u/YardPrestigious4862

My mom (RIP) always used to tell me:

“There’s a difference between busyness and business and most of it is knowing where your money goes.”

I understood that more recently when I helped an aunty who owns a small perfume shop look for a simple app to manage sales and stock from her phone since she lost a lot of money because she wasn't able to track her sales and cash flow.

We tried a bunch of apps, but honestly most felt overwhelming. Too many features, too many menus, too much going on for someone who just wants to run their shop peacefully.

It made me wonder if there’s a disconnect between the people building these apps and the people actually using them.

A lot of small business owners in Ghana aren’t looking for complicated systems. They just want something simple, clear, and reliable.

So now I’m curious:

If you own a shop or small business in Ghana, what’s the most stressful or frustrating part of managing it daily?
Are there things you still prefer doing manually because apps make them harder instead of easier?
Is there any part of your daily work you wish an app could solve? I’m just trying to understand the real problems people face before attempting to build anything.

A couple of years ago, I had a weird dream that, in hindsight, feels less like a dream and more like a trigger.

In it, Jordan Peterson appeared and told me he needed me to write a psychoanalytical theory without the concept of consciousness.

That immediately struck me as absurd. Every framework of the psyche I knew everything from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung to Merleau Ponty rests heavily on consciousness in some form. I remember arguing in the dream that it was impossible. But “he” insisted I at least try.

When I woke up, it was obvious to me that it wasn’t actually Peterson. It was my own psyche using a familiar symbol someone strongly associated (at least culturally) with psychology to deliver an idea.

Kind of like how you might dream of your father warning you about a friend. It’s not literally your father it’s your mind synthesizing subtle cues, micro expressions, and intuitions, then packaging them in a form you’ll take seriously.

But something about this stuck.

That dream sent me down a path that, honestly, bordered on obsession.

I started researching compulsively psychoanalysis, neuroscience, philosophy, even ancient texts. I’d go long stretches without eating properly, sleeping irregularly, neglecting normal life rhythms. It wasn’t healthy. But it was intense.

I drew from thinkers like Robert Sapolsky, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Dawkins, alongside religious and symbolic texts like the Bible and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Eventually, I landed on a framework that at least to me felt… different.

Possibly even useful.

The core idea: a psyche without consciousness

The theory rests on three main postulations:

The fundamental “energy source” of the psyche is preservation.

At the most basic level, human behavior reduces to two drives:

Preservation of the self

Preservation of the species

In simple terms:

don’t die + replicate

Everything from eating to ambition to love to anger can be reframed as serving one (or both) of these.

It’s similar to how binary code (1s and 0s) can generate both a calculator and a self-driving car. Simple base rules, infinitely complex outputs.

Even ancient texts (The Bible) hint at this duality as the first tasks God gives man:

Work and till the earth (survival → self-preservation)

“Be fruitful and multiply” (reproduction → species preservation)

This, in a way, reframes Freud’s aggression and sexuality into a more unified system.

2. Individual differences come from filters.

If preservation is the raw energy, then personality is the filtering system.

Two main filters:

Biological (genetics, brain structure, temperament)

Sociological (culture, norms, environment)

These filters determine:

What aspects of that core drive get expressed and repressed

How we interpret reality itself

So differences in personality aren’t random they’re functional. Variation strengthens the species by diversifying strategies for survival and reproduction.

In other words, we don’t just behave differently we perceive differently, because our filters shape reality before we even act on it.

3. The psyche doesn’t just host ideas it hosts ideologies.

This is where it gets interesting.

An idea is simple: a thought, an image, a concept.

An ideology is a system of ideas that has become complex enough to:

Preserve itself

Replicate itself

In that sense, ideologies behave almost like organisms.

Take something like communism:

It resists opposing ideas (self-preservation)

It spreads through communication and persuasion (replication)

This aligns with Richard Dawkins’ idea of memes but applied at a higher level of structure.

Inside the psyche, these ideologies interact like a kind of civilization:

They merge (e.g., Christianity + capitalism → prosperity gospel)

They compete

They evolve

It echoes Jung’s idea that “we don’t have ideas ideas have us.”

After exploring frameworks like The Society of Mind and neural network research from Geoffrey Hinton, I started thinking:

What if this kind of structure not just raw computation is what’s missing in AI?

Right now, progress often feels like “more GPUs = more intelligence.”

But maybe intelligence isn’t just scale. Maybe it’s structure.

Maybe what we need isn’t just bigger models but a psyche.

Something with internal competing systems. Something that doesn’t just process but cares (in a functional sense) about preserving itself and its internal constructs.

A final thought

If something like this ever becomes real, it won’t come from just anyone.

It would require someone deeply focused not just on capability but on alignment and safety.

Someone like Ilya Sutskever.

Because if we’re opening that kind of door, we’re not just building intelligence.

We’re building something that might start to resemble… a mind.

I know this is rough and probably incomplete. The full theory is much more detailed, but I’m curious:

Does this framework make sense? Or am I just pattern-matching myself into madness?

Link to the Study - https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1FMIpuaP2PYPRk\_cODMHj4thziO\_IPtlu.

Open to Constructive Criticisms

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