The Emotion Machine

born with all their wonderful tricks, we would share no blame for our deficiencies—nor would those artist and thinkers deserve any credit for their accomplishments.

However, let’s turn this discussion upside down, and change our question to ask instead, what could cause one person to become less resourceful than another one. Here is one condition that could have the effect of hindering further mental growth:

The Investment Principle: If you know of two ways to achieve some goal, you’ll usually start with the one you know best—and then that method may gain so much additional strength that you’ll tend to use the second one less—even if others have told you that that the second is the better one.

Thus, sometimes the problem is simply that for one to develop a new way to think, one may have to endure the discomfort of many awkward or painful performances. So, one ‘secret of creativity’ may be to develop the knack of enjoying that sort of unpleasantness! We’ll explore this more in chapter §9, when we talk about Adventurousness.

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§8-7. Memories and Representations

“There is no property absolutely essential to one thing. The same property, which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion, becomes a very inessential feature upon another.”

—William James [Principles, Chap. XXII.]

Everyone can imagine things; we hear words and phrases inside our minds. We envision conditions that don’t yet exist—and then exploit those images to predict the effects of possible actions. Much of our human resourcefulness must come from our abilities to manipulate mental models and representations of objects, events, and other conceptions.

But what do we mean by a model or a representation? As I suggested in §4-5, I am using those words to talk about any structure inside one’s brain that one can use to answer some questions about some subject. Of course, those answers will only be useful when your ‘model’ or ‘representation’ behaves enough like the model’s subject does—for the purposes that concern you now.

We sometimes use actual physical objects to represent things, as when we use a picture or map to help us find paths between parts of a city. However, to answer a question about a past event, we must use what we call our “memories.”

But what do we mean by a memory? Each memory must be some kind of record or trace that you made at the time of that prior event—and, of course, you cannot record an event itself. Instead, your brain can only make some records about some of the objects, ideas, and relationships that were involved in that incident. (Indeed, you cannot record an idea itself—and so the best that you can do is to record some aspects of your mental state.)

For example, when you hear a statement like, “Charles gave Joan the book,” you might represent that incident with a script-like sequence of If-Do-Then rules:

However, you also may have wondered about whether that book was a gift or a loan, or did Charles want to ingratiate Joan, or was merely disposed to help a friend. You might have envisioned how the actors were dressed, or some of the words they might have said. Then you might have made several representations for that incident, perhaps including:

A verbal description of that incident.

A visual simulus of the scene.

Some models of the persons involved.

Simulations of how those persons felt.

Analogies with similar incidents.

Predictions about what might happen next.

Why would your brain represent the same event in so many different ways? Perhaps each realm of thought that was engaged left an additional record or trace in some different network inside your brain. This will enable you, later, to use multiple ways to think about that same incident—for example, by using verbal reasoning, or by manipulating mental diagrams, or by envisioning the actors’ gestures and facial expressions.

Today, we still know little about how our brains make those memory traces or how they later retrieve and ‘replay’ them. We do know a lot about how separate brain-cells behave, but we do not yet have good explanations of about how our larger-scale columns and networks of cells manage to represent past events. Nor do our self- reflections help; although as we saw in §8-4, this must involves complex processes, nevertheless it seems to us that we simply ‘remember’ what happens to us.

In any case, one cannot record an event itself, but one can only make some descriptions of how that event affected one’s mental state. Some earlier sections of this book discussed some structures that could used to represent such information. The following section will review some of these, and then speculate about how such structures might be arranged in our brains.

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Multiple Ways to Represent Knowledge

This section reviews some structures that researchers have used to represent knowledge inside computers. I will have to leave out most smaller details (many of which are discussed in chapter 8, 19, and 24 of The Society of Mind). Some non-technical readers might do well to skip this section.

Narrative Scripts: Perhaps our most familiar way to represent an incident is to recount it a story or script that depicts a sequence of events in time—that is, in the form of a story or a narrative. The previous section described such a script for the sentence, “Charles gave Joan the book,” and we saw a similar one in §5-3 for Carol’s plan about how to build an arch:

A sequence-script of If-Do-Then Rules

Semantic Networks: However, when we need to describe more details, such as the relations between an object’s parts, it may be better to use the kinds of ‘semantic networks’ we saw in §4-6 to represent a person’s self-model, and in §5-8 to represent the structure of a physical book.

Semantic Networks for ‘Person’ and ‘Book’