The Reciprocality Group

Summer 1998 Composition

Bill & Mary Allsopp, Philip Arickx, Alan Carter, James Flynn, Colston Sanger, Charles Tolman

8th December 1998

This paper presents a self-replicating, homeostatic phenomenon called M0. M0 runs parasitically on populations of humans. It is remarkable in that although its anatomy is distributed across all phenomenological layers from neurological to paradigmattic, its causal sequences are robust and (once exposed) readily traceable and hence vulnerable to counterattack.

The anatomy and lifecycle of the parasite are described, together with several secondary effects which are often of primary importance to the host population. An alternative interpretation of the role of dopamine in controlling mood and awareness is proposed, and how the "security breach" thus exposed is exploited by M0 is shown. A disturbing model of the variability of human consciousness is proposed.

Appropriate responses to this construction of the data are discussed.

The life cycle of M0 consists of very different stages that live in different habitats, as caterpillars crawl along leaves and butterflies inhabit the air. Unlike insects, M0's habitats are in completely different spaces and crucially, the different stages collaborate towards ensuring the parasite's survival. Indeed, all four readily identifiable subsystems (or "organs" if you prefer) within M0 are each distributed across more than one space, making it reasonable to recognise it as a single entity that inhabits multiple spaces simultaneously. Such is the nature of M0, this actually makes it easier to understand! The spaces used by M0 are:

1. Neurological. Includes neurochemical, structural and other physically identifiable phenomena.
2. Cognitive. The subjective experience of the person - limitations on what they can perceive and how they must perceive.
3. Behavioural. Observable, manifest behavioural traits of the individual in isolation.
4. Social. Effects of groups of people behaving together.
5. Cultural. Evolved by a society and passed on through generations. The culture is explicitly preserved.
6. Paradigmattic. The nature of the universe perceived by members of a culture. Beliefs about the nature of reality. The paradigm is implicitly preserved.

The driver organ is a positive feedback loop operating between the Neurological(1) and Behavioural(3) layers of individual humans. It is the motor that keeps a flow of energy directed into maintaining the existence of M0. It does this by exploiting what in systems engineering would be termed a "security breach" inadvertently provided by an existing safety mechanism. Since understanding the breach requires a reappraisal of the existing understanding of the function of dopamine, we should first consider an analogous security breach exploited by the opium poppy.

Pain is a natural safety mechanism that prevents an injured animal sustaining further damage to the injured area. It is a safety mechanism which generally enhances the animal's survivability, but which would be counter-survival if the animal were unable to escape the cause of the injury because of the pain. Therefore a second safety mechanism has evolved that protects against problems caused by the first. For a while after injury, endorphins block the pain signals so that the animal can escape. But there are no further safety mechanisms, so if an animal performs a behaviour such as smoking opium (which simulates endorphins) for too long, it can get trapped in a situation not probed by evolution. Its brain chemistry strikes a new balance in the presence of the opium and the animal cannot stop smoking opium without experiencing distress due to withdrawal. It is therefore obliged to fund the cultivation of opium poppies.

We propose that the subjective experience of boredom is a first level safety mechanism analogous to pain, that has evolved to keep humans moving about so that they can discover and exploit their environment. This safety mechanism could itself prove fatal in siege situations, such as having to hide quietly up a tree until a predator leaves. So a second safety mechanism has evolved to place a human into a partially conscious standby mode after the human has been bored long enough that it would have moved on if it possibly could. The level of the neuroinhibitor dopamine in the human's brain rises. This induces a subjective experience of self-absorbed well being, while rendering the human quiescent but sufficiently conscious to notice when it is safe to move, by deactivating an entire layer of cognition, functionally described below as the "Exploitation of Feedback in Cognition".

There is an important difference with respect to the endorphin case. Excess dopamine is secreted after a period of boredom, not for an initial period. While an human cannot manufacture more endorphins without subjecting itself to stress of some sort, excess dopamine can be produced by simply continuing to do nothing interesting! Therefore a human that is kept in a bored state for long enough to rebalance its brain chemistry will become hooked on its own dopamine and be able to feed its own habit by simply boring itself! While tolerance may ease some of the debilitating consequences of being in standby mode, it does not even begin to compensate for the lost faculties.

The driver organ is therefore a positive feedback loop whereby a human hooked on its own dopamine (Secretion) will perform boring behaviours to stimulate dopamine production (Constraint). As with other addictive situations, the higher the usage, the greater the craving, such that the positive feedback loop will always tend to increase boring behaviour and levels within the bounds of the possible.

The vector organ primarily acts to spread M0 to new hosts, and maintain infection of existing hosts. It is a pair of positive feedback loops between the Behavioural(3) and Social(4) layers, one overt and the other covert, both again only constrained by practicalities. Its most obvious channel is the custom of almost all human societies, for a variety of rationales, to corral their children at around age four and bore them rigid for two years (Coercion), by which time dopamine self-addiction has established itself and the driver organ is running. Other examples of M0 Coercion are the explicit maintenance of ridiculous and time consuming ritualism for no useful purpose in courts, legislatures etc, as well as peer pressure to perform rituals such as attending football matches. Nations who have elected to dispense with silly wigs etc. in courtrooms have all kept the incessant, mandatory, obsessive-compulsive displays by the protagonists. If such bobbing, twitching, skipping antics were observed at the bus stop, the victim would be called mentally ill, and neurochemical "explanations" for his or her behaviour would be invented. At the bus stop, one is required to perform different rituals.

