The Emotion Machine

advance the sort of links discussed above. But constructing these requires additional skills; we’ll discuss these in §8-5 Credit Assignment.

As the start of this section we asked about how we retrieve the knowledge we need. The following section will argue that part of the answer lies in those links to the goals that each fragment of knowledge might help to achieve.” To make that statement more concrete, the next few sections will investigate what goals are and how they work.

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§6-3. Intentions and Goals

“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.”

—Alan Watts.

Sometimes we seem to act passively, just reacting to things that happen to us—but at other times we feel more in control, and feel that we’re actively choosing our goals. I suspect that this most often happens when two or more goals become active at once and thereby lead to a conflict. For as we noted in §4-1, when our routine thinking runs into trouble, this engages our higher reflective levels.

For example, when angry or greedy enough, we are likely to take actions that later may make us have feelings of shame or guilt. Then we may offer such justifications as, “that impulse became too strong to resist” or “I found that I did it in spite of myself.” Such excuses relate to the conflicts between our immediate goals and our higher ideals, and every society tries to teach its members to resist their urges to breach its conventions. We call this developing ‘self-control’ and each culture makes maxims about such feelings.

Moralist: No merit comes from actions based on self-serving wishes.
Psychiatrist: One must learn to control one’s unconscious desires.
Jurist: To be guilty in the first-degree, an offense must be deliberate.

Still, an offender can object, “I didn’t intend to do those things,” —as though a person is not ‘responsible’ for an action that wasn’t intentional. But, what kinds of behavior might lead you to think that a person did something “deliberately”—in contrast to it having resulted from mental processes that were not under that person’s control?

To understand this, it may help to observe that we have similar thoughts about physical things; when we find that some object is hard to control, we sometimes imagine that it has a goal—and say, “This puzzle-piece doesn’t want to fit in,” or “My car seems determined not to start.” Why would we think of an object in that way, when we know that it has no such intentions?

The same thing can happen inside your mind, when one of your goals becomes so strong that it is hard to think about anything else. Then it may seem to come from no choice of your own, but is somehow being imposed upon you. But, what could make you pursue a goal that does not seem to be one that you want? This could happen when that particular goal conflicts with some of your high-level values, or when you have other goals with different aims; in any case, there is no reason to expect all of one’s goals to be consistent.

However, this still does not answer the question of why a goal can seem like a physical force, as in, “That urge became irresistible.” And indeed, a ‘powerful’ goal can seem to push other goals aside, and even when you try to oppose it, it may prevail if you don’t fight back strongly enough. Thus both forces and goals share some features like these:

Both seem to aim in a certain direction.

Both ‘push back’ when we try to deflect them.

Each seems to have a ‘strength,’ or ‘intensity’.

Both tend to persist till the cause of them ends.

For example, suppose that some external force is applied to your arm—say, strongly enough to cause some pain—and your A-Brain reacts by pushing back (or by moving away)—but, whatever you do, it keeps pressing on you. In such a case, your B-brain might see nothing more than a sequence of separate events. However, your higher reflective levels might recognize these as matching this particular pattern:

“Something is resisting my efforts to make it stop. I recognize this as a process which shows some persistence, aim, and resourcefulness.”

Furthermore, you might recognize a similar pattern inside your mind when some resources make choices in ways that the rest of your mind cannot control, as when you do something “in spite of yourself.” Again, that pattern may seem as though some external force was imposed on you. So it often makes practical sense to represent both forces and intentions as though they were assistants or antagonists.

Student: But isn’t it merely a metaphor, to speak of a goal as resembling a force? Surely it’s bad to use the same words for things with such different characteristics.

We should never say ‘merely’ for metaphors, because that is what all descriptions are; we can rarely state just what something is, but can only describe what something is like—that is, to describe it in terms of other things we already know to have some similar properties—and then to consider the differences. Then, we label it with the same or a similar name—so that thenceforth that older word or phrase will include this additional meaning-sense. This is why most of our words are ‘suitcase-words’—and later I will argue that the ambiguities of our words may be the greatest treasures that we inherit from our ancestors.

We’ve mentioned goals many times in this book—but never discussed how goals might work. So let us turn from the subject of how a goal feels to ask what a goal might actually be!

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Difference-Engines

Aristotle: “Differences arise when what we get is different from what we desire; for it is like getting nothing at all when we do not get what we aim at.”

Sometimes people appear to behave as though they had no direction or aim. At other times they seem to have goals. But what is a goal, and how can we have one? If