Chapter 1.
Emotional States
This is a draft 28-Jul-05
of Part II of The Emotion Machine
by Marvin Minsky. Please send comments to .
Falling in Love............................................................................................................................................ 1
The Sea Of
Mental Mysteries..................................................................................................................... 4
Moods and Emotions.................................................................................................................................. 6
Infant Emotions.......................................................................................................................................... 7
Seeing a Mind as a Cloud of Resources..................................................................................................... 9
Adult Emotions......................................................................................................................................... 13
Emotion Cascades..................................................................................................................................... 15
Questions.................................................................................................................................................. 16
cause
logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily
use.
Wonderful. Indescribable,
------ (I can't figure out what attracts me to her.)
I scarcely can think of anything else.
------ (Most of my mind has stopped working.)
Unbelievably Perfect.
Incredible.
------ (No sensible person believes such things.)
She has a Flawless Character.
------(I've abandoned my critical faculties.)
There is nothing I would not do for her.
------ (I've forsaken most of my usual goals.)
Our friend sees all this as positive.
It
makes him feel happy and more productive, and relieves his dejection and
loneliness.
But what if most of those pleasant effects were caused by attempts
to defend him from thinking about what his girlfriend says:
Celia: “Oh Charles—a woman needs
certain things. She needs to be loved, wanted, cherished, sought after, wooed,
flattered, cosseted, pampered.
She needs sympathy, affection, devotion,
understanding, tenderness, infatuation, adulation, idolatry—that isn't much to
ask, is it Charles?”
Thus love can make us disregard most
defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments—even
when, as Shakespeare said, we still may be aware of them:
WHEN my love swears that she is made of
truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unskilful in the world's false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best,
I smiling credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love's ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age, in love, loves not to have years told.
Therefore I'll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smother'd be.”
We are equally apt to deceive ourselves,
not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas.
There, too, we frequently find ways to keep inconsistent or discordant beliefs.
Listen to Richard Feynman’s words:
“That was the beginning and the idea seemed so
obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it.
And, like falling in love
with a woman, it is only possible if you don't know too much about her, so you
cannot see her faults.
The faults will become apparent later, but after the
love is strong enough to hold you to her.
So, I was held to this theory, in
spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.”— 1966 Nobel Prize lecture.
What does a lover actually love?
That word ought to
cover the one you adore—but if your goal is just to extend the pleasure that
comes when doubts get suppressed, then you’re only in love with Love itself.
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Citizen: Your description of ‘love’ in the section
above spoke only of transient infatuation—of sexual lust and extravagant
passion.
It left out most of what we usually mean by that word—such as loyalty
and tenderness, or attachment, trust, and companionship.
Indeed, once those short-lived attractions
fade, they sometimes go on to be replaced by more enduring relationships, in
which we exchange our own interests for those of the persons to whom we’re attached:
Love, n. That disposition or state of
feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive
qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests
itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight
in his or her presence and desire for warm affection,
attachment. —Oxford English Dictionary
Yet even this conception of love is too narrow to
cover enough, because Love is a
kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like
these:
The love of a parent for a child.
A child's affection for parents and friends.
The bonds that make lifelong companionships.
Attachments of members to groups or their leaders.
We also apply that same word ‘love’ to our
fondness for objects, events, and beliefs.
A convert's adherence to doctrine or
scripture.
A patriot's allegiance to country or nation.
A scientist's passion for finding new truths.
A mathematician's devotion to proofs.
We thus apply 'love' to our likings for things that we
treasure, desire, or fill us with pleasure. We apply it to bonds that are
sudden and brief, but also to those that increase through the years.
Some
occupy just small parts of our minds, while others pervade our entire lives.
But why do we pack such dissimilar
things into a single suitcase-like word?
It’s the same for our
other ‘emotional’ each of them abbreviates a diverse collection of
mental states.
Thus Anger may change our ways to perceive, so that innocent
gestures get turned into threats, and it alters the ways that we react, to lead
us to face the dangers we sense.
Fear too affects the ways we react, but makes
us retreat from dangerous things (as well as from ones that might please us too
much).
Returning to the meanings of ‘Love’, one thing seems common to all those conditions: each
leads us to think in different ways:
When a person you know has fallen in love, it's
almost as though someone new has emerged—a person who thinks in other ways,
with altered goals and priorities.
