3.5 Correctors, Suppressors, and Censors

"Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them."—Sam Goldwyn

It would be wonderful never to make a mistake, nor ever to have a wrong idea. But perfection will always remain out of reach; we’ll always makes errors and oversights.

Joan’s sore knee has been getting worse. Today it hurts her all the time, even when it isn’t touched. She thinks, “ I shouldn't have turned while I lifted that box. And I should have put ice on my knee at once.”

We like to think in positive terms: "An Expert is someone who knows what to do." And you know how to do most things so well that you scarcely need to think at all; you recognize most of the things you see, and converse without wondering how to speak. However, expertise also has an opposite side: "An Expert is one who rarely fails–because of knowing what not to do.” Thus we usually do not walk into walls. We rarely stick things in our eyes. We never tell strangers how ugly they are.

How much of a person’s competence is based on knowing which actions not to take—that is having ways to avoid mistakes? We don't know much about such "negative expertise” because this was rarely discussed in Psychology, except in the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Perhaps that neglect was inevitable because we cannot observe, from outside, the things that people do not do. But it is almost as hard to study such things by observing from inside the mind, for example, what keeps you from having absurd ideas. To account for this, we’ll conjecture that our minds accumulate resources that we shalll call Critics—each of which learns to recognize a certain particular kind of mistake. Here are a few of those types of Critics; we’ll list more of them in Chapter §7.

A Corrector Critic warns you that you have started to do something dangerous. "You must stop right now, because you’re moving your hand toward a flame.” But such a warning may come too late.

A Suppressor can warn you of a danger you face, and can veto an action that’s being considered, to stop you from acting before it's too late—for example, by telling you, “No, do not move in that direction! Or it could tell you to use a debugging technique.

A Censor works early enough to keep you from having that dangerous thought—so it never even occurs to you to put your finger into that flame. A Censor can work so effectively that you don’t even know that it’s working for you.

A Self-Controller recognizes that you have been failing to carry out a plan because, you instead of staying with it, you have kept on “changing your mind” about it.

Suppressors are safer than Correctors are, but both of them tend to slow you down, while you think of something else to do. However, Censors waste no time at all, because they deflect you from risky alternatives without interrupting your other thoughts, and therefore can actually speed you up. This could be one reason why some experts can do things so quickly: they don’t even think of the wrong things to do.

Student: How could a censor ward off a bad thought—unless it already knows what you’re likely to think? Isn’t there some sort of paradox there?

AI Programmer: No problem. Just design each Censor to be a learning machine that records which decisions have led to mistakes. Then when it next sees a similar choice, it just steers your thoughts in the other direction, so that you won't make the same decision.

Student: Then wouldn't that Censor still take some time to have enough effect on your mind? Besides, what if both choices were equally bad? Then that Censor must work even earlier, to keep you from getting into that bad situation in the first place.

AI Programmer: We could do that by giving each Censor enough memory to record several of the previous steps that led to such situation.

Student: Might not that cure be worse than its disease? If your Correctors could save you from every mistake, this might make you so conservative that you'd scarcely ever get new ideas.

Indeed, some experts have learned so many ways for any project to go wrong that, now, they find it hard to explore any new ideas at all.

Excessive Switching

I have of late-- but wherefore I know not-- lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. –Hamlet II.ii.292

What happens if too many Critics switch on (or off)? Here is a first-hand description of this:

Kay Redfield Jamison: "The clinical reality of manic-depressive illness is far more lethal and infinitely more complex than the current psychiatric nomenclature, bipolar disorder, would suggest. Cycles of fluctuating moods and energy levels serve as a background to constantly changing thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. The illness encompasses the extremes of human experience. Thinking can range from florid psychosis, or "madness," to patterns of unusually clear, fast and creative associations, to retardation so profound that no meaningful mental activity can occur. Behavior can be frenzied, expansive, bizarre, and seductive, or it can be seclusive, sluggish, and dangerously suicidal. Moods may swing erratically between euphoria and despair or irritability and desperation. … [But] the highs associated with mania are generally only pleasant and productive during the earlier, milder stages.”[xi]

