OpinionAbbreviations: FSE: Fantasy-Support-Environment; SPE: Sanity-Protection-Environment; EMB: Emotional Master Being
Opinion
A number of problems have been encountered with healthy
humans who appear to be under no undue stress, perfectly welleducated,
well-trained and in perfect mental health and even
working together as a part of a small team and yet still making
catastrophic errors resulting in them making serious mistakes. The
Meta-Cybernetic Model describes the human mind as consisting
of world-views cocooned within a Fantasy-Support-Environment
(FSE). The FSE employs about seven orders of magnitude more
neural mass than that relatively tiny neural mass that might hold
the core fantasy world-view or fantasy view of theoretical physics
or whatever else it is that the mind is interested in trying to think
about. We can say; “he was only human; he just made a mistake”. In
meta-cybernetics we say “not good enough, kindly explain why it is
human to make mistakes”.
The Meta-Cybernetic Model is useful because it has empowered
a bridge between meta-physics and theoretical physics that has
resulted in The Gauss-Newton Quantum-Relativity which is merely
an enhanced flavor of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It has
also been used to build a bridge between the superior higherarithmetical
language of Gauss and the faulty higher-arithmetical
language we have all been taught by others. An alternative name
for the fantasy-support-environment is the Sanity-Protection-
Environment (SPE), the practitioner may challenge his fantasies
but only in the hope of finding a more satisfying fantasy. The
practitioner must realize that with some unknown critical fantasy
destroyed, he would become stark raving insane and move into a
very bad place indeed. We share a name for that very bad place; we
call that the Schizophrenic altered mind-state.
A Practical Case Study for Psychiatric Practitioners
It is generally believed by psychiatrists that psychoanalysis and counseling is unhelpful in the treatment of Schizophrenia. There is no effective treatment for Schizophrenia and the psychiatric practitioner will typically administer pharmaceuticals which have the effect of making the sufferer less of a danger and less of a difficulty for others while at the same time tending to destroy the basic humanity that the sufferer can retain. The treatment is a doctrine of despair and the prognosis is for the sufferer to die with the mental impairment. Meta-Cybernetics can help here, even though the meta-cybernetician has no knowledge of psychiatric practice and has not studied any medical science. There is the case study of John Forbes Nash. Nash was a brilliant mathematician who contracted a serious case of Schizophrenia in his mid-twenties and was gone away into the Schizophrenic altered-mind-state for about thirty years.
Nash recovered completely and even explained the actions
that the Schizophrenic-sufferer can take to get back to normal in
a few simple sentences. The obvious implied treatment therapy is
missed by the psychiatric profession because they would prefer
not to listen to the subject Nash. They prefer to regard the Nash
recovery case as an exception and an isolated miracle rather than
practical treatment advice that they could all pay attention to. Nash
explains how he chose to recover and he fully explained his own
treatment of himself. He decided to very painfully withdraw from
all medication and stop paying any attention at all to all of the
strange voices that existed within his mind. Over a gradual period
of the last three years of his thirty-year mental excursion, Nash’s
friends were amazed. After three years in recovery, Nash was fully
back from the brink as good as he ever was with the exception that
his friends reported that he was a much nicer person to interact
with in his recovered mind-state than he was before he became ill.
He was so nice to be with in the recovered mind-state that
his divorced wife stopped merely caring for him and thirty years
after divorcing him, she then happily remarried him. The obvious
treatment protocol indicated for the psychiatric practitioner is to
gently explain the Nash case study to the sufferer. Remaining in the
Schizophrenic altered-mind-state is a choice and not a permanent
condition. The only person who can do anything about it is the
sufferer himself and only if he chooses to see the reason why he
should change back to how he was before and then merely follow
the genius pioneer Nash slowly back into our “real world”.
The Neurological Mind-Model
The neurological model is very simple and comes from an
examination of artificial intelligence. The neurological mass
is highly complex involving a large number of interconnected
complex intelligent adaptive systems. The conscious Emotional
Master Being (EMB) receives neurological information from the
primary senses only after a vast array of complex subconscious
neural network processing, filtering, inferencing and path blocking.
The EMB is looking for logically satisfying or emotionally satisfying
confirmation in the source data. The networks become trained to
please the EMB and to avoid giving emotional or logical pain to the
Emotional Master Being. The networks are utterly enslaved to the
logical and emotional needs of the emotional and logical conscious
master. To give one a feel for the level of complexity here, 35-years
ago I helped to build an artificial anesthetist.
This was a very successful demonstration project. Our AIanesthetist
was trained by an expert system containing every
fact that human anesthetists asserted to be true, garnered from a
sample of 1,500 practicing anesthetists. We paid no attention at all
to obvious contradictions in the human belief set or to the highly
varied work quality results of the human practitioners within the sample. The AI anesthetist learned the trade over a synthetic career
of about 1.5 million human years of experience, with highly variable
synthetic models of patients, surgical procedures, operating
surgeons, and theater recovery nursing personnel. The simulations
ran at about 300,000 times real-time and were left to continue 24/7
for nearly one year of elapsed apparent training time. Once we were
confident that our AI anesthetist was good to go, a volunteer team
of real surgeons, a real supervising anesthetist and a large number
of volunteer patients tried “him” out for real. Our AI anesthetist
was embarrassingly good, clearly outperforming the very best of
the humankind.
The entire project was only a demonstration, and the AI
anesthetist was then quietly decommissioned. If we thought that
we are important to human survival on account of our great human
ability at highly complex tasks, then we need to completely forget
that silly thought all together. My point in telling us of this account
is only to point out that a typical human mind contains a network
with about 100 billion neurons and our AI anesthetist worked with
just seven artificial neurons. The human mind is not just more
complex than any such silly little machine, he is catastrophically
more complex than all of our wildest dreams.
The Electrical Engineer’s Conclusion
So, my question to my fellow electrical engineers is not so much;
“how can we explain our great human intelligence?” But rather;
“how can we explain our unbelievably poor actual performance?”
The answer turns out to be very simple indeed. For every neuron
that is actually engaged in conscious human logical deduction and
world-view model building, there might be ten million involved
with the provision of the Fantasy-Support-Environment (FSE). In
the Meta-Cybernetic Model, we describe the Emotional Master
Being as existing deeply cocooned within his own private Fantasy-
Support-Environment. There is not that much that is that private
about our personal FSE, because we have spent the first twenty odd
years of our life acquiring and learning roughly the same FSE that
our teachers and parents had. That FSE was built by a long chain
of FSE stretching all the way back to perhaps the first ape who
accidentally found out that he could break and form softer stones
with hard stone in his hand over a hard stone anvil.
We might call that the evolution of human thought, but there
is nothing gradual about it, the changes occur in tiny fantastic
accidental jumps. One moment apes could not break stones at all,
and a few months later, even the very young apes in the genius
ape-tribe were doing little else. How did the author uncover the
Meta-Cybernetic Model? The same way that our ape did, one day
he accidentally just put two and two together, and then bingo, four
there it was.
