Tackling human complexity  

Why this book?

I have always been intrigued by where longings come from. Some people are driven and naturally rush into everything, while others are apathetic and only want to be taken care of. How are our desires formed; i.e., how do we arrive at an image of a desirable change or situation based on a value power, and how are we then drawn to it? That power is physical. It is formed inside us, just like a fart. How does that work? And what is needed for it to continue to work properly, so that we remain viable? I spent a few years studying the dynamics of that driving force when I was about 26 years old. In the foreword to Tackling (see the pdf here), I described how that came about and how it went. Now, having gained a lot of experience with human desires and capabilities by functioning in many different situations, it seemed important to me — in light of the enormously rapid change in the role of physical musculature, sensory perception, and cerebral functions in our daily activities — to make a thorough attempt to capture the general relationships between feeling, thinking, and acting in a single description (i.e., model)..

Book summary

What is fundamental for living objects?
They possess the potential to keep a number of surrounding variables within certain boundaries by using prepared behavior.
At first glance, the way in which human behavior is determined reveals an enormous complexity in people. Consider the enormous diversity of cultures and the many ways in which behavior determination – both reactive and proactive – may change and develop throughout one lifetime. Suppose that all these pathways are not predetermined by DNA transfer or other factors; how can all the diversity between people and the complexity within people be fully explained?

In this book, we attempt to answer the above question by gradually unraveling the mechanism behind the production of that broad spectrum of developmental trajectories.

First, we discuss a very simple form of behavior determination; we list the basic subprocesses that play the leading role and look at how they interact when they deal with a domain reactively and proactively.
Next, we show how this executive building block, due to its recursive nature, can unfold in different ways in structures, allowing (a) behavior to be created from top to bottom and from abstract to concrete and back again, and (b) allowing the coordination of fitting behavior together with regard to a number of separate (but connected) domains to be carried out very efficiently. This explains complete trains of thought and why we usually don't lose track of the plot.

The description becomes really interesting once we assume — in order to understand how the process in the building block can arise from scratch and get off the ground — that this executor can do the same thing internally as it does externally, i.e., occasionally also deal with an internal domain. For example, trying to change the way you assess a situation or trying to change the way you access a memory. This brings us to self-organization, which turns out to be less complicated than is often assumed.

But the most interesting part is when we delve deeper into the stuff that triggers and drives the executors, namely the affects. There we realize that the affects — in both simple (= feeling, emotion) and compound forms (= impulses, values) — are the most important conductors in the feedforward space. This traffic guidance, in short, is orientation — the orientation to constantly find and do what needs to be found and done. And that is what life is really about, and depends on.

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This book, published by Eburon Academic Publ., Utrecht, The Netherlands, is for sale at most book web shops (like bol.com and amazon). It has a little color on seven pages and contains 53 diagrams.