How To Augment Your Mind's Immunity Vol1: A Practical Perspective, #1

By Bogdan Motoc

How to augment your mind immunity takes the sage advice of living in authenticity and updates it with multiple scientifically informed perspectives that will prime your mind towards implementing it with success. What you get is a toolset (model based methodology) that will give you a simple perspective to many of our modern life complicated and complex challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sentient Cloud Ltd
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780991863525

Bogdan Motoc

Prior to meeting in person, I will let my personality profile speak more objectively about me: Extroversion – 60-% Agreeableness – 75% Consciousness – 80% Openness – 87% Neuroticism – 17% Otherwise said, a leader that loves building successful teams, takes challenges to completion based on scientific approaches with emotional stability in difficult times.

Book preview

How To Augment Your Mind’s Immunity

Cultivate living well by reconnecting with your authentic self.

VOLUME I

by Bogdan Motoc

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

HOW TO AUGMENT YOUR MIND'S IMMUNITY - VOLUME I

First edition. November 13, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 Bogdan Motoc.

ISBN: 978-0991863525

Written by Bogdan Motoc.

First Edition

Dedication

To those who have shaped who I am

Table of Contents

How To Augment Your Mind’s Immunity

Cultivate living well by reconnecting with your authentic self.

Dedication

Part One

Serenity Prayer, a book specific perspective

Quotations

Vision

Chapter 1 Introduction to the Book

Meet the Author

The Problem

The Solution

Chapter 2 The Book’s Approach

Some Disclaimers and Book qualifications

Lifoids as A Generic Model for Life

Structure of the Book

Structure in More Detail

How the book is packaged

One Pattern, Many Roles

Sources

The Book’s Title

Proposed Methodology

Case Studies

Chapter 3 Ending Thoughts

How to Give Feedback

Part Two – Models and Methodologies

Quotations

Introduction to Part Two

Chapter 4 – Models and Knowledge

Introduction

Concepts of Interest

Sensing, measuring

Context

Information

Information Patterns

Knowledge

A Phylogeny of Knowledge Management Platforms

Procedural and Declarative Knowledge

Trust and Causation

A Knowledge Unity

Knowledge and Models

How Do We Manage Knowledge?

The Procedural Method

Storytelling - People’s Oldest form of Model-making

The Scientific Method

Generic patterns of activity in building models

Attributes of a Good Model

Attributes of Good Modeling

Abstracting

Understanding

Wisdom

The Pyramid of Knowledge

Trust in Knowledge

Minimal Necessity, Sufficiency and Reusability in Modeling

Aggregation of Knowledge in Frameworks

Procedural Knowledge Frameworks

Genetic Procedural Knowledge Frameworks

Social Procedural Knowledge Frameworks

Faith based Social Procedural Knowledge Frameworks (Religions)

Declarative Knowledge Frameworks (Sciences)

Good Model Attributes

Pitfalls of modeling and working with models

A brief look at Communication and Science

Scientific Knowledge and Trust

Knowledge Ratchets and Life

Chapter 5 Models of Interest

The context of building models

Mathematics – the universal scientific modeling framework

Models relevant to this book

Architecture

Conclusion

Chapter 6 Enterprises

Quotations – The Enterprise

Introduction

What Is an Enterprise?

Base Case Enterprise

Composite Enterprises

The Lifecycle of an Enterprise

A Systemic Enterprise Model

An Enterprise’s Motivation

How do Enterprises Compose

Allopoietic Enterprises

Autopoietic Enterprises

Architecture of an Enterprise

The role of culture in a social enterprise

What Did We Learn?

Chapter 7 Models for Life and Living

Quotations

Introduction

Why Study Life?

Model Ingredients

A Sciences Perspective

A Formal Sciences Perspective

A mythical perspective

Campbell monomyth pattern

Lifoids: Living entities generalized

Modeling our Biome

The arrow of life

Why Has Life a Finite Lifespan?

Conclusion

Chapter 8 Minds

Quotations

Preamble

Life with Mind in Mind

What Is Mind?

