The Emotion Machine

Music (or art, or rhetoric) can divert you from your mundane concerns by evoking powerful feelings that range from delight and pleasure to sorrow and pain; these can excite your ambitions and stir you to act, or calm you down and make you relax, or even put you into a trance. To do this, those signals must suppress or enhance various sets of mental resources—but why should those kinds of stimuli have such effects on your feeling and thinking?

We all know that certain temporal patterns can lead to rather specific mental states; a jerky motion or crashing sound arouses a sense of panic and fear—whereas a smoothly changing phrase or touch induces affection or peacefulness.[118] Some such reactions could be wired from birth—for example, to facilitate relationships between infants and parents. For then, each party will have some control over what the other one feels, thinks, and does.

Subsequently, as we grow up, we each learn similar ways to control ourselves! We can do this by listening to music and songs, or by exploiting other external things, such as drugs, entertainment, or changes of scene. Then we also discover techniques for affecting our mental states ‘from inside’—for example, by thinking that music inside our minds. (This can have a negative side, as when you hear a person complain that they can’t get a certain tune out of their head.)

Eventually, for each of us, certain sights and sounds come to have more definite significances—as when bugles and drums depict battles and guns. However, we usually each have different ideas about what each fragment of music means—particularly when it reminds us of how we felt during some prior experience. This has led some thinkers to believe that music expresses those feelings themselves, whereas those effects are probably far less direct:

G. Spencer Brown: “[In musical works] the composer does not even attempt to describe the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands which, if they are obeyed by the reader, can result in a reproduction, to the reader, of the composer’s original experience.[119]”

However, some other thinkers would disagree:

Marcel Proust: “Each reader reads only what is already inside himself. A book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to let the reader discover in himself what he would not have found without the aid of the book.”

Perhaps Felix Mendelssohn had something like this in mind when he said, “the meaning of music lies not in the fact that it is too vague for words, but that it is too precise for words.”

All of this raises questions that people seem strangely reluctant to ask—such why do so many people like music so much, and permit it to take up so much of their lives.[120] In particular, we ought to ask why nursery rhymes and lullabies occur in so many cultures and societies. In Music, Mind, and Meaning I suggested some possible reasons for this: perhaps we use those tidy structures of notes and tunes as simplified ‘virtual’ worlds for refining difference-detectors that we can then use for condensing more complex events (in other realms) into more orderly story-like scripts. See also §§Interior grounding.

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Difference-Networks.

Whenever you want to accomplish some purpose, you will need to decide which things to change. To do this you’ll need to retrieve some knowledge about which actions that might help make those changes. But what should you do when what you have does not exactly match what you need? Then you’ll want to find some substitute that is different—but not too dissimilar.

Whenever you want to accomplish some goal, you will need to retrieve some knowledge about some actions or objects that might help. For example, suppose that you want to sit down, so you look for a chair, but none is in sight. However, if there were a bench in view, then you might regard it as suitable. What leads you to see the bench as similar—when you would not so regard a book or a lamp? What makes us selectively notice things that are likely to be relevant? Patrick Winston suggested doing this by organizing some bodies of knowledge into what he called “difference networks”—for example, like this:[121]

To use such a structure, one first must have some descriptions of the objects it represents. Thus a typical concept of a chair might involve four legs, a level seat, and a vertical back, in which the legs must support the seat from below at a proper height above the floor—whereas a bench is similar (except for being wider and not having a back).

Now, when you look for a thing that matches your description of ‘chair,’ your furniture-network could recognize a bench as similar. Then you can choose to accept that bench, or reject it because it is too wide or has no back.

How might we accumulate useful sets of difference-links? One way would be that, whenever we find an A that ‘almost works’ (that is, for our present purposes) along with a B that actually works, we connect the two with a difference-link that represents, “A is like B, except for a difference D.” Then such networks could also embody the knowledge we need to change what we have into what we need—as well as to suggest alternative views whenever the present one fails. Thus, such difference-networks could help us to retrieve memories that are relevant.

Traditional programs did not take this approach, but were designed to use more ‘logical’ schemes—such as regarding a chair as an instance of furniture, and a table as one kind of furniture. Such hierarchical classifications often help to find suitably similar things, but they also can make many kinds of mistakes. I suspect that people use both techniques but that the ‘sideways’ connections in our difference-networks are vital to how we construct the analogies that are among our most useful ways to think.

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§6-5. Making Decisions

“This river which hid itself doubtless emerged again at some distant spot. Why should I not build a raft and trust myself to its swiftly flowing waters? If I perished, I should be no worse off than now, for death stared me in the face, while there was always the possibility that … I might find myself safe and sound in some desirable land. I decided at any rate to risk it.

—Sinbad, in The Arabian Nights. [122]

It is easy to choose among options when one appears better than all of the rest. But when you find things hard to compare, then you may have to deliberate. One way to do this would be to imagine how one might react