Less obvious is the overt return channel (Aggregation). This is the result of vast numbers of ritual addicted hosts needing to maximise repetitiveness and minimise novelty to avoid dopamine withdrawal. The result of this is that every transaction in M0 infected societies, from flirting with the opposite sex to buying a newspaper and even buttering one's toast has a defined "proper" series of actions by which it is effected. This endless barrage of repetitive input means that hosts in M0 societies rarely find opportunities to even encounter dopamine withdrawal.

The single, full duplex covert channel (Microsynchronisation) is a bizarre phenomenon that we cannot prove the existence of, but are forced to conclude must exist. As the driver and vector loops send the average dopamine levels of the population up, conscious awareness of influences and motivations reduces, and sensitivity to dopamine reducing novelty increases. Individuals become increasingly blown by the winds of the dopamine economy set up by mutual exchange of rituals. In this context, the minutiae of body language become synchronised to a level of detail, and in such a way, that we don't think one even knows what to look for without the high dopamine state needed to achieve sensitivity. In chronic cases of M0 hosting, each little crease in the host's clothing will be exactly where it was in the morning at the end of a long, hot day. Such "neatness" is a frightening measure of the constriction of the person's movements through the day, however it is rationalised as a desirable attribute in M0 afflicted society. Normal humans don't behave like that until they are dead.

Natural immunity to M0 exists. The immunes have a singular set of personality traits, but many names. Children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Hackers (creative computer programmers, not the criminals). Mystics. In industry, people who "know Quality". In medicine, star diagnosticians. Creative artists of all kinds. Several of the present authors. Despite forceful (and often highly offensive) insistence to the contrary by M0 hosts, these people are not defective, or disordered, or stupid, or anything else. They have a range of normal human faculties not possessed by M0 hosts, because their cognition can exploit feedback. While M0 hosts simply deny that this is the case, natural immunes are quite happy that they can do what they do, and recognise and communicate with each other. An explicit argument showing that it is indeed the natural immunes and not the M0 hosts that have the right of this dispute is provided under the discussion of the "Exploitation of Feedback in Cognition", below.

Natural immunes have some genetically defective dopamine receptors or over-active dopamine cleanup mechanisms. Other dopamine paths work normally, for example the damping of motor nerve excitations that is lost in dopamine depleted Parkinson's sufferers causing tremors, works in natural immunes. The defective dopamine receptors mean that however the M0 vector may assail them with boredom, they cannot enter standby mode. Therefore they cannot become self-addicted, the M0 driver cannot become established, and cognition remains intact. That is why natural immunes have low dopamine and defective receptors - we are looking at a positive feedback out-of-control loop, not a negative feedback control loop.

By so constraining the host to ritualised behaviour, and causing the host to constrain new victims until they succumb, M0 can maintain and spread itself. But it would be a cheap trick on its own, since humans would quickly spot what was going on and take steps to eradicate M0. As it operates by subtle manipulation of the host population's behaviour it cannot defend itself (in general) by open warfare. Instead it conceals itself by operating on the hosts' awarenesses from its base in Neurological(1), as discussed below. But even this would not be enough, since the hosts' perceptions would not tally with physical reality and they would see the nonsenses. The true power of M0 over its hosts comes not from the uniquely intimate way that it subverts its hosts' behaviour or cognition, but from its ability to reconcile the hosts with the nonsenses under their very noses. This is accomplished through the boom organ, which extends from the base in Social(4) to condition the entire epistemological and ontological context of the hosts. It's a neat trick for such a small self-replicator, and demonstrates the power that phenomenological distribution can give a system.

There is no connection on the M0 anatomy diagram between the Cognitive(2) and Behavioural(3) layers. This is not because hosts have no control over there own behaviour - they do. But that control can be over-ruled at any time by the requirements of M0, which does not require the host's cognition in the loop. This happens because although the hosts are effectively ritual junkies, they do not know that they are junkies. They therefore have no opportunity to resist their addictive behaviour, and believe that the urges that come upon them are their own "feelings". In fact, very little of what M0 hosts actually do is inspired by their own aspirations. They would indeed love to say, take a year off and walk along the Rocky Mountains, but in fact they'll never do it, because M0 has other plans for them.

In this way, what actually happens in M0 infected societies is only a very tiny fraction of what could happen. As the M0 society describes its extremely narrow trajectory through its state space, the region swept becomes by default, the "culture" of that society. Yet the individual hosts have no reason to think that the network of institutions, laws, literary treasures, rights and so on is anything other than the accumulation of years of their ancestors' summed wisdom and creativity. Thus M0 transfers its own limited agenda from the dynamics of Social(4) to the repository Cultural(5) (Projection).