It's almost
This book is mainly filled with ideas aboutwhat could happen
inside our brains to.
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Every now and then we dwell on questions
about how we manage ourselves.
Why do I waste so much of my time?
What determines whom I’m attracted to?
Why do I have such strange fantasies?
Why do I find mathematics so hard?
Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?
What makes me addicted to exercise?
But we can’t hope to understand such
things without adequate answers to questions like these:
How do our minds build new ideas?
What are the bases for our beliefs?
How do we learn from experience?
How do we manage to reason and think?
In short, we’ll need to get better ideas
about the processes that we call thinking.
But whenever we
start to think about this, we encounter yet more mysteries.
What is the nature of Consciousness?
What are feelings and how do they work? How do our brains Imagine things?
How do our bodies relate to our minds?
What forms our values, goals, and ideals?
Now, everyone knows how Anger feels––or Pleasure,
Sorrow, Joy, and Grief —yet as Alexander Pope suggests
in his Essay on Man, we still know almost nothing about how those
processes actually work.
“Could he, whose rules the rapid comet
bind,
Describe or fix one movement of his mind?
Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,
Explain his own beginning, or his end?”
How did we manage to find
out so much about atoms and oceans and planets and stars—yet so little about
the mechanics of minds?
Thus Newton discovered just three simple laws that
described the motions of all sorts of objects, Maxwell uncovered just four more
that explained all electro-magnetic events—and Einstein then reduced all those
laws into yet smaller formulas.
All this came from the success of those
physicists’ quest: to find simple explanations for
things that, at first, seemed extremely complex.
Then, why did the sciences of the mind make less
progress in those same three centuries?
I suspect that this was largely
because most psychologists mimicked those physicists, by looking for equally
compact solutions to questions about mental processes.
However, that strategy
So this book will embark on the opposite quest: to find more complex ways to
depict mental events that seem simple at first!
This policy may seem absurd to scientists
that have been trained to believe such statements as, “One should never
adopt hypotheses that make more assumptions than they need.”
But it is worse to do the opposite—as
when we use ‘psychology words’ that mainly hide what they try to describe.
Thus, every phrase in the sentence below conceals its subject’s complexities:
You ‘look at an object and see what it
is.
For, ‘look
at’ suppresses your questions about
the systems that choose how you move your eyes.
Then, ‘object’ diverts you from asking about your visual systems
partition a scene into various patches of color and texture—and then assign
them to different ‘things.’
And, ‘see
what it is’ sidesteps all the
questions you could ask about how that sight might be related to other things
that you’ve seen in the past.
It is much the
same for the commonsense words that we usually use to talk about what our own
minds do, as when one makes a statement like, “I think I understood what you
said.”
For perhaps the most extreme example of this is how we use words
like Me and You—because we all grow up
make
our important decisions for us. We
Child Psychologist: Among the first things you learn to
recognize are the persons in your environment.
In your next stage, you should
assume that you are also a person, too. But perhaps it is easier to conclude
that there is a person inside of you.
Therapist: Although it’s a legend, it makes life
more pleasant—by keeping us from seeing how much we’re controlled by
conflicting, unconscious goals.
Pragmatist: That image makes us efficient, whereas
better ideas might slow us down.
It would take too long for our hard-working
minds to understand
we could use to build theories of
what we are.
When you think of yourself as a single thing, that gives
you no clues about issues like these:
What determines the subjects I think about?
How do I choose what next to do?
How can I solve this difficult problem?
only offers useless
answers like these:
My Self selects what to think about.
My Self decides what I should do next.
I should try to make Myself get to work.
Whenever we wonder about our minds, the
simpler are the questions we ask, the harder it seems to find answers to them.
When you are asked about some difficult task like, “How could a person build
a house,” you might
answer almost instantly, “Make a foundation and then build walls and a
roof.”
However, one can
scarcely imagine what to say about seemingly simpler questions like these:
How do you recognize things that you
see?
How do you comprehend what a word means?
What makes you like pleasure more than pain?
Of course, none of those questions are
simple at all.
The process of ‘seeing’ a
car or a chair uses
complexity?
That’s because many processes that are most vital to us have
evolved to work inside parts of the brain that have come to function so
‘quietly’ that the rest of our minds have no access to them. This
could be why we find it so hard to explain many things we
In Chapter §9, we’ll come back to that Self—and argue
that this, too, is a very large and complicated structure.
