The Emotion Machine

brains, which are wired to arouse and suppress certain particular sets of resources.

THESIS: Each of our major ‘emotional states’ results from turning some set of resources on and turning another set of them off. Each 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 function; 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.

Romanticist: You speak of a person’s emotional states as nothing more than ways to think, but surely that’s too cold and abstract—too intellectual, dull, and mechanical. It says nothing about where feelings come in, with all their colors and intensities—or about our ambitions and goals. It doesn’t explain the pleasures and pains that come from when we succeed or fail, or how our bodies and minds interact, as when we’re aroused by 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.”[5]

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. However, our brains can’t directly detect those tensions themselves; instead, we sense signals that come up to our brains through nerves that run from those muscles and tendons. This means that we 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, the rest of this book will show why it’s better to focus on what kinds of mental resources we have, what sorts of things those resources might do, how each affects the ones it’s connected to. And especially, we’ll develop ideas about what turns those resources off and on.

Student: Why should one ever turn off a resource? Why not keep them all working all the time?

Indeed, certain resources are never switched off—like those involved with vital functions like respiration, balance, and posture—nor are those that constantly keep watch for certain particular types of danger. However, if 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.)

Critic: 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.

It’s true that we’ve only presented a caricature. To develop our Cloud-of-Resources idea, we began with a simplified version in which each resource is either switched on or off. To some degree, this might apply to some of the actions of insects and fish—and to some of what human infants do, for they are prone to strong and quick changes in state. However, in the course of growing up, we develop techniques for “self-control” and our resources become much less clearly ‘switched.’ Instead, we arouse and suppress them to different extents, so that we still can listen and speak, and to access our bodies of knowledge and skills—though we’ll use these with different 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 them, in which multiple ones are active at once—and that’s when we speak of our feelings as mixed.

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