Language provides an example of this transference of limitations. As discussed below, the faculty of striving for/reaching an understanding of something requires the exploitation of feedback in cognition. Since M0 hosts cannot exploit feedback in cognition, this is something they do not do. Therefore there is no word in English for doing it. However, there are plenty of ways of saying that one has mechanically operated on inputs to obtain outputs. "Figure it out." "Work it out." "Grind through it."

Management practice provides another. Why do organisations that purport to be managing time wisely never include a column for the time spent filling in the ever more convoluted timesheets? Should one not at least count the time spent managing time, if only to discount it to a central cost code? As time accounting systems get more complex, the time spent operating them grows vastly, since it is necessary to have extended meetings to determine and regularly renegotiate which time accounting codes one uses for different jobs, yet the cost of this to the organisation is always by custom ignored. Why? The answer is that to M0 hosts, another little administrative task is like "one for the road", which is always a moderate and reasonable thing for an addict to take. They do not recognise the extent of their usage. Therefore they genuinely perceive no need to account for the increasing time spent accounting for time, and the custom (or repetitive behaviour) of not counting another hidden cost of administration is acquired. This behaviour will then be defended by the practitioners, although they will not know why, which makes attempting to discuss the matter with them a very bizarre experience. They seem to be convinced that it is the questioner that is the imbecile, but cannot explain why. Eventually they will make an exaggerated display of contemptuous laughter and walk away, presumably to fraudulently book the time spent arguing about the time spent time accounting to some other (productive) activity, as usual.

From Cultural(5), M0 is able to condition the implicit assumptions infants pick up about the universe (Reflection) as they form their own Paradigmattic(6) layer, and so control what they learn about what is possible and impossible in this universe. By constraining the kind of questions that are meaningful, it can control just about all aspects of human affairs, and yet remain invisible even to natural immunes who although they are not in the feedback loops, learn the same paradigm as everyone else. Immunes are therefore often left with a profound sense that there is something very wrong, but cannot express what it is.

One might think that the paradigmattic component of M0 would be a rich and complex thing, inherently hard to grasp. But it turns out that this is not so. The full details of exactly how it works are covered in the second paper in this series, called "The Ghost Not".

It might seem difficult to give an example of how M0 has compromised our paradigm, since by definition a paradigm is a coherent set of implicit assumptions you don't realise you hold. But armed with some understanding of what M0 does, one can to some extent allow for the "blind spot", and notice a discrepancy. Such a discrepancy is described in the third paper in this series, entitled "Reciprocal Cosmology". It is a slight variation of the usual geometry of the universe that has been accepted since the work of Hubble, that appears to resolve most of the deep philosophical problems of modern physics. Here we can note that it does not matter if the variation is correct - that it is obvious and yet novel, and detected by applying the ideas contained in "The Ghost Not", is all that is needed to support the credibility of the M0 concept.

Although it is primitive, M0 is a loathsome parasite. The purpose of the clamp organ is to hold the host's mind in check while it uses his or her entire life to the maximum possible extent. By exploiting the standby mode security breach from Neurological(1), M0 maintains the host in a state that omits the higher value Cognitive(2) functions altogether (Suppression). This alone makes the host unable to perform the self-criticism necessary to notice that his or her actions do not correlate with their stated objectives. Worse, the self-absorbed state evolved to keep the host happy but still in sieges increases self-confidence as it progressively erodes the remaining awareness. Eventually, the host's confidence in his or her total mastery of the situation is justified (in their own eyes) by the brilliance of the strategies they create. Such as resetting the clocks and telling themselves they are more productive. Chronic cases appear criminally cynical because the mix of fatuous comments and patronising attitude seems to tally with the characteristic motor impairment symptoms of very high dopamine - rearward lolling head and a peculiar smirking expression. Sadly, the more authority a person acquires, the less practicalities intervene to moderate their self-addiction. The boom transfers the motor impairment to Cultural(5) - "airs and graces" (Projection).

Hosts do not realise they are compelled to ritual fix, and supported by an action oriented culture cannot conceive of anything more reasonable than repeating the same behaviours over and over again. It becomes an end in itself, an inherent good. In extreme cases highly ritualised workers such as nurses will replay previous life threatening behaviour caused by unawareness, including the "arguments".

This state of mind is supported (Confirmation) from Paradigmattic(6). The universe thus perceived is a shallow, chaotic one. When things work it is because they have been constrained to rigid behavioural tramlines. Otherwise, the clamped mind believes everything will slide into chaos. There is no deep structure (algorithmic redundancy) to base one's understanding on, so understanding does not take place. All learning is therefore by rote, and without structure usually forgotten very quickly. The ability to imagine themselves ever understanding anything is stripped from most people. Therefore they do not even try, and if ever circumstances do cause them to try to use their full awareness, the experience of trying to use faculties that are unavailable is unconsciously distressing and the host is effectively conditioned by aversion techniques to avoid thought!

Meanwhile the high dopamine levels numb the host, removing awareness of the state of their own metabolism, and the simplest forms of metabolic control. Most people cannot exert any influence at all over their own heart rate!