Wyour “Self,” you are switching among a huge
network of o
answer some questions about yourself.
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If one should seek to name each particular one of
them of which the human heart is the seat, each race of men having found names
for some shade of feeling which other races have left undiscriminated … all
sorts of groupings would be possible, according as we chose this character or
that as a basis.
The only question would be, does this grouping or that suit
our purpose best?
— William James, in Principles of Psychology.
Sometimes you find yourself in a state where
everything seems cheerful and bright.
Other times (although
nothing has changed) everything seems dreary and dark,
and your friends describe you as being depressed. Why do we have such states of
mind—or moods, or feelings, or dispositions—and what causes all their strange
effects? Here are dictionaries define ‘emotion’
A state of mental agitation
or disturbance.
If you didn’t yet know what emotions are,
you certainly wouldn’t learn much from this.
What is subjective supposed to mean?
How are emotions involved with feelings?
Must every emotion involve a disturbance?
And what could a conscious affection be?
Why do so many such questions arise when
we try to define what ‘emotion’ means?
That’s because ‘emotion’ is one of
those suitcase-words that covers too wide a range of things.
Here are just a
few of the hundreds of terms that we use for discussing our mental conditions:
Admiration, Affection, Aggression, Agony, Alarm,
Ambition, Amusement, Anger, Anguish, Anxiety, Apathy, Assurance, Attraction,
Aversion, Awe, Bliss, Boldness, Boredom, Confidence, Confusion, Craving,
Credulity, Curiosity, Dejection, Delight, Depression, Derision, Desire, Detest,
Disgust, Dismay, Distrust, Doubt, etc.
Whenever you change your mental state, you
might try to use those emotion-words to try to describe your new condition—but
usually each such word or phrase refers to too wide a range of states.
So,
many researchers have spent their lives at trying to classify our states of
mind, by stuffing familiar words like these into such classes as humors,
emotions, tempers, and moods.
But should we call anguish a feeling or mood?
Is sorrow a type of agitation?
There’s no way to
settle the use of such terms because, as William James observed above,
different traditions make different distinctions, and may not describe the same
states of mind because different people have different ideas.
How many readers
can claim to know precisely how each of those feelings feels?[3]
Grieving for a lost child,
Fearing that nations will never live in peace,
Rejoicing in an election victory,
Excited anticipation of a loved one’s arrival,
Terror as your car loses control at high speed,
Joy at watching a child at play,
Panic at being in an enclosed space.
Although it is hard to define words like
feeling and fearing, that’s rarely a problem in everyday life
because our friends usually know what we mean.
However, attempts to make such
terms more precise have hindered psychologists more than they've helped to make
theories about how human minds work.
So this chapter will take a different
approach, and think of minds as composed of much smaller parts or processes.
This will lead to some new and useful ways to imagine what feeling and thinking might be.
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Infants, when suffering even slight
pain, moderate hunger, or discomfort, utter violent and prolonged screams.
Whilst thus screaming their eyes are firmly closed, so that the skin round them
is wrinkled, and the forehead contracted into a frown. The mouth is widely
opened with the lips retracted in a peculiar manner, which causes it to assume
the gums or teeth being more or less exposed. —Charles Darwin,
in The Emotions of Animals
three kinds of resources: some ways to
recognize situations, some knowledge about how to react to these, and some
muscles or motors to execute actions.
–&Do& rules—where each If describes one of those situations—and its Do describes which action to take.
Let’s call this a “Rule-Based
Reaction-Machine.”
an active sexual drive, Search for a mate.
–&Do
rules like these are born into each species of animals. For example, every infant is born with
ways to maintain its body temperature:
when too hot, it can pant, sweat, stretch out, and vasodilate, when too cold,
it can retract its limbs or curl up, shiver, vasoconstrict, or otherwise
generate more heat. [See §6-1.2.] Later in life we learn to use actions that
change the external world.
your room is too hot, Open a window.
If too much sunlight, Pull down the shade.
If you are too cold, Turn on a heater.
If you are too cold, Put on more clothing.
rules”[4]remarkably
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Citizen: A machines can just do what it’s
programmed to do, and then does it without any thinking or feeling.
No machine
can get tired or bored or have any kind of emotion at all.
It cannot care when
something goes wrong and, even when it gets things right, it feels no sense of
pleasure or pride, or delight in those accomplishments.
That’s because machines have no spirits
or souls, and no wishes, ambitions, desires, or goals.
