P1: Pursuits in life

At the heart of human experience lies an enduring question: What is the basic human drive?

The answers to this question shape our understanding of why we pursue what we do, why we strive, create, compete, imitate, and sometimes self-destruct. Broadly, our pursuits fall into two categories. The first is the primal set of survival instincts consisting of the biological imperatives that override everything else. The second, and far more intricate, is the collection of cognitive patterns that guide our actions once survival is secured. These include associations, simulations, architectural perfectionism, and cerebral projections.

Associations

Augustine’s recollection in Confessions of watching his peers steal pears and feeling both repulsion and attraction captures the first layer of association: the brain’s instinctive filing of behaviors into categories of “be that” or “avoid that.” Over time, a gesture, accent, laugh, or habit becomes not merely an observation, but a judgment encoded into memory going all the way back to infancy. Phrases like “He/She’s one of ‘those’ people” or “that’s cringe” reflect this internal shorthand.

Most associations arise from conditioning. We are taught from childhood what to laugh at, what to hide, what to feel embarrassed about, and which emotions are socially permissible. A person slipping on the pavement or farting in public becomes humorous or embarrassing not because the action is inherently funny but because we have been conditioned to react that way.

Another category is computive association. Here, we recognize something as “cringe” or “off” without being able to explicitly articulate why. The brain compares the present stimulus to thousands of past impressions and produces an emotional verdict instantly. The feeling arrives long before the reasoning. Cringe sometimes, in this sense, is the brain’s compressed computational output of poorly matched patterns.

Then comes the cultural layer: a more elaborate form of conditioning. Even highly analytical or philosophical minds cannot escape it. A philosopher might fully understand that public bodily functions are arbitrary cultural taboos, yet still feel aversion, not because of rational conviction but because he unconsciously protects the social value of respectability. A lot of actions may feel “embarrassing” as they signal low value in the competitive social arena. What seems like principle is often just conditioned dopamine: the reward of social harmony, and the avoidance of disapproval.

Simulations

The heroes of our myths, films, histories, and stories provide the templates from which our simulative machinery draws. René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire highlights this. We do not just want; we want what we see others wanting. Don Quixote imitates imagined knights, children emulate astronauts and athletes, and audiences feel surges of power watching Rocky or Maverick. This is the brain’s simulation engine at work. When admiration or formidability stirs us, we unconsciously run first-person scenarios of embodying the admired trait, and the dopamine surge from anticipation of actual dopamine, becomes the driving force of our pursuit. The pursuit of dreams, passions, and ideals is thus more of a neurological theater sometimes, than a moral or rational action. We remain motivated by the anticipation, yet when the dream is realized, and the neurochemical light is felt in ‘the moment’, the feeling soon fades away, leaving behind a very common felling of “It’s nothing in the end.”, hence explaining how such simulations can fuel pursuits for a lifetime, however, quickly fading away once realized.

On the other extreme, when suffering becomes chronic and unprocessed, the mind may reverse the simulation framework. Instead of imagining heroism, it imagines domination and possibly retribution. These individuals are often, in a way, cognitively gifted as well: reversing societal simulations requires insight powerful enough to detect and reject them. The result may be an inverted simulation that society fears because its consequences can be catastrophic.

Perfectionism and Architectural Thought

From Kant’s kingdom of ends to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, history brims with minds determined to make reality fit a blueprint. In literature, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark embodies the same tension, an architect who insists that the purity of design outweighs compromise with circumstance.

 

Perfectionism emerges when the rational mind tries to make sense of life’s disorder. We synthesize principles, build moral compasses, and then live to preserve their symmetry. This crystallizes into architectural thought, the drive not only to be perfect but to construct a perfect future. Whether in administrative planning, ideologic pursuits, or even in daily personal routine, the intention is identical: to project the inner order outward.

But architectural thought contains a danger that is often overlooked: it creates fertile ground for nihilism. When the architectural mind discovers that its blueprint cannot fully map the world and that reality resists perfect symmetry, it may pivot toward total negation, and nihilation while simultaneously achieving formidability. That’s why nihilism is historically censored. When someone highly intelligent and socially isolated embraces nihilism, the results can be extreme. Such individuals can produce either groundbreaking insights or devastating collapses. Society recognizes this volatility, which is why nihilistic tendencies are culturally framed as dangerous, unstable, or pathological.

