Human 'hard needs' can be understood as the essential underlying needs for maintaining life, survival, and basic social existence. These needs are characterized by physicality, necessity, continuity, and irreplaceability. Based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory and systems theory perspective, we can categorize hard needs into several levels, conceptually expanding from the bottom up:



1. Physiological hard needs (maintaining individual life)



  • Air (oxygen): death can occur within a few minutes without it.


  • Moisture: dehydration may lead to death within 3 days.


  • Food (energy): provides sugars, fats, and proteins to maintain metabolism.


  • Temperature regulation: avoiding cold and heat (clothing, shelter).


  • Excretion and metabolic waste removal: maintaining internal environmental homeostasis.


  • Sleep and neural recovery: lack of sleep for a few days can lead to the collapse of the mental system.



These are the most basic thermodynamic and physiological maintenance mechanisms; they are rigid, uninterruptible continuous processes.



2. Safety hard needs (stable and continuous existence)



  • Physical safety (freedom from external harm)


  • Environmental safety (stable and non-toxic atmosphere, water sources, climate)


  • Economic/resource stability (regular access to food and water)


  • Shelter/shelter (against environmental fluctuations)


  • Healthcare system or self-healing ability



This layer reflects the system's closed-loop needs of individuals interacting with the external environment in an increasing entropy environment.



3. Social hard needs (individual survival within social structures)



  • Channels for communication (language, social interaction)


  • Role identity and belonging (family, group)


  • Reproductive and parental investment (mechanisms for species continuation)



Social hard needs are an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS); individuals can only survive and reproduce in the long term by being attached to systems.



4. Cognitive hard needs (abstract survival)



  • Information intake and processing (sensation, attention)


  • Decision-making mechanisms and feedback models


  • Causal relationship modeling ability (predicting the future)



The brain's compression rate of information and environmental response speed form a competitive survival advantage, which is also part of AI imitation.



5. Hard needs of spirituality/meaning (long-term stability)



  • Sense of purpose and order cognition


  • Internal consistency of worldview


  • Awareness of death and meaning construction



Over long time scales, individuals need stable psychological models and a sense of meaning; otherwise, they are prone to chaos and collapse.



Summary


From physical - physiological - social - cognitive - spiritual, this chain constitutes the continuous lineage of 'human hard needs'. Each level is a prerequisite condition for the existence of the upper levels, and it reflects a mapping relationship of energy flow - information flow - behavior flow.



Problem trigger:



If modeling human needs systems in the form of 'hard needs functions', how would you set the variables and weights? Is there a certain 'needs dissipation function' or 'minimum survival energy model'?