That’s why a machine
will just stop when it’s stuck—whereas a person will
struggle to get something done.
Surely this must be because people are
mad we are alive and machines are not.
In older times,
those were plausible views because we had no good ideas about how biological
systems could do what they do.
Living things seemed completely different from
machines before we developed modern instruments.
But then we developed new
instruments—and new concepts of physics and chemistry—that showed that even the
simplest living cells are composed of hundreds of kinds of machinery.
Then, in
the 20th century, we discovered a really astonishing fact: that the ‘stuff’
that a machine is made of can be arranged so that its properties have virtually
no effect upon the way in which that machine behaves!
Thus, to build
the parts of any machine, we can use any substance that’s strong and stable
enough: all that matters is what each separate part does, and how those
parts are connected up.
For example, we can make different computers that do the same things, either by
using the latest electrical chips— or by using wood, string and paper clips—by
arranging their parts so that, seen from outside, each of them does the same
processes.
[See §§Universal Machines.]
For example,
in the case of Charles’s infatuation, this suggests that some process has switched off some
resources that he normally uses to recognize someone else’s defects.
The same
process also arouses some other resources that tend to replace his more usual
goals by ones that he think Celia wants him to hold.
Similarly, the state we call Anger
appears to select a set of resources that help you react with more speed and
strength—while also suppressing some other resources that usually make you act
Anger replaces
cautiousness with aggressiveness, trades empathy for hostility, and makes you
plan less carefully.
More generally, this image suggests that there are
some
‘Selectors’ built into our
brains, which are wired to arouse and suppress certain particular sets of
resources.
ach
such selection will change how we think by changing our brain’s activities.
Why would a brain be equipped with such
tricks?
Each of them could have evolved to promote some special important
anger and fear evolved for protection, and affection evolved to promote reproduction (which
sometimes engages quite risky behaviors).
If several selectors are active at once,
then some resources may be both aroused and suppressed.
This could lead to the
kinds of mental states in which we sometimes say, “our feelings are mixed.”
Thus when some of your ‘Critics’ detect some sort of threat, this might
activate Selectors that make you want both to attack and
retreat, by arousing parts of both Anger and Fear.
Student: I could better grasp what
you’re talking about, if you could be a bit more precise about what you mean by
the word ‘resource.’ Do you imagine that each resource has a separate, definite
place in the brain?
I’m using
‘resource’ in a hazy way, to refer to all sorts of structures and processes
that range from perception and action to ways to think about bodies of
knowledge.
Some resources use functions that are performed in certain
particular parts of the brain, while others use parts that are more widely
spread over much larger portions of the brain. (We’ll discuss this more in
§§Resources.
As we said, this
resource-cloud idea may seem vague—but the rest of this book will develop more
detailed ideas about what our mental resources could do—and how their activities lead to the
ways that people come to think and behave. Then, as we proceed to develop those
schemes, we’ll replace this vague Resource-Cloud idea scheme with more
elaborate theories about how our resources are organized.
You speak of a person’s emotional states as
nothing more than ways to think, but surely that’s toodull,
and mechanical where feelings come in, with all their
colors and intensities—or about our ambitions and
goals.
It doesn’t our bodies and minds
interact works of art.
Rebecca West:
“It overflows the confines of the
mind and becomes an important physical event. The blood leaves the hands, the
feet, the limbs, and flows back to the heart, which for the time seems to have
become an immensely high temple whose pillars are several sorts of
illumination, returning to the numb flesh diluted with some substance swifter
and lighter and more electric than itself.”
In our usual, everyday views of ourselves,
some of our feelings seem to be in our bodies—as when we’re affected by
muscular tensions.
can see bodies, too, as composed
of resources that brains can use.
So, instead of discussing emotions as though they were
a distinctive kind of phenomenon, twill show why it’s
better to focus on what kinds of mental resources we have, what sorts of things
those
Student: Why should one ever turn off a resource?
Why not keep them all working all the time?
Indeed, certain resources
are
all our
resources were active at once, then they would often get into conflicts. You
can’t make your body both walk and run, or move in two different directions at
once.
How should we resolve such internal conflicts?
In a human society, the simplest way is for individuals to compete.
But when
competition leads to excessive waste, then we find ways to organize ourselves
into multiple levels of management, in which each manager has authority to
decide among the options proposed by lower ones.
However, a human mind cannot be so
hierarchical.
