Nikolay Amosov    WORLD OUTLOOK

What is a man? Is there any scientist or thinking individual who has not asked himself this question? Each has his own answer. We have analyzed man from our own positions, but can we create a heuristic model of him? I know everyone-will say it is impossible. That a model is an inadmissible simplification, etc. Man is an extremely complicated creature. Nobody disputes this assumption.

The unique nature of a man is manifested in a set of genes which determine his physical and psychic features. But living in-borne intellect differs from an artificial intelligence. In that it has the ability to be trained. It is trainable; it creates new and destroys obsolete models. In can be developed — its needs and feelings change constantly; its convic­tions are always in the process of being formed.

I will not go into a detailed description of a personality model. It has already been published in the book Human Nature. I will restrict myself only to general information.

In the personality model, we generalize actions to the maximum (unlike in the case of an intelligence model) and shift the accent to concepts: feelings, needs, and convictions which provide for the distribution of actions according to the types of activity. With this aim in mind, we divide twenty-four hours into spaces of time, distinguishing them by the categories of productive labour, housework, entertainment, rest, and communication, depending on whom we are modelling. In the same way, we divide "extra-temporal" occupations associated with the main ones: we distinguish statements and actions, expressing attitudes towards family, friends, or society.

In this way, a personality model is a reflection of human behaviour in the most generalized form. Man is portrayed in his very essence, without an in-depth description of his actions.

This model can be created for a specific individual if we study his psyche and actions. But it can also be a generalized one and portray an "average men" of a particular social group or age. It may represent people of a certain psychological type. And finally, with an extreme level of generalization, it is a quantitative portrayal of features common to men in general.

Any model requires definiteness. Classification of its expression parameters by numbers... And this is where we come across difficulties: what feelings and what requirements do they spring from — everyone has his own concepts concerning such things. Therefore, there is little hope that there will be universal agreement with our model.

Page gives a simplified table "Parameters of Requirements" (taken from my book Human Nature).

To simplify the model, the number of requirements has been reduced to a minimum. The first column gives an approximate definition of requirements and enumerates the feelings caused by them — both pleasant and unpleasant. The next columns distinguish three parameters. The first one, significance by maximal pleasant feeling. It means: how great the pleasant feeling is as compared to others when this requirement is fully met. The significances of feelings are roughly subdivided into three groups: large, average and small, all in comparison with other groups.

The second parameter is significance by unhappiness. To what extent, when compared, is the deprivation of the "payment," satisfying this requirement intolerable. In other words, how great is the unhappiness caused by deprivation.

Having analyzed the literature and my own experience, I tried to see how great is the diversity among people according to each given requirement. This is reflected in the fifth column. As a rule, older needs are more universal than recent ones that emerged later during the process of evolution. This is the approximate sequence of their distribution in the table.

PARAMETERS OF REQUIREMENTS

The first line reads "possession." In an approximate form, this is a human interpretation of the need in terms of food, indicative of every living being. Civilization has supplied man with things the majority of which are not related to food, but a pleasant feeling of possession is involved in them as well. And on the contrary, hunger is unpleasant, as is the foresight of it; poverty tallies fully with this threat. The significance of feelings resulting from property is as large as from possession and hunger both. But adaptation essentially differs: people rapidly get accustomed to pleasure resulting from possession and, therefore, something new is needed (claims start snowballing!). Hunger is a different thing. You cannot get accustomed to it; adaptation is a bad thing.

The diversity of people in terms of "greediness and hunger" is not very big. Particularly in terms of hunger — since possession of things is stimulated by other sources. I may be wrong. The craving for wealth does not affect all people, but, I am afraid, many of them.

The need for safety. Peace, when there is no danger of deprivation and such a need is not foreseen, as opposed to fear, when there is such a danger. For our ancient ancestors, fear was as significant as hunger. Nowadays everything has changed. Society has made the lives of some of its citizens safe, although technological progress has boosted the universal fear of war.

The significance of pleasures derived from safety is small. We rapidly adapt to them and stop noticing them. Fear is quite a different thing. Large significance and poor adaptation.

My estimation of the diversity of people according to cowardess and courage is an "average" one. I won't insist on it.

The third line lists all the needs resulting from the instinct of reproduction. I classify them as "Family" needs.

