The Emotion Machine

—except that they don’t yet know so much.” But others would take an opposite view: “An infant begins with almost no intellect, and developing one takes a sizeable time.”

Does your Self have a special location in space? Most ‘western’ thinkers might answer, “Yes”—and tend to locate it inside their heads, somewhere not far behind their eyes. However, I’ve heard that some other cultures situate Selves between the belly and chest.

Which of your beliefs are your “genuine” ones? The Single-Self view suggests that some of your many intents and views are your “sincere” and “authentic” ones —whereas the models of mind discussed in this book leave room for a person to hold conflicting values and attitudes.

Does your Self stay the same throughout your life? We each have a sense of remaining the same, no matter whatever may happen to us. Does this mean that some part of us is more permanent than our bodies and our memories?

Does your Self survive the death of your brain? Different answers to that might leave us pleased or distressed, but would not help us to understand ourselves.

Each such question uses words like self, we, and us in a somewhat different sense—and this chapter will argue that this is good because, if we want to understand ourselves, we’ll need to use several different such views of ourselves.

Whenever you think about your “Self,” you are switching among a network of models,[181] each of which may help to answer questions about different aspects of what you are.

For example, some of our models are based on simplistic ideas like “All our actions are based on the will to survive,” or “we always like pleasure more than pain,” while some other self-models are far more complex. We develop these multiple theories because each of them helps to represent certain aspects of ourselves, but is likely to give some wrong answers about other questions about ourselves.

Citizen: Why should a person want more than one model? Would it not be better to combine them into a single, more comprehensive one?

In the past, there were many attempts to make ‘unified’ theories of psychology.[182] However, this chapter will suggest some reasons why none of those theories worked well by itself, and why we may need to keep switching among various different views of ourselves.

Jerry Fodor: “If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be Me.”[183]

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: “I have been reading my old poems, and they were written by somebody else. Yet I am that selfsame person; or, if I am not, who is? If no one is, when did he die—when he finished this poem, or that one, or the next day, or the end of that month?”

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§9-1. How do we Represent Ourselves?

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”

—Robert Burns 1759-1796

How do people construct their self-models? We’ll start by asking simpler questions about how we describe our acquaintances. Thus, when Charles tries to think about his friend Joan, he might begin by describing some of her characteristics. These could include his ideas about:

The appearance of Joan’s body and face,

The range and extents of her abilities,

Her motives, goals, aversions, and tastes,

The ways in which she is disposed to behave,

Her various roles in the social world,

However, when Charles thinks about Joan in different realms, his descriptions of her may not all agree. For example, his view of Joan as a person at work is that she is helpful and competent, but tends to undervalue herself; however, in social settings he sees her as selfish and overrating herself. What could lead Charles to make such different models? Perhaps his first representation of Joan served well to predict her social performance, but that model did not well describe her business self. Then, when he changed that description to also apply to that realm, it made new mistakes in the contexts where it formerly worked. Eventually, he found that he had to make separate models of Joan to predict her behaviors in other roles.

Physicist: Perhaps Charles should have tried harder to construct one single, more unified model of Joan.

This would not be feasible, because each of a person’s mental realms may need different kinds of representations. Indeed, whenever a subject becomes important to us, we build new kinds of models for it—and this ever-increasing diversity must be a principal source of our human resourcefulness.

To more clearly see the need for this, we’ll turn to a simpler situation: Suppose that you find that your car won’t start. Then, to diagnosis what might be wrong, you may need to switch among several different views of what might be inside your car:

If the key is stuck, or the brake won’t release, you must think in terms of mechanical parts.

If the starter won’t turn, or if there is no spark, you must think in terms of electrical circuits.

If you’ve run out of gas, or the air intake’s blocked, you need a model of fuel and combustion.

It is the same in every domain; to answer different types of questions, we often need different kinds of representations. For example, if you wish to study Psychology, your teachers will make you take courses in at least