A Phylogenetic Perspective of Minds

The Human Brain

Ontology of Our Mind Model

Composition of Models

Character and Personality

Personality Dimensions

Hofstede Cultural Dimensions

Communication and Mind

Chatting about cognition

Mind Idiosyncrasies and Blindspots

Mind Models Conclusion

Chapter 9 Emotions

Quotations

Introduction

Emotions

Reacting to Emotions

Innate Emotions

Discussing Fear

The Impact of Fear on Mind

Emotive Idiosyncrasies

From Sharing Emotions to Rational Thinking

Values

Misuse of Emotions

Conclusion

Chapter 10 Human Nature

Quotations

Introduction

Behavioral Phylogeny

What got us selected?

Homo Sapiens – Side-effects

Components of human nature

Human Nature as a Dyad of Archetypes

Individualistic Attributes of Human Nature

Cooperative Attributes of Human Nature

Composition of Individualism and Cooperation

Morality and Ethics

Ending Thoughts

Chapter 11 Living Life

Quotations

Today

Multi-faceted Scope of Living

Where is Mind Manipulation Popping Up?

Resistance

Jiddu Krishnamurti Model

The Japanese Concept of IKIGAI

Being in the Flow

Life Well Lived

Conclusion

Chapter 12 Methodologies of Interest

Quotations

Introduction

Methodology and Enterprise

Methodologies of interest

Chapter 13 Discretization, Classification, Tagging

Introduction

Discretization

Classification of methodologies of dealing with problems

More Tagging – Group Identity and Tribalism

Profiling and Matchmaking

Matchmaking Based on Personalities

Conclusion

Chapter 14 Natural Selection

Quotations

Introduction

Natural Selection

The role of Reproduction

Artificial Selection

Ending Thoughts

Chapter 15 Knowledge Management

Introduction

Knowledge Growth (Management)

Knowledge Improvement Management

Knowledge Integration

Trust Aspects in Knowledge Management

Deprecation

Methodologies Related to Knowledge Management

Chapter 16 Action Management

Introduction

Priority Management

Decision Management

Progress Management

Learning

Closing Thoughts

Chapter 17 Methodologies for Human Nature Enhancement

Personal Emergence

Governance

Religion

Back to Governance

Defining Functions of a Governance Process

Cooperation

Social Cooperation

Team building

Wrapping Up Before Moving On

Chapter 18 Mind Management

Quotations

Introduction

Mind Management Methodologies

Authenticity, Confidence, and Mental Immunity

Mind Maintenance Methodologies

Authenticity Refactoring

Conclusion

Chapter 19 Communication Notes

Quotations

Introduction

Understanding Communication

Pre-human Communication

Homo Sapiens Innovations

Mass Communication Tools: Media and Internet

Ending Notes on Communication

Chapter 20 Enterprise Facilitation

Introduction

Facilitation

Emotional Intelligence

Non-violent Communication

Trust Management

Redefining Facilitation

Negative Stress During Cooperation

Capturing Stories in Ontologies

Conclusion

Chapter 21 SWOT Analysis of Natures in Context

Quotation

Introduction SWOT Analysis – Our Perspective

SWOT Analysis Implementation

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

SWOT for Lifoids

Conclusion

Chapter 22 Addiction and Recovery

The Foundation of All Addictions

Power Over Through Mind Manipulation

Self-Manipulation of Mind

Mind Manipulation by Others

Where Does Addiction Come in?

Recovery

Conclusion

Chapter 23 A Note on Relevant Tools

Quotations

Introduction

Trust Platforms

Communication Platforms

Information and Knowledge Distribution Services

Action Tools

Concluding Thoughts

Part Three – The Elixir

Enhancing Human Nature

Quotations

Chapter 24 Revising Our Living Well Challenge

Purpose of the Book, Revisited

The scientifically Informed foundation of the book

Our Tools Revisited

We, the Social Species

The Core Challenge of Living an Authentic Life

What is the Right Thing to Do?