This is because, in general, no single, lower-level resource
will be able to solve any difficult problem by itself.
So when a lower-level
‘Critic’ resource encounters a problem it needs to solve, then it may
transiently need to take over control of one or more high-level strategies—for
example, to divide the problem into simpler parts, or to remember how a similar
problem was solved in the past, or to make a series of different attempts and
then to compare and evaluate these.
So a Critic may try to arouse several Selectors, each of which could lead to different
way to think.
Now, each of such
high-level strategies will need to use hundreds of lower-level processes, so if
we tried to use several such ‘ways to think” at once, they would tend to
interfere with each other—so we’ll still need some high level management. This
could be one reason why our ‘thinking’ often seems to us more like a serial,
step-by-step process than like one in which many things happen at once.
However, every such high-level step will still need to engage many low-level
processes that may need to work simultaneously.
So the sense that our thoughts
flow in serial streams must be in large part an illusion that comes because the
higher-level parts of our minds know so little about those sub-processes.
(We’ll discuss this more in §4 and §7.)
In any case, it seems to me that your
Resource-Switching view is too radical.
Perhaps it could be used to explain
the behavior of an insect or fish—but Charles doesn’t switch, in the way you
describe, to a totally different mental state.
He changes
some aspects of how he behaves, but surely he still remembers his name—and
remains the same in most other ways.
listen and speak priorities.
And
through time we develop more intricate ways to control both old instincts and
new processes, and to make new kinds of arrangements of
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Behold the child, by nature's kindly
law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickl'd with a straw:
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and pray'r books are the toys of age:”
– Alexander Pope in Essay on Man.
Often, when a young infant gets angry, that change
seems as quick as the flip of a switch.
A certain infant could not bear frustration, and
would react to each setback by throwing a tantrum.
He’d hold his breath and
his back would contract so that he’d fall rearward on his head.
A simple theory of how this might work would be that
some separate ‘instincts’ compete until just one of them takes over control.
However,
that model cannot explain how, later, that child finds new ways to deal with
frustration:
A few weeks later,
that
no longer completely controlled by his rage, he
could also add ways to protect himself, so that when he felt this coming on,
he’d run to collapse on some soft, padded place.
This suggests
that usually, in the infant brain, only one Selector this makes the system
change states decisively, so that not many conflicts will arise.
However,
those infantile systems cannot solve the kinds of hard problems our children
must face as they move into their later lives.
This led our human brains to
evolve higher-level systems in which some instincts
that formerly were distinct now became increasingly mixed.
But as those systems gained more abilities, they also
gained new ways to make mistakes, so they also had to evolve new ways to
control themselves—and this led to a great cascade of new kinds of mental
developments.
We tend to regard a problem
as ‘hard’ when we’ve tried several methods without making progress.
But it
isn’t enough just to know that you’re stuck: you’ll do better if you can
recognize when you’re facing some particular type of barrier, impasse, or
obstacle.
For if you can diagnose what “Type of Problem” you face, this can help you to select a more
appropriate “Way to Think.”
So, later chapters of this book will suggest that to do such
things, our brains replace some of their ancient
by
what we’ll call “Critic-Selector Machines.”
The simplest version of such a scheme would be almost
the same as an “If-Then” machine
of the kind described in §1-4.
There, each “If” detects a certain real-world problem, which causes
the system then to react with a
certain pre-specified, real-world action.
So the behaviors of simple If-Then machines are highly constrained and inflexible.
However, in a Critic-Selector type of machine, those Ifs and Thens
are more general, because the resources called Critics can recognize, not just events in the external world,
but problems or obstacles inside
the mind.
Then, those “Selectors”
also are not confined to acting on things in the outer world, but can react to mental obstacles—by turning other resources on or off.
This
means a Critic-Selector machine need not just react to external events, but
also can direct itself to switch to a different way to think.
For example, it
might first consider several reactions before it decides which one to use.
Of course, we’ll need more specific ideas
pass through multiple
stages of growth, and Chapter §5 will conjecture that this results in at least
these six levels of mental procedures.
Thus, an adult who encounters
what might be a threat need not just react instinctively, but can proceed to deliberate on whether to retreat or attack—that is, to use
higher-level strategies to choose among possible ways to react.
This way, one
can make thoughtful choice between the conditions of Anger and Fear—and if it seems more
appropriate to intimidate an adversary, one can make oneself angry deliberately
(although one may not be aware of doing this).