In this state of mind, the host controls nothing, understands nothing, and he or she may do terrible things while always returning to the junkie's first priority - the next fix. The only over-riding priority, as in other forms of addiction, is fear. The host becomes completely reactive, and in the absence of an immediate cause of fear his or her biggest concern after ritual fixing is to avoid blame, a second order fear of the rituals being interrupted by fear. Such is the dimming of the host's faculties that the simultaneous subjective experience of self-important superiority and craven terror does not seem contradictory. Yet to all of this incredible contradiction and confusion in their own minds, the hosts and their co-hosting friends and relations, will be oblivious.

This model disagrees with the following interpretations, which we believe are the conventional constructions put upon the data:

Dopamine levels rise with interesting activities.

They do not. They rise with boring activities. However, there is a bizarre side effect of Microsynchronisation that may illuminate the origins of this belief. Most people's ritual fixing is constrained by physical practicalities. Most hosts would fix more if he or she could. Hosts learn to recognise people more deeply into ritual addiction by their characteristic motor impairment symptoms, in which they see the promise of powerful dopamine rushes caused by the totally predictable behaviour they will be able to regard. Thus boring people will persistently describe even more boring people (and situations, such as football matches) as "interesting", and less boring people as "boring". Natural immunes do it exactly the other way around, since they are stimulated by, and do not suffer withdrawal stress from, novelty. This effect can often be seen in social settings. So what dopamine rises with depends on who is doing the testing.

The possible states of consciousness are asleep and awake.

The most common state is M0 extended standby mode, in which the person is almost as unconscious as in normal sleep, but does not know it. The state contains its own dream reality. People who do awaken can recognise that they have been asleep. Most people enter this state by age six, become "childish" and stay that way at least until retirement. Unlike the meeting rooms of large corporations, most children under the age of six are not childish - they are simultaneously more serious and more fun than most adults. Providing they do not replace work rituals with Derby and Joan rituals on retirement and are physically robust enough to survive dopamine withdrawal stress, people's dopamine levels can drop so low that they are able to exploit feedback in cognition and normal psychological development continues where it was suspended at age four. This is sometimes referred to as the "second childhood". In M0 extended standby mode a person cannot hope to comprehend the other states, but most usually retain some emotional memories of a far happier and more alive state that they experienced as small children. This is normal wakefulness, and is their birthright through every day of their lives.

High dopamine leads to alertness.

High dopamine leads to a delusional feeling of self-confidence, and in contrived situations in M0 society the consistent repetition of actions such as simple assembly tasks. But this is not alertness. To demonstrate this, consider a situation in the countryside, away from the M0 society where everything visible is constructed for the benefit of ritual junkies. The high dopamine people trudging along, plod, plod, plod, heads down, are supposed to be the "alert" ones. The low dopamine ones looking about and seeing all the little birds and animals are supposed to be "distractible", and if they see something they point out, they must have been "hyperfocusing". The reasons for this kind of childish name calling are discussed in the section "ADHD Diagnosis and Dopamine Denial Resentment", below.

Notice that in all other circumstances, dopamine is recognised as an inhibitor. Only "alertness" is enhanced by this substance.

Normal dopamine levels are healthy.

Most people's dopamine levels are horrifyingly high. They were only ever evolved to be anything like as high for short periods, with long periods of separation between them. The high levels devastate people's consciousness and are unhealthy.

People with ADHD, hackers, mystics etc. are deficient and disordered.

In most human societies, people naturally immune to M0 are in a vastly superior mode of consciousness, compared with those around them. See the section "Exploitation of Feedback in Cognition", below.

Radiograms show people with ADHD have weak brains.

Radiograms show higher oxygen uptake by parts of M0 hosts' brains. Probably because of having to work against excessive background levels of neuroinhibitor just to be able to walk - standby mode is intended for sitting quietly! We may very well be looking at the tolerance itself.

People with ADHD live in a dream world.

There is a disagreement about who lives in a dream world. Members of both groups agree that they see the same things as other members of their group. This alone should make the situation interesting to rational people. Immunes are consciously aligned with respect to objective reality, people hosting M0 are unconsciously aligned with respect to the dopamine economy. But because the M0 hosts are unconsciously aligned to something they do not realise exists, they are incapable of defending their position. While in truth they cannot perceive the structural isomorphisms all around them that are core of what the immunes can see, they are obliged to restrict their position to an unsupported assertion that the immunes are all individually deranged and then perform exaggerated displays of contemptuous laughter when the immunes point out that they all see the same thing.

People with ADHD cannot keep calm.

In this construction it is still true that immunes are often not calm, but the disagreement is with the proposition that they should be calm given that they live on the Planet of the Dopes. In particular, they do not realise that the M0 hosts' exaggerated displays of contemptuous laughter are an attempt by the hosts to rationalise their behaviour to themselves. Because they do not understand why they behave as they do, and are in a state of mind where eventually they will reset the clocks and claim they are more productive, they display contempt because this then "proves" to them that the person they are talking to does not deserve a sensible answer. It does not even occur to them that an implication of their exaggerated displays of contemptuous laughter is that they are in the habit of mocking the afflicted! This position alone would earn them a punch on the nose in most situations, and it is only because human nature (unlike M0 nature) is gentle and forbearing that this does not usually happen when M0 hosts behave abusively towards immunes. So we have an immune who at the moment he manages to set up a logical ring of steel around the evasive behaviour of the M0 hosts, is treated to an outpouring of abuse instead of a rational response! Since this is more than a little frustrating, it is a sign of good health that immunes become frustrated at this point. In distinction, dopamine self-addicts experience their moments of greatest "calm" when their dopamine levels peak and the situation becomes maximally dangerous because of their reduced awareness.