Conclusion

Chapter 25 Enhancing Minds

Quotations

Introduction

The High-level Perspective to Our Approach

Chapter 26 Set Yourself for Success

Quotations

Introduction

Building Mind Resilience

Deal With Addiction to Mind Manipulation

Good Enough is Good Enough

Chapter 27 The First Step: Who are You?

Quotations

Introduction

Prepare Your Mind

Prop-up Your Mind Immunity

Discovering the Self

An Engineer’s Perspective to Understanding the Self

Verify Your Findings

Cultivate the Authentic You

Chapter 28 The Second Step: Meet Your Context

Quotations

Introduction

Chapter 29 Step Three: Cultivate Living Well

Quotations

Introduction

Chapter 30 Step Four: Engage, Learn, Refactor, Verify, Share and Repeat

Quotations

The Fourth Step

Chapter 31 Why

Immunity

Freedom

Becoming part of the whole

Part Three: Conclusion

Chapter 33 What Next

Quotations

Sandbox Your Own Cultivating Living Well

Consider Commenting for More Details

Get More Information and Examples

See you Soon :)

Footnotes

Terminology

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Publisher

Don't miss out!

Part One

Serenity Prayer, a book specific perspective

Be it so I have the self-confidence to deal in serenity with the things I cannot change; the knowledge to change in authenticity the things I can; and the personal wisdom to know the difference.

Sketch of swimming longdistance

Quotations

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov

This is the problem that you are not facing: how to advance science and reason in a fundamentally irrational world … this is a very very hard problem. — Scott Atran

..and there is nothing wost than too late. — Charles Bukowski

The noblest of all studies is the study of what man is and of what life he should live ― Plato

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one. ― Confucius

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. ― Joseph Campbell

Vision

Trust me for a moment and mentally detach yourself from your day-to-day specifics. Imagine a world in which you would wake-up excited by the day ahead and fall asleep satisfied with the way your day has ended. Imagine that this happens in all the roles life has to offer: as an individual; as part of a couple, family, community, organization, and nation; and as an entrepreneur, parent, and leader in the fields you care about. Imagine a world where every human being is satisfied with the contribution that he or she makes day after day. Imagine and live it; new perspectives to your life, more understanding, more self-confidence, personal growth, all in the bliss of peace of mind.

After acting on your understanding of this book, you will feel more like your better self - beyond labels, beyond stereotypes, beyond history and time - and satisfied with who you are in every respect-at home, at work, in the social domain, and as part of something awesomely bigger than yourself. 

With freedom understood as the ability of being your authentic self, you will be free.

We are born with the core need to belong with an identity. All of us have this need to fit in, to be part of a group as who we are.

This is the core need living your life well responds to.

The good news is that we are also born with everything we need to fulfill it.

Let us just do it.

Chapter 1 Introduction to the Book

Living life well seems to be something that would happen to anyone naturally, as a default outcome of choices made, and opportunities responded to.

a boat sailing in open waters

Figure 1 - There are moments in life when you need to have trust in your mind, map, and compass.

Research shows something different and the simple fact of you being here confirms at a minimum your curiosity in how you would score.

In the world of statistics (Our World In Data, 2011), most of us reach our peak of happiness in adolescence. From there, results become unclear as professionally diagnosed depression and self-reported satisfaction statistics contradict each other.

In 1987, I faced a life-defining moment; I escaped a dictatorial regime, an event that transformed into an accelerated lesson about death, life’s values, friendship, care, love, camaraderie, and mind exploration worth its own story.

The escape gifted me with exceptional experiences — directly holding in my hands not only my own destiny but the destiny of others I deeply cared about. I faced death and withstood my end-of-life experience by surviving execution, prison, open-water drowning, loneliness, violent unrest in refugee camps, homelessness, and an immigrant’s cocktail of hopes and surprises.

Amid these events I interacted with and learned from people from all walks of life who came from places that I had never imagined would touch my life. With wonder, I observed serene engagement in some and chaotic tormenting panic in others in shared times of adversity and change.

