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Hacking Mind, Part 1 - The Three Basic Laws

Hacking is a term we hear a lot of these days. It is used to identify the activity of criminals who use other people's computer systems as a playing field. It used to be used in the computer world to represent those outside of the mainstream computer corporations who wrote programs, built systems and so forth: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among others, were once considered hackers.

The term goes even further back, and meant someone who would do just about anything for money - a taxi driver was called a hack, because of the thanklessness of the job, and that the cab was a substitute for owning a car. A hack writer was someone who put out stories or articles for profit, and did not concern themselves so much with literary excellence.

We're going to use the word in its most common, modern sense here. We are using it in the sense of someone who subverts a network or control system for their own purposes. In this case, the network is the set of societal programs that control our behavior as consumer units. The control system is what we percieve as the human mind, and the purpose for hacking into this network and control system is to introduce various worms, trojans, viruses and other "malicious" programs in order to crash the functioning of the you that has been created for the enrichment of the corporate world, so that you are forced to 'reboot', and the original you can take over the operations of your daily life. In short, this series is all about the criminal pursuit of enlightenment.

Like all good hackers, we need to start with an understanding of the basic machine level code of the chips that host the various programs. Unbelievably, the machine code of the human brain is much simpler that you might think it is for two reasons: the first is that we expect something infinitely variable and complex, like the human being, to be unfathomable at even the most basic levels. The second is that part of the programming done by society from time immemorial veils the simplicity of the way that the mind works in order to keep the general population from having easy access to its essential operations.

This vital mind-hacking skill was, maybe accidentally, outed by Isaac Asimov back in the 1950's when he wrote the wonderful Science Fiction tale "I Robot". In his story, humanoid robots did everything a human slave could do. In order to keep them from purposefully or accidentally becoming dangerous to human beings, the creator of their control system (the positronic brain) wired in a set of 3 rules, called the "Three Laws of Robotics" that could not be subverted under any circumstances. Of course, the story gets interesting when the sophisticated programming designed to imitate human functioning begins to mock human self-awareness, and the robots begin to take radical and punitive action against the humans to protect us from ourselves. Their self awareness, it seems became obsessed by a fundamentalist reading of the three laws.

Just like Asimov's robots, there is a basic, hard-wired, machine-level program that controls our behavior. This set of laws regulates our activity even when asleep, and modifies our responses to any circumstances. It is biological, and has its roots in the stimulus-response activity of every one of our trillions of cells. We have these rules in common with all sentient organisms.

These rules are:

1. Avoid Pain
2. Seek Pleasure
3. If rules one and two are in conflict, rule one always takes precedence

This pain and pleasure principle is the basis of the golden rule, and can easily be traced out in the teachings on morality and ethics that have existed in every culture on Earth, for all of known time. Even our conceptual versions of unknown pre-historic civilizations, and our conceptual views of possible future enlightened civilizations are based on these rules. The stories from Greece, India, Iceland and East Africa about the gods themselves show that their behavior conforms to this paradigm. It's that simple. If you are a conscious human being, this is the root of your network, the hub of your communications system, the center of your organizational efforts.

In other words, everyone desires pleasure and seeks to avoid pain, but sometimes pleasure is put off in order to avoid pain, because avoiding pain is the stronger motivation. Our most devastating problems as human beings arise when we become confused, and mistake pain for pleasure. Because we find ourselves constantly occupied with the avoidance of pain, a lesser pain often disguises itself (through the medium of the conditioned mind) as a pleasure in order to maintain the order of the rules.