Although this paper has presented anomalies at Behavioural(3), Social(4), Cultural(5) and Paradigmattic(6) that are due to the metabolism of M0, it has not yet demonstrated what M0's clamp does to Cognition(2) through Suppression from Neurological(1). Such a demonstration is desirable to verify the assertion that the security breach at Neurological(1) is real.

Suppression does two things. As an individual's dopamine rises, self-confidence and self-absorption rise as awareness falls. This effect only amplifies the difficulties of discussing the real problem however, which is thornier. The problem is, how does one show that the subjective experience of a natural immune or a person who has grown up in a society free of M0 is not only qualitatively different to a person hooked on their own dopamine, but is also superior? Unless we can settle this question, it is going to be difficult to alert the majority of the human race to the existence of the parasite so that we can destroy it.

The problem is not to convince everybody. Natural immunes, people from M0 free societies and people who have benefited from an upbringing that values self-criticism enough to free themselves from the worst effects of M0 do not usually need convincing. We know each other, and when we are shown M0, we know. Therefore this section must be addressed strictly to people who are currently addicted to their own dopamine, without even realising it. It must show you what M0 has taken away, so that you can reclaim what is yours.

Our universe has a property called algorithmic redundancy. What this means is that every little thing does not go off doing its own sweet thing. Instead the whole universe is arranged in patterns. Study one hydrogen atom, and you've studied them all. Or a brick, or a '58 Buick. Or a tornado, which is a pattern of movement, like M0 but restricted to a single phenomenological layer. The work of both scientists and poets lies in discovering and describing the patterns that are found in nature.

There is plenty of work for scientists and poets to do. An atom at the end of one of a young girl's hairs moves in a great many patterns, discovered and described by particle physicists, fluid dynamists, meteorologists, Vidal Sassoon and poets, all at the same time. The universe does not contain just the patterns that people have discovered and described to date, it is absolutely stuffed full of them, and we have barely begun to understand. In any situation, there will be patterns. Peter Senge has recently documented a bunch of them that appear over and over again in different guises in the business world in "The Fifth Discipline". There are so many of them that being able to see the patterns allows us to chunk up the universe. To handle it with ease, the lazy person's way. It is this trick that nature has pulled off as her centrepiece of making us smart, and it is what M0 stops. What natural immunes can do are the following kinds of activities, which all require some sort of feedback - a way of taking the output of something and feeding it back into the input.

Self Remembering

At this moment you are perhaps sitting on a train, or at a workstation, reading this paper. You are "aware" of the paper. But are you also aware of being aware of the paper? Is there a part of you that watches the rest sitting on the train or in the armchair and reading the paper (through the eyes of course, we are not talking excursions to the ceiling here), that when it wants to can control the rest? As you read this, you probably became aware of yourself in just this way. People with healthy dopamine levels always have this "monitor" going in their heads. It's exceedingly handy because for one thing, it doesn't get drunk anything like as easily as the rest of our minds. This is why the "hyperactive" and "dreamworld inhabiting" hacker or artist is often in fact the most in control on drinking missions. Not the necessarily the quietest - just the most in control!

The monitor is very important. When you are aware of yourself you can notice when you are making a complete mess of something. You can recognise problems more easily, because you tend to step back and insult your own work while you are doing it! And it is the monitor that is the free and independent you that really does the wanting when you want something. When it wants something it wants it in a big way, and it is something that you find truly fulfilling when you get it. It never stops looking for opportunities. That is why natural immunes will sometimes let projects apparently lapse for years until they find whatever they need to proceed. The monitor is your real awareness, your ability to spot something that you weren't expecting to see, but which is happening nonetheless. It is by keeping all our monitors going for longer and longer periods that we will be able to "Consider all that we do, examine every rule, take it back to the rudiments" (as Kate Bush put it) and eradicate M0. If we know what we are fighting, we can do it.

In order to make the monitor happen, there must be some sort of feedback happening in the brain. Information about the world is gathered by the senses and fed to the brain, which interprets the information and can respond (even while doing "intellectual" work) on full automatic (this is what happens in standby mode). But what is then supposed to happen is that the whole scenario, the picture of the world you started with, but with you now in it as a part of the situation, is fed back into the brain to make sure that what is happening is what was supposed to happen.

Pattern Discovery

We are getting pretty good now at designing computer systems that given the clues, can solve the riddle. The clues may be a bunch of symptoms that a hospital patient has, or the dimensions of a set of boxes to be loaded onto a lorry. What we haven't really made any progress with at all is designing a computer that can first spot the clues amidst all the irrelevant facts they are hidden in before it has solved the riddle, and then use the clues to solve the riddle. Sometimes even spotting the clues before it even knows there is a riddle. It's a uniquely human talent at the moment, that lies behind all new theories of science, as well as the moment of sudden, complete understanding that inspires a poet to capture a thousand summer afternoons in six lines of text.