Figure 3 - Loss of freedom as a metaphor for the loss of authenticity in one’s life.

The desire to understand and share what brings this distinction in people’s state of mind during both dramatic and ordinary moments is the empathetic force that has stuck with me to the present day, motivating the work of love outside and behind this book.

Shakespeare’s statement that the eyes are the window to your soul has never been more relevant, a metaphoric remark further confirmed by modern facial expression studies in anthropology (de Waal, 2017). Exposed to such experiences, one quickly notices that it is one’s eyes and gaze that speak much about the nature, state, and intent of one’s mind.

The feeling of longing for something of personal, complex, and intrinsic relevance in one’s living is not new. It is called suffering and has a richer meaning in this context than in common parlance. The suffering we are talking about is an insidious, emerging, systemic anxiety that stems from feeling physically and emotionally trapped in being less than you can be as per your own authentic expectations. It is the outcome of being conditioned by covert forces of your past, subscribing to biases of perception, being weighed down by a lack of confidence in the authenticity of your purpose in life, and being helpless in breaking recurrent harmful, destructive behavior patterns. It is a place in a space where core dimensions include lack of control, in an unknown context, a sense of stagnation, and loss of trust in perceived reality.

This form of suffering is present in all of us in different degrees of awareness and impact, and it reflects in the brightness of one’s eyes. From truthful public leaders to refugees from distant cultures, the signs of resilient minds living their life at its best are the same: satisfaction, self-confidence, dignity, diligence, and serene perseverance.

Once back to my engineering routines, I dedicated myself to researching the field, modeling, understanding, and capturing these personal realizations with the hope they will make our (mine and your) journey through life a personally satisfying experience.

Meet the Author

Putting aside the personal aspects of my emergence as an adult and the dramatic events mentioned earlier, I am an engineer, a specialist that builds to purpose things that work. The drive to understand what makes life worth living has taken me through gaining expertise in artificial intelligence (simple and honest minds), neuroscience (models for the inside of minds), psychology (models for the outside of minds), process modeling, personality modeling, change management, and team building.

I applied this knowledge to the creation of mind-enhancing virtual environments in edutainment, biotechnology, healthcare, and wellness, always with a foothold in the wellbeing of the many.

I have a deep respect for entrepreneurs in all forms of entrepreneurial engagement, from living life wel, to actively caring for family, friends, and community,l to spawning and/or leading organizations, nations, and more. I understand entrepreneurship as embracing the leap of faith of trusting who you are and acting in accordance to it. Entrepreneurship takes courage, where courage is defined by triumph over fear and a propensity to act as opposed to react. Entrepreneurs are the ultimate creators.

Hi, my name is Bogdan and am motivated by one wish – to contribute to the improvement of the experience of living by sharing my experience-verified knowledge in stories. As a writer, this is my identity, and your are the group I belong to. When the match is there, these stories describe to their audience a set of tools and practices (methodologies) that will help you identify and secure what really matters to you in life. The gained knowledge will empower you to better understand your authentic self, and gain immunity against manipulation of your perceived motivations by you and others.

This is not magic; magic works by itself and at once. This is more like anti-magic; you have to do it and it takes time to do its thing.

Building of relevant knowledge is what gives personal sense to life. Sharing of knowledge is what gives purpose to living in general.

The selected tools lead into practices that provide a better understanding of how minds work, how are you similar to and different from others, listening to and understanding your mind’s messages as expressed by body and mind as a whole, connecting with your authentic self, discovering where you are on the journey of your life, finding the right-for-you path further, and means to navigating it with serenity, confidence and satisfaction.

The highest level of self-esteem is brought by a sense of personal accomplishment with authentic relevance to you, the feeling of having lived a personally meaningful life, looking forward to the rest of it, and the acknowledgment that you do like who you are.

By all means, if you’re enjoying your life as it is, then great news you made it and thank you for visiting. However, as the knowing of who you are is not trivial, I strongly believe that, by taking this journey, you will be surprised with becoming, even marginally, a better version of yourself. As first stated by Carl Gustav Jung, the pillar of modern psychology, individuation (becoming your authentic self) is a lifelong process of progressive, convergent, and individually satisfying iterations.

