The Committee of Public Safety

Triune Brain

To live is to desire. This burning desire originates from the interaction of seven internal loops (three loops in hardware for performance, one loop in firmware for stability and plasticity, and three loops in software for maximum flexibility) with the unfolding external environment:

Hardware

1. Reptilian loop
2. Mammalian loop
3. Hominid loop

Firmware

4. Cultural loop

Software

5. Political loop
6. Strategic loop
7. Operational loop
8. Tactical loop

The most fundamental desires emerge from deep in the brain. They rise through the cultural loop, where they are prioritized and on to the political loop to receive their division of power. The strategic loop follows and the desires are reconciled with power. Then the desires and their allotted power is arranged in space and time until, finally desire and power directly interact with the outside environment through the tactical loop.

Desire faces a uncertain environment. It may encounter friends and if may encounter enemies. It may only encounter indifference. At minimum, fulfilling a desire faces two obstacles: friction, the inanimate factors that cumulatively add up to make things difficult, and opposition, living competitors that react when acted upon. Together friction and opposition create a byzantine maze of barriers that stand between a desire and its realization. The only escape from frustrated desire is through adaption and control.

OODA Loop

Adaption follows John Boyd’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop. The first step is observing the environment. Observation takes a snapshot of a slice of the universe. This Observation is forwarded on to the Orientation stage. Orientation is the most important stage in the adaption process because it is where compression occurs.

To learn is to compress. The universe is vast. The mind is not. Yet, to adapt to the universe, the mind must fit it inside the mind. Through the process of Orientation, some bits of the universe are selected and other bits are discarded. This process follows a progression from analysis/deduction to synthesis/induction. First the original Observation is analyzed by breaking it into smaller, more easily processed chunks through a process of deduction which starts from the Observation’s surface and works inwards. Then the Observation is synthesized by reassembling it into a new, compressed, and possibly more relevant pattern through a process of induction which starts from inside the analyzed Observation and works outwards. Some analytic/deductive and synthetic/inductive criteria is determined in software, some in firmware, and some is hardwired into hardware. The deeper in the mind you go, the more Observed information is thrown away in analysis, the tighter the compression produced by synthesis becomes, and the more reliance is placed on compression shortcuts like heuristics and archetypes. For example, reptilian loop compression is tighter than tactical loop compression. The closer you get to the reptilian core, the more the world is reduced to stark blacks and whites.

World's Tightest Fit

The end product of Orientation is a hypothesis, a synthesized compression of the original Observation that offers a prediction of what the future holds. This hypothesis is subjected to testing either through immediate Action or by being forwarded to the Decision stage for further deliberation. If the hypothesis and the Action it produces are correct, the success will be Observed and the OODA loop will repeat. If it’s incorrect, assuming the mind taking the action isn’t killed as a result of their mistake, the unsuccessful result will still be Observed. Both mistakes and successes contribute to learning. If a hypothesis is correct and the results are stored for future recollection, adaption has been achieved. If a hypothesis is incorrect or the results of previous OODA loops are discarded, adaption has failed.

Adaption is largely a defensive reaction to the environment. Control, however, is an offensive imposition on the outside environment. Control takes the synthesized compression stored inside the mind and attempts to impose it on the outside world. Instead of synchronizing the mind with the outside environment, control is intended to synchronize the outside environment to the imprint of the mind. This is usually not a total imposition of control on the outside environment but “some selected degree of control”, as Wylie commented. The selected degree of control is determined by the nature of desire, the mind’s “own purpose”.

Desire is what drives any and all attempts to impose control on the external environment. Control’s mission is to make the world save for desire. To do this, it seeks to make the outside world conform to its internal hypothesis. Since a hypothesis is a prediction, control above all seeks to make the outside world predictable. Reality inside the mind is predictable. It’s the rudeness of outside interruptions that keeps introducing unpredictability. Some of this can be dealt with adaption. However, that may only achieve mere survival. Control holds within itself the possibility of achieving all the desires of the heart. But any selected degree of control can only be achieved through the accumulation of power.

Control Loop

The process of applying control runs through a control loop, the very same OODA loop as adaption uses. The progress of the control loop regulates power as it runs through the PAR loop:

1. Potential: power that has not been used.
2. Application: power that is in the process of being used through conversion from one form of power to another.
3. Realization: the impact of the use of power.

