The Emotion Machine

Other times we find ourselves feeling less decisive or less centralized.

Citizen: One part of me wants this, while another part of me wants that. I need to get more control of myself.

A few unusual persons claim never to feel any such sense of unity. Thus one philosopher went so far as to say,

Josiah Royce: “I can never find out what my will is by merely brooding over my natural desires, or by following my momentary caprices. For by nature I am a sort of meeting place of countless streams of ancestral tendency. … I am a collection of impulses. There is no one desire that is always present to me.”[197]

In any case, even when we feel that we’re in control, we recognize conflicts among our goals. Then we may argue inside our minds, and try to find a compromise—but sometimes we still find ourselves subject to compulsions and urges we can’t overcome. And even when we feel unified, others may see us as disorganized.

We solve easy problems in routine ways, scarcely thinking about how we accomplish these—but when our usual methods don’t work, then we start to ‘reflect’ on what went wrong with what we were attempting to do— and this chapter maintains that we do such reflections by switching around in a great network of ‘models’— where each purports to represent some facet or aspect of ourselves. Thus what we call ‘Self’ in everyday life is a loosely connected collection of images, models, and anecdotes.

In fact, if this view of the Self is correct, then there is nothing so special about it—because that’s how we represent everything else, namely, as a Panalogy. Thus when you think about a telephone, you keep switching among different views of its appearance, its physical structure, the feelings you have when you use it, etc. It’s the same when you think about your Self; you still may be using the same kinds of techniques that you use to think about everyday things; different parts of your mind are engaged with a variety of models and processes. But if so, then what impels us to believe that that we must be anything more than Josiah Royce’s meetings of streams? What leads us to the strange idea that our thoughts cannot just proceed by themselves?

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.”[198]

Citizen: Even if no central Self exists, you’d have to explain why we feel that one’s there. When I think my thoughts and imagine things, must not there be someone who’s doing those things!

After all, if we had those Single Selves to want and feel and think for us, then we would not have much need for Minds—and if our Minds could do those things by themselves, then it would be of no use to have those Selves? Then how could that curious “Self” idea ever help us to understand anything? Aha! Perhaps that is precisely the point: we use words like ‘Me’ and ‘I’ to keep us from thinking about what we are! For they all give the very same answer, “Myself,” to every such question that we might ask. Here are some other ways in which that Single-Self concept is useful to us:

A Localized Body. You cannot walk through solid walls, or stay aloft without support. Where any part of your body goes, the rest of you must also go—and the Single-Self model includes the idea of being in only one place at a time.

A Private Mind. It is pleasant to think of your Self as like a strong, closed box, so that no one else can share your thoughts to learn the secrets you want to keep—for only you hold the keys to those locks.

Explaining our Minds. Perhaps it seems to make sense to say things like, ‘I perceive the things that I see,’ because we know so very little about how our perceptions actually work. This way, that Single-Self view can help to keep us from wasting time on questions we don’t know answers to.

Moral Responsibility. Each culture needs behavioral codes. For example, because our resources are limited, we sometimes have to censure Greed. Because we each depend on others, we have to chastise Treachery. And to justify our laws and decrees, we have to assume that some Single Self is ‘responsible’ for every willful, intentional deed.

Centralized Economy. We’d never accomplish anything if we kept asking questions like, “Have I considered every alternative?” We prevent this with Critics that interrupt us with, “That’s enough thinking; I’ve made my decision!”

Causal Attribution. When we represent any thing or event, we like to attribute some Cause to it. So when we don’t know what led to some thought, we assume that the Self was the cause of it. This way, we sometimes may use the word ‘Self’ the way we say ‘it’ in “it started to rain,” because we don’t know a more plausible cause.

Attention and Focus. We often think of our mental events as occurring in a single ‘stream of consciousness’—as though they all were emerging from some single, central kind of source, which can only attend to one thing at a time. We’ll discuss this more in §§Attention.

Social Relations. Other people expect us to think of them as Single Selves, so unless we adopt a similar view, it will be hard to communicate with them.

These all are good reasons why the Single-Self view is convenient to use in our everyday lives. But when we want to understand how we think, no model so simple as that can portray enough useful details of how our minds work. For even if ‘you’ had some way to observe your entire mind simultaneously, that would be too complex to comprehend—so you still would be compelled to switch among simplified models of yourself.

Why should those models be simplifications? That’s because we would be overwhelmed by seeing too many unwanted details. That’s what makes a map more useful to us than seeing the entire landscape that it depicts; a good model helps us to focus on only those features of things that might be significant in some particular context. A good map or model may also include additional knowledge, as when the blueprint of a house shows the dimensions its parts were intended to have, as well as the name of its architect.)

The same applies to what we store in our minds. Consider how messy our minds would become if we filled them up with descriptions of things whose details had too little significance. So instead, we spend large parts of our lives at trying to tidy up our minds—selecting the portions we want to keep, suppressing others we’d like to forget, and refining the ones we’re dissatisfied with.[199]

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§9-4. What is Pleasure, and why do we like it?

We may lay it down that Pleasure is a movement by which the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being; and that Pain is the opposite. If this is what pleasure is, it is clear that the pleasant is what tends to produce this condition, while that which tends to destroy it, or to cause the soul to be brought into the opposite state, is painful.

—Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 10.

We tend to feel pleased—or at least relieved—when we accomplish something we want. Thus, as we