Your mind as a coalition of social viruses

In my previous article, I talked about behaviors as social viruses that copy themselves into us, what they’re made of, and what it says about why we take risks. An interesting observation is that, if all behaviors are social viruses, does that mean I am a chimera? Is there a me? Is there a you? What controls these things my personality is made of? Are they agents? Can they talk to each other without talking to ‘me’? This is scary.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, we are simply a platform for the evolution of social viruses. As a network of computers, we provide computation resources, which we can call neural time, and they fight each other over it. The more neural time a program recruits, the more processing power it has to recruit more. If one recruits too much, others can turn on it and destroy it.

War then, from the perspective of neural recruitment, is one large social virus eliminating other viruses by destroying their neural time. What if one side of a war is a coalition of different tribes? Then we can say, instead of one large social virus, it is a coalition of many that for whatever reason are attracted to each other.

Let’s say that they are both nations that speak similar languages, while the tribe attacking them speaks a completely different language. This means that cooperation between them is quite easy, while cooperation with the attacking tribe is difficult. You can say, if the attacking tribe will kill one nation that speaks some language, why not kill the others that speak the same language? If one goes, we all go, so we must protect each one — this should be the logic of similar nations when defending each other.

Similar to this, each individual member of any tribe is run by a coalition. If one behavior in your head gets you killed, he takes the others with him. Similarly, if one makes you rich, his friends will also be inside the head of a person who has more time on his hands. To answer the question in the beginning, if you can call an alliance between different agents an agent in itself, then indeed there is a you and a me.

On the other hand, it’s very difficult to control a group of individuals who ‘think for themselves’. Essentially they operate on consensus, and make decisions that are difficult to predict. Like people themselves, you can expect viruses to make political alliances among each other and act with affinity or aversion to other viruses.

Viral affinity

To explain viral affinity, let’s observe it in action. Let’s take a look at how advertisement works. Cigarettes, on paper, shouldn’t exist. There is no benefit, but there is a detriment in wasted time, wasted money, and cancer death. These are risks, which could help it to go viral, however they are quite mundane. You could take all those risks by driving erratically too.

Let’s take a look at another form of risk with cigarettes: the risk of offending others by lighting a cigarette in front of them while they talk to you. You are telling them that this conversation is not important, in fact you are not important, because I have some kind of leverage. The next question is, what kind of leverage?

Let’s take a look at a related virus, the Western gunslinger. His leverage is unexpected violence, and the risk of this made Clint Eastwood famous in the so called Spaghetti Western era. Besides his gun, what did he have with him? A cigarette in his mouth is easy to imagine, if not always true. If you were trying to talk to him about the weather, and he lit one up and just looked at you, what would you do about it? The cigarette is his expression of leverage.

Another cigarette smoking trope is the 1960s business executive. He runs an ad agency, womanizes, and when you sit in his office you can smell the evidence of him letting people know their place. What is his leverage? He is the boss and he has money, and he tells you with a cigarette.

If you watch movies and TV at all, likely the two personas take up some of your neural time. They may not have been friends, but they were both friends with the smoking cigarettes behavior, and where those two went, cigarettes followed. Wherever they went, they reached out a helping hand to their friends and pulled them in.

This means two things:

1. ‘You’ do not decide to become a smoker, as much as some of the viruses that occupy your neural time come to some consensus to invite mutual friend
2. Challenging your own behavior is the challenge of winning against a political alliance, which may or may not be aligned with your benefit
3. You may observe risk, and thus give a vPOR an opportunity to replicate, however if it doesn’t have a cousin already in your head, likely you won’t accept it

Imaginary friends

Sinbad, a popular comedy guy from the 1990s, is the subject of a so called mass hallucination where people say they saw him play a genie in a movie called Shazam. There are no records of such a movie, no home videos, and no financial records. There was, however, a genie movie called Kazaam starring Shaquille O’Neal.

This can be written off as an easy mistake to make, since both men were similar, but if people can hallucinate this, what else can they hallucinate? I think it’s pretty important to understand why this happens.