Let us have a look at what the problem seems to be and what solution the book proposes.

The Problem

Explained in detail later in the book, our challenge to living our life at its best is our mind’s vulnerability to manipulation, our ability to self and/or third-party obfuscate our authentic purpose in life and replace it with personally irrelevant motivations.

This vulnerability rests on two innate drives: the drive to learning – a mind openness feature that is a competitive advantage in a changing environment, and the drive for efficiency— a natural selection constraint that comes with a strong bias towards the low-hanging fruit (and we are spending a whole chapter in Part Two on clarifying this perspective).

Lies are efficient, not effective, they make you believe that you solved a problem, not solve it. Chasing efficiency (not effectiveness) with an insufficiently protected open mind is what puts us at risk.

Added to that, our extreme socio-economic race has led to changes in our context of living that exceed the inborn abilities nature has gifted us with. We exceed our specifications with either too much or too little.

A loss of authentic motivation in life is of absolute danger.

In a rapidly changing context, mind faces its fundamental challenge - motivation to living

Mind manipulation, in its many instantiations, is ubiquitous to our modern life: parenting, education, dating, family living, work, civic engagement, engagement with the environment, to name some of the highlights.

We, Homo sapiens, did not invent it (other species manipulate too), we just improved it to individual, species, and biome dangerous levels.

As modeled in this book, mind manipulation can impact the behavior of any entity that conforms with the book’s generalized definition for what is a living entity. This definition includes individuals and expands to include couples, families, communities, organizations, nations, markets, species, and even the biome. As per the corollaries of this definition, anything living has a mind, and mind manipulation is a mind’s generic vulnerability. In its drive for efficiency through minimal sufficiency, we might be nature’s fail-fast experiment in hypersocial species with communication based augmented learning.

Mind manipulation (self or third-party induced) is the low-hanging fruit of education and cooperation. When keeping our children safe by scaring them with imagined threats, we manipulate. When saving face masks for the frontline workers by telling the public that face masks are not effective in reducing the impact of an airborne pathogen, a government manipulates. Manipulation of the mind is present from very benevolent intents to the very destructive and tyrannic motivations.

And, what’s even more dangerous is that, with a plastic mind with a propensity to repeat what it did before, mind manipulation by self and/or others leads to addiction to it.

The Solution

The solution that emerged from the book’s models is simple and congruent with ancestral philosophical and spiritual presence: live your life in authenticity at all its levels of engagement.

Embracing your authenticity is the strongest mind immunity augmentation practice, protecting us against us and protecting us against others.

Simple sage advice of embracing your authenticity

Figure 4 - A millennia old sage advice central to this book

Some of us are lucky to have emerged into adults with good-enough awareness and appreciation for their authentic selves. Others, including me, had and have to work for that.

Personal change is anchored in three pillars: direction, methodology, and dedication (emotional commitment).

Figure 5 - The three pillars of personal change: direction, methodology, and dedication.

This book is sharing a practical, action-oriented perspective over all of them. Knowing who the authentic you is gives you direction by priming your mind accordingly. Understanding life and your roles in it as per who you are, not other people's templates, guides you into a methodology. As for dedication, once your mind has put its headlights on authenticity, dedication as in emotional commitment to cultivating living well follows.

Implementing this simple and wise advice is non-trivial and personal. It is a mind-refactoring exercise requiring engagement, self-care, informed commitment, grit, delicate tools, and patience.

Taking care of your own mind is always, by necessity, an on-the-fly do-it-yourself enterprise[1]. It is introspective, with a very personal type of reward, and requires mastery of your very personal fears (you will have to negotiate your journey with your very own dragons).

As an adult, finding and embracing authenticity, as puzzling as it might sound, is an exercise in abandoning who you thought you were for the promise of a future life well lived as who you authentically are. This is not about you being the better clone of the social star of the moment you have been pressured to admire. This is about you enjoying life lived as the authentic you, the most personally and socio-economically rewarding type of living one can strive for.

