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
