The Emotion Machine

to each possible outcome, and then, somehow, to compare those reactions, and then to select the one that seems best— or, as in the Sinbad case, to reject the one that seems worse.

Aristotle: “Sensitive imagination is found in every animal, but deliberative imagination only in those that can calculate: for whether this or that shall be enacted is already a task requiring calculation.”

—Aristotle, On the Soul, Book III, 4.

One way a person could ‘calculate’ would be to assign a numerical score to each choice, and then to select the largest one.

Citizen: Lately, I have been trying to choose between a country home and an apartment in town. The first one offers more spacious rooms and looks out on a beautiful mountain-view. The other is closer to where I work, is in a friendlier neighborhood, but has a higher annual cost. But how could one measure, or even compare, situations that differ in so many ways?

Still, you could try to imagine how each of those situations would help or hinder you to accomplish your various goals.

Citizen: That might just make the problem worse, because then you have to measure your feelings about the values of those various goals.

Benjamin Franklin: “When these difficult cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under consideration all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes one set present themselves and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternatively prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us.”[123]

However, Franklin went on to suggest a way to eliminate much of that measuring:

To get over this, my way is, to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one pro, and over the over con. Then during three or four days consideration I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives that at different times occur to me for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side that seem equal I strike them out: if a find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con equal to some three reasons pro I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of further consideration nothing new of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly. And tho’ the weight of reasons cannot be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities, yet when each is considered separately and comparatively and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash step; and in fact I have found great advantage from this kind of equation, in what might be called ‘Moral’ or ‘Prudential Algebra’.

Of course, if such a process were to conclude that several options seem equally good, then you would have to switch to another technique. You sometimes do this reflectively, but at other times the rest of your mind does this without your knowing how the decision was made. At such times you might say things like, “I used my ‘gut feelings’” or used ‘intuition,’ or claim that you did that ‘instinctively.’

Paul Thagard: “Many persons trust their “gut feelings” more. … You may have a strongly positive gut feeling toward the more interesting subject along with a strongly negative feeling about the more career-oriented one, or your feelings may be just the opposite. More likely is that you feel positive feelings toward both alternatives, along with accompanying anxiety caused by your inability to see a clearly preferable option. In the end, intuitive decision makers choose an option based on what their emotional reactions tell them is preferable.”[124]

However, using the word ‘emotional’ does not help us to see what is happening—because how ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ a feeling seems will still depend on how one’s mental processes deal with “all the reasons pro and con” that Franklin addressed in that letter. Indeed, we frequently have the experience that, shortly after we make a decision, we find that it ‘just does not feel right’ —and go back to reconsidering.

Citizen: Even when options seem equally good, I still can decide. How could your kind of theory explain our peculiarly human ‘freedom of choice’?

It seems to me that when people say, ‘I used my free will to make that decision,’ this is roughly the same as saying that ‘some process stopped my deliberations and made me adopt what seemed best at that moment.’ In other words, “free will” is not a process we use to make a decision, but one that we use to stop other processes! We may think of it in positive terms but perhaps it also serves to suppress the sense that we are being forced to make a choice—if not by pressures from outside, but by causes that come from inside our own minds. To say that ‘my decision was free’ is almost the same thing as saying “I don’t want to know what decided me.”[125]

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§6-6. Reasoning by Analogy

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”

—A. Lincoln

The best way to solve a problem is to already know a solution for it—and this is why commonsense knowledge is useful. But what if the problem is one you have never seen before? How can you continue to work when you lack some of the knowledge you need? The obvious answer: you just have to guess—but how does one know how to make a good guess? We usually do this so fluently that we have almost no sense of how we are doing it, and, if someone asks about that, we tend to attribute it to mysterious traits with names like intuition, insight, creativity, or even to intelligence.

More generally, whenever anything attracts your attention—be it an object, idea, or a problem—you are likely to ask yourself what that thing is, why is it there, and whether it should be a cause for alarm. But as we said in §6-3, we can’t usually say what anything is: we can only describe what something is like, and then start to think about questions like these:

What sorts of things is this similar to?

Have I seen this anything like it before?”

What else does it remind me of?

This kind of thinking is important because it helps us to deal with new situations—and in fact that is almost