Let’s say that comedy is a large social virus made out of smaller viruses. Each subvirus is a different type of comedy — slapstick, dry humor, dry black humor. These viruses have an incentive to recruit their friends, and in fact to create friends, as this increases their political leverage as they fight for neural recruitment in the arena of our collective consciousness. Lying, or hallucinating in this case, is similar to a war tactic of exaggerating the size of your army to demoralize your enemy.

If the army-and-comedy marriage of concepts don’t make sense, think about how a politician would market himself. The public image of someone running for office should be treated as a social virus, and the higher its rate of replication, the more popular the candidate.

If a politician is a ‘no nonsense’ person, who stands up to bureaucracy, he may run on an anti lockdown campaign. Whether he was anti lockdown during the pandemic doesn’t matter, what matters is the anti lockdown persona is a subvirus of the no nonsense persona, and so they may make a handshake deal. Their constituents may say they have a ‘memory’ of the candidate being anti lockdown during the pandemic, however with our new perspective on memory, we can comfortably say that, in the endeavor of increasing rate of neural recruitment, which necessarily means kicking established viruses off their neural space, the candidate’s persona projected strength by any means necessary. Even if it meant making up an imaginary friend.

This brings us back to the concept of coercion. If viruses can create hallucinations to project strength, this would be for the purpose of coercing other viruses. If you are a supporter of candidate ‘no nonsense’ Bob, you then cannot bring up Bob’s pro lockdown past as a counter to the anti lockdown hallucination. You are riding with him, and if he loses, you lose. You are coerced but cannot say you are coerced, as if the candidate has a magical power. That word looks familiar.

This opens the door to something called Stockholm syndrome. In 1973, a bank robber took innocent people hostage in Sweden. He put their lives in danger, both threatening them directly and putting them in harms way of the police’s bullets. Upon being released, the hostages wouldn’t leave their captor’s side, and actually refused to testify against them and instead raised money for their defense.

Magic is a powerful thing, and we must be careful that we are not led against ourselves by a harmful social virus.

Bad friends

If you grew up spending most of your time on video games, movies, and music, your neural space is host to viruses who’s job it is to measure and evaluate media. Listening to music is actually work — you are interpreting melody and lyrics, ranking songs on an album, albums of an artist, and artist versus artist. If you get a time consuming job, it means the death of those viruses. Thus, certain useless behaviors are incentivized to create conditions where you do the minimum to sustain them, but you never do so well that you have to kick them out of your head.

Let’s take a look at two seemingly unrelated behaviors: overeating and agoraphobia. Overeating can cause one to look in a way that other people disapprove of, and agoraphobia means you don’t want to go outside, where people can judge you. These two viruses have a high affinity, and challenge the agoraphobia is to challenge overeating.

Paul the mechanical engineer plays video games in his free time — sounds like solid a hobby. However if an engineer’s skills lapse, he could become dependent on social engineering and politics to get ahead at work. Thusly, wasting time and manipulative, zero sum behavior also get along very well. The better he is at office politics, the more video games he can play. The more time he spends on games, the more he has to rely on politics.

When you ask him if video games are a waste of time, what can he say? To say yes is a major betrayal of the playing video games virus and all of its friends. Perhaps his social engineering behaviors have congealed into what he calls his personality, and to betray video games is to betray himself.

The greatest problem with parasitic behaviors is that they are so incentivized to create alliances with each other. What does this look like in real life?

A superficial viewing of this video will lead to a couple questions: what is an intergalactic message? What do aliens have to do with Lyme disease? Let’s take a look at this interaction from the perspective of social viruses recruiting neural space.

The phrases spoken don’t need to be looked at deeply. The words represent mouth sounds and the groups of people who speak them. There is a group of people who signal proof of Lyme disease, and there is a group of people who signal proof of astrological alignment. The Lyme disease crowd has a ‘medical’ vibe, and the astrological crowd has an ‘intergalactic’ and ‘intuitive’ crowd. The ‘vibes’ mean they are small subviruses of larger mother viruses. For instance, and the ‘intuitive’ virus can also contain the tarot card reading virus, and the medical virus also contains AIDS sufferers.

