The Background

Much of what I write here, and what I have written in "How God Makes God" and "Lingo Sorcery", might appear to many people to be a little weird. It combines biological theories and structures with computer programming; business strategy and economics with probability and game theory. It plunges into areas of scientific controversey and borders into subject matter more usually associated with philosophy and metaphysic. Even more confusing, all of this is spiced with elements of arcane theories of mathematics and physics.

The reader might be forgiven for considering this to be the sad ravings of a very scary sort of deranged person.

However, before you write it off entirely, you might like to know some of the background which may offer some sort of explanation and perhaps even provide a little credence.

I had been very lucky, a freak chance in education brought me to the cutting edge of all the emerging technologies of the late twentieth century before most people had even heard of them. Electronics, systems theory, computers, game theory, servo mechanisms and automatic control, etc., were taught to me by scientists in a special college which had been set up in the middle of a UK government research center during the late 1950's.

Instead of using this educational advantage to map out a successful career, I dropped out of the conventional world to experiment with an independent existence as an entrepreneur. I reasoned that with my education and training I ought to be able to learn how to make my own money (it seemed a rational supposition at the time).

If I had taken a normal educational route, I might have approached money making in a conventional way and seen the goal of making money as the possession of large sums of it. As it happened, my aims were more abstract and far less focused.

Receiving an education from scientists, as opposed to educational lecturers, had given me an enthusiasm for unraveling mysteries, thus, it was the technicalities and the theory of wealth creation which were the main attraction for me. The possession of vast wealth seemed no more than a "hoped for" possible outcome.

Noting that few successful entrepreneurs had started out by being trained as professional managers, accountants, lawyers or financiers, I figured that there must be other key elements involved which weren't being taught. What were they? How do you begin life as an entrepreneur if you aren't taught how to be one? It was an intriguing puzzle, which launched me into a strange new world of exotic businesses.

After several years of see-sawing fortunes, in an exciting roller coaster life, I seemed to have been getting nowhere with any general theory of wealth creation. Certainly, I had made and lost plenty of money, but, it had all seemed to be from opportunistic adventuring rather than strategic planning. There were no overall concepts developing. Most of the ventures had involved a certain amount of technical skill, planning and organization, but, the feeling that I "knew" how to make money, just wasn't there.

During one of my frequent 'back to square one' periods, I decided to study marketing to see if that would throw any light on the problem. Three months of intensive reading at the Holborn library in London, which specializes in books on marketing, provided me with a new role game to play: as a marketing consultant. This career move stopped at the first consultancy when I became involved in the writing of a correspondence course on investment.

In writing the correspondence course, I used a games theory approach. To my great disappointment, one of the main requirements of the optimum strategy for investment turned out to be one of preserving capital. With such a specification, investments are spread to safeguard against any serious loss; this effectively also eliminates any possibility for spectacular gains.

Although I didn't get any direct benefit from this investment knowledge, the insight it gave me into the underlying mathematics of financial decision making turned out to be invaluable. Also, it brought to my attention the work of John Maynard Keynes, in the context of general economic theory.
Having spent an intensive year, sitting down in a smoke filled room in the City of London to write the correspondence course, I felt the need for a dramatic change in life style. I got it, when, in 1970, I discovered the hippie market in Kensington High Street, London.

Even with my experience of different life styles this was something I had never come across before. Not only was this hippie lifestyle fun, it was generating wealth. The hippie colonies, centered around Kensington Market, were not just idling life away in a drug induced state of euphoria, these people were making serious money from real industry and effort.

In this hippie market, even the casual employees, working in the small cramped upstairs trading units, were earning more money per week than most young engineers. Something was happening there and I wanted to be part of it and find out what was the secret of this wealth creation.

If the wealth creation strategy which I uncovered had remained a theoretical concept it would have been of little consequence. The significance came from the fact that the ensuing theoretical framework helped me to build a fairly successful business using a predetermined strategy.