We know that these mental abilities grow
over several years of one’s childhood. Then why is it that we can’t recollect
much of that stretch of development?
One reason for this could be that, during
those years, we also develop new ways to build memories—and when we switch to
using these, that makes it hard to retrieve and interpret the records we made
in previous times.
Perhaps those old memories still exist, but in forms that
we no longer can comprehend—so we cannot remember how we progressed from
infantile reaction-sets to using our new, adult ways to think.
We’ve rebuilt
our minds too many times to remember how our infancies felt!
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Some habits are much more difficult to cure or
change than others are. Hence a struggle may often be observed in animals
between different instincts, or between an instinct and some habitual
as when a dog rushes after a hare, is rebuked, pauses, hesitates,
pursues again, or returns a or as between the love of a
female dog for her young puppies and for her master, —for she may be seen to
slink away to them, as if half ashamed of not accompanying her master.
—Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man
The Resource-Cloud image suggests that
such a change could result when a certain “Selector” excites (or suppresses) a
certain large set of resources.
Thus Charles’s attraction to Celia becomes
stronger when all his fault–finding Critics turn off.
Psychologist: Indeed, infatuations sometimes strike
suddenly.
But other emotions may flow and ebb slowly
In either case, any large change in one’s
set of active resources will cause a large change in one’s mental state.
One
way this could happen would be for a certain resource to directly arouse many
others:
In this way, the Selectors we mentioned in §1-5 could directly have
substantial effects.
Furthermore, Selector resources, then this will cause a yet
larger change, by activating yet more resources.
Then these to arouse yet other resources that they
need—and if each such change leads to yet several more, this spreading could
escalate
The further these activities spread, the
more they will alter your Way to Think—and if your behavior then changes
enough, then your friends might get the impression that you have turned into a
different person.
Critic: That would be an exaggeration, because Charles will
still be the very same person.
He will still speak the same language and use
he’ll just have some different attitudes.
Of course, those cascades won’t change
everything. When Charles adopts a new Way to Think, in many respects he’ll still be the
same—because not all his resources will have been replaced.
He still will be able to see and hear—but now he’ll
perceive things in different ways.
And because he now represents them in different
ways, he’ll get different ideas about what those things or events might “mean.”
Charles will also still know how to talk—but may now use different styles of speech, and
choose different subjects to talk about because, although he still has access to the same knowledge, skills, and memories, now different
ones will be retrieved.
He still may maintain the same plans and goals—but
now they’ll have different priorities.
He may still get dressed and go to
work—but in some of those states he won’t dress so well.
And so far as
Charles, himself is concerned, he still has the same identity.
To what extent, then, will Charles be
aware of such changes in his mental condition?
He sometimes won’t notice those
changes at all—but at other times, he may find himself making remarks to
himself like, & I am getting angry now.&
To do this, his brain must have ways to
“reflect” on some of its recent activities (for example, by recognizing the
spread of some large-scale cascades).
Chapter §4 will discuss how such
processes could lead to some aspects of what we call “consciousness.”
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What are
dispositions and moods?
We all use many
different words to vaguely describe how we feel and behave. We know that angry people more quickly react (but, usually,
less cautiously) and that happy people less often start fights—but terms like these do not
suggest ideas about how those states affect how we think.
We recognize this
when we deal with machines: Imagine that your car won't start—but when you ask
your mechanic for help, you only receive a reply like this:
&It appears that your car doesn’t want to run.
Perhaps
it's become annoyed with you because you haven’t been treating it well.&
But psychological
terms like these don’t help you to get good ideas to explain the behavior of
your car.
Perhaps you towed too heavy a load and broke some of the teeth of
one of the gears.
Or perhaps you left the lights on all night, and completely
discharged the battery.
Then those ‘mentalistic’ descriptions won’
to diagnose and repair what’ you need to know about that car’s parts.
That’s where the view of a
mind as a Cloud of Resources is
better than the Single-Self
it encourages us to look at the parts instead of the whole.
Is there something
wrong with the starter switch?
Has the fuel tank been completely drained?
Those commonsense psychology-words are useful in everyday social life, but to
better understand our minds we need more ideas about their insides.
To what
extents are emotions innate?
It would seem that all normal person share some common emotions,
such as anger, ,
sadness, joy, disgust, and surprise—and some would also include curiosity.
