The power of ordinary words like fish comes from how we make them span so many meaning-worlds at once. However, in order to do this, we have to be able to tolerate many exceptions. We almost never find rules that have no exceptions — except in certain special, artificial worlds that we ourselves create by making up their rules and regulations to begin with. Artificial realms like mathematics and theology are built from the start to be devoid of interesting inconsistency. But we must be careful not to mistake our own inventions for natural phenomena we have discovered. To insist on perfect laws in real life is to risk not finding any laws at all. Only in the sciences, where every exception must be explained, does it make sense to pay that price.
Why can one build a tower or arch of stone or brick, but not of water, air, or sand? To answer that amounts to asking, How do towers work? But asking that seems quite perverse, because the answer seems so obvious: Each block holds the next one up, and that's all there is to it! As we've said before:
An idea will seem self-evident — once you've forgotten learning it!
We often use words like insight or intuition to talk about understandings that seem especially immediate. But it is bad psychology to assume that what seems obvious is therefore simple or self-evident. Many such things are done for us by huge, silent systems in our mind, built over long forgotten years of childhood. We rarely think about the giant engines we've developed for understanding space, which work so quietly that they leave no traces in our consciousness. How towers work is something everyone has known for so long that it seems odd to mention it:
A tower's height depends only upon the heights of its parts! None of the other properties of the blocks matter — neither what they cost, nor where they've been, nor what you think of them. Only lifting counts — so we can build a tower by thinking only about actions that increase its height.
This makes tower building easy, by letting us separate the basic building plan from all the small details. To build a tower of a certain height, just find enough pieces of height and stack them up by lifting actions. But towers have to stay up, too. So the next problem is to find actions we can take to make our tower stable. Here we can use a second, wonderful principle:
A tower is stable if each block is properly centered on the last. Because of this, we can build a tower by first lifting each block vertically and then adjusting it horizontally.
Notice that this second kind of action — adjusting for stability — requires only horizontal movements, which do not affect the tower's height at all. This explains why towers are so easy to build. To increase a tower's height, you need only vertical lifting actions. The second-rank goal, stability, requires only horizontal sliding motions, which don't interact with height at all — provided the blocks have horizontal surfaces. This lets us achieve our tower-building goal simply by doing first things first.
To adults it is no mystery that height and width are independent of each other. But this is not so evident in infancy: to understand the world of space and time, each child must make many such discoveries. Still, the division into Lifting and Sliding has a special importance; there are an infinity of ways to move around inside the world: how could a person ever learn them all? The answer: We don't need to learn them all, because we can learn to deal with each dimension separately. Lifting has a special significance because it isolates the vertical dimension from the others and relates it to ideas about balancing. The complementary operations of Sliding can then be divided into two remaining dimensions: either to push and pull or to move from side to side. One way to Lift and two ways to Slide makes three — and that is just enough to move around in a three- dimensional world!
It's wonderful when we can find out something's cause. A tower is high because each of its separate blocks contribute height; it stands because those blocks are adequately firm and wide. A baby cries because it wants food. A stone falls down because it's pulled by gravity. Why can we explain so many things in terms of causes and effects? Is it because there is a cause for everything — or do we merely learn to ask only about the kinds of happenings that have causes? Is it that causes don't exist at all but are inventions of our minds? The answer is all of the above. Causes are indeed made up by minds — but only work in certain parts of certain worlds.
What are causes, anyway? The very concept of a cause involves a certain element of style: a causal explanation must be brief. Unless an explanation is compact, we cannot use it as a prediction. We might agree that X causes Y, if we see that Y depends more on X than on most other things. But we wouldn't call X a cause of Y if describing X involved an endless discourse that mentioned virtually everything else in the world.
There can't be any causes in a world in which everything that happens depends more or less equally upon everything else that happens.
Indeed, it wouldn't make any sense to talk about a thing in such a world. Our very notion of a thing assumes some constellation of properties that stays the same (or changes in ways we can predict) when other things around it change. When Builder moves a block, that block's location will change — but not its color, weight, material, size, or shape. How convenient that our world lets us change a thing's location while leaving so many other properties unchanged! This lets us predict the effect of motions so well that we can chain them into combinations never tried before — yet still predict their principal effects. Furthermore, because our universe has three dimensions, we can easily predict the effect of combining several actions from knowing only their effects in each of those three dimensions.
Why does a block retain its size and shape when it is moved? It is because we're fortunate enough to live within a universe in which effects are localized. A solid object with a stable shape can exist only because its atoms stick together so tightly that when you move some of them, the others are pulled along. But this can happen only in a universe whose force laws work in close accord with the nearnesses of time and space — in other words, a universe in which entities that are far apart have much less effect on each other than ones that are close together. In worlds without constraints like that, there could be no things or causes for us to know.
To know the cause of a phenomenon is to know, at least in principle, how to change or control some aspects of some entities without affecting all the rest.
The most useful kinds of causes our minds can discern are predictable relationships between the actions we can take and the changes we can sense. This is why animals tend to evolve sensors that detect stimuli that can be affected by those animals' own actions.
What is a meaning? Sometimes we're told a definition of a word, and suddenly, we know a way to use that word. But definitions do not often work so well. Suppose you had to explain what game means. You could start like this:
GAME: An activity in which two teams compete to make a ball do something that results in a winning score.
This fits a certain range of games — but what of games that just use words, or keep no scores, or lack the element of competition? We can capture the nature of more kinds of games by using other definitions, but nothing seems to catch them all. We simply cannot find much in common to everything we call a game. Yet one still feels there is a certain unity that underlies the idea of a game. For example, we feel that we could recognize new games, and that game is more than an arbitrary accumulation.
But now let's turn our attention away from the physical aspects of games and focus on the psychological purposes that games can serve. Then it is much easier to find some qualities that are common to most adult games:
GAME: An activity that is engaging and diverting, deliberately detached from real life.
This second kind of definition treats a game, not as a kind of object-thing, but as a process in the mind. At first this might seem somewhat strange, but really it is nothing new — even our first definition already contained psychological elements, concealed in the words competing and winning. When seen this way, different kinds of games seem much more similar. This is because they all serve common purposes — despite the great diversity of their physical appearances. After all, there is virtually no limit to the variety of physical objects or structures that could be used to accomplish the same psychological purpose — in this case, to make an activity diverting (whatever that might mean). Naturally, then, it would be hard to specify the range of all the possible physical forms of games.
Of course, it is no great surprise to find that game has a more psychological character than does brick, which we can define in physical terms without referring to our goals. But most ideas lie in between. We saw this in the case of chair, which we cannot describe without referring both to a physical structure and to a psychological function.
At last we're coming close to capturing the meanings of things like chairs and games. We found that structural descriptions are useful, but they always seem too specific. Most chairs have legs, and most games have scores — but there are always exceptions. We also found purposeful descriptions to be useful, but they never seemed specific enough. Thing you can sit upon is too general to specify a chair, since you can sit on almost anything. Diverting activity is too broad for game — since there are many other ways to turn our minds from serious things. In general, a single definition rarely works.
Purposeful definitions are usually too loose. They include many things we do not intend. Structural definitions are usually too tight. They reject many things we want to include.
But we can often capture an idea by squeezing in from several sides at once, to get exactly what we need by using two or more different kinds of descriptions at the same time.
Our best ideas are often those that bridge between two different worlds!
I don't insist that every definition combine just these particular ingredients of structure and purpose. But that specific mixture does have a peculiar virtue: it helps us bridge between the ends we seek and the means we have. That is, it helps us connect things we can recognize (or make, find, do, or think) to problems we want to solve. It would be of little use to know that X's exist without some way to find and use them.
When we discussed accumulation, we saw that the concepts of furniture and money have reasonably compact functional definitions but accumulate many structural descriptions. Conversely, the concepts of square or circle have compact structural definitions but accumulate endless collections of possible uses.
To learn to use a new or unfamiliar word, you start by taking it to be a sign that there exists, inside some other person's mind, a structure you could use. But no matter how carefully it is explained, you must still rebuild that thought yourself, from materials already in your own mind. It helps to be given a good definition, but still you must mold and shape each new idea to suit your own existing skills — hoping to make it work for you the way it seems to work for those from whom you learn.
What people call meanings do not usually correspond to particular and definite structures, but to connections among and across fragments of the great interlocking networks of connections and constraints among our agencies. Because these networks are constantly growing and changing, meanings are rarely sharp, and we cannot always expect to be able to define them in terms of compact sequences of words. Verbal explanations serve only as partial hints; we also have to learn from watching, working, playing — and thinking.
Imagine all the kinds of arches one can build.
How could we capture what's common to so many things with just one single uniframe? Impossible — if we were forced to think of them in terms of blocks and how they're placed. Not one of the expressions we used before applies to all of them: neither three blocks, nor two blocks standing up, nor the supports must not touch. How could we make our minds perceive all these arches as the same? One way would be to draw this imaginary line:
Now, suddenly, all those different arches fit one single frame — of a single Body with two Supports. There are two different ideas here. The first is the idea of dividing an object's description into an essential portion, namely the body, and some auxiliary portions, which correspond to the support. Later we'll see that this is a powerful idea in its own right. The second idea is even more powerful and general: after failing to find a unified description of all those arches, we abandoned the method we were using — and adopted, instead, a quite different style of description. In a word, we reformulated the problem in new terms. We started by using a language that was based on expressing the precise shapes of individual blocks. We replaced this by another language in which we can speak of shapes and outlines that are not confined to those of the blocks themselves.
Reformulation is clearly very powerful — but how does one do it? How do people find new styles of description that make their problems seem easier? Does this depend upon some mysterious kind of insight or upon some magically creative gift — or do we simply come upon them by accident? As I said when discussing creativity, these seem to me mere matters of degree, since people are always making reformulations of various sorts. Even when we contemplate those rarest and most revolutionary new ideas that come like revelations, suddenly to shed new light on entire fields of thought — like evolution, gravity, or relativity — we usually see by hindsight that these were variants of things that people knew before that time. Then we have to ask, instead, for reasons why those reformulations were so long postponed.
What is creativity? How do people get new ideas? Most thinkers would agree that some of the secret lies in finding new ways to look at things. We've just seen how to use the Body-Support concept to reformulate descriptions of some spatial forms, and soon we'll see some other ways to reformulate in terms of strength, containment, cause, and chain. But first let's look more carefully at how we made those four different arches seem the same, by making each of them seem to match a thing supported by two legs. In the case of Single-Arch, we did this by imagining some boundaries that weren't really there: this served to break a single object into three.
However, we dealt with Tower-Arch by doing quite the opposite: we treated some real boundaries as though they did not exist:
How cavalier a way to treat the world, to see three different things as one and to represent one thing as three! We're always changing boundaries! Where does an elbow start or end? When does a youth become an adult? Where does an ocean change into a sea? Why must our minds keep drawing lines to structure our reality? The answer is that unless we made those mind-constructed boundaries, we'd never see any thing at all! This is because we rarely see anything twice as exactly the same. Each time we're almost certain to be looking from a somewhat different view, perhaps from nearer or farther, higher or lower, in a different color or shade of light, or against a different background. For example, consider these two appearances of the same table.
Unless the mind could thus discard the aspects of each scene that are not essential to its present purposes, we could never learn anything. Otherwise, our recollections would rarely match appearances. Then nothing could make any sense — since nothing would seem permanent.
