Strife is always present in the past. The institutions that have evolved to direct the course of human civilization have been varied and many, though they tend to parallel one another throughout history. The tensions of religion versus rationalism, id versus superego, and past versus future represent how this struggle has developed throughout the past 3000 years. An investigation into these inherent checks and balances may shed light into the uniquely human course of determination. Comparing and contrasting these significant dichotomies in human experience may serve to elucidate the foundations of a synthetic representation for human cognition, vis-à-vis artificial intelligence.
Religion has been the dominant force in human history since the dawn of primitive society, exhibiting hunter-gatherer modalities. Its organizational structure formed the precursor for what eventually became politics. The establishment of an ultimate power by holding the "keys to heaven" allowed religion to supersede the powers of most monarchies. The form this power took was that of a top-down dogma that was enforced with threats of ostracism from the social framework up to and including execution. Starting in the seventeenth century, conflicts with the emergent evolutions of reason led to a still ongoing replacement of religion with science as the social cement. This began during the Reformation wherein individualism began to exhibit this conflict as an internalized force, thus losing the social nature of the tension. Personal philosophy began to evolve from Descartes onward, and those philosophies which were in the majority we called either science or government.
Freudian conceptions of id, ego, and superego are always represented as being in competition with each other for dominance. As social institutions began to take on more responsibilities, it became their business to make a harmony between public and private interests. This lends itself easily to Locke's doctrines as exhibited in the American Constitution: the ego is the line-towing executive, Congress is the pandering id, and the Judicial branch is the idealized superego. No one has supreme authority but must work with the others in order to accomplish tasks. This taken together organizes the conflicting desires of the psyche as one of checks and balances, all feeding back to each other for regulation. In this model the ego establishes an interest rate that acts as quantitative discounting future pleasures against the id. Assigning an interest rate in agreement with a democratically established majority should compel the individual to minister to the general happiness.
Further parallels exist as the tension of decision trees in time. The id is the shameful though experiential past, while the superego is the communally valued and sought after social standard. The ego must balance the conflicting extremes in both cases. In time, as in philosophy, the tension of the values of what is desirable for the individual versus what would benefit society as a whole must bias toward the majority in order for society to flourish. What was done in the past instructs how we can enact change, while what we desire for the future instructs what we are to change. #ToBeCompleted
