The Emotion Machine

sent to school. However, we do not see the same decline in the roles of those other, self-conscious, attachment- based feelings. These persist for longer times and sometimes, perhaps, for the rest of our lives.

John Bowlby: “During adolescence … other adults may come to assume an importance equal to or greater than that of the parents, and sexual attraction to age-mates begins to extend the picture. As a result individual variation, already great, becomes even greater. At one extreme are adolescents who cut themselves off from the parents; at the other are those who remain intensely attached and are unwilling or unable to direct their attachment behavior to others. Between the extremes lie the great majority of adolescents whose attachments to parents remain strong but whose ties to others are of much importance also. For most individuals the bond to parents continues into adult life and affects behavior in countless ways. Finally in old age, when attachment behavior can no longer be directed to members of an older generation, or even the same generation, it may come instead to be directed towards members of a younger one.”

[Bowlby, Attachment, p207]

What happens in other animals? In those that do not remain in herds, attachment frequently only persists until the offspring can live by themselves. In many species it’s different for females; in many species the mother will actively drive the young ones away as soon as a new litter is born (perhaps because of evolutionary selection against inbreeding)—while in other cases attachment will stay until the time of puberty or even later for females. In Attachment (p182) Bowlby mentions a phenomenon that results from this:

“In the female of ungulate species (sheep, deer, oxen, etc.), attachment to mother may continue until old age. As a result a flock of sheep, or a herd of deer, is built up of young following mother following grandmother following great grandmother and so on. Young males of these species, by contrast, break away from mother when they reach adolescence. Thenceforward they become attached to older males and remain with them all their lives except during the few weeks of each year of the rutting season.”

Of course, other species evolve different strategies that are better suited for different environments; for example, the size of the flock may depend on the character and prevalence of predators, etc.

Why should we need Imprimers at all—and why should we be so exclusive in how our brains make us choose them? Why not simply elevate goals in response to anyone’s censure or praise? There’s an excellent reason why we evolved to be selective about this—for if any stranger could program your goals, you’d be in danger because strangers are less likely than your close relatives are to be concerned for your welfare.

However, ‘welfare’ can mean different things. For example, Bowlby argued that our attachments mainly promote our children’s physical safety. Here’s a paraphrase of his argument”

“That protection from predators is by far the most likely function of attachment behaviour is supported by three main facts. First an isolated animal is much more likely to be attacked than is one that stays bunched together with others of its kind. Second, attachment behavior is especially easy to arouse in animals that, by reason of age, size, or conditions are especially vulnerable to predators. Third, this behavior is strongly elicited in situations of alarm, which are commonly ones in which a predator is sensed or suspected. No other theory fits these facts.”

Here, Bowlby’s main concern was to refute the then popular view that attachment’s primary function was to ensure a dependable source of food. Instead, he argued that physical care (including nutrition) did not play a crucial role in attachment and security was the more influential. I suspect that this was largely correct for animals, but does take into account how human attachments so strongly promote our acquiring values and high-level goals.

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§2-9. Self-Models and Self-Consistency

To solve a hard problem, one must work out a plan—but, then, you need to carry it out; it won’t help to have a multi-step plan if you tend to quit before it is done. This means that you’ll need some ‘self-discipline’— which in turn needs enough self-consistency that you can predict, to some extent, what you’re likely to do in the future. We all know people who make clever plans but rarely manage to carry them out because their models of what they will actually do don’t conform enough to reality. But how could a trillion-synapse machine ever become predictable? How did our brains come to manage themselves in the face of their own great complexity? The answer must be that we learn to represent things in extremely simple, yet useful ways.

Thus, consider how remarkable it is that we can describe a person with words. What makes us able to compress an entire personality into a short phrase like “Joan is tidy,” or “Carol is smart,” or “Charles tries to be dignified”? Why should one person be generally neat, rather than be tidy in some ways and messy in others? Why should traits like these exist? In §9-2 Traits we’ll see some ways in which such things could come about:

In the course of each person’s development, we tend to evolve certain policies that are so consistent that we (and our friends) can recognize them as features or traits—and we use these to build our self- images. Then when we try to formulate plans, we can use those traits to predict what we’ll do (and to thus discard plans that we won’t pursue). Whenever this works we’re gratified, and this leads us to further train ourselves to behave in accord with these simplified descriptions. Thus, over time our imagined traits proceed to make themselves more real.

Of course, these self-images are highly simplified; we never come to know very much about our own mental processes, and what we call traits are only the few consistencies that we learn to perceive. However, even these may be enough to help us conform to our expectations, so that this process can eventually provide us with enough of what we call “Self-Reliance.”

We all know the value of having friends who usually do what they say they will do. But it’s even more useful to be able to trust yourself to do what you’ve asked yourself to do! And perhaps the simplest way to do that is to make yourself consistent with the caricatures that you’ve made of yourself—by behaving in accord with self-images described in terms of sets of traits.

But how do those traits originate? Surely these can be partly genetic; we can sometimes perceive newborn infants to be more placid or more excitable. And, of course, some traits could be the chance results of developmental accidents. However, other traits seem more clearly acquired from contacts with one’s imprimers.

Is there some risk in becoming attached to too many different personalities? That could lead to attempting to model yourself on too many different sets of traits; a person with coherent goals should usually do better than one encumbered by conflicts because of having more time to acquire the skills to achieve them all—and consistency also makes others feel safe in depending on you.

This also applies inside ourselves: if we changed our minds too recklessly, we could never predict what we might want next. We’d never be able to get much done if we could not “depend on ourselves.” However, on the other side, we need to be able to compromise; it would be rash to commit to some long-range plan with no way to later back out of it. It would be especially dangerous to change oneself in ways that prevent ever changing again.

If a child has only a single Imprimer—or several with more or less similar values—it won’t be too hard for the child to learn which behaviors will usually be approved. However, if the child’s Imprimers have conflicting goals, this could make it difficult for the child to decide which to elevate—or to end up with so many different ambitions that very few of these will develop well. Nevertheless, eventually we each must deal with persons with diverse ideas, so there can be advantages to having diverse collections of models.