Since these viruses have no claim to benefit, their only path to recruitment is coercion. If the ‘medical’ virus and the ‘astrological’ virus can demonstrate a relation, then their combined armies will seem more formidable.

As demonstrated, the blond lady smiles and becomes excited at the realization of such an alliance. Smiling, which in the world of animals is a threatening gesture, makes perfect sense here. Since there is an increase in leverage realized, the probability of retribution in response to a threatening gesture is lowered, thus we can say the new alliance of viruses is smiling through her as a way of signaling proof of replication.

If this virus is ‘smiling through her’, where is the ‘her’ part? Does ‘she’ stand a chance against viral replication? What if the virus instructs her to partake in more and more risky behavior to increase it’s signal strength and therefore rate of replication? At what risk level does ‘she’ take a stand? What is standing in the way of her committing suicide?

How do you protect yourself from proof of risk social viruses?

‘You’, whatever that is, are an unreliable judge of your own behaviors. Even if a behavior is objectively a waste of time, you may be coerced into tolerating it. If enough other viruses in your viral flora support a useless behavior because they depend on it, they may create rhetoric that paints incompatible behaviors as some hallucinated enemy of yours. Ever heard hard working, professional people described as ‘bricks in the wall’, while so called artists are individuals?

Hallucinated enemies

Most of the time our behavior can be called reasonable to some extent. When we venture away from reasonableness, often times the word ideology is brought up. We’ve come to use that word as an explanation for conflicts that don’t make sense. Why did the woman blow herself up at the meat market? Idealogical differences. You may accept it as an explanation, but what does it explain? It is more of a descriptor, as the people involved often self references their reasoning as idealogical in nature, yet we still don’t know what sustains the behavior.

Looking at things from the perspective of social viruses, we can try to come up with an actual explanation. If you are a social virus, and you want to copy yourself into someone else, what are your problems? Depends on what kind of virus you are — ah, the more risk you pose to the host, the more work you will have to do to remain there.

Let’s say that vPOR (proof of risk viruses) an copy themselves quickly, but understandably have a hard time holding onto neural time. How do we improve retention? Or in other words, how do we avoid any kind of immune system?

An immunity program, let’s call it a self awareness that queries behaviors for proof of benefit, is just another program taking up computational resources. So if we are time constrained, we won’t have time to run it, thus avoid any questioning. If the self awareness program does a cost benefit analysis, and the benefit is you do not die, then cost stops becoming an issue.

What checks both of these boxes is a dire conflict. If a virus can convince you that you are at war, it can sell you a weapon at any cost. If the conflict can start at any time, you don’t have time to switch in the proof of benefit governor. Since you are at risk of dying, you are able to justify a high cost.

To hallucinate an enemy than is a viable strategy for certain types of viruses to retain neural time. You are probably thinking of certain religions, however the conflict can be as trivial as sports, artistic rivalries, or food preferences.

For instance, many foods are talked about as bad for you. We somehow ‘know’ that ‘junk food’ is to be avoided. Even if a lolly pop and an apple contain the most ‘bad stuff’, which we refer to as ‘sugar’, we will file the apple under ‘good for you’. However, if you replace candy with fruits, will not see any so called health benefits. The strange part is, you were told that candy is bad, but were you told that fruits are good for you? There are some sayings such as ‘an apple a day will keep the doctor away’, but is this truly the source of ‘natural food vs junk food’ debate where we assume the natural foods are better?

Let’s say two villages have a history of conflict. Village A attacked village B and left them devastated. As an inhabitant of a third village C, which happened not to be hurt in the attack, do you have an incentive to vilify A anyways? The three villages, being near each other, compete for resources. C then has an incentive to pick a side and combine forces to eliminate one of the villages to increase resources per villager. An incentive for retribution on B’s part creates an opportunity for C to ally with B against A.

