Your HI Mind
Humanity in Action.
The Nature of Being Human.
I love exploring ideas, particularly when those ideas help to explain what it is to be a human with human aspirations.
2023 to 2025: A New Way to Imagine the Mind
In early 2023 I experienced a period of almost overwhelming intuitional creativity. Almost every morning I would wake with a mind full of inspiration and fresh enlightenment, and I'd try to make sense of these and write them down as fast as I could. For a number of years I had been puzzling over many aspects of motivation, purpose-work, therapy, habit-management, and approaches to mental self-care. At last it seemed that I was putting the vast puzzle of the mind together in a new way. The more I worked with this new model, the more I learned, the more I understood, and the more applications I was able to envision.
During 2023 I progressed through various prototypes of the model and added to the content of each of the significant parts of the mind that seemed to make sense. A friend suggested that I read up about hemispheric theory (shout-out to Iain McGilchrist: "The Master and his Emissary") and I realised that my model could, perhaps, be mapped to the brain. The diagrammatic form of the HI Mind Model reflects this suggested link between brain and mind.
In 2024 I realised that there was something missing and I began to describe what I term "Imperatives". A series of drives that provide a form of instinctual guidance for our behaviour at a level that seems to operate mainly at a non-cognitive level. Some people may describe the influence of these imperatives as "human nature".
Also through 2024 I started trying to compare the HI Mind Model to other models and disciplines. I found mappings to the descriptions of the mind proposed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (which also shed some light on their apparent disagreements). I also found mappings to the main cognitive core beliefs and to the personality work of David Keirsey. I found these mappings encouraging as it implied at least some potential that the HI Mind Model represented a fusion of existing ideas rather than a replacement of them.
In early 2025 I tried mapping the HI Mind Model to various theories about consciousness. This led on to a tentative extension of the "Global Workspace Theory" that seems to offer considerable promise in understanding consciousness as a process but adds structure to that model.
The result of all this is what I call the HI Mind Project. The HI Mind not only offers a fresh and productive way to understand the way that our mind works but it also includes a fusion of nearly all of the various current and historical psychological approaches. This is my attempt to pass on this development to others who may wish to make deeper sense of what we daily experience as human beings.
The Significance of Evolution
I must admit, I never set out to manifest an improved model of the human mind but in early 2023 it grew out of my exploration of the process of combining purpose and passion to achieve particular objectives.
Historical descriptions of the mind, whether from science, psychology, philosophy, or theology, are limited because they are nearly all, so far as I have been able to find out, derived from a subjective description of our own experience. I chose to try and improve this by looking as objectively as I could at the features that our mind must have due to our inherited evolution. Whatever our mind is, conscious or non-conscious, logical or ethereal, our mind should be giving us motivations and behaviours that help use survive and prosper. Everything that goes on in our mind must serve, or have served, an evolutionary function.
The result that I came up with is a model described as series of behavioural evolutions leading from primitive beginnings to our highest observable motivations. We have evolved to be able to get on in family groups, to explore for our own learning and for the benefit of our troupe. Consciousness gives us strong abilities to solve problems. Building on these, evolution has given us a brain and mind that supports the growth of complex and densely-populated cultures and also to appreciate potentials in life that extend beyond self-interest.
I have no real idea what our ancestors must have gone through that nurtured these evolutionary developments but, to me, they seem to make sense and also describe what we experience as modern human beings.
Why?
Why bother with yet another mind-model? One answer came quickly as the model quickly offered a number of functional results that I had not anticipated. It gave me a better understanding of depression, anxiety, mood, etc. along with some obvious potential interventions. It allowed a match to different types of intellect (missing from other models), it explained tricky cross-purposes (missing from other models but addressed by cognitive psychologies), it hinted at ways to achieve congruence across our motivations, it included the role and expressions for creativity, it explained why such things as morals, ethics, wisdom, and awe can seem hard to pin down experientially.
The HI Mind Model also gave me some of the final pieces of the long-term puzzle that I had been working on of how to more easily manage our addictions and habits so that we can change our habits in the ways that suit us and for as long as we want. In short, to use a couple of common metaphors, this model offers a much better mousetrap and a much better description of the elephant in the room.
Improving our understanding of how consciousness and our mind works also offers us, I suggest, better opportunities to more safely manage the many crises that are seem to be faced with at this point in human history. A better understanding of why and how humans go about living will be needed to cope with mass-migration, international political division, environmental challenges, technological advances that offer promise but also need to be adopted beneficially, post-truth thinking, global capitalism, and growing self-entitlement and inequality.