The Happiness of Humanity

The Happiness of Humanity

"Complexity made simple", is a title of a lecture series in the Santa Fe institute, the cradle and most central place for the study of Complex Adaptive Systems in the world. I have decided to take upon such a clever idea and do a bit play. Naturally, ant colonies come to my mind, but I don't feel I know them enough despite how cute those little creatures are. Besides, I have no way to get into their brains. So I choose to play with human beings, ourselves. I am certain there is plenty of complexity I can explore about us. For instance, what simple rules have given rise to the complex world we live in today: big cities, small towns and large countryside? It sounds like a fascinating question to me.

I begin with a theory of the human world. It goes like this.

It was back in the pristine world. "God" was bored of his eternal happy life. One day he created humans on a whim. He wanted his new creature different from other living beings on earth (and himself); he made them be able to feel (not only pleasure but also pain). He thought it'd be fun to see how such human beings would go about their lives in various parts of the earth. After he distributed them randomly on a varied landscape, he let them free.

At the very beginning, each human being lived and did whatever he could to survive on his own. Those who survived well, at leisure time, would explore around in the world. He discovered that there were creatures of his kind in other places. Some of them felt better when they communicated with his kind and moved to live closer. As they lived closer, they also discovered that by exchanging produces and helping each other, their material needs were better satisfied and their lives became better off. This discovery, however, made them greedier on material stuff. They traveled further to look for more opportunities to satisfy their ever increasing material needs. Some humans had enjoyed the quiet life living alone, but the places where God put them were too harsh for them to survive. They had to look for better places. They soon realized that it was not always possible to find a good place and live a quiet life, but they could survive better with others. They learned to compromise. In either case, trying to be happy, whenever possible, a human being searched for a place that could satisfy both his social and economic needs.

This has been going on and on for millions of years. And the world has become how it looks today: big cities, small towns and quiet countryside habituated by humans of mixed types. Some have managed to live happily while most can not. God is glad that they all have survived and his creatures have populated every corner of the earth. Nonetheless, he is surprised and amazed by the great tragedies and dramas played in the human world simply because he had created them to feel. Neither had he anticipated that his creatures would make fire and tools, build houses and roads, and invent light bulb, telephone, TV, machine, car, airplane, satellite, computer and internet simply driven by that desire to feel good. The complexity the human world has evolved into since his whimsical creation is far beyond God's imagination and comprehension.

Here comes my idea: I am to test my theory using the new weapon from the science of complex adaptive system. This new weapon is agent-based model (ABM). Before I muddle ahead, I'd better tell you a bit about my new weapon.

ABM is a computer program that simulates a diverse set of agents, their behaviors and interactions in a complex adaptive system. These models are often used to demonstrate how coherent behaviors or global properties of complex systems emerge from individual behaviors and interactions in a bottom-up fashion. By capturing feedbacks, they are also used to explore the complexity and non-linearity of the system.

An early example of ABM is named Boids, developed by Craig Reynolds. Boids successfully demonstrates the emergence of the flocking behavior of birds with no leader birds at all. In Boids, each individual bird only follows three steering rules: move in the same direction that nearby birds are moving, move toward other nearby birds, avoid another bird which gets too close. Social scientists have used ABMs to explore human interactions. For instance, with his well-known Segregation Model, Schelling shows how even a small preference for one's neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation, an insight interesting and perhaps a bit counter-intuitive.

A good agent-based model captures the very essence, not every detail, of a system. Simple and elegant is the key just as the way of life. With this golden rule in mind, in my model, I implement two mechanisms to reveal the processes underlying the emergence of cities and towns. The first one is about psychology: humans are social animals and have a need for communication. The second one is economic in nature: humans ever look for better opportunities to satisfy our material needs. I expect my model to replay the history of the evolution of the world. I have a higher hope that it will also tell us a few important things about the happiness of humanity.

