The Emotion Machine

Summary: This chapter addressed some questions about how people acquire the goals they pursue. Some of these are instincts that come with our genetic inheritance, but others are subgoals that we construct to achieve other goals that we already have. I also conjectured that some of our highest-level goals are produced by special machinery that lead each person to try to adopt the values of other persons who become what I call that person’s “Imprimers.”

Imprimers are parents, friends, or acquaintances to whom a person becomes ‘attached,’ because they respond actively to one’s needs—and they then can induce special feelings in us, such as guiltiness, shame, and pride. At first, those Imprimers must be actually present, but older children form ‘mental models’ of them, and can use these to evaluate goals when those imprimers no longer are on the scene. Eventually, these models later develop into what we call by names like conscience, values, ideals, and ethics.

The next chapter will look more closely at the clusters of feelings and thought that we know by such names as hurting, grief, and suffering—to see how they might be understood as varieties of ways to think.

(I should note that this chapter’s ideas about Imprimers are only theories of mine, and don’t yet appear in psychology books. These ideas might be right but they also might not.)

Part III. From pain to suffering

§3-1. Being in Pain

“Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering. Even when a limb or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a tendency to shake it, as if to shake off the cause, though this may obviously be impossible.”

—Charles Darwin[31]

What happens when you stub your toe? You’ve scarcely felt the impact yet, but you catch your breath and start to sweat—because you know what’s coming next: a dreadful ache will tear at your gut and all other goals will be brushed away, replaced by your wish to escape from that pain.

Why does the sensation called pain sometimes lead to what we call suffering? How could such a simple event distort all your other thoughts so much? This chapter proposes a theory of this: if a pain is intense and persistent enough, it will stir up a certain set of resources, and then these, in turn, arouse some more. Then, if this process continues to grow, your mind becomes a victim of the kind of spreading, large-scale “cascade” that overcomes the rest of the mind, as we depicted in §1-7:

Now, sometimes a pain is just a pain; if it’s not too intense or doesn’t last long, then it may not bother you much. And even if it hurts a lot, you can usually muzzle a pain for a time, by trying to think about something else. And sometimes you can make it hurt less by thinking about the pain itself; you can focus your attention on it, evaluate its intensity, and try to regard its qualities as interesting novelties.

Daniel Dennett: “If you can make yourself study your pains (even quite intense pains) you will find, as it were, no room left to mind them: (they stop hurting). However studying a pain (e.g., a headache) gets boring pretty fast, and as soon as you stop studying them, they come back and hurt, which, oddly enough, is sometimes less boring than being bored by them and so, to some degree, preferable.”

But this only provides a brief reprieve, because until your pain goes away, it may continue to gripe and complain, much like a nagging frustrated child; you can think about something else for a time, but no matter what kinds of diversion you try, soon that pain will regain its control of your mind.

Still, we should be thankful that pain evolved, because it protects our bodies from harm. First, as Darwin suggests above, this may induce you to shake off the cause of the pain—and it also may keep you from moving the injured part, which may help it to rest and repair itself. However, consider these higher-level ways through which pain may protect us from injury.

Pain focuses your attention on the particular body-parts involved.

It makes it hard to think about anything else.

Pain makes you tend to move away from whatever is causing the stimulus.

It makes you want that state to end, and it makes you learn, for future times, not to repeat the same mistake.

Yet instead of being grateful for pain, people always complaining about it. “Why are we cursed,” pain’s victims ask, “with such unpleasant experiences?” We often think of pleasure and pain as opposites—yet they share many similar qualities:

Pleasure makes you focus on the particular body-parts involved.

It makes it hard to think about anything else.

It impels you to draw closer to whatever is causing the stimulus.

It makes you want to maintain that state, while teaching you, for future times, to keep repeating the same mistake.

This suggests that both pleasure and pain could engage some of the same kinds of machinery. For example, they both tend to narrow one’s range of attention, they both have connections with how we learn, and they both assign high priority to just one of a person’s many goals. In view of those similarities, a visiting alien intelligence might wonder why people like pleasure so much—yet display so little desire for pain.

Alien: Why do you humans complain about pain?

Person: We don’t like pain because it hurts.

Alien: Then explain to me just what ‘hurting’ is.

Person: Hurting is simply the way pain feels.

Alien: Then please tell me what a ‘feeling’ is.

At this point the conversation may stop, because quite a few human thinkers might claim that we’ll never have ways to explain such things, because feelings are ‘irreducible.’

Dualist Philosopher: Science can only explain a thing in terms of other, yet simpler things. But subjective feelings like pleasure or pain are, by their nature, indivisible. They can’t be reduced to smaller parts; like atoms, they simply are or are not.

This book will take the contrary view that feelings are not simple at all; instead they are extremely complex. And paradoxically, once we recognize this complexity, this can show us ways to explain why pleasure and pain