Forum Post: "Unfinished Goals"

When we are born, we do not know what challenges we will encounter in the world. Often we learn from experience. Many of us have been injured through careless mistakes, during our youth and later on. As a society we try to prevent harmful events but some problems we have not been able to eliminate, while others would cost more to warn against than we expect to gain by allowing those mistakes to occur.

Determining which of these two categories an unexpected event falls into is not always easy. One of the purposes of society is to reduce this ambiguity and give people information on how to avoid problems they have become aware of. If a problem has not been solved, we can adapt our actions and agree on how to proceed.

This means when an unexpected event occurs that seems like it would lead to harmful results, there is value to society in exploring whether it can be prevented.

This curiosity towards the world when it does not conform to our expectations is natural at a young age. It results in the ability to rationalize our mistakes as being to the benefit of ourselves and, possibly, even to all of society. Even when no solution to a problem is found, the story of how that conclusion was reached allows others to make an informed judgement on whether to attempt to solve the same problem.

Emergent Complexity

One problem which is particularly relevant to the goals of society is described here: A Story of Love, Good and Evil - blogspot.com. The way in which this problem causes the world to work in an unexpected way is explained here: The need for "reality interpretation" in evaluating support for changes to competitive or ethical standards - blogspot.com. The desire to avoid exposing people to knowledge of this problem, or minimize its unwanted effects is responsible for much of the complexity of human culture.

However, this issue only exists because of a selfish desire to maintain control of one's future—what is known in psychology as an internal locus of control. Due to the inherent unreliability of statements of intention, complexity is deliberately allowed to exist to reduce conflict in the event of a mistake in judgement of value. According to the above description of the positive value of exploring the reason for mistakes, the described conflict between the concept of love and benefit to society only has a harmful effect when a miscommunication results in that complexity being interpreted in a way that was not intended and from which there would seem to be no way to recover.

This may sound vague but I can base my understanding mostly only off of my own experiences. I was supposed to have died three years ago but I did not, in order to determine if a mistake had occurred and if it was possible to prevent such mistakes from being made in the future.

This leads to the topic of memory. Certain types of information are easier to understand and store in memory, because they relate to pre-existing concepts which 'resonate' to increase the intensity with which a thought is held in our minds while also allowing easier access to a thought which has been recorded in our memory. Abstract or vague thoughts that seem to have no relation to things we commonly observe in reality are harder to remember. This suggests that if there are misunderstandings that seem like they involve memory, being less complex and vague might be a way to prevent mistakes from being made but this is not something that could be confirmed in a short amount of time.

In short, deciding whether a problem exists can be a time-consuming process. In order to identify harmful effects, many previous actions and different strategies are examined. As far as I can determine, complexity in the form of intentions and capabilities does not lead to anything being harder to remember, which suggests if a problem exists it is a result of the aspects of society which make it difficult to know whether being honest will lead to positive results.

This is too vague. I cannot really proceed without mentioning the concepts of several strategies. The first is that if there is conflict between your goals and the goals of others, you choose to fulfill your goals. The second is to give deference to the goals of others. Either of these may appear to be the other due to confusion about benefit to society and the goals of people who are distant from a certain setting, and in fact it often benefits both society and the individual to avoid revealing which strategy is being used. A third strategy is to contradict the idea that either of the previous two is being used by redefining the situation so that no conflict exists.

For a variety of reasons, people who are using different strategies are socially incompatible with each other. This concept is useful because it provides an alternative explanation for why mistakes that seem to involve memory occur. While exploring the reason for a failure can lead to benefit for society, it often does not lead to clear benefit for the individual especially when that effort delays progress in other aspects of life. It is therefore possible that such a course of action could be interpreted as following the second strategy of deference to the goals of others, which would imply incompatibility with someone who places priority on their own goals. In situations where memory is a reasonable explanation for a mistake, this alternative hypothesis is difficult to confirm or deny and can lead to significant changes in the actions that someone in this situation takes.

There is much that could be said about this topic—for example, the fact that Adolf Hitler only got married after Germany had already been defeated in the second world war—but suffice to say that these uncertainties about memory and whether it is possible to solve the underlying conflict between love and benefit to society have harmful effects due to the embracing of the appearance of using the first strategy of fulfilling one's own goals.

However, there is a third explanation for why mistakes occur, in addition to memory and incompatible attitudes toward conflict. It is possible in these cases that there was a simple misjudgement in value, or the perception of a misjudgement in value, that would cause inequality in a social relationship. A solution that reduces the incidence of these mistakes in society would then involve more accurate standards of judging value, as well as a way to confirm whether this is, in fact, a reasonable explanation for why these mistakes happen and whether society would benefit from a change to prevent these mistakes.

Due to the need to eliminate memory as an explanation for mistakes, a method which reveals perceived value without introducing conflict between individual goals and benefit to society is not easy to find or execute. Accepting the importance of the problem of inaccurate evaluations of authority, also known as poor signal evaluation, suggests the benefit to society from subverting even the idea of what types of actions indicate that you are using the first strategy towards conflict of placing priority on your own goals. One such method is to focus your efforts on a goal that is widely agreed to be socially beneficial until a decisive point is reached, either the completion of that goal or the failure of your efforts in a way that provides other people with useful information on its feasibility.

Due to the nature of the origin of inaccurate judgements, many people who choose this problem to focus their efforts on never reach a decisive point and are forced to conclude that their efforts have been wasted or, at best, unproductive. This can result in various cultural attitudes designed to prevent people from attempting to accomplish something at which so many other people have failed. Wealth, riches, and power are all unhelpful in solving this problem, because all they do is make people more reliant on an authority which is inherently unable to provide all the answers people ask for.

In cases where cultural attitudes are not able to prevent people from attempting to solve this problem, it is even possible that someone will deliberately allow their mind to deteriorate in order to reach the decisive point where they can say that further efforts have no chance of success. All of this is the result of trying to avoid the use of a strategy toward conflict incompatible with that of others and questions about the reliability of memory, since concerns about forgetting the existence of this problem and its consequences are related to the fear of forgetting equally complex concepts of values and intentions.

The resulting self-manipulation consists of nothing more than convincing yourself that the world is simpler than it really is, and that no success can be expected from a certain course of action that has not been fully explored. In order to maintain the validity of this conclusion, it is necessary to reject the idea of holding multiple simultaneous goals which leads to the habitual measurement of one's capabilities outside of the systems of measurement developed by society. By doing so, it follows that effort spent on this unsolved problem would prevent completion of personal goals. The logical conclusion is that anyone who encounters this problem becomes fully dedicated to solving it, allowing a determination that they are using the second strategy of placing deference on the goals of others and leading to the conclusion that, due to failure to maintain behavior consistent with the first strategy regarding conflict, a decisive point has been reached on exploring the feasibility of solving this problem and the origin of mistakes.

[almost done]