This ability is based in being able to imagine the relationships of cause and effect between the parts of what one is seeing being arranged in many different possible ways, and then test each arrangement to see if holds up. As we do this we can start to get a feel for how the pieces can fit together very quickly - sometimes only a few hours skillful playing can make the subtle world hidden in whatever one is studying become apparent. A creative software engineer can take a software problem, chunk it into four or five subsystems, then chunk it again into 4 or 5 different subsystems (which must obviously be connected differently). Then he or she can compare the different approaches and spot the underlying similarities between the approaches, however these are disguised by details of each approach. These are then the real problem - the hard issues that the designer must address to do a good job. And with the problem understood, getting a sensible answer usually isn't too difficult. A musical composer or someone doing logistics for a major trade fair can do exactly the same thing. In mathematics, the technique is called inductive reasoning. In the textbooks it is usually shown as a complement or equal to deductive reasoning - step by step stuff. But all mathematicians know better. In fact they do exactly the same thing as a DJ finding the perfect mix for the moment.

The only way to do anything like this with conventional computers is called exhaustive search. We just program the computer to try every possibility, including the vastly overwhelming number of ridiculous ones, and test them. All the experience of chess program designers is that human players do not do this. They find themselves pitting exhaustive searches against something else. The recent ability of computers to function at Grandmaster level in chess doesn't mean that exhaustive search is now as good as Grandmasters - merely that it is as good as chess.

This trick of holding all the elements of a problem in mind at once and considering each possibility while bearing in mind that as the elements change, the relationships between them also change is very suggestive of a mathematical idea called modal logics. In modal logics, the value of an expression (or even parts of the expression) can change the relationships indicated by the operators within the expression. Instead of saying,

A + B = C

we can say

A ? B = C

and make the rule that if C is odd the ? becomes a +, but if C is even it must become a -. The odd thing is, we can actually build computers that can cope with this sort of thing. They are analogue machines rather than digital ones. Analogue machines were commonly used for graphics rendering until about 20 years ago, and are not theoretical notions at all. Analogue machines don't even have to be electronic. Minimum area problems that would make a Connection Machine cough can be solved by soap films in an instant. The analogue machines that can do modal logics must have a feedback connection in them. The electronics that hold the value of ? must be connected to the electronics that hold the representation of C forwards to fix the value of C and backwards to be fixed by C. The purpose of the circuit is to find a balance or true possibility, not a halt or answer.

The machines have to be analogue because the effect of ? and C on each other must be felt instantly. If the computer was conscious, there would be no period of time in which a process of applying the change could take place. So there would be no sequence of actions that an analogue machine could specify to a digital one to tell it how to do the trick. Of course, the digital computer could be programmed to simulate the physics of what the analogue machine was made of, and do it that way, but it would take a long time. All those atoms to model...

We are here faced with a trick that humans can do, that seems miraculous without feedback being involved in how we do it, but makes much more sense if we assume it is used.

Self Extension

When we discover a pattern, it has a profound way on how we see situations where it is found. When we first encounter a complex situation such as the deck of a yacht or a theatre stage, all seems chaos. Later, when we have come to understand the situation, the purpose of each piece of equipment and its relationship to other equipment, all seems simple. The situation has not changed, so we must have. This is one of the reasons why understanding based learning is so much more effective than the usual sort. Instead of memorising facts in a disinterested state of mind, one gets the subject literally under one's skin. One in part becomes the area of study, and lessons learned in one situation will always be available in any other.

This is by definition a form of feedback. The mind observes and considers, and what it sees causes it to change. The mind acts upon itself.

Pattern Recognition

When we have learned a pattern by coming to understand it, it becomes very easy to spot it hiding in any other situation. For example, a small and innovative company might be bought by a larger one on the death of the founder. After a period of neglect in unimaginative hands, it emerges triumphant and ends up top of its class. In such a situation, it should be easy for the "Cinderella" pattern to be visible. Indeed, languages used in non M0 societies involve exactly this kind of telling of legends as the definitions of words!

Again, there is a physical example of this kind of behaviour available, called a tuned oscillator. A tuning fork is an example. Stick a bunch of them in a piece of wood, play a G, and the G fork will ring. When we add a pattern to our repertoire, we seem to do something like set up a tuned oscillator holding it in our minds. Another example simply pumps the oscillator into prominence. This is another example of feedback, since the activity in the oscillator is dependent on the activity in previous cycles plus inputs.

Meaning Based Thinking

Our culture places great value on symbol based thinking. This is presumably because the idea of letting symbols stand for things and then manipulating the symbols seems like a great advance over trying to manipulate brute matter. It would have taken Hannibal a long time to pile up supplies in front of each of his legionaries and elephants to find out if he had enough to feed everyone before setting off. This is all well and good, but it removes the awareness of the haybales and pizzas concerned. This difference becomes extremely important when one is trying to for example, understand a physical law, rather than the notation used to describe what is so far known of it. But how can it be possible to understand the meaning of something not yet understood? The answer is that we let the parts of our new understanding of the meaning behind the behaviour described by the symbols be defined by their relationships to the other parts. We construct self-defining whole pictures that allow us to fill in the details. This requires the use of the same modal logic faculties described above, and hence a hardware level feedback in the brain.