More specifically, in my model, humans are simulated as autonomous agents with social and economic needs. Each human agent has an expectation of opportunity and a social preference. He can be very social feeling good among many others; he can be the average type who likes to live around some; he can also be the solitary kind who tries to stay away from others as much as he can. He moves around in the world to search for a place that can offer him expected opportunity and satisfies his social needs. A human being is said to be an economically happy man if he lives in a place that meets his expectation of opportunity. He is said to be socially happy if he lives in a place with the number of neighbors he prefers. A happy human being is the one who is happy both economically and socially.

In addition, every human agent values the importance of his economic and social needs differently. He knows what make him feel better. If he regards economic needs more important, he will look at the opportunity in a place first and then the number of neighbors. If his social needs are more important, he will first look at the number of neighbors and then the opportunity.

While every human agent is free to move to any place available, he is not a superman. He is constrained by his exploring power. Each time, he can only look at a certain number of places to choose before he makes a move.

And the world humans live in is forever changing. First, when people move around, the population density of the social environment changes. So does the opportunity distribution in the economic world as people bring opportunities to new places and the opportunities left behind diminish. Second, the economic world has its own dynamics. As the opportunities in a place diffuse over space, it follows the laws of diffusion.

Just to make sure you are still with me: in the simulated world, a bunch of heterogeneous human agents, each with different expectation of opportunity, capacity of bringing new opportunity, social preference and relative importance of social and economic needs, try their best to satisfy both needs, with limited exploring power, in the ever changing social and economic environments that shape and are constantly shaped by the actions of human agents.

To be scientific, I decide to go with a standard approach to research. I specify my general goal with four questions. I have hypotheses as well, but I don't want to mislead or bias you. You may feel free to speculate on your own.

v Will cities and towns emerge in such a simulated world?

v How are our happiness and economic achievement affected by how we value the two needs?

v Will we become happier as our exploring power increases?

v Will we ever settle down happily?

I don't want to bore you with the details of model implementation either. I assure you that the economic world and the social environment are implemented appropriately. So are the human agents. The opportunity in the economic world is displayed with hues of red color in a two-dimensional space. A human agent is represented by his type: a very social person is shown as a solid green square, the average type a yellow circle and the solitary kind a blue circle. At each time step, if he is not happy at his current location, he randomly samples a number of places, evaluates them, picks the best place and makes the move. The happiness of humanity is measured by percentage of socially happy people, percentage of economically happy people and percentage of happy people while the economic achievement of humanity by average opportunity achieved. They are carefully calculated based on the attributes of all human agents at each time step.

I strictly follow the procedures of doing science with ABM. I first initialize my model. The economic world and the social environment are set up as empty spaces. A number of human agents are created. Each of them is assigned a social preference (randomly drawn from three types), an amount of opportunity he can bring (randomly drawn from a range), an amount of opportunity he expects (also randomly drawn from a range) and a value of relative importance of the two needs (randomly drawn from a normal distribution). He is placed randomly in the world, and immediately generates an opportunity.

I then run the model interactively and automatically (by scheduled computer commands) for thousands of steps each time and for thirty times with each value combination of the parameters (relative importance of the two needs, exploring power etc.). I observe patterns, register results, do statistics and plot graphs, from which and only from which I find answers to my questions.

Will cities and towns emerge in such a simulated world?

No doubt each interactive model run has given rise to cities and towns (as I have expected), though the patterns vary when human agents value the two needs differently or have different levels of exploring power.

When human agents only care about their social needs, nice looking clusters form with a few big cities, some towns and countryside. When they only care about their economic needs, clusters also form. But they tend to be much smaller in size. This suggests economic needs alone can't bring people close enough to form large cities as we see in the real world.

Among all cases, when human agents value social needs about four times as much as economic needs, the model generates patterns that best match the real world (a few big cities, some small towns and large countryside). It tells us both mechanisms are at work underlying the evolution of the world (as my theory has predicted). It also indicates the social needs may be more important in the process of evolution.

A small interesting detail: when human agents only care about their social needs and have significant exploring power, they first start moving closer to form many small clusters, and then one big city forms. But later the big city dissolves, and a couple of cities and towns of various sizes take shape before people gradually settle down. I wonder if it says the diversity of places is important for us to live happily.

How are our happiness and economic achievement affected by how we value the two needs?

