MindStretched Museum
One human machine. Billions of configurations.
An explanation for why people do things that make no sense.
Welcome
Guess what? The specimen under investigation is us.
Every person on Earth appears to be running the same basic contraption. It's called the Overreaction Machine.
The machine is the model of how humans make choices.
Why did they do that? Why did I know better and do it anyway? Why is she holding on to that grudge for years?
Are you ready to question the answers you've inherited?
Let's go.
Explore the Machine
How does one human choose?
The Overreaction Machine is the hidden machinery that receives the world, predicts what happens next, commits to a future, produces behavior, explains what it just did, and uses the whole mess to prepare for next time.
This machinery turns what was happening into what this human did.
Once you can see the machinery, human weirdness stops looking quite so mysterious.
We have work to do.
Let's Be Classy
Why don't humans choose the same way?
Someone won't let something go. Someone else forgot it by breakfast. One person needs to talk. Another needs the conversation to end. Two people experience the same event and somehow leave with different realities.
Those aren't explanations. They're evidence.
BEHAVIOR IS THE CLUE
How can one machine create several billion known specimens? Find out.
Go to Machine Classification >>>
Follow the classification tree as it becomes increasingly unhelpful.
Multiply By 8 Billion
What happens when all these differently configured humans build a world together?
Every person receives a slightly different world, chooses different trajectories, and becomes input into everybody else's machinery.
Keep doing that long enough and humans build things.
Families. Religions. Governments. Schools. Businesses. Laws. Borders. Status systems. Moral systems. Wars.
And eventually the things humans built start shaping new baby humans.
Go to the Civilization Wing >>>
That's where this gets interesting.
Connections
The museum has side doors. Browse the full exhibit collection, meet the curator, or wander into the other places MindStretched has escaped to.
