The Short Version

A few years ago, Eve named one of my subpersonalities “Mr. Fussy,” and sometime after that, another one got the name of “Mr. Beaver.” (I explained my tendency to turn off water faucets behind her as due to sharing with beavers a built-in aversion to the sound of running water.) In my last post you met “the one who laughs,” who shall henceforth be known as Mr. Amusement.

So Mr. Diligence, the one who keeps us all focused on the goal of the moment, has been in charge for what seems like weeks, but last night at about 3:00 AM, Mr. Cogitator took the stage and kept the rest of us awake for almost an hour. The only way to get him to shut up was to promise to give him full reign to write this post if he would wait till a reasonable hour.

Mr. Cogitator is now the “me” of the moment, and what “I” was thinking about earlier this morning was a particular passage in Marvin Minsky’s book, “The Emotion Machine,” that has been bothering me since I first read it. But first the good stuff.

One of his most amazing and wonderful insights (Mr. Enthusiasm here) is the way he clarifies this idea of subpersonalities I’ve been using. The book is littered with examples and variations on this theme, and this is one of my favorites:

“…everyone undergoes changes of mood in which one exhibits somewhat different sets of intentions, behaviors, and traits. Then, whether those shifts are persistent or brief, the subpersonality that is now in control may activate a set of views and goals for you, which, for the moment, you may believe to be the views and goals of the ‘genuine’ You.”(p.307)

These shifts happen throughout the day, and for most people they are taken for granted without having any impact on their ideas about the nature of their “selves.”

This is just a specific case of a more general tendency that is central to Minsky’s discussions: that we commonly describe very complex mental processes with simple words–he calls them “suitcase words”–that obscure the underlying complexity; a complexity that we must unravel if we’re to make any headway in understanding how our brains work. This particular simplification of the self he attributes to the “fairy tale” we all grow up with:

“We each are constantly being controlled by powerful creatures inside our minds who do our feeling and thinking for us, and make our important decisions for us. We call these our ‘Selves’ or ‘Identities’–and we believe that they always remain the same, no matter how we may otherwise change.”(p.14)

He goes on to unpack this suitcase and many others, and to suggest why such simplifications appeal to us. He is meticulous, thorough, and wonderfully inventive. Isaac Asimov said Minsky was one of only two people he had ever met who were smarter than himself, and while he never met me, I’m fairly certain I would not have made the cut. Nonetheless, I have a near-fanatic sensitivity to certain lapses, brought on, I think, by growing up poor–which I certainly wouldn’t have chosen if I’d had any other options, so I can’t claim any credit for having it.

Which brings us to the passage that bothers me, which follows a presentation of the idea that, “If a program works in only one way, then it gets stuck when that method fails…”

“This idea is a central theme of this book–and it is firmly opposed to the popular view that each person has a central core–some sort of invisible spirit or self–from which all their mental abilities originate. For that seems a demeaning idea–that all our virtues are secondhand–or that we deserve no credit for our accomplishments… Instead, I see our dignity as stemming from what we each have made of ourselves: a colossal collection of different ways to deal with different situations and predicaments.”(p. 6)

When I read that I thought, “Jeez Marv, you’re not even out of the box and you’re screwing it up.” The alarm bell words were “credit” and “dignity,” of course, but the really tricky ones in that passage are “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” plurals of “I,” “mine,” and “myself.” If there is no “self,” how can it make something of itself?

I finished the book, marking passages and taking notes, and found that elsewhere, Minsky is totally aware of the problems with these words, and is obvious and direct in pointing them out. Still, they are so socially useful, and so engrained in our usage, that he is not as rigorous as I would like. Let me juxtapose two passages–only a couple of pages apart in the book–one of which can be used to clarify the other:

“…when you see the mind as a cloud of conflicting resources, then you no longer need to think of pleasure as a ‘basic’ or all-or-none thing. For now you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them.”(p. 325)

“…we spend large parts of our lives at trying to tidy up our minds–selecting the portions we want to keep, suppressing others we’d like to forget, and refining the ones we’re dissatisfied with.”(p. 321)

The crucial question for the second passage is, who is this “we” that’s tidying up? The first passage provides the answer. Let me re-word the second in terms of the first to show what I mean:

Large parts of our lives are spent in competition between subpersonalities trying to suppress or emphasize parts that each has a different attachment to. Mr. Nutrition would like to suppress memories of meals and dishes that were unhealthy, while Mr. Glutton holds those memories dear, and fondly relives them. The two compete for control of the brain at mealtime, and if the Nutritionist is successful, eventually the memories of giant ice cream sundaes will fade away, replaced by recollections tasty salads.