Starting out with a tiny stall, on the top floor of Kensington Market, within two years I had shops and trading units all over London and had more money than I had ever seen in my life before. The details of the business are secondary, what was important was that it had all been built upon a theoretical foundation and strategy which had been planned - and by a hippie who was enjoying himself.

After "discovering" this general strategy for creating wealth, I started to observe the many other traders around me who were also making money. What strategy were they using?

It was then I realized that the successful hippie culture was underpinned by a variety of non hippie business people who were operating, almost transparently, in the background. This transparent infrastructure was made up mainly from Asian immigrants and Jewish business people. What role were they playing in the game to make money?

As I observed the inconspicuous way the non hippie infra structure provided the links and the oil which kept the hippie culture financially viable, I couldn't help but be struck by the way in which the people involved seemed to be adopting the same money making strategy which I had theorized to be optimal.

However, there was one important difference. These successful entrepreneurs weren't working to some carefully worked out conscious plan; these people were acting instinctively. The successful strategies they were adopting to create wealth was an unconscious, natural way for them to behave.

I might still have been puzzled by this anomaly today if I hadn't have made a disastrous lifestyle experiment in Spain.

Imagine, having more money than you can spend, a luxury penthouse apartment overlooking the Mediterranean, a business consisting of rents from forty two little shops - yet feeling bored and miserable. Wouldn't you have thought this would have provided the basis for an idyllic existence? Sadly, it didn't for me.

As I lay on the beach one morning, reflecting upon the unexpected disappointment of my lifestyle experiment, I began to think about what enjoyment in life was really all about. It couldn't be material benefit, I had all of that. All I could think of was that it must have something to do with what was happenings in the brain: like neurons firing and stuff.

This thought set me on a search to find out how the brain works.

I skipped through various books on psychology and philosophies of the mind but didn't seem to be getting very far until I began to look at the physical structure of the brain and came across Jacque Monod's "Chance and Necessity".

"Chance and necessity" is not about the brain, it is about DNA and the molecular theory of the genetic code. For me it was a revelation. Here was a Nobel prize winner explaining the physical mechanisms which cause life to come into existence in a way I could understand - in terms of feedback and control mechanisms in which the human cell and its chromosomes are seen as parts of a complex system of interacting components.

Having been convinced by Monod that the human cell consisted of mechanisms which were potentially explainable, I began following all references to the working of the human biological cell.

The next thing to strike me was an article I came across in Scientific American: it was explaining some obscure points about molecular interactions. The explained method involved modeling the structures of proteins on a computer. It was the paradigm shift I needed.

If proteins could be modeled on a computer, their structure could be represented as strings of binary code. Taking this paradigm just a little bit further, the interactions of proteins and other chemical items in a cell could be abstracted out and considered as operating upon each other in the same way that the code of a computer language could act upon and process the data in the memory space of a computer. Both could be represented as binary strings and this, for me, was the key to understanding the mechanisms of molecular biology. Two completely different types of system yet sharing a common abstraction.

At about this same time (1975-6) my attention was drawn to a new and controversial publication: "Sociobiology" by O. E. Wilson. Here was the critical piece of the jigsaw which linked all of my disparate observations and findings together.

"Sociobiology" is a masterful and authoritative work which fully explains the evolution of behavior patterns in terms of survival and reproduction strategies. The evidence suggested that much of animal behavior is instinctive and inherited and although the empirical data related to the animal world, there were none too subtle hints that this could also be applied to humans.

Inherited patterns of behavior? To many influential educationalists this was a heresy and the book was condemned by many as a wild speculation without any credence.

For me, Wilson's argument, together with its supporting wealth of empirical data, was overwhelmingly convincing. Its only weakness was that the actual mechanism which provided the transmission of behavior from one generation to another was missing. How is it possible to pass on behavior "genetically" from one generation to another? Surely, behavior is passed culturally, as a series of learned responses? Wilson's book never really addressed that problem.

However, a bell had rung in my head. I'd seen behavior patterns in business people which I'd been sure were unconscious. I had assumed they were a result of social and cultural learning and conditioning. After reading Wilson's book I began to wonder. Could a propensity to be good at business be an inherited trait? The idea seemed too outrageous to warrant serious contemplation, but, the seed was sown.

