So, why and how did I come to the realisation of decision trees?
Well, I assume I am not the only one who has come across this venture and moment of clarity. So here goes and likely you have heard/thought it all before. I just write it down, so my own mind makes sense.
I have two children and they evolve. Before my eyes, they become bigger, they learn and they come across every awareness level, we all have at moments in our lives. Sometimes more often when we ‘rediscover’ some clarity. Seeing my children evolve and recognizing the moments from before their birth, as the phases they are changing, I began to realize that humanity and from that actually all of the universe and life on Earth in specific, wasn’t really evolving much different. Of course it doesn’t, because every current state of species grows along the same line. But not just physically, we as humans evolve in mind, along the same path. Humanity as a whole follows the same path. I guess someone already made some ‘great unification’ theory, explaining how this is true. Children first learn of input, then of acquiring the necessities to survive physically (cry, find a caretaker). After the moment it feels secure it will live, it learns of its body (aware of ability, not of self), it learns of the world close by, small steps in grasping things, seeing things, then interacting with things. It finds out, that there is a ‘Pavlovian’ effect, Cry and food comes. Cry and attention comes, attention is activating neurons, feeling good. Then it starts to feel comfortable about its abilities and recognizes its interaction and its results. Stimuli and response, but also intent and reaction.
So, that is all fine, it is how a child gets to know itself and learns to be human. YES, but not just humans have this. EVERY species has this. They learn up to their abilities. The closer their neurological network resembles ours and their physical abilities resemble ours, the closer their learning/adapting process seems to ours. This means that it is not the human conscious that causes learning and adapting, but something earlier. Children with low cognitive abilities, still are able to act on simpler impulses. They are still able to adapt, to respond. Life is all about responding.
What I have named above, is actually the fact that humanity grows like all species, and even the whole of life on earth grows in awareness. Like every individual organism that starts live, it has to come to understand what it can do, where it is, how to interact. What it is, depends on whether it becomes self aware. To understand how our psyche works, it is imperitive to understand that our drives, our inner nature, comes from…nature. From the first photosynthetic plantlike organism that consumed sunlight to mix chemicals, up to the actual animals of any size and complexity, it had specific responses to stimuli. Our brains are created after milions and millons of years and millions and millions of generations adjusting into a neural network that is able to respond to stimuli of its surrounding and, in our case, also able to act upon its environment. The responses are the basic results when a stimuli is processed by the body and nervous system. The brain is the center of action, because the signal will be sent there for a decision to be made. As Michael Shermer explained already with Patternicity, it is simply a response to a complex amount of stimuli that might cause the organism harm. If something touches the skin, the skin will send a signal to the brain, the brain will send the haptic values (heat, cold, pinch, puncture) to different parts of the brain that have been previously activated by comparative signals. The build up of the brain is generally the same with every human, when they are growing up, because the same pathways/decision trees are build, based on cultural structure. This is no different with an amoebe or a coyote, just the level of intrinsic complexity differs. Now, this is the base on which I seat my theory of decision trees and I will work this out as I continue to find objective reasoning for it.
To put it short:
The model came to be, based on my research/understanding of how humanity came about ‘religious’ ideas. Like children (or rather children like humanity, being an individual evolved from the ancestral relative), we started having very little ability to cognitively understand the world. We start with emotions. Our parents are our world. Then we start to become able to move ourselves and our parents become our protectors in the surrounding we now see as our world. Then we try to mimic cognitive abilities after we mimicked physical abilities. This will give us freedom, but we still hold to the affection of the parent/protector/ruler of our world. The emotions are still vivid, but we are then moving into a more cognitive phase. We start to understand the world, bit by bit on a cognitive level. But lacking language and the possibility to see causality, we fill in the blanks. We have a ‘magical’ world, because we don’t know everything yet. We see a chair and it is an object, it moves if we move it, but when we kick it, we are surprised it didn’t move. We expect it to behave as ourselves. ‘magical thinking’, agenticity as some scientifically knowledgeable people call it. This was the start on which I based my theory that the way humans think and evolve, is caused by the ‘development’ of inherited abilities. This means that in the same analogous way, humanity will grow as humans grow in their understanding of their life and abilities.