Progress through Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action regulates progress through Potential, Application, and Realization. The reference point by which progress is gauged is desire. However, this gauging of progress is complex. This complexity comes from the multitude of control loops guiding the consumption of power towards the realization of desire. There are seven control loops, the same seven loops introduced earlier. Each of these loops serve different functions and move at different speeds. In the loops of the software layer, adaption can be quite brisk. In the firmware layer, adaption is somewhat slower and more plastic. In the hardware layer, adaption can take centuries to eons to change. For example, tactical loop adaption is fast while reptilian loop adaption is slow. One is adaption entirely in software. The other is adaption in hardware. One is shaped by conscious design. The other is shaped (at least up to this point) solely by biological circumstance.

In some ways humans are profoundly unprepared for the modern world. Their most primeval loops are optimized for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where the world is populated by hostile predators, especially other humans. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the compression the human mind utilizes is optimized for a predictable range of eventualities. His example is that of seeing a leopard. Seeing a leopard, the danger centers of the reptilian and mammalian brains kick in and you turn and run. This is a response with a fair degree of success and was rewarded by natural selection. A species of people running from leopards was created and filled the earth. However, the same instincts fail in stock trading. If you see a crash, you’re tempted to run from it. The modern world is filled with ambiguities the hardware of the human mind is unprepared for, though seeing a banker bearing derivatives is good reason to turn and run.

Pareto distribution

The worse thing that the mind is unprepared for is the black swan. A black swan has a profound impact, it is unexpected, and all you can do afterward is moralize it. The OODA loop could accurately be called the Observe-Moralize-Decide-Act loop. This is because the black swan, with its occurrence in fat tails, tempts the mind to beat a Pareto curve into a Bell curve.

Bell Curve

This is the realist dilemma: when all you see is bell curves, everything is a bell curve. Imagine yourself an Eastern Roman or Sassanid IR scholar. 700 years of incremental warfare has presented you with a stable international regime where parts of Armenia and Syria might change hands several times every 100 years. You would expect both regimes to endure since they’ve both been around for 700 years. Both are relatively politically stable and have seen many a crisis and endured them just fine. Based on the bell curve, you would be right. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

The realist is baffled by the black swan. He, following the logic of control, seeks predictability by imposing his well-worn compression on a world. Sometimes the world will be compliant. Sometimes, however, it will black swan. Some desert dwelling nomads of no consequence will pour out of the Arabian wastes, inspired by an idea. The Byzantines were driven beyond the Taurus mountains and pressed within an inch of their lives. The Sassanid state was destroyed and its religion and political order destroyed. The IR scholar would be found in a wasted city or in a refugee column. Perhaps a passerby would be kind and listen to his wailing over the destruction of his theories of equilibrium. All should mourn with the IR scholar. Theirs is the lot of modern man, the ever more frequent victim of the black swan and his own slow control loops.

The Islamic universalist tide, instantiated in jihad, continued to sweep the world. More worldly men would attempt to buy it off or make peace with it but that was only a temporary respite if there was any at all. Islam was quite entrepreneurial. Since every Muslim was under the command to spread the faith, every local ghazi or khan could launch his own local offensive against his infidel neighbor. A Shadow of God on Earth such as Suleiman the Magnificent was perfectly happy to strike a realist alliance with a naive infidel like Francis I of France. If the infidels in the House of War were fighting each other, it just made the job of the Faithful that much easier.

Islam did encounter counter-movements. Some of these succeeded. Some failed. The Crusades failed to win permanent Christian possession of the Holy Land but it did regain Portugal and Spain, nations built upon a universalist ideal that carried them around the African coastline in search for Prester John as an ally against the Muslim tide and across the New World in search of souls, among other commodities. While faith did not reclaim the Holy Land for the Christians, it did regain the Holy Land for the Muslims. Call it the Last Crusade, if jihad can be called a crusade. About the point when Islam was reaching its extremes under the Moguls and the Ottomans at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a new Islam was rising on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. This tide would eventually destroy the old empires of Eurasia and aggressively provide a model that was so pervasive that modern tyranny would parrot its forms as the tribute vice gave to virtue. But that’s a story for another time.