Daily Thought 20 - Understanding Human Psychology: A Proposal or Introduction for Micro and Macro Psychology

As each of these thoughts gets put down on metaphorical paper, my own inadequacy and ignorance reveals itself.  These thoughts here border on triviality, not because I am an idiot, but because I have not lived long enough nor dived to the depths necessary on a single topic to divulge any revelations of appreciable magnitude.  I write these tidbits not as a means of educating others, but as a record of my own my own self education.  Everything here could very well be jotted in a journal and kept private.  Maybe it should; with the current and projected state of machine learning and generative pre-trained transformer systems, someone could very easily replicate an artificial version of me based on the things I share here.  While this is a terrifying thought, I absolutely am flattering myself thinking anyone would do such a thing at this point in time.  Granted (a term I seem to use with regularity, and something a GPT would definitely pick up on), should I keep this up for even a hundred days, or potentially a thousand (three years), you could probably generate essays and sentences that I would not be able to tell whether they came from my own brain or a machine (some may argue those are one and the same).

Anyways, the above was not my intended topic for today.  However, it was spurred on in recognition of my own deficiencies and desire to improve on this front: the front of psychology.  Humans are remarkable creatures.  I would know, I’m one of them.  However, the very thing which makes them a point of inspirational wonder also leads to a bewildered wonder.  Why?  Why do people do the things they do?  How do they make decisions?  These are critical question, not just supremely important in personal relationships, but also in business.  A machine makes decisions from a knowledge set and series of logical operations, operations which can be traced back in their entirety, replayed, and predicted with high, often perfect, accuracy.  But, humans approach decisions differently.  Emotions come in to play.  Social pressures.  Personal inclinations.  Occasionally, a hint of logic.  If you’re a computer scientist, you might assume these things could just be assigned variables and, with the right tuning and enough data, you could perfectly predict, and possibly backtrack, a human’s thought process.  Maybe you could, maybe within this generation it will be achieved.  However, I have a feeling, that like some physics problems, there is an inherent instability involved; perfect replication of a human will never take place.  Despite this, I do think it is of utmost importance to continually try and understand your fellow human.  And, I believe there are two scales at which this understanding of psychology is relevant; borrowing from economics, I’ll call them micro and macro psychology.  As a matter of fact, I think economic studies are the shadow and mathematical interpretation of these two sectors of psychology.  Micropsychology would be the understanding of an individual’s brain chemistry and how their neurons particularly fire in order to make personal decisions.  Macropsychology focuses on the hoard; how does a group think collectively.  Unfortunately, this is as far as I can take the topic at this point.  Possibly, this may be merely an introduction to a much longer discussion with more hard evidence and research to backup thorough and complete premises.  However, knowing my own micropsychology, this current fascination may dwindle in a day only to be rekindled with one-hundred times the intensity in a decade.  So, do not hold your breath in anticipation.  Take each day with the curiosity it brings and explore.