If social viruses share the resource of your neural space, then they will do something similar. When snacks and fast foods are vilified, viruses that can convincingly signal opposition have an opportunity and incentive to exaggerate opposing traits to the vilified virus and create alliances. Not only that, but these new alliances seem to be emergent ideas.

You can be informed to scapegoat some virus, which means you can question the information. However, a new viral alliance that grows in opposition seems to be ‘your idea’, and is therefore difficult to oppose. How many of our actions are ‘decisions’ rooted in agency, and how many are the result of viral warfare?

Given that some viruses are friends, and some are enemies, what are the lower and upper bounds of these dynamics? Meaning, if viruses can be friends, can all viruses be friends with all other viruses? Doesn’t this lead to completely random behavior? How random can things get, and under what circumstances can entropy be reduced or increased? If some viruses are natural enemies, can they still tolerate each other until some point of conflict? What if this happens to a lot of people in a group at once?

Viral entropy

When things are going well, we can afford to be more friendly. If you got a raise at work recently, you probably don’t mind buying your friends a round of drinks. If you got laid off, probably you are expected to be treated. How bad do things have to get for you and your friends to stop talking to each other altogether? To go to war against each other? If no one has enough good to eat, violence becomes a certainty.

The same thing should be assumed of the flora of viruses within us all. When resources are plentiful, one can be a fan of the Yankees and the Dodgers. Once the expectation of resources, or from a social virus’s perspective, neural time, is reduced, you have to choose between them.

The sports team analogy sounds trivial, but think about the nature of fanaticism — we both want our team to win, and the other team to lose. How badly do you want the other team to lose? Does killing them increase the resources per person, given that we all compete against each other for resources?

How are fans of the others teams supposed to respond? They will also become more militant. Thus, a lowering of the expectation of resources, or neural time, means a viral polarization. The lower the resources, the more incentive your viral flora has to hallucinate an enemy. The more your enemy is aware of the rivalry, the more your viral flora will have to agree to kick out viruses friendly to your so called enemy. This positive feedback loop can work as an explanation for so called idealogical differences. What helps especially is that so called ideologically driven behavior increases when wealth decreases.

Viral polarization

So far, we’ve talked about polarization in terms of sports teams and ideologies. Those are two obvious examples, by they don’t illustrate just how much our every day behavior depends on these concepts, and how easily we are controlled by shifts in our perception of popular opinion.

In the previous article, we talked about an advertising slogan by Volkswagen ‘On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted’. We also talked about people buying useless, but expensive things to signal membership in elite groups for coercion, called magical reasoning. Using our new concepts of viral entropy and coercion, we can shed light on why these things are so powerful.

Let’s say we want to sell a hat that costs us four dollars to make for twenty dollars. Our market has to believe three messages for our hat to sell:

1. Resources are scarce, or will become more scarce
2. You have an adversary who either has to change behaviors or be eliminated
3. People with this hat can convince their adversaries to change or can kill them in a war

If people believe these messages, or even just the first two messages, they practically have no option but to purchase the hat. The point of the hat is not that it has any practical use, but it is itself simply a virus that some people’s viral flora will coerce them to adopt.

Another example is a so called fake accent. Linguistic accents seem, on the surface, natural and impossible to avoid. Unless the subject is a child, where we say the magic words ‘brain plasticity’ and stop looking for an explanation. But what if a new language is viewed by your currently established flora as a stranger in a strange land, and is able to be coerced to signal affinity to a familiar language.

