The Theory of Survivability: A Theoretical Exploration of the Nature of Mind (Part 1)

The mind remains one of the most fascinating subjects across neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. This paper proposes three postulates to decode the functioning of the mind and its relation to the self. The first postulate argues that humans possess innate evaluative architecture alongside experience-derived knowledge. The second postulate proposes that the mind subconsciously allocates survival values to everything, actual or presumed, through two distinct constructs: General Survival Value (GSV), a benchmark of presumed human benefit, and Self Survival Value (SSV), a personal compatibility judgment shaped by presumptions and past experiences. The third postulate corrects existing frameworks by proposing that the mind tends to maximize survival of a dynamically expanding and contracting self, rather than a fixed agent. The paper draws on utilitarianism, appraisal theory, Reinforcement Learning, and the free energy principle, while extending them through the GSV/SSV architecture and a computational account of the self comprising body, energy, information processing, materialistic elements, and relationships.