We normally assume that children see the same as we do and only lack our tricky muscle skills. But that doesn't explain why so many children produce this particular kind of drawing, nor why they seem so satisfied with them. In any case, this phenomenon makes it seem very unlikely that a child has a realistic, picturelike image in mind.
Now let's consider a different idea. We'll suppose that the child does not have anything like a picture in mind, but only some network of relationships that various features must satisfy. For example, a child's person-drawing feature-network might consist of the following features and relations:
To convert this description into an actual drawing, the child must employ some sort of drawing procedure. Here's one in which the process simply works its way down the feature list, like a little computer program:
When the child starts to draw, the first item on the list is large closed figure. Since there isn't any such thing yet, the child draws one: that's the head.  But then, when it comes to drawing the body feature, step 2 of the procedure finds that a large closed figure has already been drawn. Accordingly, nothing new is required, and the procedure simply advances to step 3. As a result, the child goes on to attach the arms and legs to the feature that has been assigned to both the body and the head.
An adult would never make such a mistake, since once some feature has been assigned to represent a head, that feature is thereafter regarded as used up or occupied and cannot represent anything else. But the child has less capacity or inclination for keeping track. Accordingly, since that large closed figure satisfies the description's requirements for both the head and the body — albeit at different moments of time — there is no cause for discontent. The little artist has satisfied all the conditions required by its description!
That body-head drawing seems very wrong to most adults, yet it seems to please many children. Does it really look like a person to those children? That seems like a simple question, but it is not — for we must remember that a child is not a single agent and that various other agencies inside a child's mind may not be satisfied at all. At the moment, those other agencies are not in control and have little effect. Yet if some creature came on the scene that really looked like that, most children would be terrified. It does not make much sense to speak of what a person really sees, because we have so many different agencies.
What happened in the intervening years to make the older children draw the body separately? This could come about without even making any change in the list of features and relations we used in the previous section. It would need only a small change in step 2 of our drawing procedure:
This ensures that every feature mentioned in the list will be represented only once in the drawing, even if two such features look alike. Of course, this requires some ability to count each feature only once, and never twice. How interesting that in order to make mature, realistic drawings, the child could exploit the same kind of ability it must acquire in order to count things properly!
To be sure, we could explain the child's progress in other ways. That new and more realistic picture could come from adding a neck to the feature list, for that would demand a separate body and head. It might suffice simply to impose an additional constraint or relationship: that the head be above the body. One might argue that the younger child never had a clear concept of a separate and distinct body feature in the first place; after all, there are many things that you can do with your arms and legs or with your head — but your body only gets in the way.
In any case, after mastering the art of making these body-head drawings, many children seem to progress rather slowly in the art of making personal portraits, and these types of childish drawings often persist for some years. I suspect that after children learn to make recognizable figures, they usually move on to face the problems of representing much more complicated scenes. As they do this, we should continue to appreciate how well children deal with the problems they set for themselves. They may not meet our own grown-up expectations, but they often solve their own versions of the problems we pose.
What will our portrait-drawing child try next? Some children keep working to improve their person pictures. But most of them go on to put their newfound skills to work at drawing more ambitious scenes in which two or more picture-people interact. This involves wonderful problems about how to depict social interactions and relationships — and these more ambitious projects lead the child away from being concerned with making the pictures of the individual more elaborate and realistic. When this happens, the parent may feel disappointed at what seems to be a lack of progress. But we should try to appreciate the changing character of our children's ambitions and recognize that their new problems may be even more challenging.
This doesn't mean that drawing learning stops. Even as those children cease to make their person pictures more elaborate, the speed at which they draw them keeps increasing, and with seemingly less effort. How and why does this happen? In everyday life, we take it for granted that practice makes perfect, and that repeating and rehearsing a skill will, somehow, automatically cause it to become faster and more dependable. But when you come to think of it, this really is quite curious. You might expect, instead, that the more you learned, the slower you would get — from having more knowledge from which to choose! How does practice speed things up?
Perhaps, when we practice skills we can already perform, we engage a special kind of learning, in the course of which the original performance process is replaced or bridged-across by new and simpler processes. The program to the left below shows the many steps our novice portrait drawer had to take in order to draw each childish body-face. The script to the right shows only those steps that actually produce the lines of the drawing; this script has only half as many steps.
The people we call experts seem to exercise their special skills with scarcely any thought at all — as though they were simply reading preassembled scripts. Perhaps when we practice to improve our skills, we're mainly building simpler scripts that don't engage so many agencies. This lets us do old things with much less thought and gives us more time to think of other things. The less the child has to think of where to put each arm and leg, the more time remains to represent what that picture-person is actually doing.
We can get more insight about children from another experiment of Piaget's. A child is shown a short block resting on a longer one and is asked to draw the scene. Next the child is asked to draw a sketch of what might happen if we pushed the upper block a little to the right. At first, the result is more or less what we'd expect.
But when we ask the child to do the same repeatedly, we see a strange result. The top block suddenly grows shorter as it meets the edge of the long block!
To understand what happened, just put yourself in the child's place. You've started to draw the upper edge of the short box, but how do you decide where to stop?
Younger children don't yet possess much ability to draw lines in good proportion. Instead, they tend to use procedures that locate each new feature in some recognizable relationship to other features already represented in the drawing — that is, to easily described places that have previously been depicted. Since there are no such features near the middle of the long block, the child will use the same method, whatever it is, for the first few drawings. But it is easy to describe the location of the end of the long block, and that's why this is where the younger children tend to stop, once they approach that neighborhood. Piaget called this the frontier effect — the tendency to place new features at locations that have easily described relationships to other, already represented features.
Why can't children simply copy what they see? We adults don't appreciate how complicated copying really is — because we can't recall what it was like before we learned to do it. To make a good copy, the child would have to draw each line to a scale and direction consistent with all the others. But these young children are scarcely able to trace the outline of an object with a finger; they certainly cannot mentally transport an entire figure shape from one location to another. So it is actually easier for the child to do what adults might consider more abstract : first to construct a mental description of the relations involved in the scene, and then to design a drawing -scheme to represent those relationships. It can require more skill to produce what we regard as a simple copy or imitation than to produce what we consider to be an abstract representation!
Sometimes when we watch a scene, the wholes we see add up exactly to the sum of their separate parts. But other times, we do not mind if certain things get counted twice. In the first figure below, we divide an arch into body and support with no concern that both parts have exactly the same boundaries. In the second figure, we seem to see two complete arches, despite the fact that there aren't enough legs to make two separate arches.
Sometimes it is vital to keep track, to count each thing exactly once. But in other situations, no harm will come from counting twice. It is efficient to use the same block twice when making viaducts for roads for cars. But if we tried to use the same five blocks to build two separate bridges, we'd end up short. Different kinds of goals require different styles of description. When we discussed the concept of More, we saw how each child must learn when to describe things in terms of appearance and when to think in terms of past experience. The double-arch problem also offers a choice of description styles. If you plan to build several separate things, you'd better keep count carefully or take the risk of running out of parts. But if you do that all the time, you'll miss your chance to make one object serve two purposes at once.
We could also formulate this as a choice between structural and functional descriptions. Suppose we tried to make a match between the structural elements of the double-arch and those of two separate block-arches. In one way to do that, we would first assign three blocks to each arch — and then verify that each arch consists of a top supported by two blocks that do not touch. Then, of course, we'll only find a single three-block arch. There isn't any second arch, since there are only two blocks left.
On the other hand, we could base our description of the double-arch scene on the more functional body-support style of description. According to that approach, we must focus first on the most essential parts. The most essential part of an arch is its top block — and we do indeed find two blocks that could serve as top blocks. Then we need only verify that each of them is supported by two blocks that do not touch — and this is indeed the case. In a function-oriented approach, it seems natural to count carefully the most essential elements, but merely to verify that the functions of the auxiliary elements will somehow be served. The functional type of description is easier to adapt to the purposes of higher-level agencies. This doesn't mean that functional descriptions are necessarily better. They can make it hard to keep track of real constraints; hence they have a certain tendency to lead toward overoptimistic, wishful thought.
What can we do when we can't solve a problem? We can try to find a new way to look at it, to describe it in different terms. Reformulation is the most powerful way to attempt to escape from what seems to be a hopeless situation. Thus, when we couldn't find anything common to all those different kinds of arches, we changed our way of looking at them. We moved from the world of rigid, geometric block descriptions to a less constrained domain of body-support descriptions — and there we found a way to make a uniframe for all of them: a span supported by a pair of legs. But think of all the other ways a person might describe an arch.
Aesthetic: A pleasing, shapely form. Dynamical: The top will fall if either leg is removed. Topological: The arch surrounds a hole in space. Geometrical: The three blocks form an inverted U shape. Architectural: The arch's top could be the base of something else.
Constructional: Place two blocks, then place another across their tops. Circumventional: Can be used as a detour, to go around an obstacle. Transportational: Can be used as a bridge, to go from one place to another.
Each of these involves a different realm of thought with its own style for describing things. And every different realm of thought can bring new kinds of skills to bear on a problem. We each learn various ways to reason about paths and obstacles; we each learn ways to deal with vertical support; with doors and windows; with boxes and bridges and tunnels; with stacks and rows and stairs and ramps.
To an outsider, it may seem that a creative inventor (or designer or thinker) must possess an endless source of novel ways to deal with things. Yet inside the inventor's mind, that all might stem from variations on far fewer themes. Indeed, in that inventor's view, those styles of thought may seem so clear (and those inventions all so similar) that the question turns the other way: Why can't outsiders understand how to think about these simple kinds of problems? In the long run, the most productive kinds of thought are not the methods with which we solve particular problems, but those that lead us to formulating useful new kinds of descriptions.
How do we reformulate? Each new technique presumably begins by exploiting methods already learned in other, older agencies. So new ideas often have roots in older ones, adapted for new purposes. In the next section, we'll see how that body-support idea has counterparts in virtually every realm of thought. Toward the end of this book, we'll speculate about how those various realms themselves evolve inside the mind.
We were able to uniframe many kinds of arches by dividing each into a Body and a Support. See how well that technique works on many other sorts of things.
What makes such simple cuts seem meaningful? It is because we can imagine purposes for each. In everyday life, there is a special significance to dividing a table into top and legs. This is because the tabletop serves our principal use for a table, as thing to put things on. The table's legs serve only secondary purposes: without those legs, the top would fall — but without its top, the table has no use at all. And it would make no sense to imagine dividing that table in half, vertically, to see it as two stuck-together, L-shaped parts.
This must be one reason why the body-support idea seems so universal. It is not merely a matter of physical support: the more profound idea is that of building a mental bridge between a thing and a purpose. This is why bridge-definitions are so useful: they help us connect structural descriptions to psychological goals. But the point is that it is not enough just to link together descriptions from two different worlds — top supported by legs and thing to put things on. It is not enough simply to know that tables keep things off the floor. To use that knowledge, we must also know how it is done: that things have to be put on the table, rather than, for example, between the table's legs.
This is where the body-support representation helps us to classify our knowledge. The body represents those parts of a structure that serve as the direct instrument for reaching the goals and the support represents all the other features that merely serve that instrument. Once we can classify the tabletop as the body of the table, we will tend to think only of using the tabletop for keeping things off the floor. Of course, we would gain even more power by understanding how those supports assist the body's goal; that is, by understanding that the table's legs are for keeping the tabletop itself away from the floor. A good way to understand that is to have a representation of what might happen if one of the table's legs failed to perform its function.
To understand how something works, it helps to know how it can fail.
How do we connect the things we have with the goals we want to achieve? The answer: We have many ways! Each use or purpose may suggest some corresponding way to split things up — and in each such view there will seem to be some most essential parts. These are the ones that, in such a view, appear to serve the goal directly; the rest will seem like secondary parts that only support the role of the main parts. We do this not only in the physical realm, but in many other realms as well.
Each of these dumbbell distinctions has its own style for distinguishing essential parts from supportive parts. And even in the world of physical things, we can apply these different mental views in different ways. For example, there are many ways to describe the act of standing on a table in order to be able to reach higher.
| Support: | Tables hold things away from the floor. |
| Function: | Tables are for supporting things. |
| Conclusion: | If you put something on a table, its height increases. |
| Cause-Effect: | I can reach higher because I start higher. |
| Means-Ends: | If I want to reach higher, I can stand on a table. |
Our systematic cross-realm translations are the roots of fruitful metaphors; they enable us to understand things we've never seen before. When something seems entirely new in one of our description-worlds, it may turn out that when translated to some other world it resembles something we already know.
Now, before you turn to the following page, try to solve this puzzle.
Most people find the nine-dot problem hard to solve because they assume that the dots form a square that bounds the working space. Indeed, the problem is insoluble unless the drawing can extend outside that area. Thus the problem is easier if one does not perceive those dots as forming a square. We often self-impose assumptions that make our problems more difficult, and we can escape from this only by reformulating those problems in ways that give us more room.
Really, there was never any square in the first place — that is, in the literal sense of a rectangle with equal sides. What makes us see so many different sorts of things as though they were squares?
Some of these squares have no corners, others have no edges, and some of them have neither corners nor edges! What makes us see them all as squares? Psychologists have long wondered how we recognize such similarities but often forgot to ask how we recognize the very simplest forms of squares in the first place. Which comes first in recognition, specific features or global shapes? It must depend upon one's state of mind. The way we perceive the world, from one moment to another, depends only in part on what comes from our eyes: the rest of what we think we see comes from inside our brain; we respond not only to visual features, but also to our remembrances of things we've seen before and to our expectations of what we ought to see.
It is tempting to assume that our visual processes work only in one direction, bringing information from the world into the mind:
But this does not explain how what we see is influenced by what we expect to see. Human vision must somehow combine the information that comes from the outer world with the structures in our memories. The situation must be more like this:
Once you set that nine-dot problem into a larger frame, you could solve it in a routine way, with only a little thought. What lets you reformulate such complex scenes so easily — once you've thought of doing it? It must be that your mind is constantly preparing ways to do such things by building up connections between different kinds of descriptions. Then, when you finally change your view to find another way to look at things, you can apply a lifetime of experience as easily as turning on a switch.
This takes us back to the question of when to try to be a Reductionist or a Novelist. How do you decide when to quit after investing a great deal of effort in doing something a certain way? It would be bad to discard all that work just before you might find the answer — but there's no way to be sure when that will happen. Should people always try to break their well established, self-made mental bonds and try to think in less constricted ways? Of course not. It will usually do more harm than good.
However, when you're really stuck, you may as well try wilder ways to find some new ideas. You might even consider using one of the systematic, therapylike disciplines that go under names like brainstorming, lateral thinking, meditation, and so forth. These can help, when people get badly stuck, by encouraging the search for new formulations. However, when you switch to unfamiliar views of things you may get new ideas, but you also put yourself in the situation of a novice; you become less able to judge which new ideas are likely to be compatible with any of your older skills.
 Remember the principle of exceptions: it may be rash to change yourself too much just to accommodate a single strange experience. To take every exception seriously is to risk the loss of general rules that previous experience has shown to work most frequently. You must also be particularly wary of methods you can always use:
Quit what you're doing. Find an easier problem. Take a rest. You'll feel better afterward. Simply wait. Eventually the situation will change. Start over again. Things may work out better the next time.
Such methods are too general; they're things that one can always do, but they do not apply especially well to any particular problem. Sometimes they can help us get unstuck, but they must be barred from usual thought — or at least be given low priority. It isn't any accident that the things that we can always do are just the ones we should rarely do.
To him that has, more shall be given; but from him that has not, the little that he has shall be taken away. —St. Matthew
Some ideas acquire undue influence. The prominence of the body-support idea is well-deserved; no other scheme compares to its ability to help us link things into causelike chains. But there are other, not so honorable ways for ideas to gather influence.
The Investment Principle: Our oldest ideas have unfair advantages over those that come later. The earlier we learn a skill, the more methods we can acquire for using it. Each new idea must then compete against the larger mass of skills the old ideas have accumulated.
This is why it's so much easier to do new things in older ways. Each new idea, however good in principle, seems awkward until we master it. So old ideas keep gaining strength, while new ones can rarely catch up. Furthermore, our oldest and best-developed skills will be the first to spread to other realms of thought where again they'll start out far enough ahead to keep any new ideas from taking root.
In the short run, you will usually do better by using an old idea than by starting out anew. If you can already play the piano well, it is easy to start playing the organ in the same way. The many superficial similarities will make it hard for you to tell which aspects of your old skills are unsuitable, and the easiest course is to keep applying your old technique, trying to patch each flaw until none show. In the long run, you'd probably do better by starting fresh with a new technique — and then borrowing what you can from your older skills. The trouble is that we're almost always immersed in the short run. So the principles both of investment and of exception make us reluctant to tamper with our well-established skills and uniframes lest we endanger all that we have built upon those old foundations. I don't mean to say there's anything wrong, in principle, with using what you are comfortable with and already know. But it is dangerous to support your old ideas merely by accumulating ways to sidestep their deficiencies. That only increases the power of your old ideas to overcome new ones and could lead your style of thought to base itself yet all the more, as time goes by, upon less and less.
Evolution illustrates how processes can become enslaved by the investment principle. Why do so many animals contain their brains inside their heads — as with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and bats? This arrangement was inherited long before our earliest aquatic ancestor first crawled upon the land three hundred million years ago. For many of those animals — woodpeckers, for example — another arrangement might serve at least as well. But once the pattern of centralizing so many functions in the head was established, it carried with it great networks of dependencies involving many aspects of anatomy. Because of this, any mutation that changed any part of that arrangement would disrupt many other parts and lead to dreadful handicaps, at least in the short run of evolution. And because evolution is so inherently short-sighted, it would not help if, over longer spans of time, such changes could lead to advantages. Perhaps the best example of this can be seen in the fact that virtually every detail of every plant and animal on earth is written in terms of a genetic code that has scarcely changed a single bit in a billion years. It does not seem to be a particularly efficient or reliable code, yet so many structures have been based on it that all living things are stuck with it! To change a single detail of that code would cause so many proteins to get tangled up that not a single cell could live.
As an example of reformulation, we'll represent the concept of a box in the form of a machine that has a goal. We can use this to understand the Hand-Change phenomenon. What makes a Block-Arch trap a person's arm so that there's no way to escape except to withdraw? One way to explain this is to imagine the arch as made of four potential obstacles — that is, if we include the floor.
An obstacle is an object that interferes with the goal of moving in a certain direction. To be trapped is to be unable to move in any acceptable direction. Why does the block-arch form a trap? The simplest explanation is that each of its four sides is a separate obstacle that keeps us from escaping in a certain direction. (For our present purposes, we'll regard moving the hand forward or backward as unacceptable.) Therefore we're trapped, since there are only four acceptable directions — up, down, left, or right — and each of them is separately blocked. Psychologically, however, there's something missing in that explanation: it doesn't quite describe our sense of being trapped. When you're caught inside a box, you feel as though something is trying to keep you there. The box seems more than just its separate sides; you don't feel trapped by any particular side. It seems more like a conspiracy in which each obstacle is made more effective because of how all the other obstacles work together to keep you from going around it. In the next section we'll assemble an agency that represents this active sense of frustration by showing how those obstacles cooperate to keep you in.
In order to represent this concept of trap or enclosure, we'll first need a way to represent the idea of a container. To simplify matters, instead of trying to deal with a genuine, six-sided, three-dimensional boxlike container, we'll consider only a two-dimensional, four-sided rectangle. This will let us continue to use our Block-Arch uniframe, together with that extra side to represent the floor.
Why focus so sharply on the concept of a container? Because without that concept, we could scarcely understand the structure of the spatial world. Indeed, every normal child spends a great deal of time learning about space-surrounding shapes — as physical implements for containing, protecting, or imprisoning objects. But the same idea is also important not only physically, but psychologically, as a mental implement for envisioning and understanding other, more complicated structures. This is because the idea of a set of all possible directions is one of the great, coherent, cross-realm correspondences that can be used in many different realms of thought.
When life walls us in, our intelligence cuts an opening, for, though there be no rememdy for an unrequited love, one can win release from suffering, even if only by drawing from the lessons it has to teach. The intelligence does not recognize in life any closed situations without an outlet. —Marcel proust
How do boxes keep things in? Geometry is a fine tool for understanding shapes, but alone, it can't explain the Hand-Change mystery. For that, you also have to know how moving works! Suppose you pushed a car through that Block-Arch. Your arm would be imprisoned until you pulled it out. How can you comprehend the cause of this? The diagram below depicts an agency that represents the several ways an arm can move inside a rectangle. The top-level agent Move has four subagents: Move-Left, Move-Right, Move-Up, and Move-Down. (As before, we'll ignore the possibility of moving in and out, in three dimensions.) If we connect each of these sub-agents to the corresponding side of our four-sided box frame, each agent will be able to test whether the arm can move in the corresponding direction (by seeing whether there is an obstacle there). Then, if every direction is blocked, the arm can't move at all — and that's what we mean by being trapped.
The ---o symbol indicates that each box-frame agent is connected to inhibit the corresponding subagent of Move. An obstacle to the left puts Move-Left into a can't-move state. If all four obstacles are present, then all four box-frame agents will be activated; this will inhibit all of Move's agents — which will leave Move itself in a can't-move state — and we'll know that the trap is complete.
However, if we saw a Topless-Arch, then the Move-Up agent would not be inhibited, and Move would not be paralyzed! This suggests an interesting way to find an escape from a Topless-Arch. First you imagine being trapped inside a box-frame — from which you know there's no escape. Then, since the top block is actually missing, when your vision system looks for actual obstacles, there will be no signal to inhibit the Move-Up agent. Accordingly, Move can activate that agent, and your arm will move upward automatically to escape!
This method has a paradoxical quality. It begins by assuming that escaping is impossible. Then this pessimistic mental act — imagining that one's arm is trapped — leads directly to finding a way out. We usually expect to solve our problems in more positive, goal-directed ways, by comparing what we have with what we wish — and then removing the differences. But here we've done the opposite. We compared our plight, not with what we want, but with a situation even worse — the least desirable antigoal. Yet even that can actually help, by showing how the present situation fails to match that hopeless state. Which strategy is best to use? Both depend on recognizing differences and on knowing which actions affect those differences. The optimistic strategy makes sense when one sees several ways to go — and merely has to choose the best. The pessimistic strategy should be reserved for when one sees no way at all, when things seem really desperate.
What's so special about moving left or right or up or down? At first one might suppose that these ideas work only for motions in a two- dimensional space. But we can also use this square-like frame for many other realms of thought, to represent how pairs of causes interact. What is an interaction, anyway? We say that causes interact if, when combined, they lead to effects that neither can cause separately. For example, by combining horizontal and vertical motions, we can move to places that can't be reached with either kind of motion by itself. We can represent the effects of such combinations by using a diagram with labels like those on a compass.
Many of our body joints can move in two independent directions at once — not the knee, but certainly the wrist, shoulder, hip, ankle, thumb, and eye. How do we learn to control such complicated joints? My hypothesis is that we do this by training little interaction-square agencies, which begin by learning something about each of the nine possible motion combinations. I suspect that we also base many of our nonphysical skills on interaction-square arrays because that is the simplest way to represent what happens when two causes interact. (There is even some evidence that many sections of the brain are composed of square arrays of smaller agencies. )
Consider that the Spatial agency in our Society-of-More is not really involved with space at all, but with interactions between agents like Tall and Thin. If you were told that one object A is both taller and wider than another object B, you could be sure that there is more of A. But if you were told that A is taller and thinner than B, you couldn't be sure which one is more. An interaction-square array provides a convenient way to represent all the possible combinations:
If square-arrays can represent how pairs of causes interact, could similar schemes be used with three or more causes? That might need too many directions to be practical. We'd need twenty-seven directions to represent three interacting causes this way, and eighty-one to represent four. Only rarely, it seems, do people deal with more than two causes at a time; instead, we either find ways to reformulate such situations or we accumulate disorderly societies of partially filled interaction-squares that cover only the most commonly encountered combinations.
We normally assume that consciousness is knowing what happens in our minds right at the present time. In the next few sections, I'll argue that consciousness does not concern the present, but the past: it has to do with how we think about the records of our recent thoughts. But how can thinking about thoughts be possible at all?
There's something queer about describing consciousness: whatever people mean to say, they just can't seem to make it clear. It's not like feeling confused or ignorant. Instead, we feel we know what's going on but can't describe it properly. How could anything seem so close, yet always keep beyond our reach?
There is a simple sense in which thinking about a thought is not so different from thinking about an ordinary thing. We know that certain agencies must learn to recognize — and even name — the feel of touching a hand or an ear. Similarly, there must be other agencies that learn to recognize events inside the brain — for example, the activities of the agencies that manage memories. And those, I claim, are the bases of the awarenesses we recognize as consciousness.
There is nothing peculiar about the idea of sensing events inside the brain. Agents are agents — and it is as easy for an agent to be wired to detect a brain-caused brain-event, as to detect a world-caused brain-event. Indeed, only a small minority of our agents are connected directly to sensors in the outer world, like those that send signals from the eye or skin; most of the agents in the brain detect events inside the brain. But here we're especially concerned with agents that are engaged in using and changing our most recent memories. These lie at the roots of consciousness.
Why, for example, do we become less conscious of some things when we become more conscious of others? Surely this is because some resource is approaching some limitation — and I'll argue that it is our limited capacity to keep good records of our recent thoughts. Why, for example, do thoughts so often seem to flow in serial streams? It is because whenever we run out of room, the records of our recent thoughts must then displace those of our older ones. And why are we so unaware of how we get our new ideas? Because whenever we solve hard problems, our short-term memories become so involved with doing that that they have neither time nor space for keeping detailed records of what they themselves have done.
What happens when we try to think about our most recent thoughts? We examine our recent memories. But these were already involved in what we were thinking about — and any self-inspecting probe is prone to change just what it's looking at. Then the system is likely to break down. It is hard enough to describe something with a stable shape; it is even harder to describe something that changes its shape before our eyes; and it is virtually impossible to speak of the shapes of things that change into something else each time we try to think of them. And that's what happens when we try to think about our present thoughts — since each such thought must change our mental state! Would any process not become confused that alters what it's looking at? In such a fix, how could one ever hope to be articulate?
What do we mean by words like sentience, consciousness, or self-awareness ? They all seem to refer to the sense of feeling one's mind at work — but beyond that, it is hard to say whether there are any differences in what they mean. For instance, suppose that you had just smiled, and someone asked if you had been conscious of this. It would scarcely matter how that question was posed:
Did you just smile? Do you realize that you just smiled? Do you remember smiling? Were you conscious of doing so? Were you aware of it?
Each of these questions really asks what you can say about your recent mental past. In order for you to reply truthfully, Yes, I know I smiled, your speaking-agencies must use some records about the recent activity of certain agents. But what about all the other activities involved in everything you say and do? If you were truly self-aware, wouldn't you know all those other things as well? There is a common myth that what we view as consciousness is measurelessly deep and powerful — yet actually, we scarcely know a thing about what happens in the great computers of our brains. How can we think, not knowing what it is to think? How can we get such good ideas, yet not be able to say what ideas are or how they're made?
Why is it so hard to talk about our present state of mind? We've already seen several reasons for this. one is that the time-delays between the different parts of a mind mean that the concept of a present state is not psychologically sound. Another reason is that each attempt to reflect upon our mental state will change that state, and this means that trying to know our state is like photographing something that is moving too fast: such pictures will always be blurred. In any case, we aren't much concerned in the first place with learning how to describe our mental states; instead, we're more engaged with practical things, like making plans and carrying them out.
How much genuine self-insight is possible for us? I'm sure our memory-machinery provides some useful clues, if only we could learn to interpret them. But it is unlikely that any part of the mind can ever obtain complete descriptions of what happens in the other parts, because, it seems, our memory-control systems have too little temporary memory even to represent their own activities in much detail.
In order for a mind to think, it has to juggle fragments of its mental states. Suppose you want to rearrange the furniture inside a room you know. Your attention keeps shifting, first to one corner, then to another, next to the center of the room, and then, perhaps, to how the light falls on some object on a shelf. Different ideas and images interrupt each other. At one moment it seems as though your entire mind were focused on one small detail; at another moment you might dwell on why you are thinking about that room in the first place; then you might find yourself comparing or contrasting two different rearrangements of that scene: If that couch were over here, there would be room for guests to chat — but no, that would block the path so that they wouldn't be able to enter.
How do our various agencies keep track of imaginary changes in scenes? Where do the different versions go when out of mind, and how do we get them back again? They must be stored as memories.
But what do we mean by that? Some readers may be surprised to learn that biologists still have no well-established theory of what happens in our brains when memories are formed. Psychologists, however, do agree that there must be at least two different mechanisms. We appear to have long-term memories, which can persist for days or years or all one's life. We also have short-term memories, which last only for seconds or minutes. In the next few sections we'll talk mostly about the uses of these transient traces of our recent thoughts. For example, whenever we get stuck in the course of solving a problem, we need to be able to backtrack, modify our strategy, and try again. To do this we need those short-term memories, if only not to repeat the same mistake.
How much do we remember? Sometimes we surprise ourselves by remembering things we didn't know we knew. Could this mean that we remember everything? Some older theories in psychology have supposed this to be true, and there are many legends of persons having fabulous abilities. For example, we often hear about people with photographic memories that enable them to quickly memorize all the fine details of a complicated picture or a page of text in a few seconds. So far as I can tell, all of these tales are unfounded myths, and only professional magicians or charlatans can produce such demonstrations.
In any case, I suspect we never really remember very much about a particular experience. Instead, our various agencies selectively decide, unconsciously, to transfer only certain states into their long-term memories — perhaps because they have been classified as useful, dangerous, unusual, or significant in other respects. It would be of little use for us simply to maintain vast stores of unclassified memories if, every time we needed one, we had to search through all of them. Nor would it be of any use for them all to flood at once into our agencies. Instead, each of us must develop fruitful and effective ways to organize our memories — but how that's done is inaccessible to consciousness. What barriers keep us from knowing such things? The next few sections sketch out some theories, both about how our memory-systems work and why we can't find this out directly by examining our own thoughts.
Ask anyone for memories from childhood, and everyone will readily produce a handful of stories like this:
My neighbor's father died when I was four. I remember sitting with my friend in front of their house, watching people come and go. It was strange. No one said anything.
It's hard to distinguish memories from memories of memories. Indeed, there's little evidence that any of our adult memories really go way back to infancy; what seem like early memories may be nothing more than reconstructions of our older thoughts. For one thing, recollections from our first five years seem strangely isolated; if we ask what happened earlier that day, the answer almost always is, I can't remember that. Furthermore, many of those early memories involve incidents so significant that they probably occupied the child's mind repeatedly over a period of years. Most suspicious of all is the fact that such recollections are frequently described as seen through other, older eyes — with the narrator portrayed inside the scene, right near the center of the stage. Since we never actually see ourselves, these must be reconstructed memories, rehearsed and reformulated since infancy.
I suspect that this amnesia of infancy is no mere effect of decay over time but an inevitable result of growing out of infancy. A memory is not a separate entity, apart from how it works upon the mind. To remember an early experience, you must be able not only to retrieve some old records, but to reconstruct how your earlier mind reacted to them — and to do that, you would have to become an infant again. To outgrow infancy, you have to sacrifice your memories because they're written in an ancient script that your later selves can no longer read.
We reconstruct our recent memories as well, since they portray less what we saw than what we recognized. From every moment to the next, your mental state is shaped not only by signals from the outer world, but by agents activated by the memories these evoke. For example, when you see a chair, what makes it appear to you to be a chair — rather than an assortment of sticks and boards? It must evoke some memories. Only a part of your impression comes from agents activated directly by your vision; most of what your higher-level agencies experience comes from the memories those vision-agents activate. Usually, we have no conscious sense of this happening, and we never use words like memory or remembering when the process works quickly and quietly; instead, we speak of seeing or recognizing or knowing. This is because such processes leave too few traces for the rest of the mind to contemplate; accordingly, such processes are unconscious, because consciousness requires short-term memory. It is only when a recognition involves substantial time and effort that we speak of remembering.
Then what do we mean by memory ? Our brains use many different ways to store the traces of our pasts. No single word can describe so much, unless it is used only in a general, informal sense.
Memories are processes that make some of our agents act in much the same ways they did at various times in the past.
Everyone will readily allow that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation, or anticipates it by his imagination. These faculties may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses; but they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment…The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation. —Marcel proust
We like to think of memories as though they could restore to us things we've known in the past. But memories can't really bring things back; they only reproduce some fragments of our former states of mind, when various sights, sounds, touches, smells, and tastes affected us.
Then what makes some recollections seem so real? The secret is that real-time experience is just as indirect! The closest we can come to apprehending the world, in any case, is through the descriptions our agents make. In fact, if we inquired instead about why real things seem real, we would see that this depends, as well, on memories of things we've already known.
For instance, when you see a telephone, you have a sense not only of the aspects you can see — its color, texture, size, and shape — but also of how it feels to hold the instrument to your ear. You also seem to know at once what telephones are for: that you speak into here and listen there; that when it rings you answer it; that when you want to call, you dial it. You have a sense of what it weighs, of whether it is soft or hard, of what its other side is like — although you haven't even touched it yet. These apprehensions come from memories.
The Immanence Illusion: Whenever you can answer a question without a noticeable delay, it seems as though that answer were already active in your mind.
This is part of why we feel that what we see is present in the here and now. But it isn't really true that whenever a real object appears before our eyes, its full description is instantly available. Our sense of momentary mental time is flawed; our vision-agencies begin arousing memories before their own work is fully done. For example, when you see a horse, a preliminary recognition of its general shape may lead some vision-agents to start evoking memories about horses before the other vision-agents have discerned its head or tail. Perceptions can evoke our memories so quickly that we can't distinguish what we've seen from what we've been led to recollect.
This explains some of the subjective difference between seeing and remembering. If you first imagined a black telephone, you probably would not find it hard to reimagine it as red. But when you see a black telephone and then attempt to think of it as red, your vision-systems swiftly change it back! So the experience of seeing things has a relatively rigid character, in contrast to the experience of imagining things. Every change that the rest of your mind tries to impose upon your vision-agencies is resisted and usually reversed. Perhaps it is this descriptive rigidity that we identify with vividness or objectivity. I do not mean to suggest that this is usually an illusion, because it often truly reflects the persistency and permanence of actual physical objects. Sometimes, though, our sense of objectivity can get reversed — as when an attitude or memory becomes more stable and persistent than what it represents. For example, our attitudes toward things we love or loathe are often much less changeable than those things themselves — particularly in the case of other people's personalities. In instances like these, our private memories can be more rigid than reality.
We often talk of “memory” as though it were a single definite thing. But everyone has many kinds of memories. Some things we know seem totally detached from time, like such facts as that twelve inches make a foot or that a bull has dangerous horns. Other things we know seem linked to definite spans of time or space, like memories of places where we've lived. Still other recollections seem like souvenirs of episodes we can reexperience: Once, when visiting my grand- parents, I climbed an old apple tree.
A brain has no single, common memory system. Instead, each part of the brain has several types of memory-agencies that work in somewhat different ways, to suit particular purposes.
Why do we have so many kinds of memory? If memories are records of our mental states of earlier times, how are those records stored and kept? A popular image of memories is that they are like objects we store away in various places in the brain. But then what are those places like? How do memories get into them and come out again? And what takes place inside of the vaults in which they're stored? Are memory banks like freezer chests where time stands still, or do their contents interact? How long can our old memories remain; do some of them grow old and die, do they get weak and fade away or just get lost and never found?
We have the impression that even our long-term memories become harder to recall as time goes on, and that might lead us to suppose that they have some inherent tendency to fade away. But even that is uncertain; it could simply be because so many other memories begin to interfere with them. Most likely, some types of memory mechanisms retain the records of sensations only for seconds; we use others to adopt habits, goals, and styles that we hold only for days or weeks; and we make personal attachments that endure through many months or years. Yet suddenly, from time to time, we'll modify some memories that seemed, till then, quite permanent.
More evidence that there are many kinds of memory has come from accidental injuries to brains. One injury may cause the loss of abilities to deal with names; another injury can make you lose some capacity to recognize faces or to remember musical tunes; still other kinds of injuries can leave unchanged what you have learned in earlier times but keep you from learning anything more in some particular domain. There is evidence that long-term memories can never form at all unless their short-term antecedents are permitted to persist for certain intervals; this process can also be blocked by various drugs and injuries, and this is why some people can never recollect what happened in the minutes before a brain concussion.
Finally, it appears that there are strong limitations on how rapidly we can construct our long-term memories. Despite all the legends about prodigies, there seems to be no evidence from any well-designed experiments that any human being can continue to construct long-term memories, over any substantial interval of time, more than two or three times faster than the average person.
Let's return to moving mental furniture. What would we need to imagine moving things around a room? First we'd need some way to represent how objects are arranged in space. In our Block-Arch scenario, the scene was represented in terms of the shapes of the objects and the relations between them. In the case of a room scene, you might also relate each object to the walls and corners of the room; you might notice that the couch is about midway between a table and a chair, and that all three are lined up near a certain wall.
Once we have a method for representing rooms, we also need techniques for manipulating these representations. How could we envision the result of exchanging that couch and chair? Let's oversimplify, and suppose that this can he done simply by exchanging the states of two agencies — an agency A, which represents the couch, and another agency B, which represents the chair. To exchange these states, let's assume that both agencies have access to two short-term memory-units, called M-1 and M-2, which can record the states of agencies. Then we can exchange the states of A and B, first by storing away the states A and B, and then by restoring them in reverse order. In other words, we could use the following simple four-step script :
1. Store the state of A in M-1. 2. Store the state of B in M-2. 3. Use M-2 to determine the state of A. 4. Use M-1 to determine the state of B.
A memory-control script like this can work only if we have memory-units that are small enough to pick out couch-sized portions of the larger scene. M-1 and M-2 would not do the job if they could store only descriptions of entire rooms. In other words, we have to be able to connect our short-term memories only to appropriate aspects of our current problems. Learning such abilities is not simple, and perhaps it is a skill some people never really master. What if we wanted to rearrange three or more objects? As a matter of fact, it is possible to produce any rearrangement whatsoever, using only operations that exchange two objects at a time! When you approach an unfamiliar kind of problem, it's best to start by making only one or two changes at a time. Then, in the course of becoming an expert, you discover schemes that make several useful changes in memory at once.
Our pair-exchanging script needs more machinery. Because each memory-unit must wait until the previous step is finished, the timing of each script step may have to depend on various condition sensors. Shortly we'll see that even this is not enough to solve hard problems: our memory-control processes also need ways to interrupt themselves while they call on other agencies or memories for help. Indeed, the problems we must solve when managing our memories are surprisingly like those we face when dealing with things in the outside world.
What controls the working of the mind from one moment to the next? How do we keep our place when doing complicated jobs, so that when interrupted from outside — or by another thought from inside — we can get back to where we were, instead of having to start all over again? How do we keep in mind which things we've tried and what we've learned along the way, so that we don't go round and round in loops?
No one yet knows how memories control themselves inside our brain; perhaps each major agency has somewhat different processes, each suited to the special kinds of jobs it does. The diagram below suggests some of the sorts of memory-machinery we'd expect to find inside a typical large agency.
We'll assume that every substantial agency has several micromemory-units, each of which is a sort of temporary K-line that can quickly store or restore the state of many of the agents in that agency. Each agency also has several short-term memory-units, which can, in turn, store or restore the states of the micromemories themselves. When any of these temporary memory-units are reused, the information that was stored in them is erased — unless it has somehow been transferred into more permanent or long-term memory-systems. There is good evidence that, in human brains, the processes that transfer information into long-term memory are very slow, requiring time intervals that range from minutes to hours. Accordingly, most temporary memories are permanently lost.
A growing child acquires many ways to control all these mechanisms. Accordingly, our diagram includes the flow of information among the other agencies. Since this memory-controlling agency must also learn and remember, our diagram includes a memory-system for it as well.
Imagine that you plan to take a trip. You start to think of how you'll pack your traveling case and start some spatial problem-solving agency — call it Packer — to see how to fit the larger items in. Then you interrupt yourself to think about your smaller things, perhaps of how to pack your jewelry in a smaller box. Now Packer has to reapply itself to a new and different box-packing problem. The problem of keeping track of what is happening is hard enough when one agency calls on another one for help. Until the other's job is done, the first agency has to keep some temporary record of what it was doing. In Packer's case the problem is even worse because it interrupts itself to pack the smaller box. And here is the important point: when that second packing job is done and we return to the first, we mustn't go all the way back to the very beginning, or else we would be caught in a circular loop. Instead, we must return to the point where we were when we interrupted ourselves — which means the system needs some memory to keep track of what it was doing before. This is exactly the same problem we mentioned long ago when Find and See had several different jobs to do at the same time.
Why do we so often get confused when we're interrupted? Because then we have to keep our place in several processes at once. To keep things straight, our memory-control machinery needs intricate skills. Yet psychologically, we're unaware that ordinary thinking is so complicated. If someone asked, What was your mind just doing? you might say something like this:
I was thinking about packing that suitcase, and started to wonder if the umbrella might fit. I remembered that on an earlier trip, I managed to fit my camera tripod in the same case, and I tried to compare the umbrella and the tripod in my mind, to see which one was longer.
Now, this might be a true account of some of the things you were thinking about. But it says little of how the mental work was actually done. To understand how thinking works, we'd really need descriptions of the processes themselves:
A few moments ago, I activated two micromemory-units inside Packer, one of my space-arranging agencies, while also activating one of Packer's memory-control scripts. This script proceeded to use the information inside those two micromemory-units as cues to fetch certain partial states from the long-term memory-system attached to Packer. Next, the script controlling Packer's memory-system requested a certain higher-level planning-agency to record most of Packer's present state. Then it interchanged the contents of the two active micromemory units, and then used other cues to fetch another, second script from long-term memory — and thus erased the present copy of itself. The last step of that second script caused yet another micromemory-unit to restore Packer to its previous state, so that the original script could continue on its interrupted course. Then . . .
But no one ever says such things. The processes are too many levels away from those we use to work the short-term memories involved with language and consciousness. We couldn't think so if we wanted to — without knowing more about the anatomy of our memory-
machinery. Even if we had ways to represent those processes at higher levels, our memory-controls would probably be overloaded by attempting, both at the same time, to solve a difficult problem and to remember everything that was done while solving it.
Whenever we solve complicated problems, we get into situations in which our agencies must keep account of many processes at once. In computer programs, the many subjobs often seem to pile up like the blocks of a tower. Indeed, computer programmers often use the word stack to describe such situations. But I doubt that untrained human minds use anything so methodical; in fact, we simply aren't very good at dealing with the kinds of situations that need such memory-stacks. This could be why we get confused when hearing sentences like this:
This is the malt that the rat that the cat that the dog worried killed ate.
The very same words can be rearranged to make an equivalent sentence anyone can understand:
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt.
The first sentence is hard to understand because so many verb processes interrupt one another that when the end of the sentence comes, three similar processes are still active — but they have lost track of what roles should be assigned to all the remaining nouns, namely, the rat, cat, and malt. Why do visual processes so rarely encounter similar difficulties? One reason is that our visual-systems can support more simultaneously operating processes than our language-systems can, and this reduces the need for any process to interrupt another one. A second reason is that the vision-agencies can choose for themselves the sequence in which they attend to details, whereas language-agencies are controlled by the person who is speaking.
It takes each person many years to learn to use those memory- systems well. Younger children certainly cannot keep track as well as adults. It's generally of little use to ask a pair of two-year-olds to play together or to take turns at using a toy. We consider them to be too self-centered and impatient for that. Surely much of their undisciplined impulsiveness comes from desires that are less regulated than our own. But that impatience could also stem from insecurity about memory: the child may fear that what it wants will slip from mind while other thoughts are entertained. In other words, the child who is asked to take turns might fear that by the time its turn arrives, it may not want the object anymore.
When people ask, Could a machine ever be conscious? I'm often tempted to ask back, Could a person ever be conscious? I mean this as a serious reply, because we seem so ill-equipped to understand ourselves. Long before we became concerned with understanding how we work, our evolution had already constrained the architecture of our brains. However, we can design our new machines as we wish, and provide them with better ways to keep and examine records of their own activities — and this means that machines are potentially capable of far more consciousness than we are. To be sure, simply providing machines with such information would not automatically enable them to use it to promote their own development, and until we can design more sensible machines, such knowledge might only help them find more ways to fail: the easier to change themselves, the easier to wreck themselves — until they learn to train themselves. Fortunately, we can leave this problem to the designers of the future, who surely would not build such things unless they found good reasons to.
Let's consider one last time how a mind could juggle nonexistent furniture inside an imaginary room. To compare different arrangements, we must somehow maintain at least two different descriptions in the mind at once. Can we store them in different agencies, both active at the same time? That would mean splitting our space-arranging-agency into two different smaller portions, each working on one of those descriptions. On the surface, there's nothing clearly wrong with that. However, if those smaller agencies became involved with similar jobs, then they, in turn, would also have to split in two. And then we'd have to do each of those jobs with but one-quarter of a mind. If we had to divide agencies into smaller and smaller fragments, each job would end up with no mind at all!
At first this might seem to be an unusual situation. But it really is very common. The best way to solve a hard problem is to break it into several simpler ones, and break those into even simpler ones. Then we face the same issue of mental fragmentation. Happily, there is another way. We can work on the various parts of a problem in serial order, one after another, using the same agency over and over again. Of course, that takes more time. But it has one absolutely fundamental advantage: each agency can apply its full power to every subproblem!
The Recursion Principle: When a problem splits into smaller parts, then unless one can apply the mind's full power to each subjob, one's intellect will get dispersed and leave less cleverness for each new task.
Indeed, our minds don't usually shatter into helpless fragments when problems split into parts. We can imagine how to pack a jewelry box without forgetting where it will fit into a suitcase. This suggests that we can apply our full space-arranging resources to each problem in turn. But how, then, do we get back to the first problem, after we've thought about the other ones, without having to start all over again? To common sense the answer seems clear: we simply remember where we were. But this means that we must have some way to store,
and later re-create, the states of interrupted agencies. Behind the scenes, we need machinery to keep track of all the incomplete accomplishments, to remember what was learned along the way, to compare different results, and to measure progress in order to decide what to do next. All this must go on in accord with larger, sometimes changing plans.
The need to recall our recent states is why our short-term memories are short-term memories! In order to do their complex jobs so quickly and effectively, each micromemory-device must be a substantial system of machinery, with many intricate and specialized connections. If so, our brains cannot afford to make too many duplicate copies of that machinery, so we must reuse what we have for different jobs. Each time we reuse a micromemory-device, the information stored inside must be erased — or moved to another, less costly place. But that would also take some time and interrupt the flow of thought. Our short-term memories must work too fast to have any time for consciousness.
Each emotion has its own world view
Love includes and merges and nurtures
Joy is light and dances even with the eyes
Grief heavy, hopeless, and the lungs empty, as is the heart
and Hate wants to destroy, to kill,
that is its very nature
and almost involuntarily, matter of factly,
another part of me says
“es ist das hier ja nicht unbekannt.” —Manfred Clynes
Why do so many people think emotion is harder to explain than intellect? They're always saying things like this:
I understand, in principle, how a computer might solve problems by reasoning. But I can't imagine how a computer could have emotions, or comprehend them. That doesn't seem at all the sort of thing machines could ever do.
We often think of anger as nonrational. But in our Challenger scenario, the way that Work employs Anger to subdue Sleep seems no less rational than using a stick to reach for something beyond one's grasp. Anger is merely an implement that Work can use to solve one of its problems. The only complication is that Work cannot arouse Anger directly; however, it discovers a way to do this indirectly, by turning on the fantasy of Professor Challenger. No matter that this leads to states of mind that people call emotional. To Work it's merely one more way to do what it's assigned to do. We're always using images and fantasies in ordinary thought. We use imagination to solve a geometry problem, plan a walk to some familiar place, or choose what to eat for dinner: in each, we must envision things that aren't actually there. The use of fantasies, emotional or not, is indispensable for every complicated problem-solving process. We always have to deal with nonexistent scenes, because only when a mind can change the ways things appear to be can it really start to think of how to change the ways things are.
In any case, our culture wrongly teaches us that thoughts and feelings lie in almost separate worlds. In fact, they're always intertwined. In the next few sections we'll propose to regard emotions not as separate from thoughts in general, but as varieties or types of thoughts, each based on a different brain-machine that specializes in some particular domain of thought. In infancy, these protospecialists have little to do with one another, but later they grow together as they learn to exploit one another, albeit without understanding one another, the way Work exploits Anger to stop Sleep.
Another reason we consider emotion to be more mysterious and powerful than reason is that we wrongly credit it with many things that reason does. We're all so insensitive to the complexity of ordinary thinking that we take the marvels of our common sense for granted. Then, whenever anyone does something outstanding, instead of trying to understand the process of thought that did the real work, we attribute that virtue to whichever superficial emotional signs we can easily discern, like motivation, passion, inspiration, or sensibility.
In any case, no matter how neutral and rational a goal may seem, it will eventually conflict with other goals if it persists for long enough. No long-term project can be carried out without some defense against competing interests, and this is likely to produce what we call emotional reactions to the conflicts that come about among our most insistent goals. The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions. I suspect that once we give machines the ability to alter their own abilities we'll have to provide them with all sorts of complex checks and balances. It is probably no accident that the term
machinelike has come to have two opposite connotations. One means completely unconcerned, unfeeling, and emotionless, devoid of any interest. The other means being implacably committed to some single cause. Thus each suggests not only inhumanity, but also some stupidity. Too much commitment leads to doing only one single thing; too little concern produces aimless wandering.
In ancient times it was believed that the newborn mind started out just like a full-grown mind, except for not yet being filled with ideas.  Today, there are many different views. Some modern theories see a baby's mind as starting with a single Self whose problem is to learn to distinguish itself from the rest of the world. Others see the infant's mind as a place containing a horde of mind-fragments, mixed together in a disconnected and incoherent confusion in which each must learn to interact and cooperate with the others so that they can grow together to form a more coherent whole. Yet another image sees the child's mind as growing through a series of layerlike construction stages in which new levels of machinery are based and built upon the older ones.
How do our minds form? Is every person born containing a hidden, built-in intellect just waiting to reveal itself? Or must minds grow in little steps from emptiness? The theories of the next few sections will combine ingredients from both these conceptions. We'll start by envisioning a simple brain composed of separate proto-specialists, each concerned with some important requirement, goal, or instinct, like food, drink, shelter, comfort, or defense. But there are reasons why those systems must be merged. On one side, we need administrative agencies to resolve conflicts between the separate specialists. On the other side, each specialist must be able to exploit whatever knowledge the others gain.
For a relatively simple animal, a loose-knit league of nearly separate agencies with built-in goals might suffice for surviving in a suitable environment. But human minds don't merely learn new ways to reach old goals; we can also learn new kinds of goals. This enables us to live within a broader range of possible environments, but that versatility comes with its own dangers. If we could learn new goals without constraint, we'd soon fall prey to accidents — both in the world and inside our own minds. At the simplest levels, we have to be protected against such accidents as learning not to breathe. On higher levels, we need protection against acquiring lethal goals like learning to suppress our other goals entirely — the way that certain saints and mystics do. What sorts of built-in self-constraints could guide a mind toward goals that will not cause it to destroy itself?
No possible inheritance of built-in genes can tell us what is good for us — because, unlike all other animals, we humans make for ourselves most of the problems we face. Accordingly, each human individual must learn new goals from what we call the traditions and heritages of our peers and predecessors. Consequently our genes must build some sort of general-purpose machinery through which individuals can acquire and transmit goals and values from one generation to another. How could brain-machines transfer things like values and goals? The next few sections suggest that this is done by exploiting the kinds of personal relationships we call emotional, such as fear and affection, attachment and dependency, or hate and love.
Suppose you had to build an artificial animal. First you'd make a list of everything you want your animal to do. Then you'd ask your engineers to find a way to meet each need.
This diagram depicts a separate agency for each of several basic needs. Let's call them proto-specialists. Each has a separate mini-mind to do its job and is equipped with special sensors and effectors designed to suit its specific needs. For example, the proto-specialist for Thirst might have a set of parts like these:
It would not usually be practical to make an animal that way. With all those separate specialists, we'd end up with a dozen different sets of heads and hands and feet. Not only would it cost too much to carry and feed all those organs; they'd also get in one another's way! Despite that inconvenience, there actually do exist some animals that work this way and thus can do many things at once. Genetically, the swarms of social ants and bees are really multibodied individuals whose different organs move around freely. But most animals economize by having all their proto-specialists share common sets of organs for their interactions with the outer world.
Another kind of economy comes from allowing the proto-specialists to share what they learn. Whether you seek warmth, safety, nutrition, or companionship — eventually you'll have to be able to recognize and act in order to acquire the objects you need. So even though their initial goals are entirely different, all those different proto-specialists will end up needing to solve the same sorts of subproblems — such as finding ways around obstacles and deciding how to conserve limited resources. Whenever we try to solve problems of increasing complexity, whatever particular techniques we already know become correspondingly less adequate, and it becomes more important to be able to acquire new kinds of knowledge and skills. In the end, most of the mechanisms we need for any highly ambitious goal can be shared with most of our other goals.
When a dog runs, it moves its legs. When a sea urchin runs, it is moved by its legs. — JAKOB VON UEXKLL
An ordinary single-bodied animal can only move in one direction at a time, and this tends to constrain it to work toward only one goal at a time. For example, when such an animal needs water urgently, its specialist for thirst takes control; however, if cold is paramount, finding warmth takes precedence. But if several urgent needs occur at once, there must be a way to select one of them. One scheme for this might use some sort of central marketplace, in which the urgencies of different goals compete and the highest bidder takes control. However, that strategy is prone to fall into a funny, fatal indecisiveness. To see the problem, imagine that our animal is both very hungry and very thirsty.
Suppose that our animal's hunger is, at first, just slightly more urgent than its thirst. So it sets out on a trek toward the North Plain, where food is usually found. When it arrives and takes
a bite of food, its thirst instantly takes precedence over its need for food!
Now that thirst has top priority, our animal sets out on the long journey toward South Lake. But once it arrives and takes one satisfying sip, the balance instantly tips back to food. Our animal is doomed to journey back and forth, getting hungrier and thirstier. Each action only equalizes ever-growing urgencies.
This would be no problem at a dinner table, where food and drink are both within easy reach. But under natural conditions, no animal could survive the waste of energy, when every minor fluctuation caused a major change in strategy. One way to manage this would be to use that marketplace infrequently — but that would make our animal less capable of dealing with emergencies. Another way is to use an arrangement called cross-exclusion, which appears in many portions of the brain. In such a system, each member of a group of agents is wired to send inhibitory signals to all the other agents of that group. This makes them competitors. When any agent of such a group is aroused, its signals tend to inhibit the others. This leads to an avalanche effect — as each competitor grows weaker, its ability to inhibit its challengers also weakens. The result is that even if the initial difference between competitors is small, the most active agent will quickly lock out all the others.
Cross-exclusion arrangements could provide a basis for the principle of noncompromise in regions of the brain where competitive mental agents lie close together. Cross-exclusion groups can also be used to construct short-term memory-units. Whenever we force one agent of such a group into activity, even for a moment, it will remain active (and the others will remain suppressed) until the situation is changed by some other strong external influence. Weaker external signals will have scarcely any effect at all because of resistance from within. Why call this a short-term memory if it can persist indefinitely? Because when it does get changed, no trace will remain of its previous state.
Few of the schemes we've discussed would actually work if they were built exactly as they were described. Most of them would soon break down because virtually all their agents would become engaged into unconstrained activity. Suppose each typical agent tends to arouse several others. Then each of those would turn on several more — and each of those would turn on yet others; the activity would spread faster than a forest fire. But all that activity would accomplish nothing, since all those agents would interfere with each other and none of them could gain control of the resources they need. Indeed, this is more or less what happens in an attack of epilepsy.
Similar problems arise in every biological system. Each simple principle or mechanism must be controlled to operate within some limited range. Even little groups of genes embody schemes to regulate the quantities of proteins they cause to be manufactured inside every cell. We find the same pattern repeated on every scale. Every biological tissue, organ, and system is regulated by several kinds of control mechanisms, and wherever these fail we find disease. What normally protects our brains from such avalanches of activity? The cross- exclusion scheme is probably the most usual way to regulate the levels of activities within our agencies. But there are also several other frequently encountered schemes to prevent explosions.
Conservation: Force all activities to depend upon some substance or other kind of quantity of which only a certain amount is available. For example, we controlled our Snarc machine by setting a limit on the total electric current available to all the agents; this permitted only a few of them to be active at any particular moment. Negative Feedback: Supply a summary device that estimates the total activity in the agency and then broadcasts to that agency an inhibitory signal whose strength is in proportion to that total. This will tend to damp down incipient avalanches.
Censors and Suppressors: The conservation and feedback schemes tend to be indiscriminate. Later we'll discuss methods that are more sensitive and versatile in learning to recognize — and then to avoid — specific patterns of activity that have led to trouble in the past.
These methods are simple enough to be applied inside small societies, but they are not versatile enough to solve all the management difficulties that can arise in the more complex societies we need for learning to solve harder problems. Fortunately, systems built upon larger scales may be able to apply their own enhanced abilities to managing themselves — by formulating and solving their own self-regulation problems. In the next few sections we'll see how such capacities could grow in the course of several stages of development. Not all of this need happen independently inside each separate child's mind, because that child's family and cultural community can develop self-regulation schemes of great complexity. All human communities seem to work out policies for how their members ought to think, in forms that are thought of as common sense or as law, religion, or philosophy.
Imagine that a thirsty child has learned to reach for a nearby cup. What keeps that child, afterward, from reaching for a cup in every other circumstance — say, when it is lonely or when it is cold? How do we keep separate what we learn for satisfying different goals? One way is to maintain a separate memory bank for every distinct goal.
To make this work, we must restrict each specialist to learn only when its own goal is active. We can accomplish that by building them into a cross-exclusion system so that, for example, Hunger's memories can be formed only when Hunger is active. Such a system will never get confused about which memories to use. When it is hungry it will do only what it learned to do at previous times when it was hungry; it won't eat when it is thirsty or drink when it is hungry. But it would be too extravagant to have to keep completely different memories for every goal — since, as we said, most real-world goals engage the same kinds of knowledge about the world. Wouldn't it be better if all those specialists could share a common, general-purpose memory?
This would lead to problems, too. Whenever any specialist tried to rearrange some memories to its own advantage, it might damage structures upon which the others have come to depend. There would be too many unpredictable interactions. How could specialists cooperate and share what they have learned? If they were like people, they could communicate, negotiate, and organize. But because each separate specialist is much too small and specialized to understand how the others work, the best each can do is learn to exploit what the others can do, without understanding how they do it.
How could any specialist cooperate when it doesn't understand how the others work? We manage to do our worldly work despite that same predicament; we deal with people and machines without knowing how their insides work. It's just the same inside the head; each part of the mind exploits the rest, not knowing how the other parts work but only what they seem to do.
Suppose Thirst knows that water can be found in cups — but does not know how to find or reach for a cup; these are things only Find and Get can do. Then Thirst must have some way to exploit the abilities of those other agents. Builder, too, has a similar problem because most of its subagents cannot communicate directly with one another. It would be easy for Thirst or Builder simply to turn on other agents like Find and Get. But how will those subordinates know what to find or get? Must Thirst transmit to Find a picture of a cup? Must Builder send a picture of a brick? The trouble is that neither Builder nor Thirst is the sort of agent to contain the kind of knowledge required by Find — namely, the visual appearances of things. That kind of knowledge lies inside the memory-machinery of See. However, Thirst can achieve its drinking goal by activating two connections: one to cause See to hallucinate a cup and another connection to activate Find. Find itself can activate Get later. This should suffice for Thirst to locate and obtain a cup — if there is one in sight.
This scheme could be unreliable. If See became concerned with another object at that moment, Get would acquire the wrong object. Infants often disappoint themselves this way. Still, this scheme has the kind of simplicity one needs when starting to build any larger skill:
one needs a process that sometimes works before one can proceed to improve it.
This is merely a sketch of how to build an automatic getting machine. We'll return to this idea much later, when we discuss language, because what Thirst and Builder have to do resembles what people do when using words. When you say to another person, Please pass the cup, you don't emit a picture of a cup but merely send a signal that exploits the other person's memory.
Achieving a goal by exploiting the abilities of other agencies might seem a shabby substitute for knowing how to do the work oneself. Yet this is the very source of the power of societies. No higher-level agency could ever achieve a complex goal if it had to be concerned with every small detail of what each nerve and muscle does. Unless most of its work were done by other agencies, no part of a society could do anything significant.
We've just seen how one agency could exploit another one by focusing its attention on some object in the outer world. Thus Thirst can make Get reach for a cup — provided there's a cup in view. But what about that fantasy about Professor Challenger, in which there was no real villain on the scene, but just a memory? Apparently one agency can activate another merely by imagining a stimulus! One way to do this would be for Anger to somehow construct an artificial picture that other agencies like See could see. If this were done with enough detail, the other agents couldn't tell that the image wasn't genuine. However, to construct the sorts of images we see on television screens, we'd have to activate a million different sensory nerves, which would require a huge amount of machinery. Besides, we could do more with less: A fantasy need not reproduce the fine details of an actual scene. It need only reproduce that scene's effect on other agencies.
Fantasies usually depict occurrences we've never seen. They need no detailed, realistic images — since the higher levels of the mind don't really see things anyway! Instead, they deal with summaries of signals that come from sensory experience and are condensed at several levels along the way. In the fantasy of Professor Challenger, there was no need to see any of the actual features of Challenger himself; it was enough to reproduce some sense of how his presence once affected us.
What kind of process could reproduce the effect of an imaginary presence? Although scientists don't yet know the fine details of how our vision-systems work, we can assume that they involve a number of levels, perhaps like this:
First, rays of light excite sensors in our retinas. Then, other agents detect boundaries and textures. Then, yet other agents describe regions, shapes, and forms. Then, some memory-frames recognize familiar objects. Next, we recognize structural relationships among those objects. Finally, we relate these structures to functions and goals.
Accordingly, it would be possible to produce illusions by operating at any of these levels. Most difficult of all would be to construct a picture-image by arousing, from inside the brain, the million lowest-level sensor-agents involved in real-world vision. Perhaps the simplest way of all would be to force just the highest-level vision-agents into whichever states would result from seeing a certain scene: this would only require some suitable K-lines. Let's call this a simulus — a reproduction of only the higher-level effects of a stimulus. A simulus at the very highest levels could lead a person to recollect virtually no details about a remembered object or event, yet be able to apprehend and contemplate its most significant structures and relationships while experiencing a sense of its presence. A simulus may have many advantages over a picture-image. Not only can it work more swiftly while using less machinery, but we can combine the parts of several simuli to imagine things we have never seen before — and even to imagine things that couldn't possibly exist.
A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love
—George Eliot
Some readers may be horrified at picturing a baby's mind as made up of nearly separate agencies. But we'll never understand how human natures grow without some theories for how they start. One evidence for separateness is how suddenly infants switch from smiles of contentment to shrieks of hunger-rage. In contrast to the complex mixtures of expressions that adults show, young children seem usually to be in one or another well-defined state of activity — contentment, hunger, sleepiness, play, affection, or whatever. Older children show less sudden mood changes, and their expressions suggest that more different things are happening at once. Our minds may thus originate as sets of relatively simple, separate need machines. But soon enough each becomes enmeshed in all the rest of our growing machinery.
How should we interpret an infant's apparent single-mindedness? One explanation of those striking shifts in attitude is that one agency attains control and forcibly suppresses the rest. Another view is that many processes continue at once — but only one at a time can be expressed. It would be more efficient to keep the whole array of proto-specialists at work. Then each would be more ready to assume control in case of an emergency.
What would be the advantage in a mechanism that makes a baby conceal that mixture of emotions, expressing only one of them at a time? Perhaps that artificial sharpening promotes the child's welfare by making it easier for the parent to respond to whichever problem has the greatest urgency. It's hard enough to know what infants want, yet think how much harder it would be if they confronted us with complicated expressions of mixed feelings! Those infants' very lives — and, in turn, our own lives — depend upon their expressing themselves clearly. To achieve that clarity, their agencies must be equipped with powerful cross-exclusion devices to magnify small differences that make it clear which needs come first. This leads to simple summaries — which manifest themselves as drastic changes in appearance, voice, and mood that others can interpret easily. And this is why, under circumstances in which adults merely frown, babies tend to shriek.
Given that those signs are clear, what forces us to respond to them? To help their offspring grow, most animals evolve two matching schemes: communication is a two-way street. On one side, babies are equipped with cries that can arouse parents far away, out of sight, or sound asleep — for along with sharpening those signs, cross-exclusion also amplifies their intensity. And on the other side, adults are made to find those signals irresistible: there must be special systems in our brains that give such messages a high priority. To what might those baby-watching agents be connected? My guess is that they're wired to the remnants of the same proto-specialists that, when aroused, caused us as infants to cry in the first place. This leads adults to respond to babies' cries by attributing to them the same degrees of urgency that we ourselves would have to feel to make us shriek with similar intensity. This drives the babies' caretakers to respond to their needs with urgent sympathy.
Since emotions are few and reasons are many (said the robot, Giskard), the behavior of a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person can. —Isaac Asimov
What are emotions, anyway? Our culture sees this question as a deep and ancient mystery. How could the idea of society of mind contribute to what our ancestors have said? Common-sense psychology has not even reached a consensus on which emotions exist.
| Restlessness | Fear | Gladness | Jealousy | Sorrow |
| Curiosity | Hate | Enthusiasm | Ambition | Thirst |
| Infatuation | Anger | Admiration | Laziness | Disgust |
| Impatience | Love | Boredom | Contempt | Hunger |
| Excitement | Greed | Reverence | Anxiety | Lust |
If there exists anger, what constitutes rage? How does fear relate to fright, terror, dread, dismay, and all such other awful things? How does love relate to reverence or to attachment or infatuation? Are these just various degrees of intensity and direction, or are they genuinely different entities that happen to be neighbors in an uncharted universe of affections? Are hate and love quite separate things, or, similarly, courage and cowardice — or are these merely pairs of extremes, each just the absence of its peer? What are emotions, anyway, and what are all the other things we label moods, feelings, passions, needs, or sensibilities? We find it hard to agree on the meanings of words like these, presumably because few of them actually correspond to clearly distinct mental processes. Instead, when we learn such words, we each attach to them variously different and personal accumulations of conceptions in our minds.
Infants' early emotion signs clearly signify their needs. We later learn to use such signals in more exploitative ways. Thus you can learn to use affection or anger as a social coin in trade for various accommodations; for example, one can pretend to be angry or pleased, or even offer — that is, threaten or promise — to become angry or affectionate in certain circumstances. Our culture is ambivalent about such matters; on one side we're taught that emotions should be natural and spontaneous; on the other side we're told that we must learn to regulate them. We recognize in deeds (though not in words) that feeling may be easier to understand and modify than other parts of intellect. We censure those who fail to learn to control their emotions but merely pity those whose problem-solving capabilities are poor; we blame for lack of self-control, but not for weakness of intelligence.
Our earliest emotions are built-in processes in which inborn proto-specialists control what happens in our brains. Soon we learn to overrule those schemes, as our surroundings teach us what we ought to feel. Parents, teachers, friends, and finally our self-ideals impose upon us new rules for how to use the remnants of those early states: they teach us how and when to feel and show each kind of emotion sign. By the time we're adults, these systems have become too complicated to understand.
To the child, Nature gives various means of rectifying any mistakes he may commit respecting the salutary or hurtful qualities of the objects which surround him. On every occasion his judgments are corrected by experience; want and pain are the necessary consequences arising from false judgment; gratification and pleasure are produced by judging aright. Under such masters, we cannot fail to become well informed; and we soon learn to reason justly, when want and pain are the necessary consequences of a contrary conduct.
In the study and practice of the sciences it is quite different; the false judgments we form neither affect our existence nor our welfare; and we are not forced by any physical necessity to correct them. Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts… —A. Lavoisier
Up to this point we've portrayed the mind as made of scattered fragments of machinery. But we adults rarely see ourselves that way; we have more sense of unity. In the next few sections we'll speculate that this coherency is acquired over many stages of development. Each new stage first works under the guidance of previous stages, to acquire some knowledge, values, and goals. Then it proceeds to change its role and becomes a teacher to subsequent stages.
How could an early stage teach anything to a later one when it knows less than its student does? As every teacher knows, this is not as hard as it might seem. For one thing, it is usually easier to recognize a solution to a problem than to discover a solution; this is what we called the puzzle principle. A teacher need not know how to solve a problem to be able to reward a student for doing so or to help the student search for solutions by imparting ways to sense when progress has been made. Even better is for the teacher to impart new goals to the student.
How could an early stage of development affect the goals of a later stage? One simple way would be to give each later stage some access to the goals of earlier stages; however, those early goals would then remain infantile. How could later stages develop more advanced goals? Shortly we'll see an astonishing answer: it is not necessary to formulate more advanced goals at higher levels of organization because they are likely to develop spontaneously, as subgoals of relatively simple goals.
In any case, it wouldn't be safe to send the student into the world equipped with systems that have not yet been tried and tested. A safer strategy would be to keep each new stage suppressed — that is, incapable of controlling the child's actual behavior — until it passes tests to verify that it is at least as capable as its predecessor. This could explain some of those apparently sudden spurts in our children's development — for example, in episodes of rapid growth of language skills. That apparent speed could be illusory if it were merely the end result of longer, hidden projects carried out silently inside the mind.
Returning to our sense of Self, how could so many steps and stages lead to any sense of unity? Why wouldn't they lead us, instead, to feel increasingly fragmentary and dispersed? I suspect the secret is that after each old stage's work is done, its structure still remains available for further use. These remnants of our prior selves provide us with a powerful resource: whenever one's present mind gets confused, it can exploit what once was used by earlier minds. Even though we weren't as smart then as we are now, we can be sure that every stage once had, in its turn, some workable ways to manage things.
One's present personality cannot share many of 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.
Suppose a child were playing in a certain way, and a stranger appeared and began to scold and criticize. The child would become frightened and disturbed and try to escape. But if, in the same situation, the child's parent arrived and proceeded to scold and criticize, the result would be different. Instead of being frightened, the child would feel guilty and ashamed, and instead of trying to escape, the child would try to change what it was doing, in attempts to seek reassurance and approval.
I suspect that these two scenarios engage different learning mechanisms. In the encounter with the forbidding visitor, the child might learn I should not try to achieve my present goal in this kind of situation. But when scolded by someone to whom the child is attached, the child might learn I ought not to want to achieve that goal at all! In the first case, it is a matter of learning which goal to pursue in which circumstance; in the second instance, it is more a question of what goals one should have. If my theory is right, the presence of the attachment-person actually switches the effect of learning over to different sets of agents. To see the difference, let's make a small reformulation of the concept of a difference-engine to represent three different kinds of learning that an infant might use.
In the case of ordinary forms of failure or success signals, the learner modifies the methods used to reach the goal. In the case of fear-provoking disturbances, the learner may modify the description of the situation itself.
In the case of attachment-related failure or reward signals, the learner modifies which goals are considered worthy of pursuit.
So far as I know, this is a new theory about attachment. It asserts that there are particular types of learning that can proceed only in the presence of the particular individuals to whom one has become attached.
No form of behavior is accompanied by stronger feeling than is attachment behavior. The figures towards whom it is directed are loved and their advent is treated with joy. So long as a child is in the unchallenged presence of a principal attachment-figure, or within easy reach, he feels secure. A threat of loss creates anxiety, and actuall loss, sorrow; both, moreover, are likely to arouse anger. —John Bowlby
Most higher animals have evolved instinctive bonding mechanisms that keep the youngsters close to the parents. Human infants, too, are born with tendencies to form special attachments; all parents know their powerful effects. Early in life, most children become attached to one or a few family members or caretakers, sometimes so firmly that for several years such children may never stray more than a few meters from the attachment-figure. During those years, a prolonged separation of the child from those particular persons may be followed by an enduring depression or disturbance, during which the child's personality does not develop normally.
What is the function of childhood attachment? The simplest explanation is that it evolved to keep children within a safe sphere of nurture and protection. But according to our theory, our human bond machinery has the additional function of forcing children to acquire values, goals, and ideals from particular older individuals. Why is this so important? Because even though there are many ways a child could learn about ordinary causes and effects, there is no way for a child to construct a coherent system of values — except by basing it upon some already existing model. The task of constructing a civilized personality must be far beyond the inventive power of any single individual. Furthermore, if too wide a variety of adult models were available, it would be too hard to build a coherent personality of one's own, because one would have to pick and choose fragments from all those different personalities — and this might lead to so many conflicts and inconsistencies that many of them would cancel each other out. It would simplify the child's task if the attachment mechanism restricted attention to only a few role models.
How did our attachment-bonds evolve? In many species of animals, attachment occurs so swiftly and firmly that scientists who study animal behavior call it imprinting. Presumably, the machinery that makes us learn our parents' goals is descended from the mechanisms of our animal ancestors. Presumably our infantile attachment-bonds form as soon as various inborn systems learn to distinguish the parents' individual peculiarities — first by senses of touch, taste, and smell; then by sound of voice and, finally, by sight of face.
Once those attachment-bonds are formed, a child won't react in the same way to the faces and voices of strangers and parents, for these have different effects on how we learn. The effect of an attachment-person's affection or rejection is not like that of ordinary success-failure goal-rewards — which merely teach us what to do in order to achieve our goals. Attachment-related signals seem to work directly on those goals themselves — and thus can modify our personalities. Attachments teach us ends, not means — and thus impose on us our parents' dreams.
We've talked about some ways to learn goals from other people. But how do we come to make goals for ourselves? It seems simple enough always to move from goal to subgoal — but how could one go the other way, moving outward to find new kinds of goals? Our answer may seem strange at first: there is a sense in which we never really need to invent new high-level goals at all. This is because, in principle, at least, it is enough to keep inventing lower-level subgoals for problems that we have to solve! Here is why this need not limit our ambitions:
Functional Autonomy. In the course of pursuing any sufficiently complicated problem, the subgoals that engage our attentions can become both increasingly more ambitious and increasingly detached from the original problem.
Suppose a baby's initial goal was to reach a certain cup. This could lead to the subgoal of learning how to move the arm and hand efficiently, which, in turn, could lead to sub-subgoals of learning to move around obstacles. And this could keep growing into increasingly general and abstract goals of learning how to understand and manage the physical world of space and time. Thus one can begin with a lowly goal, yet end up with some sub-subgoals that lead our minds into the most ambitious enterprises we can conceive.
This can also happen in the social realm. The same baby can form, instead, the subgoal of engaging another person's help in bringing it that drinking cup. This can lead to trying to find more effective ways to influence that other person — and thus the child could become concerned with representing and predicting the motives and dispositions of other people. Again, a relatively modest drinking goal can lead to a larger competence — this time in the realm of comprehending social interactions. An initially simple concern with personal comfort becomes transformed into a more ambitious, less self-centered enterprise.
Virtually any problem will be easier to solve the more one learns about the context world in which that problem occurs. No matter what one's problem is, provided that it's hard enough, one always gains from learning better ways to learn.
Many of us like to believe that our intellectual enterprises lie on higher planes than our everyday activities. But now we can turn that academic value-scheme upon its head. When we get right down to it, our most abstract investigations can be seen as having origins in finding means to ordinary ends. These turn into what we regard as noble qualities when they gain enough functional autonomy to put their roots aside. In the end, our initial goals matter scarcely at all, because no matter what our original objectives, we can gain more by becoming better able to predict and control our world. It may not even matter whether an infant was initially inclined to emulate or to oppose a parent, or was first moved primarily by fear or by affection. The implements of accomplishment are much the same in either case. Knowledge is power. Whatever one's goals, they will be easier to achieve if one can become wise, wealthy, and powerful. And these in turn can best be gained by understanding how things work.
On the surface, the theories of Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud might seem to lie in different scientific universes. Piaget seems to be concerned almost wholly with intellectual matters, while Freud studies emotional mechanisms. Yet the differences are not really clear. It is widely understood that emotional behavior depends on unconscious machinery, but we do not so often recognize that ordinary intellectual thinking also depends on mechanisms that are equally hidden from introspection.
In any case, despite their differences, both these great psychologists asserted that every child proceeds through stages of mental development. And surely every parent notices how children sometimes seem to stay the same but at other times appear to change more rapidly. Rather than review particular theories of how children progress through stages, let's look at the concept of stage itself.
Why can't we grow by steady, smooth development?
I'll argue that nothing so complex as a human mind can grow, except in separate steps. One reason is that it is always dangerous to change a system that already works. Suppose you discover a new idea or way to think that seems useful enough to justify building more skills that depend on it. What happens if, later, it should turn out that this idea has a serious flaw? How could you restore your previous abilities? One way might be to maintain such complete records that you could undo all the changes that were made — but that wouldn't work if those changes had already made your quality of thought so poor that you couldn't recognize how poor it had become. A safer way would be to keep some older versions of your previous mind intact as you constructed each new version. Then you could regress to a previous stage in case the new one failed, and you could also use it to evaluate the performance of the new stage.
Another conservative strategy is never to let a new stage take control of actual behavior until there is evidence that it can outperform its predecessor. What would an outside observer see if a child employed this strategy? One would observe only plateaus, during which there were few apparent changes in behavior, followed by spurts of growth in which new capacities emerge suddenly. Yet that appearance would be illusory, since the actual times of development would occur within those silent periods. This scheme has the great advantage of permitting the child to continue to function during mental growth and, thus, maintain business during renovations. Each working version can hold still while new ones safely move ahead.