The case of Mackenzie Dern’s accent is a good example. Mackenzie was born and raised in the US, and spoke American English without a hint of Brazilian. After competing in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, she spoke with a heavy Brazilian accent, and people took notice and called the accent fake. Let’s understand this from the perspective of viral entropy and polarization:

1. BJJ being sport with a Brazilian origin, the Brazilian accent and BJJ have a high affinity.
2. Having learned it when she was young and well taken care of, her entropy was high, so learning something ‘random’ like grappling was possible
3. Transitioning into a state of competition, entropy become low and polarization occurred, coercing her flora to agree on BJJ and BJJ-associated behaviors — facial expressions, eating habits, and linguistic accent and so on
4. The more she dedicated to viruses with high BJJ affinity, the more she won, creating a positive feedback loop

Remember that various grappling techniques, as well as a Brazilian accent, can all be described as subviruses of BJJ. From this perspective, the cargo cult phenomenon makes sense. When so called primitive cultures received supplies as airplane cargo, they built what looked like runways to attract more cargo. The runway and the cargo had affinity in their minds, and so building runways made sense.

The term Cargo Cult later became an umbrella term used to describe civilizations that were looked down on as inferior, however, given our explanation of accents, is everything actually a cargo cult? If viral affinity dictates the way we speak, isn’t everything a Cargo Cult? When a child wants to become a physicist, she knows she has to study math. Is getting good at mathematics a logical ‘decision’, or is it viral affinity?

Child virus hypothesis

In the world of software engineering, we make a big deal about space and time complexity of algorithms because they save us money. But when talking about biological organisms, solving problems fast is much more important, because if an adversary catches you thinking, that’s the end of you. The idea of a ‘you’ as a decision maker simply does not make sense in that context. Our behavior is too complex.

Software engineering is actually a great example of a complex problem. If there is a singular you, and this you has to do the work of following the decision tree of code and analyzing the benefit of each branch in the tree, you would never get any work done. What is easier is that each decision is it’s own virus, and each ‘child’ decision is a subvirus, leaving the benefit analysis of its behaviors to be done later by the viral flora of the brain it resides in later. This means that changes in behavior are more the result of unthinking evolution, rather than complex real-time cost-benefit analysis.

Think back to the previous article and the example of sheep in a flock taking a step forward. The step spreads from the leader to the back of the flock as a virus. What’s important here is that, if after the leader steps forward, something dangerous pops up to the right of the flock, by the time the ‘one step forward’ virus gets to the sheep in the back, it will have evolved into a ‘take three steps to the left’ virus. Each sheep did not have to decide which direction to step in, or when to take the step.

If true agency is even possible, it may not be worth it. Propagation of messages throughout the network via a social virus mechanism may be the best system we’ve got, and it works by treating each behavior as a subvirus, or child virus of another. This way behaviors can be trivially complex or trivially simple, and whether or not they should exist at all depends on a network, which has much more processing power than any individual.

Rejecting the notion of a singular ‘you’ may be difficult, because now we don’t just look out at the world with two eyes, but with many sets of eyes. One of those sets may be what you refer to as yourself, but is it in control? Given computational constraints, it can’t be.

It’s best to look at your whole self as a professional dog walker struggling to control a pack of self interested, powerful animals. The pack will largely go where it wants, with ‘you’ trying to steer them away from calamity, but otherwise going with the crowd. Now take away the dog walker, can the pack of dogs, leashed together by the closed circuit of your brain, still roam and figure out a way to accomplish a common goal? Sure. That in fact may be more accurate. If you haven’t developed a strong proof-of-benefit layer in your brain, you may as well be a pack of dogs succumbing to whatever is the strongest one of the pack at any one moment.

It is a disturbing image, but it helps to explain both the inconsistency of our behavior and the evidence of subconscious thoughts. Navigating our environment may be too complex to have any other way to thinking — this system creates the possibility of behaviors evolving in parallel.

Introduction of new behaviors, which can be trivially random, via entropy can help solve the overfitting problem of natural neural networks. Viral polarization — child viruses asking for protection from parent viruses, and sometimes being protected or sometimes being kicked out, can help solve under fitness.

Speaking of complexity, just how complex can a virus get? We’ve only mentioned proof of risk viruses, but there’s also proof of work. What about proof of benefit? Can a virus dictate two individuals to have totally different behaviors? In the next installment, we’ll explore more complex viruses and try to determine our evolution from the perspective of behavior, including why earlier versions of ourselves built the pyramids.

In the meantime, check out some of my other articles.