All of the faculties listed above, that are prominent in people naturally immune to M0 and not used in people with normal vulnerability are based in feedback at a hardware level in the brain. All engineers know that in any circumstance where they employ feedback, they must take care to control the gain of the circuit. This is the measure of how much the signal is amplified before it is reintroduced to the circuit's input. Too little and it might as well not be there, but too much and it will quickly become a howl. The control must be just right.

This point is very important indeed. Existing understanding says that high dopamine gives rise to a state known as "alertness", which can be identified by various behavioural traits that are deemed desirable in M0 society. The best "alertness" is found in high dopamine people, and there is then a range of people of inferior "alertness" as the level of dopamine in their brains reduces.

Now the low dopamine people certainly have the faculties described above, and the evidence for feedback being involved is strong although circumstantial. So the low dopamine people must have their amplification precisely controlled! They are not at one of an infinite number of possible points on a line, they are at the one point where the feedback works! Therefore there is no range of anything healthy visible at all! There is a single point that gives rise to the faculties concerned, and a range of points where they are not present, and happen to be more or less far away.

Therefore despite being in a massive minority in modern societies, low dopamine people have healthy brains and are normal, and everyone else has been made unwell by the M0 parasitisation of their society.

This section discusses some examples of the secondary effects of M0 on human populations. Terming the effects "secondary" is not intended to belittle their importance to humans - only to M0.

As the average dopamine of a population rises, reducing awareness and dopamine craving increase the microsynchronisation of the population's body language. In these circumstances, individuals who are not members of the dopamine economy because they are naturally immune to M0 cause unconscious resentment by the majority simply by existing. For example, consider the situation of a primary school teacher. As the principle source of M0 infection in most human societies, schools are highly ritualised. Because the teachers are adjusted to very high dopamine levels, they suffer withdrawal stress very easily. When they are approached by a child, they anticipate a dopamine rush caused by its predictable and ritualised behaviour. If instead the child then moves in a non-standard way they face novelty, and their dopamine drops. This causes stress and they are quickly conditioned to resent the child.

Later, they must deal with the fact that this child does not sit and ritually perform untold dozens of simple arithmetic examples one after the other, and looks out of the window instead. Worse, the child claims to have understood the operations he or she has been doing (which is more than the teacher's symbol based thinking can actually do), and does not need to do any more! With the dopamine denial resentment already in play, the teacher will announce that the child is stupid or bad, and simply not notice that the best way to keep him or her quiet would be to replace the simple arithmetic with some number theory.

Therefore the act of diagnosing "attention deficit disorder" is a social disease of the M0 hosts surrounding a healthy child. It is this wider context that explains why it is not possible to have a rational discussion of the fact that so-called ADHD children can consistently outperform their peers, often by one or two orders of magnitude, in anything they turn their hands to.

The simultaneous problems of spontaneous "lesson teaching" behaviour by highly ritualised workers such as minor administrative officials, the consequences of attempting to form emotional relationships with people who do not even know they are junkies, and living in a society that both denies the existence of and acts contrary to the findings of the higher cognitive faculties, cause many natural immunes to develop psychological problems. Natural immunes tend to end up sufficiently powerful to control "lesson teaching" by instilling fear, or members of the underclass.

Like many parasites, M0 is a much less sophisticated organism than its hosts. The feedback loops leading to the higher cognitive faculties in the human brain are precisely controlled, but the two feedback loops in M0's anatomy do not have controls. To be feedback loops at all, they must therefore be over-amplified. The activity in the circuits increases in a positive feedback until the supporting environment collapses.

This results in the human socioeconomic and warfare cycle. The cycle starts with the population at relatively low dopamine levels, although too high to permit the exploitation of feedback in cognition. They are confused and in their era's version of poverty. Because of the low dopamine and the presence of a few natural immunes seeing what is in front of their noses and behaving opportunistically, they soon get organised and start to get real and paying, if "humble" jobs. As useful work builds, ritualism builds with it. Each roof tile is put on the same way, each palette of bricks is loaded the same way, the bus is caught at the same time every day, the same conversation happens a hundred times a day in the grocery shop. So dopamine levels rise as well as activity and material productivity.

The Earth is bountiful, and soon an economic surplus develops. By now, the population is suffering high dopamine levels, are seriously unaware of the overall picture of their own actions, and need more and more frequent ritual fixes. So they start to accrete pointless ritualised behaviours that can be performed more frequently than productive rituals such as carrying bricks up ladders. They "regularise" and "administrate" themselves. Throughout the whole human history that M0 culture has been able to retain, people have always moaned about administration, but it is no sick joke. The population soon absorb the entire economic surplus they have generated, swanning around in ever deepening dopamine induced standby mode with ever more pompous "job titles". When the surplus is exhausted, the dopamine self-addiction has become chronic, and the ritual fixers begin to abandon productive work to concentrate on ritual fixing. Everybody is "in a meeting", "arguing" around in circles.

