you try to answer such questions in everyday words like, “a goal is thing that one wants to achieve,” you will find yourself going in circles because, then, you must ask what wanting is—and then you find that you’re trying to describe this in terms of other words like motive, desire, purpose, aim, hope, aspire, yearn and crave.
More generally, you get caught in this trap whenever you try to describe a state of mind in terms of other psychology-words, because these never lead to talking about the underlying machinery. However, we can break out of that with a statement like this:
A person will seem to have a goal when they keep different techniques that are likely to change their present situation into a certain other condition.
This takes us out of the psychological realm by leading us to ask about what kind of machinery could do such things. Here is one way such a process might work:
Aim: It begins with a description of a certain possible future situation. It also can recognize some differences between the situation it now is in and that “certain other condition.”
Resourcefulness: It is also equipped with some methods that may be able to reduce those particular kinds of differences.
Persistence: A process that keeps applying those methods. Then, in psychological terms, we will perceive it as trying to trying to change what it now has into what it ‘wants.’
Persistence, aim, and resourcefulness! The next few sections will argue that this particular triplet of properties could explain the functions of what we call motives and goals, by giving us answers to questions like these:
What makes some goals strong and others weak?
What are the feelings that accompany them?
What could make an impulse “too strong to resist?
What makes certain goals ‘active’ now?
What determines how long they’ll persist?
No machine had clearly displayed those three traits of Aim, Persistence, and Resourcefulness—until 1957, when Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw and Herbert Simon developed a computer program called the “General Problem Solver.” Here is a simplified version of how it worked; we’ll call this version a Difference-Engine.[110]
At every step, this program compares its descriptions of the present and that future situation, and this produces a list of differences between them. Then it focuses on the most serious difference and applies some technique that has been designed to reduce this particular type of difference. If this succeeds, the program then tries to reduce what now seems to be the most serious difference. However, whenever such a step makes things worse, the system goes back and tries a different technique.
For example, every infant is born with such a system for maintaining ‘normal’ body temperature: when too hot, the baby may sweat, pant, stretch out, and/or vasodilate; when too cold, it will curl up, shiver, vasoconstrict and/or raise its metabolic rate.
At first we may be unaware of such processes, because such instinctive reactions begin at very low cognitive levels. For example, when you become too hot, you automatically start to sweat. However, when perspiration drips, you may notice this, and deliberate: “I must find some way to escape from this heat.” Then your acquired knowledge may suggest other actions to take, such as moving to an air- conditioned place. If you feel too cold, you might put on a sweater, turn on a stove, or begin to exercise (which can make you produce ten times as much heat).
Now we can interpret “having a goal” to mean that a Difference-Engine is actively working to remove those differences.
Student: To have a goal, does one really need a representation of the desired situation? Would it not be sufficient just to have a list of desired properties?
This is a matter of degree, because one could never specify every aspect of a situation. We could represent a ‘desired situation’ as a simple, rough sketch of a future scene, as a list of a few of its properties, or as just some single property (for example, that it is causing some pain).
Student: It seems to me that we should distinguish between ‘having a goal’ and actively ‘wanting’ it. I would say that your difference-engine is a “wanting machine’ and that the goal itself is only the part that you called its ‘aim’—its current description of some future situation.’
An imagined description becomes an active goal when one is running a process that keeps changes conditions until they fit that description. Our everyday language does not serve well for making the kinds of distinctions we need and, to remedy that, each technical field must develop its own specialized language or ‘jargon.’ However, it will be hard to do this for psychology until we can agree on which more detailed models of minds to use.
Romanticist: This Difference-Engine idea could account for some of what “having a goal” might mean—but it doesn’t explain the joy of success, or the distress that besets us when we fail to achieve what we’ve hoped for.
I agree that no single meaning of goal can explain all of those cascades of feelings, because wanting is such a large suitcase of concepts that no single idea can embrace them all. Besides, many things that people do come from processes with no goals at all, or goals of which they are unaware. Nevertheless, the Difference-Engine’s characteristics capture more of our everyday concept of ‘goal’ than any other description I’ve seen.
Student: What happens when that difference-engine finds several differences at once? Can it work on them all simultaneously, or must it deal with them one-by-one?
When several differences are evident, one might try to reduce several at once, perhaps by using different parts of the brain. However, Newell and Simon concluded that it is usually best to first try to remove the one that seems most significant, because this is likely to change quite a few of the others. So the General Problem Solver included a way to assign a different priority to each kind of difference that it could detect.
Student: Isn’t that a flaw in that? What if Carol places a block in a place that prevents her from building the rest of her arch? Sometimes reducing one difference might make all the other differences