Assume human agents have a medium level of exploring power (anyway we are not supermen). When they only care about economic needs, they achieve more economically and become happier economically. When they only care about social needs, they are happier socially.

Let's forget about these two extreme cases for a moment (we know they are not realistic). Among all other cases, as human agents regard economic needs more important than social needs, they definitely become less happy socially. Surprisingly, they are not economically better off. In fact, it is when they value social needs more important than economic needs that they are the happiest and they also achieve the best economically.

Will we become happier as our exploring power increases?

As human agents can explore more places, the world appears more fragmented with many small clusters. The percentage of happy people does rise, but only slightly and to a certain degree. And the average opportunity achieved increases very little.

Interestingly, even when human agents only care about their economic needs, the average opportunity achieved becomes almost constant after some time steps regardless of exploring capacity. This suggests there is a limit to the performance of humanity that may be determined by the initial settings of the system (dimension of the world, opportunity diffusing/diminishing rate, the range of opportunity that can be generated in human population etc.). It reminds me of the concept of carrying capacity in an ecosystem, which says there is a maximum number of living things that can be supported for long periods by a given environment.

Will we ever settle down happily?

Out of all the experiments, only once the system converges to equilibrium. It is when human agents only care about their social needs and are equipped with a tremendous exploring power. Apparently it's an unrealistic case. The percentage of happy people becomes sort of stabilized after some time steps, but human agents continue to move around a lot. At maximum, only one third of them can achieve happiness. Notice also that the individual happy human agents are not the same at each time step. Since there are always unhappy human agents and they keep searching and moving, the system will not settle.

As the model has demonstrated, the percentage of happy people doesn't increase much even over many generations. Darwin evolution may have enhanced the average fitness of human population but not necessarily the happiness.

Thus, I have tested my theory of the human world using my new weapon, ABM. Further, I have proved scientifically that attaining happiness is not a matter of time, and our increased exploring power enabled by modern technologies will not help much either. If we want to be happier, we'd better be more attentive to our social/psychological needs (by doing so, we will also become economically better off). After all, it was God's intention for us to feel. As we'll never be perfectly happy, unhappy people will continue to struggle, and the world will continue to evolve. But at least we are alive!

I am quite pleased with (perhaps a bit proud of) my model till one morning I wake up with a cloud in the two hemispheres: have I really proved anything than imposed a world view of my own?

Notes:

In this essay, God is used only for fun and convenience. The key points of the story are:

1. The birth of humanity is a chance event, no matter by God or by nature.

2. There is no super power that can intervene or control us or that we can resort to. Even if there were a "God", he had only created humans. After that, we were totally on our own. First, God didn't intend to interfere with humans when he created them. Second since the complexity of the human world is beyond his comprehension, he simply can't intervene, and therefore it doesn't really matter he exists or not. According to Kant, the existence of God is not something that can be proved - or, for that matter, disproved.

3. Feeling is the fundamental difference between humans and other living things. Intelligence comes after feeling, and is an evolutionary result of feeling. According to Hume, whose philosophy is now more supported by new scientific evidence such as pleasure center, our aims in life are not chosen by intellects. The ends of our behaviors are set by our desires, our passions, our emotions, and our tastes - our feelings of every sort. The chief way in which reasons comes in is in adopting and adapting all the various ways to secure our ends. Reason is the slave of passions.

4. Humans were not created or born with a real purpose. According to Schopenhauer, life is a meaningless tragedy ending in inevitable death. It is Existentialist's view that it's up to us to make our lives. We are not created or born to be happy either. To live is to feel (both pleasure & pain). Feeling makes us alive and our life interesting.

5. The world (both the social and natural world) around us is constantly changing, and we also constantly change the world while the world constantly shapes us. This has been recognized and discussed even from ancient Greek philosophy, and well described by Hegel's dialectical process. According to Hegel, we can't jump out of history.

6. Because humans have unsatisfiable desires and our happiness is greatly affected by the highly dynamic environment, we can never be completely happy. This is a view held by oriental philosophy. Schopenhauer also expressed a similar view. According to him, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, we can never obtain lasting happiness.