The Emotion Machine

‘strength.’ The trouble with this is that a single numbers is ‘opaque’ in the sense that it has so little expressiveness. For, whenever one computes an average or a probability, this conceals the knowledge or evidence that led to it.[175] For, consider that if you only see the number 12, you cannot tell if that number represents 5 plus 7, or 9 plus 3, or 27 minus 15! Did it come from counting the eggs in a nest, or from counting the years of your grandchild’s age? For example, if you represent the concept of ‘apple’ this way, your machine may be able to recognize an apple, but it won’t be able to reason about it. In short, numerical representations become obstacles to using more reflective ways to think—because it is difficult for other, higher- level processes to think about the knowledge that such systems contain. [We’ll discuss this more in §§§Opacity.]

Let’s contrast this with representing a concept of “apple” by using a semantic network like this:

This kind of representation can help you answer many questions about an apple, such as where you can find one and what you can use it for—because a semantic network can express all sorts of different relationships, whereas numerical representations ultimately limit a system’s mental growth, because they provides no parts that the rest of a mind can use to produce more elaborate explanations.

Micronemes for Contextual Knowledge. We always face ambiguities. The significance the things that you see depends on the rest of your mental context. This also applies to events in your mind, because what they mean depends on which mental resources are active then. [176] In other words, no symbol or object has meaning by itself, because your interpretation of it will depend on the mental context you’re in. For example, when you hear or read the word block, you might possible think that it means an obstacle to progress, a certain kind of rectangular object, a wooden board to chop things on, or a stand on which things in an auction are shown. Then which interpretation will you select?

Such choices will depend, of course, on the preferences that are active in your current mental context— which, somehow, this will dispose you to make selections from such sets of alternatives as these:

Conceptual or material.

Animal, mineral, or vegetable.

Well-established or speculative.

Common, rare, or irreplaceable.

Robust, fragile or reparability.

Indoors or outdoors.

Public or private.

Residence, office, theater, or car.

Urban, rural, forest, farm.

Color, texture, hardness, strength.

Irregular or symmetrical.

Hunting, gambling, entertainment.

Cooperation, conflict, etc.

Many contextual features like these have common names, but many others (such as aromas) have no such words. I have proposed to use the term “micronemes” for the myriad of nameless clues that color and shade how we think about things, and the diagram below suggests some machinery through which such contextual features could affect many mental processes. Imagine that the brain contains a bundle of thousands of wire-like fibers that pass through a great many of other structures inside that brain—so that the state of each of those ‘micronemes’ can influence many processes:

On the input side, we shall assume that many of your mental resources—such as K-lines, Frame-slots, or If-Do-Then rules— can alter the states of some micronemes. Then the present state of your micronemes could represent much of your current mental context—and the states of those fibers are changed, your far-reaching bundle of micronemes will broadcast that information to many other mental resources—so that this will change some of your attitudes, outlooks, and states of mind. In other words, this system could switch you into other, different ways to think. I think that this concept of micronemes could help to replace many old and vague ideas about ‘association of ideas.’ In §§Brain-Waves, we suggest more details about how such a system could play central roles in how our mental processes are organized.

A Hierarchy of Representations

The sections above have briefly described several kinds of structures that we could use to represent various types of knowledge. However, each of these representation types has its own virtues and deficiencies—so each of them may need some other connections through which they can exploit some of the other types of representations. This suggests that our brains need some larger-scale organization for interconnecting our multiple ways to represent knowledge. Perhaps the simplest such arrangement would be a hierarchical one like this:

This diagram suggests how a brain might organize its ways to represent knowledge. However, we should not expect to find that actual brains are arranged in such an orderly way. Instead, we should not be surprised if anatomists find that different regions of the brain evolved somewhat different such organizations to support mental functions in different realms—such as for maintaining our bodily functions, manipulating physical objects, developing social relationships, and for reflective and linguistic processes.

This hierarchy of representation appear to roughly correspond to the various levels of thinking that were proposed in our previous chapters—in the sense that increasingly higher levels will tend to more depend on using story- and script-like representations. However, each of those levels itself may use several types of representations. In any case, even if this diagram turns out to be a good description of the relations between those representations, it is unlikely to closely match the gross anatomy of the brain—because the structures shown in this diagram need be spatially close to each other. Indeed, a substantial volume of a human brain consists of bundles of nerves that interconnect regions that are quite far apart.[177]

How do we learn new Representations?

From where do we obtain our ways to represent knowledge, and why do we find it so easy to arrange our knowledge into panalogies? Are these abilities installed genetically into our infant of memory systems, or do we learn them individually from our experiences? These questions suggest a more basic one: how do we manage to learn at all? As Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, learning to learn is one of the things that we cannot learn from experience!

Immanuel Kant:“That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of