Duty

Duty .
Andre Willers
12 Sept 2008

“England expects every man to do his duty.” Nelson
“Death is as light as a feather . Duty is a mountain . “ Eastern epigram .
“Discipline is doing your duty .” Tacitus .

Synopsis:
The mechanisms of the duty meme enable high-level abstractions to influence low-level driven actions .
Biological analogues are reverse-transcription and epigenetics .
A purely physical example would be sonons .

Discussion
This is most easily followed by using the Matriarchos Myth (see www.andreswhy.blogspot.com “ Myths , memes and boredom” and “Artificial Intelligence”)

The bargain made with the invention of Peace at the time of Toba was that the designation of legitimate prey was only to be by the Leaders (women at first , then later by inheritance or election) . In return , freedom from being prey (essentially cannibalism) was promised .

This was hard-wired into the cultures via language (ie AI(1) . The language is also the external database)

Essentially :
You can kill them , but you can’t eat them . Reversions(like the Aztecs) were exterminated . It was our duty , your honor.

The software meme-mechanism in language and culture to allow prey-designation outside the immediate family-group evolved into the concept of Duty .

This usually involved some heavy-duty learned-helplessness conditioning during school and military training , followed by rebuilding of shattered neuronal-nets along lines of Duty assigned by authority figures .

An unintended consequence of the Chinese one-child policy and the Western-European low birthrates is that the learned-helplessness conditioning no longer happens . The essential callousness of the mechanism is negated by the “one-chick” human cosseting . (Something similar happened to the Romans when their birthrate declined . Sextus might be disciplined , but Unus not . )

Large families and duty go together .

This is why duty is usually so aggressive . The complex in the brain that being manipulated is the prey-designation complex of neurons , a variant of obsessive-cumpulsion disorder . Another variant is the Don Juan obsession , where women are targeted .

Once Duty is programmed , the organism starts hunting for prey .

Boundaries like common-sense , logic , morality , etc are overridden in the fever of the hunt .

This same mechanism has been abused by innumerable religions and sects .

Yet we must make the difference between Savanarola burning heretics in the name of duty , and the soldiers standing on the deck of the sinking Birkinhead to let the women and children escape .
Duty .
Discipline is doing your duty .

Duty and lies .
This is especially important to Mk IV Humans (ie Asperger derivatives after circa 1700 AD) See previous posts .
Since Aspergers are susceptible to rule-based systems , they can be easily subverted by a coherent lie .

Note that armed forces(at NCO levels especially , and to a lesser degree at officer level) are rule based .

We have seen that the optimum level of truth for any sapient with bandwidth less than internally generated signals (ie all) is about 33% .
Scepticism rise within +- 6% of 33% to peaks at 27% and 37% .

Outside these levels , the systems go idiosyncratic .

Ironically , the BBC broadcasts in WWII prolonged the war , by giving a lower boundary by which Germans could measure an average with the official propaganda .

Something similar happened in the Cold War on both sides .

A simple therapeutic technique for those who dare .
This will work for all sapient problems with less than 33% physical causes .
Essentially , we exploit the sapient propensity to lie about 67% of the time .
Telling the truth only 33% of the time is not trivial . To lie consistently , the system has to know what the truth is . It can handle inconsistences (paradoxes) , usually via humour (the general mechanism in the brain for handling contradictions) . But this carries heavy energy costs .

The algorithm is simple :
We use Beth(0) Randomness to inveigle the mind .
The proportions has to be 1 – 27 – 37 – 100 .
This will work on any mind with a bandwith smaller than it’s internal signal generation . (Ie not a full telepath)

Ask the patient what are his two lucky numbers (x,y)
Throw two normal six-sided dice repeatedly .
(Why two dice?
Human brains only have three short-term memory registers .
One dice is too simple , and three are too many for a stressed system .
The idea is to maintain contact with the patient.)

Tell the patient
This is important: the brain has to know that it must react .

The patient has to tell simple lies (truths minus lies) if (x+y)<24/3
The patient has to tell complete truths if (x+y)=24/3
The patient has to tell complex lies (truths plus lies) if (x+y)>24/3

It does not matter if the patient completely ignores you .
The answers does not really matter at the beginning , but the system rapidly approaches reality in the deep-mind of the patient . Quite powerful .

It does not matter if the patient initially lies on all three points . Repeated throws of the dice exhausts any lie brain pathways (neurotransmitter exhaustion) .
The system is sucked in and has no choice but to respond .
The mirror networks all fire up .
The lies(alternates) have to be visited more often. (Takes more energy )

The only way to beat it is not to interact at all .

But even that will not work if the patient is hooked up to a fMRI .

Caution :
Catatonic patients may react violently . They do monitor threats . The two varieties of lies and one safe one rapidly exhaust neurotransmitters that maintain the withdrawal state . Keep on throwing the dice and have a beady eye on the exit .

Another caution :
Do not try this alone at home with wifey .
The exhaustion of neurotransmitters in this particular cadence triggers a Hyde response .


And so it goes .

Andre .