Architectural thought is therefore allowed, even celebrated, so long as it builds. But it’s heavily scrutinized when it begins to dismantle given the stakes are existential on both ends.

Cerebral Projections

Another pattern of thought is cerebral projection, which usually, but not necessarily, arises after illusions of perfect design dissolve. Here, emotion is regulated, illusions are discarded, and strategy governs action. The world becomes a series of variables and leverage points. The central question becomes: What must be done, and what sequence of moves will achieve it? This is the realm of Machiavelli’s Prince, of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, and of the strategist who sees the world not as moral order but as moving geometry.

Cerebral projection is the adaptive mind’s late stage. Having understood the limits of association, the volatility of simulation, and the rigidity of perfectionism, it now operates through foresight. It weighs variables, anticipates reactions, and models futures. But because projection can reshape societies, it is heavily censored. Successful projection produces extraordinary outcomes such as power, influence, and historical impact, but its risks are equally immense. People capable of sustained projection are rarely metaphysical thinkers or isolated intellectuals. Instead, they are high-functioning social strategists who can read their surroundings, anticipate reactions, and focus their cognition ruthlessly on one objective. They succeed because they have both the focus and the social skill to navigate power.

Society therefore regulates them with narratives warning against ambition, norms enforcing modesty, and institutions that contain potential excesses. Projection is therefore dangerous when unbounded, but undoubtedly indispensable when guided. 

The Music Sheet of the Mind

In the long run, we pursue a combination of the above mentioned cognitive patterns. But when it comes to the moment by moment functioning of our brain, the question shifts: what determines which thought we are having right now?

We walk, drive, eat, or stare blankly into space, yet a constant stream of inner commentary persists. It changes every few seconds. Sometimes it clings, sometimes it jumps. So the core question is what governs which thought we’ll have at a given time? To answer this question, the brain can be imagined as a music sheet, full of notes being played at a given time. Each cortical and subcortical area fires its own rhythm, some sharp, some faint, some sustained, and some transient. What we call thinking is the brain’s way of cruising through this neuronal orchestra.

But the question then arises: what is the playhead that moves across this sheet?

That playhead is our conscious awareness, the act of knowing what we are thinking at any given moment. The playhead scans across notes, and whichever note has the highest amplitude or emotional charge becomes the dominant thought. For a few seconds, that note occupies consciousness, then fades, and another rises. We may dwell on this thought for three seconds, five, or a minute before the next one replaces it. Our entire inner life is this endless traversal of the score: one thought at a time, then another, then another.

The strength of a thought / note depends on the value attached to it. Thoughts tied to survival, hunger, safety, sex, or immediate danger, have evolutionary neurochemical dominance. They fire louder and their notes spike higher on the sheet. Frequency, on the other hand, is the number of similar notes that appear within a given timeframe. A repeated motif gains familiarity and, through repetition, attention. This explains why cravings, obsessions, or habits gain power over time, they are not single strong notes, but dense clusters of repeated ones.

If addiction is viewed through this framework, it’s essentially an overrepresentation of a particular motif on the neuronal sheet. The same circuits are replayed over and over while the playhead has little room for alternative notes. ADHD represents the opposite extreme: too many scattered notes, each too brief for sustained melody. The playhead keeps jumping before one tune completes.

Meditation, by contrast, slows the sheet down. It reduces the frequency of active notes, and lets the playhead linger longer on a given note, leading to an increase in concentration, leading to a phase where distractions recede, and over time, productivity and clarity rise as the mental orchestra becomes more synchronized. So controlling thought at its origin could reshape an entire life, addictions, procrastination, impulsivity, even unhappiness.

But the control depends not on forcing the playhead but on altering the score itself, the underlying distribution of notes. The stronger and more frequent a type of thought, the more likely it is to resurface. Changing it requires reweighting the neural sheet: reducing the salience of certain nodes and strengthening others. This can be achieved through behavioral conditioning, mindfulness, cognitive reframing, or long-term habit training. Over time, the emotional charge attached to certain ideas diminishes, and the playhead naturally gravitates toward calmer, more deliberate notes.

The next question is whether this process can be externally manipulated. Could external devices  alter the frequency or nature of the notes or the playhead? The mystery to solve before this is the playhead, the conscious observer, which remains elusive. Where exactly is it located? The brain has no single “center” of consciousness. It’s considered more of an emergent phenomenon, a dynamic synthesis of sensory input, emotional valence, and memory integration.