The Emotion Machine

objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these—and so to convert the raw material of our sensations into a knowledge of objects?”

“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a combination of that which we receive through impressions, and [additional knowledge] altogether independent of experience … which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself, sensory impressions giving merely the occasion. ^[30]

So, although sensations give us occasions to learn, this cannot be what makes us able to learn, because we first must have the ‘additional knowledge’ that our brains would need, as Kant has said, to “produce representations” and then “to connect” them.[178] Such additional knowledge would also include inborn ways to recognize correlations and other relationships among sensations. I suspect that, in the case of physical objects, our brains are already innately endowed with machinery to help us “to compare, to connect, or to separate” objects so that we can represent them as existing in space.

All this leads me to suspect that we must be born with primitive forms of structures like K-lines, Frames, and Semantic Networks—so that that no infant needs to wholly invent the kinds of representations that we depicted above. However, I doubt that we’re born with those stuctures complete, so it still requires some effort and time for us to refine those primitive representations into their more adult forms. I hope that soon there will be some research on how that development process works.

Could any person ever invent an totally new kind of representation? Such an event must be quite rare because no type of representation would be useful without some effective skills for working with it— and a new set of such skills would take time to grow. Also, no fragment of knowledge could be of much use unless it is represented in a familiar way. For reasons like these, it makes sense to conjecture that most of our adult representations come either from refining our primitive ones, or by acquiring them from our culture. However, once a person has learned to use several different representations, then that person might be more able to invent new ones. Indeed, we see such skills in the work of those exceptional writers, artists, inventors, and scientist who repeatedly discover new and useful ways to represent things.

How should a brain proceed to select which representation to use? As we have emphasized several times, each particular kind of description has virtues and deficiencies. Therefore it makes more sense to ask, “Which methods might work well for the problem I’m facing—and which representations are likely to work well with those methods?”

Most computer programs still, today, can do only one particular kind of task, whereas our brains accumulate multiple ways to deal with each type of problem we face. However, once we better understand how to organize such resources, along with knowledge to help us decide which technique to use in each situation. To do this we need to develop a wide range of ways to represent those all those capabilities—so that, whenever the method we’re using fails, we can switch to another alternative.[179]

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Part IX. The Self

Could be

I only sang because the lonely road was long;

and now the road and I are gone

but not the song.

I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time:

and now the clock and I are broken

but not the rhyme.

Possibly,

the self not being fundamental,

eternity

breathes only on the incidental.

—Ernesto Galarza, 1905-1984

What makes each human being unique? No other species of animal has such diverse individuals; each person presents a different set of appearances and abilities. Some of those traits are inherited, and some come that person’s experiences—but in every case, each of us ends up with different characteristics. We sometimes use ‘Self’ for the features and traits that distinguish each person from everyone else.

However, we also use Self in a sense which implies that all our activities are controlled by powerful creatures inside ourselves, who do our thinking and feeling for us. We call these our Selves or Identities, and sometimes we tend to think of them as like separate persons inside our heads.

Daniel Dennett: “A homunculus (from Latin, ‘little man’) is a miniature adult held to inhabit the brain … who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an infinite regress … since we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible for his perception and action, and so on.”[180]

What attracts us to the queer idea that we can only think or feel with the help of those Selves inside our minds? Chapter §1 suggested some reasons for this:

Citizen: Whether or not you believe that Selves exist, I’m perfectly sure that there’s one inside me, because I can feel it working to make my decisions.”

Psychotherapist: The Single-Self legend helps makes life seem pleasant, by hiding from us how much we’re controlled by goals that we’d rather not know about.

Pragmatist: The Single-Self concept helps make us efficient by keeping our minds from trying to understand everything all the time.

The Single-Self view thus keeps us from asking difficult questions about our minds. If you wonder how your vision works, it answers that: ‘Your Self simply peers out though your eyes.” If you ask how your memory works, you get: “Your Self knows how to recollect whatever might be relevant.” And if you wonder what guides you through your life, it tells that your Self provides you with your desires and goals—and then solves all your problems for you. Thus, the Single-Self view diverts you from asking about how your mental processes work, and leads you to wonder, instead, about these kinds of questions about your Self:

Is an infant born with anything like what an adult would call a Self’? Some would insist on answering with, “Yes, infants are persons just like us