The AI programmers designing self-driving cars take a network, give it a goal to navigate safely, and a way to measure success against it.¹ From there, they turn the vehicle on, and it collects information from its sensors as it interacts with its environment. This information shapes its network, allowing it to drive itself based on moves that maximize its score. All an artificial network needs is a goal and data; with that, it learns the rules for itself through trial and error.² The network may have some base programming hardwired as a starting point, but how it connects is dependent on experience.

Nature’s Homosapien product line follows a similar design to an AI programmer developing a Level 4 high-automation vehicle. Nature takes a network, gives it the goals of survival and procreation, motivates it to act on those goals, and provides a way to measure success against them.³ Some circuits come hardwired with hard-earned lessons from the past that will help us achieve those goals. While the rest of the network is wired through experience as we navigate our environment.  

A Level 4 high-automation vehicle has an internal point system that gives a high score for any response that helps it achieve its goal of navigating safely. Staying in the lane, maintaining a safe following distance, and smoothly adjusting the gas and brakes are maneuvers that get a positive score. Driving outside the lane, slamming on the brakes, or misidentifying objects receives a low score. The point system serves as a reference for the vehicle to measure the success of each move, guiding how it connects toward its goal. 

The human vehicle uses feelings as its internal point system, guiding us toward survival and procreation.⁴ When an act promotes the goal, we feel pleasure; when it doesn’t, we feel pain.⁵ Activities like drinking coffee, having sex, and acts of kindness get a high pleasure score. Touching a stove, rejection, or shame gets a high pain score. 

Feelings are momentary responses to our encounters, teaching us what to pursue or avoid.⁶ They are meant to be temporary so that we learn the lesson and move on. By making feelings fleeting, we will want to repeat what pleases us so we can feel the rush again. Likewise, if something causes pain, we don’t feel its sting forever; it fades, and we learn to avoid it so we don’t feel it again.⁷ Feelings are short-lived responses to what we encounter, serving as a point system that tells us when something is good or bad in terms of survival and procreation.⁸ 

Nature does not want us to be happy; it wants us to survive and procreate, and feelings guide us toward that end.⁹  Our self-driving system automatically assigns a pain or pleasure score to everything we encounter, while we, as the driver, experience and evaluate the result. A lifetime of the driver appraising automatic self-driving responses to what we encounter determines what is good or bad, as we unknowingly wire what we approach and avoid according to our inborn goals.¹⁰   

In addition to goals and a point system to measure success, AI programmers hardwire their network with rules that set the constraints for how it operates. A Level 4 high-automation vehicle is designed to prioritize human safety, stay within lanes, and avoid obstacles. These are hardcoded programs that provide templates, which the car embellishes through experience. Programmers establish behavioral parameters that the vehicle expresses by driving, until it tunes a network that can drive independently. Rules are a framework, but experience determines precisely how the network wires. 

Nature takes a similar approach to AI programmers by installing rules that provide constraints we embellish with experience.¹¹  It gives us the goal of survival and procreation, then hardwires behavioral templates to guide how our network wires.¹² We do not come into the world as a blank slate; nature installs hard-earned lessons from the past to set us up for success and point us in the right direction.¹³ 

These are not rigid programs, but flexible templates that govern defense, social interactions, decision-making, and reproduction, which we embellish through experience ¹⁴ For example, with our defense template, there are some hardwired fears that we are all born with, such as the fear of falling and loud noises. However, the fears of airplanes, police, hospitals, clowns, and public speaking are fears added to the defense template through experience. It is beneficial for us to come hardwired with basic fears, but we also need the flexibility to learn new ones that are unique to our experiences. 

Caring what others think, wanting to outdo rivals, seeking high social rank, and defending what’s ours are invisible forces that we come into the world with, pushing us toward our goals.¹⁵ If we can get to the top of the pecking order, our odds of finding a mate increase, and so do our chances of producing offspring.¹⁶ Although we come with templates that guide our behavior, our unique experiences determine how they are expressed.

Our genes only care about being passed down to the next generation, so they equip our self-driving system with goals, feelings, and rules to make that happen.¹⁷  At the same time, we are the driver who oversees the self-driving decisions, deciding whether to follow them or not. For some, the driver is asleep at the wheel, rarely intervening, as the vehicle drives unsupervised.  For others, they are actively challenging the self-driving system, watching closely, and taking the wheel in corrective action often. 

Although self-driving goals, feelings, and templates guide us toward survival and procreation, we all have a driver that can rise above it all. Our self-driving System 1 has the first response, but our driver has the ultimate say. If we use our executive circuitry to its full potential, we can override System 1 urges and impulses and wire our brain in any way we want. Our genes have an agenda and push us in a specific direction, but our driver is another layer of processing that can decide where we go, if we choose to use it. Each of us can wake up our driver to challenge our self-driving system, and take the wheel to direct how our brain wires. Deliberately engaging our driver is our hidden power to wire our network toward the life we want. 

Endnotes

1. Shane, Janelle. P.22. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place. Voracious, 2019.
2. Shane, Janelle. P.9. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
3. Brockman, John. P.164. What to Think About Machines That Think: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence (Edge Question). Harper Perennial, 2015.
4. Haidt, Jonathan. P.50.The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books, 2006.
5. Wright, Robert. P.28. Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Simon & Schuster, 2017. Kindle file.
6. Wright, Robert. P.7. Why Buddhism is True
7. Wright, Robert. P.7. Why Buddhism is True
8. Wright, Robert. P.8. Why Buddhism is True
9. Wright, Robert. P.8. Why Buddhism is True
10. Haidt, Jonathan. P.50. The Happiness Hypothesis
11. Dormehl, Luke. P.172. Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence–and Where It’s Taking Us Next. TarcherPerigee, 2017.
12. Whybrow, Peter C.. P.62. The Well-Tuned Brain: The Remedy for a Manic Society. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
13. Bargh Ph.D., P.8.John. Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do. Atria Books, 2017
14. Whybrow, Peter C.. P.62.The Well-Tuned Brain
15. Haidt, Jonathan. P.140. The Happiness Hypothesis
16. Wright, Robert. P.34. Why Buddhism is True
17. Hawkins, Jeff. P.96. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. Basic Books, 2021