Eventually, the physical wealth in play drops to the point where economic collapse occurs. The apparatus used in ritual fixing disappears, and at the height of their self-absorption and dopamine induced stupidity, the population are plunged into massive dopamine withdrawal and poverty.

Since it provides both ritual and an outlet for aggression, the population now start marching, and destroy the remaining ritual supporting apparatus. The cycle then begins again.

This alternative to existing socioeconomic and political theory may appear simplistic, and to be sure there are regional variations. But the core idea is sound. The problem is so big we simply cannot see it, although it is celebrated in the classic "Mattress Shop Sketch" by "Monty Python's Flying Circus". A couple dressed in wedding attire enter a mattress shop, urgently wishing to buy a mattress. But there is a problem. They have uttered the word "mattress", and now one of the assistants simply must stand in a tea chest and sing "Jerusalem". This causes the couple to inadvertently utter another keyword, and more lunacy ensues. This continues until all are leaping and cavorting about singing hymns and the bride bursts into tears.

It helps to consider concrete examples. It takes a staff of hundreds of thousands of NASA employees and NASA subcontractors all over the world months to prepare each Space Shuttle launch. And yet a team of just six workers could turn around the DC-X experimental Single Stage To Orbit spacecraft in 24 hours. It is true that DC-X was atmospheric and uncrewed, but the Shuttle has never performed an atmospheric skew-flip either! The Delta Clipper programme has of course been cancelled in favour of something more complex.

Or consider the UK Government. One dynamic person should be able to handle logistics efficiently for about ten productive workers, and yet when a group of just eight scientific workers recently left a government research centre, a staggering 116 administrators were left without a reason for employment. Since the loss of eight people from the headcount did not significantly reduce the administrative workload, the administrators simply continued to self-administrate, and to date, no-one seems to have noticed.

Every few months in the U.K. there is a major scandal as yet another Path. Lab. is discovered to have been producing erroneous test results, and fears of undiagnosed cancers and other ailments are raised in the minds of thousands. The Lab. personnel are ritually condemned, and more "procedures" are instituted. The same thing must happen elsewhere too.

Given the security breach at Neurological(1), the situation is tragically clear. The only people who can cope with the staggeringly boring work of examining one slide after another, day after day, looking for the often subtle signs of a positive test, are those who (in M0 terms) can "concentrate". That is, those who enter standby mode and continue to perform the same ritual with no real awareness for hours on end. The problem is not just the loss of pattern recognition capability. An explicit structure is still identifiable without exploiting feedback in cognition, so a job description such as "Look for a daisy pattern" is reasonable. But a real pattern, a pattern in the deep structure, such as "Look for irregular spatial distribution", is not an instruction one can give to a person in standby mode and expect them to succeed. No, the problem is deeper than that. It is that the person's awareness shrinks into unconsciousness and they add the action of marking the test result as negative (which it usually is) to the ritual!

There seems to be one, and only one, way out of this situation. The job must be done, it must be done right, it cannot be livened up, and we cannot yet automate it. Our pattern recognition technology isn't good enough. So no matter how much they find the boredom excruciatingly unbearable, natural immunes are the only people who can be trusted to do this job and stay alert enough for their work to be believable. This would still be true in M0 free societies. To date, Path. Lab. technician is the only job we have identified that requires a naturally immune person. This point should be emphasised for two reasons. Firstly, it has been suggested that understanding of M0 should be suppressed since it implies that natural immunes are a "Master Race". It does no such thing - even if it did, the truth does not bend its knee (or perform any other self-abasing rituals) to the rituals of so called "Political Correctness". But it so happens it doesn't. Unless one counts a Master Lab Tech Race, and Lab Techs already think they are the Master Race anyway.

The second point is that natural immunes, who will be able to command high salaries doing interesting jobs where their normal human talents are desirable will not want to do poorly paid, excruciatingly boring but vitally necessary work. Since natural immunes can exploit feedback in cognition and understand feedback effects such as "the good of society" without being "very clever" and expecting some other fool will do the job while they get on with the very important inconceivable grandeur of ritual fixing, we are likely looking at a voluntary organisation. How such an organisation will be able to function in the highly ritualised environment of a hospital, where the M0 hosts will be unconsciously compelled to demonstrate their contempt for, and "teach lessons" to the immunes at every turn, we cannot yet see. Issuing sidearms would seem to be self defeating in the circumstances.

The picture presented in this paper addresses many of the deepest puzzles confronting the human race, many of which have been in existence for all of the history recorded since the problem it describes began. It does this in a simple, necessary and sufficient, unambiguous and falsifiable way. If the hypothesis is false, it can be proved so. This is because it naturally decomposes into three distinct parts. The processes and examples given from Behavioural(3) to Cultural(5) involve reinterpretation of existing understanding. This reinterpretation hangs on the specific assertions as to the function of dopamine and the security breach at Neurological(1), and the exploitation of feedback in cognition at Cognitive(2). These assertions are testable. The picture is strengthened by the example of M0's action at Paradigmattic(6). This is theoretically disproveable.

If the picture is correct, there is much to do. We are faced with the biggest public health problem in history, but we get a huge "peace dividend" for solving it because so many other problems are caused by it.

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