The Emotion Machine

What if your set of active Critics does not change? Then you would be likely to keep repeating the same approach because, after each attempt to change your way to think, those Critics would try to switch you back again—and you might get stuck with a ‘one-track mind.’

What if some Critics stay on all the time? Certain Critics must always be active to make us react to serious hazards—but if these are not selected carefully, it could lead to obsessive behaviors by repeatedly making you focus too sharply only on certain particular subjects.

What if all your Critics get turned off? Then all your questions would seem to be answered because you are no longer able to ask them, and all your problems would seem to be gone because nothing seems to have any flaws.

Everything may seem wonderful during such a ‘mystical experience’—but such ‘revelations’ usually fade when enough of your critics get turned back on.

What if too many Critics are active at once? Then you’d keep noticing flaws to correct, and spend so much time repairing them that you would never get any important things done. And if you find ugliness everywhere, your friends may perceive you as depressed.

What if too many Critics are turned off? If you can ignore most alarms and concerns, that would help you to ‘concentrate’—but it also might lead you to ignore errors and flaws in your arguments. However, the fewer Critics you activate, the fewer goals you will try to pursue, and then you would tend to be mentally dull.

Then what should decide which ones are active? Your thinking would become chaotic if too many goals were to freely compete without any larger-scale management—but if and particular Way to Think persisted too long, you would appear to have a ‘one-track’ mind.

Chapter §9 will argue that control over which of our Critics are active must never be too highly centralized, because sometimes we need to concentrate—yet still respond to emergencies. Also, consider what might happen if large classes of Critics turned off, and then on, for excessive durations of time: then there would be long cycles in which you would first be euphoric, when nothing would ever seem to be wrong, followed by intervals in which no goal would seem to be worth pursuing. In such cases, the Critics that normally help us to think could play a role, when they’re poorly controlled, in what we call manic-depressive disorders.

Questions

Which of our ways to think are inborn? Which of them are not innate, but are ones that each child eventually learns from its experience with its environment? Then do certain individuals go on to discover special techniques that lead them to yet better ways to think? We’ll discuss this in §8-8 Genius.

What determines the urgencies of our goals? What keeps track of the tasks that we have postponed? Are there clocks or timers in our brains that schedule or otherwise regulate our higher-level activities? We’ll talk about this in Chapter §9.

How many things can we think about at once, and in how many different realms? How many different contexts can we manage to keep active? How are such activities distributed among the billions of cells in our brains?

How does Context affect how we think? We’ll come back to this in Chapter §10.

Part VIII

§8-1. Resourcefulness

“Although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us, they infallibly fall short in others, from which we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the arrangements of their parts.”

—Descartes, in Discourse on Method, 1637.

We are all accustomed to using machines that are stronger and faster than people are. But before the first computers appeared, no one could see how any machine could do more than a very few different things. This must be why Descartes insisted that no machine could be as resourceful as any person can be.

“For while reason is a universal instrument which can apply to every situation, a machine’s parts need a particular arrangement for each particular action; therefore it is impossible for a single machine to have enough diversity to enable it to act in all the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act.”[149]

Similarly in earlier times there appeared to be an unbridgeable gap between the capacities of humans and other animals. Thus, in The Descent of Man, Darwin observes that,” Many authors have insisted that man is divided by an insuperable barrier from all the lower animals in his mental faculties.” However, he then contends that this difference may be just “one of degree and not of kind.”

Charles Darwin: “It has, I think, now been shewn that man and the higher animals, especially the primates … all have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations, — similar passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity; … they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees.”[150]

Then Darwin observes that “the individuals of each species may graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence,” and argues that even the highest forms of human thought could have developed from such variations—because he sees no particular point at which that would meet an intractable obstacle.

“That such evolution is at least possible, ought not to be denied, for we daily see these faculties developing in every infant; and we may trace a perfect gradation from the mind of an utter idiot ... to the mind of a Newton.”

Many people still find it hard to envision how there could have been transitional steps from animal to human minds. In the past, that view was excusable—because few thinkers had ever suspected that only a few small structural changes could vastly increase what machines can achieve. However, in 1936, the