I could offer numerous other examples, but Mr. Cogitator has exhausted the forbearance of his companions in this brain, and now, Mr. Photographer is going to have a little fun preparing an illustrative image for you. After that, Mr. Fitness plans on taking us to the gym, after which Mr. Nutrition is taking us out for a healthy salad. Later today, if he’s lucky, Mr. Diligence can muster his collaborators–Mr. Photographer, Mr. Problem-solver, and Mr. Designer–and force the rest of us to continue work on the web site rebuild. (There’s someone in here that would prefer to watch TV and eat chocolate eclairs like normal folks, but he doesn’t stand a chance.)

None of them deserve any credit for their accomplishments, and without credit, there’s no basis for pride or dignity. Mr. Amusement chuckles at all of them, including himself.

Duck Dignity

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I was getting ready for bed last night–turning down the covers, getting my foam wedge sleeping pillow out of the closet–when I realized that the bed-prep module of my brain had chosen an inappropriate option: it was spreading the extra blanket neatly across the bed instead of bunching it up at the side for easy 3AM access. It’s only supposed to execute the spreading option if the temperature is below 70 degrees, which it wasn’t.

I laughed at the error, then laughed at the laughing, realizing that, in effect, one part of my brain was laughing at another part for making a mistake. Then the thought occurred to me that if you have multiple personalities, they can keep each other company, eliminating the need for outside friends, which brought on the biggest chuckle of all.

In The Book of Serenity, there’s a passage:

“There is still someone who laughs, ha! ha!” But tell me, who is it, laughing at what? “If you know this one, your task of study is finished.”(p. 194, 1990)

I puzzled over that for a long time, and I didn’t have an answer that satisfied me until I came to understand how the brain functions, helped largely by Minsky’s, “Society of Mind.”

Applying a modular understanding of the brain to last night’s bout of laughter: as I was prepping the bed, part of my brain was still thinking about the current stage in redesigning my web site, and it was hogging resources (Minsky again, “The Emotion Machine,”) that the bed-prep module needed to execute the correct option. A “critic,” Minsky’s term for one of the brain’s monitoring networks, noted the error and triggered “the one who laughs:” another network. My brain has concluded that laughter is the optimal response to mistakes of this kind, which are brought on by its different goals competing for scarce resources.

Chapter 2, “Attachments and Goals,” in “The Emotion Machine,” offers a wonderfully insightful account of how goals are acquired and modified that has clarified my own thinking tremendously. The Link I’ve given is to a draft of the chapter on Minsky’s website, a valuable read.

One of the things he discusses is how we come to develop models of ourselves, and then how we react with shame when our behavior doesn’t match our expectations, based on these models. “Such feelings frequently come to us when we’re in the presence of those we respect, or those by whom we wish to be respected…”(p. 39) These “imprimers”–people or ideas that we become attached to in the course of our history–don’t have to actually be present: we internalize their values and then react to our own behavior as if they were watching. These attachments, as Minsky says, “… teach us ends, not means–and thus impose our parents’ dreams on us.”(p. 65) And here’s the real kicker: “…when you come right down to it, all our attachments are made to fictions; you never connect to an actual person, but only to the models you’ve made to represent your conceptions of them.”(p. 65)

That last quote is the key to as much freedom from our conditioning as is possible. All the choices we make are the products of our history as interpreted by brain machinery–they are as determined as any other natural process–but our understanding of these processes becomes part of our history, and can alter the effects of the history that came before. If all our attachments are made to fictions, and if we can understand how those fictions were constructed, we can eliminate their painful constituents.

Example: I have felt shame, or at least disappointment, when I have experienced lapses like the one I had last night in spreading the blanket instead of bunching it neatly to the side of the bed. Feeling such emotions is the result of having a model of oneself that entails holding this “self” responsible for paying attention to the task at hand. I no longer have such a model. I see my brain as a device in which numerous goals compete for scarce resources, and there is no “self” in charge of the competition. When resources are allocated in a way that results in mistakes, then there are costs involved: Last night I could have been in bed 20 seconds sooner if the bed-prep module had gotten a little more attention. When the mistakes are more costly, or could be more costly, the brain takes that into account and allocates resources more carefully. The “one who laughs” can be amused by the less costly mistakes–among other things–and the “stern disciplinarian” is triggered when the stakes are higher. Actually, the one who laughs is often amused at the very fact that the stern disciplinarian was called into action.

In either case, “I” am just along for the ride, which reminds me of a song lyric from Kenny Rogers and the First Edition: “I just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in).”

Smiling, Not Laughing

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