Weighing up Wilson's evidence for the evolution of behavior patterns and my observations of strategic emotive decision making by business people, I concluded that emotions might be involved in some kind of automatic control of human behavior.

Although it made sense that behavior was to a large extent driven by emotions, there needed to be some conclusive proof that such a mechanism could evolve. A possible way to do this suggested itself when I realized that the business people I'd observed were mainly from cultures with strong religious associations; although the business people themselves may not necessarily have been religious, their cultural influences could have been an important factor.

Checking out the rules of the respective religions, I found that they all seemed to incorporate heuristic strategies which would be conducive to good business ethics and practice. This raised the interesting possibility that religions, which have survived and prospered to the present day, may have owed their success to the survival advantage of their religious rules and edicts.

Switching paradigms, it could therefore also be argued that the religions which are prospering today are a result of an evolutionary process, where the religions with the most effective rules gradually replaced religions which had less effective rules.

In other words the evolving entity was not the religions themselves but the sets of rules which religions abide by (which in game theory terms is the evolution of an heuristic strategy).

This set a new train of thought. A set of rules evolving?

It was then that I came across J. H. Holland's work on genetic algorithms and rule based classifier systems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan). The versatility of this technique allows sets of rules to be tested against each other in a competitive environment.

The trick is to specify a whole range of rules and then state how strongly each should be enforced. A zero weighting would indicate that a particular rule was not to be applied; a positive value indicating the rule was to be applied (with a strength proportional to the value); and a negative value indicating that the opposite of the rule had to be applied.

Starting off with random values, it could be shown how optimum rules and rule combinations could be selected for in the evolutionary progress of a genetic algorithm and after a significant number of generations an optimum set of rules would evolve.

The next conceptual jump was to associate the weightings given to the application of rules with emotional pressures to apply those rules. Suddenly, I had a model which demonstrated the mechanism by which emotionally driven behavior patterns could evolve. How could I prove it?

I then retraced the steps I had taken to come to those conclusions. I remembered that the starting position had been to create a strategy which would be optimum for creating wealth.

I considered the conclusion I'd drawn, that the heuristic strategy had seemed to work. I'd observed for myself that it really could result in an increase in wealth within a community (remember wealth creation is a statistical concept which applies to an aggregate and not necessarily specific to an individual).

This, I thought, could provide the basis of a test scenario.

My next step was to create artificial software life forms which existed as emotionally driven entities whose emotions would cause them to favor specific types of behavior (obey certain rules). These entities were then set to compete with each other in an artificial competitive environment.

Initially, the emotions of the life form entities were set to random values (the life forms started out by not favoring any particular rules or behavior), but, as the evolution progressed, emotions developed (in the life form entities) which caused them to act optimally: to cooperate with each other and act in ways which would be optimally efficient for their economic success in the artificial scenario provided.

Not only did these simulations cause the life form entities to evolve the correct mix of emotions to enable them to act optimally for survival, they also developed much deeper emotions which could easily be interpreted as ethics, altruism and most surprisingly of all - conscience.

This was an astounding result (which is fully explained in the CD-ROM "How God Makes God").

I have noticed recently that there has been an increasing number of scientific articles which seem to add support to these suppositions. However, even if the connection between the software models and the real life working of the brain may be considered somewhat tenuous, there is no doubt at all that the underlying "emotional" software mechanisms described can be used to provide a fuzzy control system which will give any software object a capacity for learning and adapting.

The most exciting possibilities for the "emotional" control stuff is in being able to provide COISes (client oriented intranet systems, also known as Web buggies or client side bots) with virtual brains. Such "intelligent" entities could have a wealth of applications on the Internet and is now the subject of my current interest.

The conceptual frameworks developed in HGMG have also proved to be extremely useful for looking at the Internet and the World Wide Web in different ways. The analogies of the cell as a miniature computer and the genome as a CD-ROM have great application for visualizing the potential of the Web for commercial applications.

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