The Emotion Machine

Joan is in a certain room. She has a mental model of some of the contents in that room. One of those objects is Joan herself

Most of those objects will have sub-models themselves, for example to describe their structures and functions. Joan’s model for that object “Joan” will be a structure that she calls “Myself,” and which includes at least two parts—one called Body and one called Mind.

By using the various parts of this model, Joan could say ‘Yes’ if you asked her, “Do you have a mind?” But if you asked her, “Where is your mind?” this model would not help her to say, as some people would, “My mind is inside my head (or my brain).” However, Joan could offer such a reply if Myself included a part-of link from Mind to Head, or a caused-by link from Mind to another part of the body called Brain.

More generally, our answers to questions about ourselves will depend on what is in our models of ourselves. I used models instead of model because, as we’ll see in §9, one may need different models for different purposes. So there may be many answers to the same questions, depending on what one wants to achieve—and those answers need not always agree.

Drew McDermott: Few of us even believe that we have such models, much less know that we have one. The key idea is not that the system has a model of itself, but that it has a model of itself as conscious.”

—comp.ai.philosophy, 7 Feb 1992.

What if we were to ask of Joan, “Were you conscious of what you just did, and why?”

However, those descriptions don’t have to be correct, but they are not likely to persist if they never do anything useful for us.)

If Joan has good models of how she makes choices, then she may feel that she has some ‘control’ over these—and then perhaps use the name ‘conscious decisions’ for them. As for activities for which she has no good models, she may categorize these as beyond her control and call them ‘unconscious’ or ‘unintentional’. Or alternatively, she may take the view that she’s still in control, and makes some decisions by using ‘free will’ — which translates, despite what she might actually say, into, “I have no good theory of what made me do that.”

So, when Joan says, “I made a conscious decision”, that need not mean that some magical thing has happened; she attributes her thoughts to various parts of her most useful models.

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§4-6. The Cartesian Theater

“We can see that the mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of others, of the rest, by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most celebrated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty below that…in turn sifted from a still larger amount of simpler material, and so on.”

—William James [].

We sometimes think of the work of the mind as like a drama performed on a theater’s stage. Thus Joan may sometimes imagine herself as watching from a front row seat while the ‘things on her mind’ act out the play. One of the characters is that pain in her knee (§3-5), which has just moved to center stage. Soon, Joan hears a voice in her mind that says, “I’ll have to do something about this pain. It keeps me from getting anything done.”

Now, as soon as Joan starts to think that way—about how she feels, and about what she might do—then Joan herself takes a place on that stage. But in order to hear what she says to herself, she must also remain in the audience. So now we have two copies of Joan—the actor, and her audience!

When we look further behind that stage, more versions of Joan begin to emerge. There must be a Writer- Joan to script the plot and a Designer-Joan to arrange the scenes. There must be other Joans in the wings, to manage the curtains, lights, and sounds. We need a Director-Joan to stage the play—and we need a Critic-Joan to complain, “I just can’t endure any more of this pain!”

However, when we look closely at this theatrical view, we see that it provides no answers, but only raises additional questions. When Critic-Joan complains about pain, how does she relate to the Joan-on-the-stage? Does each of those actresses need her own theater, each with its own one-woman show? Of course no such theater really exists, and those Joan-things are not people like us; they are only different models that Joan has constructed as ways to represent herself in various kinds on contexts. In many cases, those models are much like cartoons or caricatures— and in yet other cases, they are downright wrong. Still, Joan’s mind abounds with varied self- models—Joans past, Joans present and future Joans; some represent remnants of previous Joans, while others describe what she hopes to become; there are sexual Joans and social Joans, athletic and mathematical Joans, musical and political Joans, and various kinds of professional Joans—and because of their different interests, we shouldn’t expect them to all ‘get along’. We’ll discuss this more in §9-X.

Why would Joan model herself this way? The mind is a maze of processes, few of which we understand. And whenever there’s something we don’t comprehend, we try to represent it in familiar ways—and nothing is more familiar to us than the ways that objects work in space. So it’s easy for us to imagine a place for the processes that we use when we think—and it certainly seems that many people do indeed construct such models. Daniel Dennett has named this “The Cartesian Theater.”[67]

Why is this image so popular! To begin with, it doesn’t explain very much—but it’s better than the simpler idea that all thinking is done by a Single Self. It recognizes that minds have parts, and that these may need to interact—and that theater serves as a metaphor for a ‘place’ in which those processes can work and communicate. For example, if different resources were to propose plans for what Joan should do, then this idea of a theater-like stage suggests that they could settle their arguments in some kind of communal working-place. Thus Joan’s Cartesian Theater lets her use many familiar real-world skills by providing locations in space and time to represent the things ‘on her mind.’ So this could give her a way to start to reflect on how she makes those decisions.

Why do we find this metaphor to be so plausible and natural? Perhaps this ability to ‘simulate a spatial world inside the mind’ was one of the early seeds or catalysts that led our ancestors to be able to self-reflect. (There is some evidence that some other animals’ brains develop map-like representations of environments they’re familiar with.) In any case, such metaphors now permeate our language and thought; imagine how hard it would be to think without our thousands of concepts like, “I’m getter closer to my goal.” Space-related models are so useful in our everyday lives, and we have such powerful skills for using them, that it would seem that almost always engaging them.[68]

However, perhaps we’ve carried this too far, and the concept of a Cartesian Theater is now become an