologies that kill people and do tremendous damage to the world it's easy to reach for the old explanation that these people are evil. At one level they are evil. But calling something evil is unsatisfactory because it offers us no understanding how something evil takes places or starts up in the first place.

Will Stor explains this all perfectly in The Status Game when he talks about the Cultural Revolution in China, which you can see in Netflix's 3 Body Problem opening scene depicting a "struggle session” where preceived enemies of the state and “reactionaries” who believed things that the Party believed to be false were hauled on stage and shouted down, humilitated, beaten and killed before crowds of screaming young people:

It's one of the most confusing, terrifying and horrifying spectacles in human history with millions dying, where armies of young people killed, maimed and terrorized the populace in the name of Communism and a "better" future:

"When the revolution spilled into the streets, Red Guards searched house after house looking for ‘old things’ that, in their vindictive dream of reality, symbolised a secret commitment to the pre-Communist game: scrolls, jewellery, books, tight-fitting jeans, pointed shoes, quilts made in Hong Kong.

"‘Some of us would tear down the walls and look behind the plaster while others seized shovels and picks and tore up the cellars looking for hidden items,’ said Dai. ‘I even recall seeing two or three people in my group squeezing a tube of toothpaste for hidden jewellery.’ While they searched, the occupants were forced to wait outside and confess counter-revolutionary crimes. ‘If the women had long hair, we cut it. Sometimes we would shave half of the hair on a man’s head and defy him to shave the rest of it. Our object was to humiliate these people as much as we could … I thought what we were doing was important; therefore, I enjoyed myself fully. It was a great deal of fun.’

"He found it fun.

"What sense can the standard account of human nature make of this?

"None, so it reaches for the cartoon: Dai was evil, and that was all. But Dai wasn’t a devil in a story, he was an ordinary human with an ordinary brain, and he was playing a status game just as he was designed to. Status depended on conforming not with mere belief, but active belief. Having been warned away from his doubts, he allowed himself to be washed into the nightmare perception of his game:

"'I gradually realised that they were right. The Party could not be wrong and it was my duty to join the struggle. I did so and eventually with enthusiasm.'"

"He believed what he was doing was important. This revolution he’d joined was a status goldrush: its rewards were immense. Of course it was fun. For willing players on the right side of the gun, tyranny always is."

• Storr, Will. The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it (pp. 218-219). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Suicide bombers are motivated by a deep seated desire for revenge on perceived historical and current wrongs. Couple that with a strong input of "honor" taught by a culture and you have the recipe of someone choosing their objective to be kill lots of people and die doing it. The reward function is the imagined adulation of other righteous people and paradise beyond the grave.

Storr goes on to describe an interview with "a Muslim extremist in Indonesia had the following exchange:

"‘What if a rich relative were to give a lot of money to the cause in return for you cancelling or just postponing a martyrdom action?’

"‘Is that a joke? I would throw the money in his face.’

"‘Why?’

"‘Because only in fighting and dying for a cause is there nobility in life.’

"Terrorists believe in their moral virtue, and so do racist colonialists. The imperialists of the British Empire told a self-serving story that said they were leading lower forms of life on a journey towards the promised land of civilisation. Poet Rudyard Kipling captured this sentiment in ‘The White Man’s Burden’: ‘Take up the White Man’s burden / And reap his old reward / The blame of those ye better / The hate of those ye guard / The cry of hosts ye humour / (Ah, slowly!) toward the light.’ The white settlers of the United States believed they, too, were on a civilising mission. For the twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt, ‘the settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages’."

Taking Control of Your Own Life

If you don't understand the invisible drivers of your own behavior and your own beliefs, choices and ideas then there's nothing you can do about it. You're a prisoner of your own mind, like the man strapped down in Plato's cave staring at shadows.

But there's real hope. If you become aware of these inner workings you can start asking real questions.

Who am I?

What's actually true?

Why?

What do I believe that is actually wrong?

What do I think is wrong that is actually right?

How did I get my ideas? Where did they come from? Who put them there? What were their goals?

Do I still want these thoughts in my head?

How can I change?

None of this is easy. When you start to think you have to use paper or digital paper to do it. You can't just think through these things in your head. You need to dedicate time to it. You need to sit down and look at these ideas and examine them, expose them to the light of day. Ask questions. Ask more questions. Try to find something true and don't stop until you find it.

What you'll find, most likely, is that you've never done any actual thinking at all. You've chosen all your thoughts and ideas and beliefs haphazardly, like a ball of tape rolling down a mountain, picking up lint and dust along the way. There was no real reflection there, no consideration of alternatives, no thought that you might be wrong.

You'll likely find this process intensely painful as you discover that more and more of your sacred cows were nothing but phantoms all along. That hits at the heart of what makes us human because we start to question who we are. We identify with our beliefs and that feeling about them forms our sense of self. When we start to peal back the layers of that system we start to have the very unstable and uncertain feeling that we don't know who we are and why we are doing anything that we're doing.

There's also the chance that we fail and run screaming back to the safe comfort of our cherished beliefs because it's much easier. Questioning everything is hard. Very hard. It's dangerous. Much of the world and society is arrayed against it and if you fail or get scared there are armies of people waiting to welcome you back into the warm embrace of the herd.

But on the other side of that question and answering is more freedom to craft your own beliefs, to choose the ones you really want to be there. It's the chance to shape events, to build things, to shape your environment, to understand how things really work and how you work within them. On the other side of that hard work is the chance to manifest your authentic desires rather than slogging along manifesting whatever was given to you along the way by sheer chance.

Without understanding these two prime motivators of human behavior, you can't understand human behavior at all. You can't understand yourself and how you go that way. You can't understand why other people are they way they are and do what they do.

But when you begin to dig deep and look closely at your objective function, at your reward function, at the status game, at what you put meaning on and what you don't, then you gain a brand new power in life:

The ability to change.

Whenever anyone gets this power it's as if they've opened into a totally different world, as if they were caterpillars and they're now butterflies. But there is only one way to go there. You have to get there yourself. You have to peal back the layers of your own mind and ideas. You have to look closely at how you got here and where you're going. Nobody else can do this for you. Nobody else can push you or pull you or make you do it. It's up to you to open your eyes and see rather than imagining the world from behind closed eyes.

There is no way to understand it without doing the process of self-reflection and sharpening your self-awareness.

There are no expert caterpillars on the life of butterflies. There are only expert butterflies on the life of butterflies.

Do it and the world expands.

Don't do it and you're like a leaf blown around by the wind, drifting wherever life pushes you and imaging the whole time that you are the wind.