As you give-up past habits, beliefs, and perspectives, cultivating living well requires leaps of faith that are made easier (sometimes significantly easier) by understanding (and that's why I added Part Two, also affectionatelly nicknamed The Ordeal).

Newborns, when working on understanding their new and complicated reality, constantly change inquiry and verification perspectives:

Can I grab it?

Is it hard?

Does it stink?

Can I eat it?

Will it move on its own if I shake it?

Will I see something new if I spin it?

So does this book with our core questions in life. By priming your mind on identifying your authentic self, it provides you with novel perspectives that, when combined with the rest of your past experience, make understanding easier. You see, understanding combines gaining knowledge, verifying it, and further-priming yourself for action. If life is a journey, knowing how to make it personally rewarding is the elixir of living well. Or, in the language of our models, every action, including living with everything in it, requires knowledge and a specific base case agency. Once you understand that, your perspective will change, your mind will be primed to perceive and act in the comfort of personal serenity, on simple, and, even more relevant, hard decisions.

When starting to solve a problem, there is no greater joy (for an engineer at least) than putting together the required set of tools.[2] The value of good tools is their amplifying effect on your abilities in sensing and defining the problem, and, even more relevant, the freedom they grant to craft your own constructive adventures.

Good tools enable you to express yourself with more authenticity[3].

The method we are going to build together throughout this book includes a novel perspective to life, mind, and wellness. Its novelty resides in the generality of the proposed models. They are easy to adapt and instantiate for challenges we face in ordinary and extraordinary moments of our lives.

Another value of this book is the side effect of traveling through the jungle of models and shared knowledge of the Part Two. Exposure to models about mind, life, and living primes your mind on recognizing your own authenticity and on identifying the where/when/and even the why of cases when life drifts away from it.

Through the book’s perspective, the method of cultivating living well applies to all dimension of your life: your life as an individual, your life in a couple, family, parenting life, community, organization, nation, and biome. It applies at emotional, cultural, rational, and socio-economic levels. Being one with all life feels good (emotional), it is a scientific fact (rational), and it guides us towards delivering sustainable value to our society (socio-economic perspective) and biome.

As a multi=purpose self-help tool, this book proposes this common template methodology that, instantiated to practice by you, responds to questions your life raises in the many roles you play:

Do I like me?

Do I feel satisfied with my life?

Is our family happy as a unity?

Am I raising my kids well?

Is my work satisfactory to me?

Am I leading my organization well in its socio-economic continuum?

Am I a good citizen of my nation, species, biome?

What is my footprint in life?

As with any self-help book, keep in mind the 123 rule (or one-to-three): invest at least three times (3) the reading time (1) into (2) acting on the newly acquired knowledge. Good books give guidelines one is expected to personalize into blueprints, act on, learn, and enjoy.

And, as mentioned by many sages of our past and present times, it is only you who can address the healing and strengthening of your mind; the rest of us, living and unliving, are tools for you to use along your journey.

Chapter 2 The Book’s Approach

The book has used a typical engineering approach guided by a humble respect for what already works: model and understand the problem, model the solution, verify, and apply while staying open, learning, and refactoring your perspective.

Understanding a problem is crucial to dealing with it. As Deming, Drucker, and Ackoff have stressed, doing the right thing even wrongly puts you in a much better situation than doing the wrong thing righter (Ackoff, 1987). With a finite mind, understanding of a challenge primes your perception on relevant information that further promotes relevant knowledge into action.

Slightly off the engineering approach, I value generalization. This is why the book expands its models and perspective to include life in general, from cells to socio-economic constructs specific to our species, to biome and more. Hence, what I have struggled for is to prime the reader's mind (me included) towards honoring life (a spiritual perspective) with engineering tools (a pragmatic approach). Even if my models will shock you, what I hope is that they will make you more open and sensitive to who you are and what matters in your own life.(And the near-death experiences I have been lucky to survive have contributed to my dedication to understand and share.)

