Comind â–¶ Understanding â–¶ S0: Understand â–¶ Mind for humanity ? â–¶ Organizing the Collective â–¶ Motivations and Needs â–¶ Defining What Is Good â–¶ Intelligence Mechanism â–¶ Motivation & representations
To have a good collective representation of reality and to make it progress, it is important to define which representations to use as well as the social system that ensures people are motivated to create and improve it.
What motivation system should be used to ensure people create and improve the collective representation system of reality ?
We know that in order to not deviate from the long-term common good goal, we must measure actions on these representations from that perspective.
It may seem complicated, but this is how our mind works: we are forced to evaluate the benefit brought by our representations of reality in order to correct them. For example, if a person has many traffic accidents, they may reflect on the reason and correct their idea "speed is not a danger factor, it’s the driving style that is" rather than their representation of the harm caused by accidents. If they succeed, it’s because they are aware of their different representations, the relationships between them, and can evaluate different possibilities.
When we have a success in an action, we empirically validate the different representations involved. For example, if one successfully whips egg whites, one will validate that adding a pinch of salt is necessary when used to doing so, without verifying that it works just as well without (which is the case). If someone explains that salt is useless, we might believe them. However, if someone explains that egg white is useless, we won’t believe it, because our representation of material transformation is validated countless times in a wide variety of circumstances.
When a scientist questions a scientific theory and designs explorations (experiments in physics, etc.), they also use a method to evaluate their representations and modify them. This consists of meticulously verifying each representation.
In conclusion, our cognition regarding the change of representations includes various methods ranging from empirical to complex formalism. Moreover, we can expend a good amount of energy to determine the validity of some of our representations.
To motivate people, it is necessary to determine the importance of the change made by a person. For example, if a team of scientists works on the representation of social relations, it would be necessary to determine each person’s share in this work, then the share of the representation realized in the progress for the common good.
It is quite clear that people can evaluate each other’s work in a small group where many elements are informal and intertwined.
The question remains of the evaluation when each person brings a well-identified element. For example, a person designs a kind of bridge using a tool developed by a physicist, how much recognition should be attributed to each ?
The justice system seems much more appropriate. It allows for the separation of innovation from commerce. On one hand, innovators are rewarded, and on the other, any company can incorporate innovations, which allows for better competition. The funds for these innovations could come from the financing system described in the management of the collective decision-making system by emotion.
For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, we would have a much larger public sector for new drug research, researchers rewarded when they make discoveries, and companies that would use these discoveries. The money needed for research could come from a global tax on medicines. We would thus have a financially autonomous system, motivating for everyone (for the research part as well as for the manufacturers), and that would avoid financial leakage (through excessive profits and rewards) of capitalism.
We have just determined a method that seems suitable for sharing the rewards of collective work on a composite representation. It remains to determine the evaluation of the effect of a representation on the long-term common good. This effect is measured by the actions using the representation.
If we eat a good praline cake, digest it well, and feel good afterward, we might think it’s a good thing from the perspective of long-term personal well-being. But if we consider that praline is carcinogenic, then we would have the opposite opinion. We see from this that the judgment of the benefit of actions, and therefore of the underlying representations, is relative to current representations. And since our representations can change, it may be necessary to revise the judgment (and therefore the reward or penalty). This also happens in our mind: we can revise the benefit of our actions and our convictions that supported them due to changes in representations. This flexibility allows us to evolve in the right direction.
In conclusion, just as an individual evaluates an act, the representations supporting that act, and revises their evaluations when their perspective changes, our collective intelligence must do the same.
Let us recall that we saw in the study on the collective representation of reality that these representations are structured (and also continuously improved). This whole framework makes judgments sufficiently uniform and meaningful. For example, one of the deepest representations would be the norm of logical reasoning, and many other representations would be used between this and the judgments.
The reader might think that the system proposed here is entirely merit-based and stressful due to the possibility of constant revision. This would be a far too direct transposition between the current system and the one proposed here. It is clear that leaving individuals in the stress of uncertain and revisable income is very harmful when it comes to vital income, and that a very bad system in the present rarely leads to happiness.
We have just seen that representations are judged using our representations. This is always true individually and collectively. Just as individually or socially, one can fall into a system where a representation validates its own usefulness, the system proposed here can also fall into this trap. This can lead, for example, to corruption with people making judgments that in one way or another benefit them more than society and tend to perpetuate representations supporting such judgments. We see this often in our current societies where representations tend to minimize the effect of collusion of interests between different powers (judicial, executive, media, financial) and where those in power defend and benefit from these collusions.
From the moment we move away from pure deductive logicwe cannot avoid these problems. But we can apply measures to distance them as much as possible: