The Emotion Machine

You have trouble recalling past events.

You have trouble when solving an urgent problem.

You cannot decide which action to take.

You’ve lost track of what you were trying to do.

Something has happened that surprises you.

Nevertheless, in cases like these, usually you still can switch to other productive ways to think. For example, you might change the domain you are searching through, or select some other problem to solve, or switch to some different overall plan, or make a major switch in emotional state—without knowing or even being concerned with why your original project might have failed.

Furthermore, it seems possible that, whenever some of your systems fail, your brain may retain some earlier versions of it. Then in situations where you get confused, you may be able to ask yourself, “How did I deal with such things in the past?” Then this might cause some parts of your mind to ‘regress’ to an earlier version of yourself, from an age when such matters seemed simpler to you. This suggest another reason why we might like the idea of having a Self:

“One’s present personality cannot share all the thoughts of all one’s older personalities—and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self—a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.”

—§17.01 of “The Society of Mind.”

However, we should not ignore the tragic fact that people also are subject to failures from which recovery may be difficult, or impossible. For example, if something went wrong with the machinery that controls your Critic/Selector processes, then the rest of your mind may become reduced to a disorganized cloud of inactive resources, or get stuck with some single, unswitchable way to think.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

Mental Bugs and Parasites

If a mind could make changes in how it works, it would face the risk of destroying itself. This could be one reason why our brains evolved so many, partly separate systems, instead of a more unified and centralized one: there may have been substantial advantages to imposing limits on the extent to which our minds could examine themselves!

For example, no single Way to Think should be allowed to have too much control over the systems we use for credit assignment—because then it could make itself grow beyond bound. Similarly, it would be dangerous for any resource to be able to keep enforcing its goals, because then it could make the rest of the mind spend all its time at serving it. The same would apply to any resource that could control our systems for pleasure and pain—for any resource that found a way to completely suppress some instinctive drive might be able to force its person to never sleep, or to work to death, or to starve itself.

While such drastic calamities are rare, a great many common disorders do result from the growth of such ‘mental parasites.’ For many human minds do indeed get enslaved by the self-reproducing sets of ideas that Richard Dawkins entitled “memes. ” Such a collection of concepts may include ways to grow and protect itself by displacing competing sets of ideas.[206] (I should note that many such sets of beliefs are so widespread that they are not regarded as pathological.)

However, many people are so clever that, when their minds get occupied by those ‘mental parasites,’ they may invent or find some social niche in which they can ‘make a living’ by recruiting yet other minds to adopt those same sets of strange ideas.

[Another class of bugs: thinking too much and getting in circles.] Nevertheless, the problem of meandering is certain to re-emerge once we learn how to make machines that examine themselves to formulate their own new problems. Questioning one’s own “top-level” goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile—unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile? How could one decide when a question is properly answered—unless one knows how to answer that question itself? Parents dread such problems and enjoin kids to not take them seriously. We learn to suppress those lines of thoughts, to “not even think about them” and to dismiss the most important of all as nonsensical, viz. the joke “Life is like a bridge.” “In what way?” “How should I know?” Such questions lie beyond the shores of sense and in the end it is Evolution, not Reason, that decides who remains to ask them. (from “Jokes and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious.”

To protect themselves from such extremes, our brains evolved ways to balance between becoming too highly centralized, or too dispersed to have much use. We had to be able to concentrate, yet also respond to urgent alarms. We still needed some larger-scale organization because no much smaller part of us could know enough about the world to make good decisions in all situations.

Why don’t we have more bugs than we do?

In the evolution of our brains, each seeming improvement must also have brought additional sorts of dangers and risks—because every time we extended our minds, we also exposed ourselves to making novel types of mistakes. Here are some bugs that everyone’s subject to:

Making generalizations that are too broad.

Failing to deal with exceptions to rules.

Accumulating useless or incorrect information.

Believing things because our imprimers do.

Making superstitious credit assignments.

Confusing real with make-believe things.

Becoming obsessed with unachievable goals,

We cannot hope to ever escape from all bugs because, as every engineer knows, most every change in a large complex system will introduce yet other mistakes that won’t show up till the system is moved a somewhat different environment. In any case, such failures are not uniquely human ones; my own dog also suffers from most of those bugs.

Each human brain is different because it is built by pairs of inherited genes (each chosen by chance from one of the parents). Also, many of its smaller details depend on other events that happened during its early development. So an engineer might wonder how such a machine could possibly work in spite of so many possible variations.

In fact, it was widely believed until recent years, that our brains must be based on some not-yet- understood principles, whereby every fragment of process or knowledge was (in some unknown manner) ‘distributed’ in some global way so that the system still could function in spite of the loss of any part of it. Today,