The significance in terms of the maximum pleasure is, no doubt, large. Love and hunger rule the world. The real significance in a specific society is undoubtedly large. When there is love — of large significance on the level of emotional comfort (LEC) — with a plus when it exists and with a minus when you loose it. Adaptation to love? It depends upon what kind of love. It is almost absent in the case of a small child, and is present in the case, alas, of the beloved.

Love in contemporary society is a complicated feeling. The factors of the level of information and the compliance of partners' convictions greatly restrict primitive sexual feelings. They are also directly related to adaptation: if there is a harmony of intellectual properties, it, the process of adaptation, is slowed down. And vice versa.

I have left two blank lines for the needs resulting from the gregarious instinct. They are too complicated. The first group of feelings is related to leadership and subordination. First you derive pleasure from winning a competition, from primacy. Then a pleasant feeling comes from respect for other people. Satisfied leadership yields a large amount of pleasure. Its significance is large.

There is another side of leadership. It is pleasant to win and rule, but the situation is quite different with subordination. Let's say it is bearable only when the source of power (your boss) is prestigious.

Capacity for subordination as well as leadership is inherited genetically, however, in an inverse proportion: too much leadership, too little subordination. This is the principle of the pack: the leader is selected in such a way that all the members will have an acceptable correlation of these properties. If a pack has two leaders, conflicts are inevitable, and one of them will have to leave.

Small collectives of people, forced to work together, are ruled by the same law. This condition is alleviated by convictions, but it is not cancelled altogether. Psychological compatibility is based on selection by this principle.

Almost every individual considers himself to be good — this self-assertion is also inherited genetically. Respect for dignity and forcing another to subordinate without recognized prestige always cause resistance up to aggressiveness of actions in the state of emotion and wrath, spearheaded against its causes. Aggressiveness is measured by the significance of the reason for the wrath and the intensity of responsive actions in that wrath. Regrettably, this does not complete the list of negative human properties. There are people capable of sober-minded ruthlessness, when pain and suffering are inflicted without the emotion of wrath, but for the mere sake of deriving pleasure. Fortunately, such individuals are the exception.

The fifth line gives another need. I have divided it into two similar polar properties: altruism — egoism and sociability — reticence. They are based on the need to be sociable and the "level of kindness." I classify it by the ratio "to receive — to give away." In an egoist, this ratio is more than one, and in an altruist, less than one.

The significance of kindness as compared to other qualities that give pleasure is small.

Personal contacts mean much in the life of man. They are of vital necessity. But in the balance of pleasures, their role is not so vividly pronounced. Apparently this is because contemporary life provides for large-scale contacts, promoting adaptation to them. However, the absence of contacts (for instance, forced solitude) in the balance of unpleasant means a lot, particularly for "extroverts." That's what psychologists call sociable people as opposed to "introverts" — unsociable ones. I have designated adaptation to solitude as average, although I understand that it is different for different types.

The most important issue of social psychology is the level of compassion, known as mercy. This is when a man experiences the feelings of another person, shares his joy and grief, responding to it with aid or, at least, with an expression of sympathy. This quality may be reflected as the "significance of other people's feelings" with respect to one's own, and is expressed by the ratio —"other people's — my own." For a mother, this ratio is more than one; for strangers, this ratio is measured in tenths of fractions. In general, it may be a negative value when the mischief of a hated man causes joy. You can see for yourselves what an interesting index it is — it expresses all the feelings of relations: sympathy, antipathy, indifference, or hatred. Individual differences of compassion are large. There are people with a talent for kindness or outright malevolence.

One law is indisputable — close acquaintance increases the ratio of compassion. Therefore, personal contacts are useful between people in general as well as between nations.

The next item on the list of requirements is designated by the word "interest." It means all types of pleasures which do not have a direct practical significance from the viewpoint of meeting those needs dic­tated by our instincts: not only of the goal of actions, but of interest itself. Doing for the sake of "doing" and not for the sake of some goal, cognition for the sake of information and not for "benefit" — this is characteristic of all of us. These are the same full-fledged needs as those for food, family, contacts or safety. Adaptation to the new, from the viewpoint of mounting claims due to situation is average, whereas diversity in terms of "non-material" needs is large.

And finally, the last line in the table. It represents the need for rest and relaxation, caused by any stress, any pursuit, even an interesting one. Stress causes fatigue. If the pursuit is an easy but long-term one, we say: "Too dull. I'm fed up with it." To eliminate fatigue we need rest, and to get rid of dullness, we must engage in some other pursuit: "Be it also dull, but different."

