The Emotion Machine

Charles was answering a question she asked. Charles is in a different room. They both know how to use telephones.

He advised her to read a certain book. Joan understands what Charles has said.

Joan thanked him. Was that just a formality or was she genuinely grateful to him?

He’ll soon be in her neighborhood. Joan won’t be surprised when he arrives.

He gave her the book. We don’t know if this was a loan or a gift.

We draw these conclusions so fluently that we don’t even know that we’re doing it. So let’s try to examine how much is involved when one understands what happened when Joan heard that sound and picked up that phone.

First, when Joan looks at her telephone, she sees only a single side of it, yet she feels that she’s seen the entire thing, And even before she reaches for it, she anticipates how it will fit in her grasp, and how it will feel when it contacts her ear, and knows that one speaks into here and hears answers from there. She knows that if she dials a number, some other phone will ring somewhere else—and if anyone happens to answer it, then those two persons can start to converse.

All this rapid retrieval of knowledge seems a natural aspect of seeing an object—and yet, one has only detected some patches of light! How does such scanty evidence make it seem as though what you’re ‘looking at’ has been transported right into your mind—where you can move it and touch it and turn it around—or even open it up and look inside? The answer, of course, is that what you ‘see’ does not come from your vision alone, but also from how those visual clues lead you to retrieve other knowledge.

However, on the other side, you know so much about such things that, surely, your mind would be overwhelmed if you had to ‘attend’ to all that knowledge at once. So our next few sections will be discuss how brains might interconnect fragments of knowledge so that we can often retrieve just the ones that we need.

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The concept of a ‘Panalogy’

“If you pluck an isolated sentence from a book, it will likely lose some or all of its meaning—i.e., if you show it out of context to someone else, they will likely miss some or all of its intended significance. Thus, much of the meaning of a represented piece of information derives from the context in which the information is encoded and decoded. This can be a tremendous advantage. To the extent that the two thinking beings are sharing a common rich context, they may utilize terse signals to communicate complex thoughts.”

—Douglas Lenat

Every word, event, idea, or thing can have many different meanings to us. When you hear, “Charles gave Joan the book,” that might make you think of that book as a physical object, or as a possession or possible gift. And you could interpret this ‘giving act’ in at least these three different realms of thought:

The Physical Realm: Here ‘give’ refers to the book’s motion through space, as it moves from Charles’ hand to Joan’s.

The Social Realm: One might wonder about Charles’ motivation. Was he just being generous, or hoping to ingratiate himself?

The Dominion Realm: We may infer that Joan is not only holding that book, but also has gained permission to use it.

That “Dominion” realm” is important because we need it to achieve our goals. You cannot solve problems or carry out plans without adequate tools, supplies, and materials—but most of the things in our civilized world are controlled by persons or organizations that won’t allow you to use those things until you get permission to do so. So gaining control or authority is often a requirement for (or an obstacle to) achieving some other goal.

Similarly, when two children are playing together with blocks, each may have concerns in many different mental realms:

Physical: What if I pulled out that bottom block?

Social: Should I help him with his tower or knock it down?

Emotional: How would he react to that?

Mental: I forgot where I left the arch-shaped block.

Bodily: Can I reach that arch-shaped block from here?

Visual: Is the long flat block hidden behind that stack?

Tactile: What would it feel like to grab three blocks at once?[92]

Spatial: Could I arrange them into the shape of a table?

What happens when you select an inappropriate realm of thought, in which to interpret a certain event? Then almost instantly after you notice this, you switch to a relevant point of view, without any sense of starting over again. How do we do this so rapidly? In §8-3 I will argue that our brains may use special machinery that links corresponding aspects of each view to the same ‘role’ or ‘slot’ in a larger-scale structure that is shared across several different realms. We’ll call such a structure a “Panalogy” (for Parallel Analogy) and will discuss this more in §8-3.[93]

Three meanings of ‘give.’

We again see how a thing or idea can be viewed as having multiple meanings. We sometimes call these ‘ambiguities’ and regard them as defects in how we express or communicate. However, when these are linked into