The best approach to understanding both problems and their solutions is modeling, gathering, and using trusted pieces of knowledge and wisdom that make sense to you and guide your actions. Modeling, at least as defined in this book, includes any and all efforts to capture knowledge in whatever format, from a sketch on a napkin to the whole corpora of genetic encoding, philosophy, belief frameworks, and science.

The best approach to identifying your challenges and feeling comfortable with your response to them is knowing and befriending your authentic self. And, to get there, one approach is taking the journey of this book.

Some Disclaimers and Book qualifications

This book carries the patterns of its emergence: it is my first book, English is my second language acquired through my professional engagements mostly, and it is produced with budget/timeline constraints. As no story is a (good or bad) story until it is shared, I have decided to self-publish once the good enough threshold has been reached.

You are likely to struggle with some overloaded terminology (a side effect of English as a late second language), with the redundancy of explanations (a side effect of many first time non-fiction books), and some structural choices (a pattern of my native culture). All I can assure you is that neither of them is due to a lack of respect for you and your time and that after more than a decade of research and more than 50 revisions I felt that letting the story fly is the right thing to do.

Lifoids as A Generic Model for Life

There have been and are many other efforts to generalize what life is. However, I felt that their naming confuses the model with its target. The term lifoid is a novel term I propose in this book and past speaker engagements for all entities that satisfy a generic definition for living, as provided by academia and philosophers to date (discussed at large in Part Two of the book).

A lifoid, identified through its ability to persist in time, embedded in context.

A functional ontology of a lifoid, a generic living entity

Life is complicated. Within our lives, we find ourselves acting in many roles, from an emerging individual (a child) to being part of a couple, building and maintaining a family, being part of a community, building and/or being part of an organization, and a nation to mention the most familiar instances of us. Living life at its best includes all these experiences, in individually specific proportions, and has shared patterns in all these roles.

For this purpose, we have researched and assembled a generic definition for a living entity that we named a lifoid. 

Lifoids live (actively persist in time) as per the patterns of behavior common to biological life, from protocells[4] to biomes; they emerge within their context, perform their socio-economic role, and share their experience.

However, beginning with the first social species, this pattern expands in the informational, socio-cultural, and socio-economic domains. Hence communities, organizations, nations, and supra-national socio-economic constructs can be modeled and understood as lifoids.

When instantiated to an organization or nation for example, lifoids help us better understand ourselves as part of our socio-economic constructs to predict and respond to challenges of socio-economic survival in a specific market with confidence rooted in our authenticity, organizational authenticity[5].

Using the notion of lifoid, we apply the methodology of living well to each and all lifoids life spawns around us, from cells to mega-corporations and biome.

Structure of the Book

The modeling approach for the journey from problem to solution mentioned earlier is incorporated in this book’s structure: we look at the challenge at hand (Part One), prepare our toolbox with the relevant models (Part Two), define our action (Part Three), and verify its utility (Part Four). Part Five (a dedicated terminology and bibliography section) supports your understanding, customization, and application of the proposed models and living better methodology.

Figure 6 - Structure of the book

Of course, the methodology’s utility to you (like any other sane methodology) is its practical, clear, and specific response to your needs as an individual, member of a couple, family, community, organization, nation and so on.

And, while not emotionally attractive to some of us, tools[6] have helped us differentiate from the rest of our phylogenetic tree. Tools help us create, expand, and maintain that bubble of trusted order that results from cultivating living well in our increasingly complicated socio-economic life.

For size, price, and scope reasons, I have grouped Part One (exploring the problem), Part Two (gathering the tools to understand and solve), and Part Three (understanding the solution) on one volume (Volume I) and bundled  Part Four (case studies) and Part Five (Terminology and Bibliography) in a separate volume (Volume II), packaged as separate purchases (ebook, audio, and/or print).

Structure in More Detail

Part One introduces you to the book and the author’s perspective. It also points to what the author has identified in his research as the root threat to cultivating living well.