The significance of fatigue among other unpleasant feelings is slight. Adaptation to it is expressed in training for stress. The diversity of people with respect to fatigues sustained is designated as large. This quality of the personality directly dovetails with the concept of "disposition" if it is interpreted as the ability to tolerate stress in terms of its intensity and duration.

The most important issue of human science is the ability to be educated. In a model, this concept is expressed by a change in the significance of the given biological needs with respect to other needs. In this way, education differs from adaptation, which lowers or increases claims ("payments"), but does not alter the limits of feelings.

The perceptible human sphere, unlike that of animals, consists not only of biological feelings (also altered by education) but of convictions as well. I have already mentioned that in cybernetics, these verbal formulas, well-learned, that is, well-trained, have direct ties with the "pleasant — unpleasant" centres. They contain estimates of the en­vironment and of oneself as well as programmes of "correct" actions in response to such estimates. At the same time, the centres of pleasant and unpleasant are stimulated to the same extent as by particular biological needs.

The ability to train nervous structures is particularly large in a person's young years; it decreases in old age, although not to the zero level. The training of the brain in childhood is of particular significance — since at this time new ties are developing between neurons, and their growth is controlled by this function. In this way, the main postulates of the morale directly related to inborne needs are being formulated. ("What is good and what is bad.")

The process of personality development can be conventionally divided into three stages: so-called "imprinting" in early childhood, approximately to two years of age; education through directed external impact — through teachers, relatives, friends, and finally, self-education — the realization of one's convictions. The first stage, well-documented in animals, is rather disputable in man. It refers to an automatic imprinting of external impacts with no criticism involved. The second is typical training in morals nad physical habits. The most important guarantee of success here is the prestige of the educator.

The most difficult to understand is the third stage — self-education when a man "creatively re-interprets" what he has been taught.

It has been mentioned already that a model needs formalization, in other words, it needs some sequence of determinations of what is dependent on what and in what way. Our table presents a simplified version of this formalization of inborne needs and their feelings. It is more difficult with convictions: they are extremely diverse. Therefore, only those characteristics are selected for a model which refer to its purpose. For instance, our laboratory was interested in convictions related to social problems.

To derive a model of a community, we have to visualize the distribution of citizens by social classes and groups, and additionally, by types of personality with approximate characteristics for each type. The fundamentals for division into types are the strength of the disposition which expresses the ability to withstand stress, which determines the specific importance of man in work and leadership. The second feature is the most important need which orients the activity of a representative of a given social class. In our models, we used only three features: possession, leadership and interest.

Then what is a man?

You cannot give a simple answer to this question — good or bad, egoist or altruist. People are different; they are what they are. A draft model reveals that there are at least ten indices defining these differences. If each person may have from 1 to 3 conventional units, then the diversity is almost boundless; each person is unique. That is why limitations should be introduced into the model.

We have conducted a survey on the needs in different social systems. These are the approximate results.

The significance of "family" needs is rather high. Apparently they are the most "biological" ones. As for material needs — belongings, food, clothes, housing — their significance is high, but it can be substantially reduced by meeting the minimum, by equality or the absence of examples for expanding claims.

Safety is virtually expressed by the level of social security and unemployment, since all other risks are absent. Socialism has finally annulled these problems.

This cannot be said of leadership — as a need for prestige — as of a stimulus. In any work collective, its members show a desire to be self-assertive and to gain superiority over others. Since modern technology and labour division are related to "technological" inequality, there will always be conditions for claims to a high place in the hierarchy, even informal, for instance in a work team or classroom. Therefore, leadership will remain an important stimulus for action. One of its manifestations is the feeling of dignity. Socialism has indisputable advantage, since labour for a concrete owner humiliates, while for a community, it ennobles.

The need for contacts is universal; it is mainly met within the sphere of labour and family.

The most difficult situation is with the need for information. A simple expression of it is the need for diversity of labour. The technology of mass production gave birth to the assembly line, which deprived labour of interest. At the same time, the desire for new knowledge increases proportionally with education. This gives rise to one of the most important contradictions of our industrial century: dissemination of education and the prevalence of dull labour. We can smooth out this contradiction only through technological revolution: automated devices and robots should replace people at dull jobs.