The Emotion Machine

—St. Augustine, in Confessions, 35.55.

Understanding a new and difficult subject—or exploring an unfamiliar terrain—can lead to a lot of pain and stress. Then how can we keep this from holding us back from learning new ways to accomplish things? One antidote for this is Adventurousness.

“Why do children enjoy the rides in amusement parks, knowing that they will be scared, even sick? Why do explorers endure discomfort and pain—knowing that their very purpose will disperse once they arrive? And what makes people work for years at jobs they hate, so that someday they will be able to—they seem to have forgotten what! It is the same for solving difficult problems, or climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with one’s feet: some parts of the mind find these horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them.”

—The Society of Mind, §9.4.

Most of our everyday learning involves only minor adjustments to skills that we already know how to use. One can do this by using ‘trial and error; one makes a small change, and if that results in a pleasant reward (such as being pleased with an improved performance) then that change will become more permanent.[201] This fact has led many teachers to recommend that ‘learning environments’ should mainly consist of situations in which pupils get frequent rewards for success. To promote this, then, one should help the students to progress through a sequence of small, easy steps.

However, this strategy won’t work well in unfamiliar realms because, when we learn a substantially new technique, this will involve more work with less frequent rewards, while enduring the additional stress of being confused and disoriented. It also may require us to abandon older techniques and representations that previously have served us well—and this might even arouse a sense of loss that brings “negative” feelings akin to grief. Such periods of awkwardness and ineptitude would usually cause a person to quit.

This suggests that that “pleasant” or “positive” practice, alone, may not suffice for us to learn more radically different ways to think. This, in turn suggests that to become proficient at learning new things, a person must somehow acquire what Augustine called, in the extract above, ‘a passion for experimenting and knowledge.’ Such persons must somehow have managed to train themselves to actually enjoy those discomforts.

Citizen: How can you speak of ‘enjoying’ discomfort? Isn’t that a self-contradiction?

It is only a contradiction when you regard your Self as a single Thing. But when you see the mind as a society, then you no longer have to think of pleasure as an all-or-none thing. For now you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. For example, one part of your mind can still represent your state in a positive way by saying “Good, this is a chance to experience awkwardness and to discover new kinds of mistakes!”

Citizen: But wouldn’t you still be feeling that pain?

Indeed, when struggling at their seemingly punishing tasks, athletes still feel physical pain, and artists and scientists feel mental pains—but, somehow, they seem to have trained themselves to keep those pains from spiraling into the awful cascades we call ‘suffering.’ But how could those persons have learned to suppress, ignore, or enjoy those pains, while preventing those disruption cascades? To answer that, we would need to know more about our mental machinery.

Scientist: Perhaps this does not really need any special explanation, because explorations can provide their own rewards. For me, few things bring more pleasure than making radical new hypotheses—and then showing that their predictions are correct, despite the objections of my competitors.

Artist: It seems almost the same to me, because nothing can surpass the thrill of conceiving a new kind of representation and then confirming that this will produce new effects in my audience.

Psychologist: It seems clear that many such achievers regard their ability to function in spite of pain, rejection, or adversity to be among their outstanding accomplishments!

In any case, all this suggests that ‘exploration pleasure’ (however it works) may be indispensable to those who want to keep extending their development.

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§9-5. What controls the mind as a whole?

Jean Piaget: “If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another. … The explainer believes from the start that the reproducer will grasp everything, will almost know beforehand all that should be known. ... These habits of thought account, in the first place, for the remarkable lack of precision in childish style.”[202]

How do human minds develop? We know that our infants are already equipped at birth with ways to react to certain kinds of sounds and smells, to certain patterns of darkness and light, and to various tactile and haptic sensations. Then over the following months and years the child learns many more perceptual and motor skills, and proceeds through many stages of intellectual development. Eventually, each normal child learns to recognize, represent, and reflect upon some its own internal states, and also comes to self-reflect on some its intentions and feelings—and eventually learns to identify these with aspects of other persons that it observes. This section will speculate about possible structures we might use to support those activities; the next section will suggest some ideas about how children might develop these.

This book has proposed several different views of how a human mind might be organized. We began by portraying the mind (or brain) as based on a scheme that deals with various situations by activating certain sets of resources—so that each such selection will function as a somewhat different “way to think.”

To determine which set of resources to select, such systems could begin with some simple sorts of “If–>Do” rules. Later these develop into more versatile “Critic– >Selector” systems.

Chapter §5 conjectured that the adult mind comes to have multiple levels of organization. Each level has Critics to recognize situations and Selectors that can activate appropriate ways to think, by exploiting the resources at its own and at other levels. We also noted that these ideas could be seen as consistent with Sigmund Freud’s early view of the mind as a system for resolving (or for ignoring) conflicts between our instinctive and acquired