Figure 7 - Part One topics

Part Two of this book is a visit through our warehouse of selected models and methodologies that will help us understand life, our species, and our mind. The models are explained from a common perspective, making them compatible for our goal of assembling a trusted methodology for cultivating living well. We define generalized models for life, mind (including consciousness), and living well in support for understanding and designing methodologies that increase mind immunity and assist us in cultivating living well in many of the roles that make up our life.

Figure 8 - Part Two topics

In this part, we show how knowledge is instantiated to enterprises by matching base cases. We look at knowledge inheritance with innovation throughout the phylogenetic tree of life, we build models of living entities using the autopoietic mode enhanced by a utility network perspective. We show how nature optimizes its resources investments by rewarding minimal sufficiency. We look at ontogeny as an emergent process that matches inherited capabilities with present context features. We build a generalized model for life and living that enables us to model our living well solution from individual to species. We combine everything in a guideline for you to personalize in cultivating living well.

Going through someone else’s models is usually a difficult job, as they contain known stuff integrated with new information and perspectives that pop out here and there. Part Two might be much more interesting after reading Part Three (see Figure 8 to follow), as the choice of models and the book’s perspective make greater sense once you familiarize yourself with the resulting methodology. But the engineer in me took over the control room, and the current structure ended up as is (you build your tools and then use them to do what you wanted to have done).

Figure 9 - Part Three list of Topics

Part Three (Figure 9) synthesizes the solution, putting together models and methodologies in a simple and easy to apply approach to living life at its fullest, as per your natural abilities. As in culinary recipes, each of us will put more of this and less of that to make the outcome fit our own version of delicious.

Figure 10 - Part Four topics - Case studies for our methodology

Part Four (Figure 9) shares case studies, various aspects of our modern life and history, and present and future alternatives of life seen from the perspective of the book’s approach to our species’ current challenges and our roles in it. This part is intended to give you the comfort of applying the methodology to understand the whats of the various whens of past and future. Having the right trusted knowledge is the best fear deterrent, and fear messes with our minds mostly to our detriment.

Part Five Topics: Terminology, Bibliography, Feedback links

Figure 11 - Part Five Topics

Part Five contains support information for you to customize, enhance or modify any of the building blocks of the book’s approach. I have included a rich bibliography of the sources I have directly quoted, paraphrased, or I consider myself being directly influenced by, and a terminology that shares the book’s perspective and understanding of various terms.

How the book is packaged

The reading challenge is, of course, going through Part Two (hence, the subtitle of The Ordeal). It has more than twenty chapters with block diagrams and ontologies representing the work of the many for many decades. Added to the sheer size, I have given the many models, hypotheses, and theories a book specific perspective: life is a special type of enterprise governed by governing agents (minds) and acting agents (bodies) in context. As such, a core set of terms (life, enterprise, mind and body, context) need to be understood in an integrated way relevant to you and your act of living and that is re-enforced throughout the book by repetition with accent on the core aspects of the definition.

Parts One and Three are easy to read and short. Part One describing the problem, you are nearly done with it, and Part Three holding the recipe for the solution,as long as you have either read or credit the models, is short and easy too.

Part Four and Part Five are intended to give more understanding and trust to our approach. Part Four has case studies that take the methodology of cultivating living well and apply it to different type of lifoids. Part Five has details on the used terminology and bibliography.

Please proceed at your own discretion, as per your needs of the moment. Parts One, Two and Three are bundled in Volume I, while Parts Four and Five are part of Volume II. For your convenience, the two volumes are also available as audio books.

One Pattern, Many Roles

The mission of the book is to highlight one pattern of behavior that responds to challenges we face when performing the many roles a life puts us through. We named this methodological pattern cultivating living well.

With an enterprise-centered perspective to events in our lives including life itself, traditional solutions for enterprise effectiveness get new utility. From individual wellness and health to social harmony at couple, family, business, nation, and species levels, one pattern of behavior projects through complexity – know your authentic motivation and act on it with effectiveness, more so when life bumps you off the rails.

The many roles life offers: from individual to member of the greater biome.