Couple of Tullamore Dews down and still sound sleep evades me. It must be weight of things to be done bearing on my mind. There is nothing really to do this Saturday Night…well not after you’ve already been to friends and the pub (The SissiKingKong) anyway. Sipping herbal tea and reading blogs is what I do at this time…and then begin to write my own, which according to Google Analytics and the Bayes theorem , has only about a 7-10% chance of actually being read. But what the heck…

Of late I have been thinking, what makes the world go around…and I realise that it is not morality, altruism, spirituality, faith or anything of the sort. These seem to facets - merely behaviour options that ultimately fall to the most basic principle - a simple cost-benefit analysis of everything. We do it all the time, even with the most intimate emotional questions that plague us.

For example, should I get into a relationship ? Should I cheat on my lover/boyfriend/husband ? Should I follow my heart ? Immediately we start thinking about the pros and cons. Its an insight into how the mind works, we are essentially a logic machine with one important difference, a very large parameter set and in my case, about 23 years of data on these parameters. The cynics might say why if we are such an incredible logic machine, do we make mistakes?

And the answer, to my mind, is simple. While I believe most people given the same amount of data will arrive at the same conclusions about the most optimal solution to their problem, it will not necessarily be a solution we like. And hence we choose to follow a sub-optimal path, primarily labelling it as “because I wish” , “Because I feel like” - i.e., because I want to follow my heart. Aha!

A logic machine with a devious loop back that allows it to compute the most optimal path, but not always take it. Brilliant! Why ? Because that makes a logic machine that inherently breaks from its own stronghold and ventures into the unknown, with the hope that there will be some data its vast but limited databases did not have and suddenly its sub-optimal solution may not be sub-optimal after all. It will have discovered a new way of achieving its goal…by taking …a risk. Which brings us again to a risk analysis of whether it wants to take the risk.

So the human mind algorithm , I propose :

Risk-Benefit >> Logic >> Solution >> Scrambling >> Sub-Optimal Solution >> Implementation >> Risk >> Risk-Benefit.

Circle complete. So great, this nicely ties in with conventional belief that we are emotional, we are explorers of the unknown , and it also implies that this constant exploration of sub-optimal paths means that 95% of us will fail.

Now doesn’t that sound like the world we live in ?

I just read what I wrote.

In retrospect, those Tullamore Dews may have gotten to me more than I thought. Cheers!