However, psychologists do not broadly agree about which of these are innate and
for example, some of them regard anger as based on fear.
This book will not get involved in that debate, because it is more concerned
with what emotions are—in
the sense of being ‘ways to think’—than with finding ways to classify them. [7]
How do Chemicals affect
our Minds?
Physiologist:
Your ideas
about switching resources sound good, but can all mental states be
explained in that way? Aren’t we also affected by chemicals like ,
endorphins
There’s no doubt that such chemicals do
affect the internal states of our brains—but the view that those effects are direct is a popular but bad mistake—somewhat
like the error that someone would make by supposing that rain makes umbrellas
unfold.
Here’s how one author depicts what this misses:
Susanna Kaysen: “Too much
acetylcholine, not enough serotonin, and you've got a depression.
So, what's
left of mind? It's a long way from
not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is &stale, flat and
unprofitable&; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that
thought.”
For just as the meaning of each separate word depends
on the sentence that it is in, the effect of each chemical on the brain depends
on all the particular ways in which each of your brain-cells react to it—each
type of cell may differ in that.
So the effect of each chemical will depend which brain-cells react to it—and then on how other cells
in that happen to be connected to these, etc.
So the large-scale effect of
each chemical depends, not only on where and when it’s released, but also on
the other details of the interconnections inside your brain.
We’ll discuss
more details in §§Chemicals.
How could machines
understand what things mean?
In the popular view, machines do things
without understanding what their activities mean.
But what does ‘understanding’ mean?
Even our best philosophers have failed to explain what we mean
by words like “understand.”
However, we
should not complain about that, because this is precisely the way it should be!
For, most of our common psychology-words have this peculiar property: the
more clearly you try to define them, the less you capture their commonsense
meanings.
And this
applies especially to words like understand and mean!
If you 'understand' something in only one way then you scarcely
understand it at all.
For then, if anything should go wrong, you'll have no
other place to go.
But if you represent something in multiple ways, then when
one of them fails you can switch to another—until you find one that works for
you.
It’s the same when you face a new kind of
problem:
If you only know a single technique,
then you’ll get stuck when that method fails.
But if you have multiple ways to
proceed, then whenever you get
into trouble, you’ll be able to switch to a different technique.
except when this
leads to cascades so great that we notice a change in emotional state.
One of the central goals of this book is to describe the
variety of our mental resources, and how these might be organized—and the show that much of our human
resourcefulness depends upon on having multiple ways to escape from getting
stuck.
Why do we think that we
have Selves?
However, every normal person also builds
many other kinds of self-models that try to describe how they think about such
subjects as their social relationships, physical skills, political views, and
economic, spiritual, and sexual attitudes.
Why have multiple models
of Selves?
unified one that merges
the virtues of all those separate ones?
How do we develop new
goals and ideas?
The next few
chapters will take the commonsense view that everyone already knows what goals
are, and focus instead on questions about how we come to acquire them.
However, that discussion will be incomplete until we present (in Chapter §6)
more detailed ideas about how goals work.
In the usual view
of how human minds grow, each child begins with instinctive reactions, but then
goes through stages of mental growth that overlay these with additional layers
and levels of goals.
Those older instincts may still remain, but these new
resources gain increasing control—until we can think about our own motives and
goals, and perhaps try to change or reformulate them.
But what possible
basis could we use for learning to appraise ourselves?
How could we choose
which new goals to adopt—and how could we possibly justify them?
No infant
could ever be wise enough to make good such choices by itself.
So the
following chapter will argue that our brains must have evolved, instead, ways
to copy the ideals and attitudes of our parents, friends, and acquaintances!
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See
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/parker/lightverse.htm
Barry Took and Marty Feldman, Round the
Horne, BBC Radio, 1966
This list is adapted from a note from Aaron Sloman in
comp.ai.philosophy, 16/5/1995.
Nikolaas
Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, .]
In The Strange
Necessity, 1928. ISBN: .
See Glossary: Cross-Exclusion.
However, I recommend Aaron
Sloman’s discussion of this in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/talks/gatsby.slides.pdf.
In Girl, Interrupted, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 137-143.
Such an ‘all-or-none’ view of what 'understand''
means can be seen at /~prolog/ai/mind.html or in“Minds,
Brains, and Computers” by John
Searle, in Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. Oxford Univ. P 5th edition, ISBN:
R. Feynman, Modern
Library, 1994, ISBN: .