In a later paper, this author says more about such massive mental cascades:

It seems, then, that both the quantity and quality of thoughts build during hypomania. This speed increase may range from a very mild quickening to complete psychotic incoherence. It is not yet clear what causes this qualitative change in mental processing. Nevertheless, this altered cognitive state may well facilitate the formation of unique ideas and associations. … Where depression questions, ruminates and hesitates, mania answers with vigor and certainty. The constant transitions in and out of constricted and then expansive thoughts, subdued and then violent responses, grim and then ebullient moods, withdrawn and then outgoing stances, cold and then fiery states—and the rapidity and fluidity of moves through such contrasting experiences—can be painful and confusing.[xii]

It is easy to recognize such extremes in the mental illnesses called ‘bipolar’ disorders, but Chapter §7 will conjecture that we also use such processes in the course of everyday commonsense thinking. Thus, you might use a procedure like this whever you face a new problem:

First, shut most of your Critics off. This helps you to think of some things you could do—without concern about how well they might work—as though you were in a brief ‘manic’ state.

Then, you could turn many Critics on, to examine these options more skeptically—as though you were having a mild depression.

Finally, choose one approach that seems promising, and then proceed to pursue it, until one of your Critics starts to complain that you have stopped making progress.

Sometimes you may go though such phases deliberately. However, my conjecture is that we frequently do this on time-scales so brief that we have no sense that it’s happening.

Learning from Failure

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Many things we regard as positive (such as beauty, humor, and pleasure itself) may be partly based on censorship—hence, to that extent, could be considered negative. Thus pleasure can seem 'positive' to the processes that now are presently “in control’—no matter that other processes (whose expressions are currently being suppressed) might otherwise see this as ‘negative.' (See §9-2 of SoM.) For, "I’m enjoying this” could mean, both at once, “I want to stay in my present state,” and “I want to prevent any changes in it."

Student: But I thought that it was widely believed that learning works by 'reinforcing' connections that have led to success, and by weakening those that contribute to failure. Many educators say that we should always make it pleasant to learn, because pleasure is our reward for success—whereas failure deters and discourages us.

That popular view is mainly based on research (mostly done with pigeons and rats) that also shows that quicker rewards make learning more rapid. This has many teachers toward the idea that learning should be a pleasant experience. However, we should not be too quick to apply this idea to beings like us, who also can learn by reflecting on the things they have done!

I’m not saying that ‘reinforcement theory’ is wrong—but that, for humans, it’s just part of the story; in §8-5 I’ll argue that what we can learn from how we have failed could be more important than ‘reinforcement’ can be—at least, for our highest levels of thinking.[xiii] For, while pleasure may help us learn easy things, section §9-4 will argue that we may need to endure some suffering to make larger-scale changes in how we think. If so, as an ancient Stoic might say, rewarding success can lead you to celebrate more than to investigate. Here are a few other reasons why to ‘learn from success’ is not always wise—especially when that success was expected.

Reinforcement can lead to Rigidity. If a system already works, additional ‘reinforcement’ could make some its internal connections become stronger than they need to be, which could make it harder for that system to adapt to later new situations.

Dependency leads to Side Effects. If a certain resource R has worked so well that other resources have come to depend on it, then any change you make in R will now be more likely to damage those others. In other words, as the saying goes “Don’t fix it, unless it is broken.[xiv]

Negative Expertise. One way to avoid such side effects is to leave an established resource unchanged, but to add Critics and Censors to intervene in conditions where it has failed to work. In other words, treat them as exceptions to rules.

Radical Learning: You can ‘tune up” a skill by many small steps, but eventually no more small changes will help, because you have reached a local peak.[xv] Then further improvement may require you to endure some discomfort and disappointment. See §9-4.

Papert’s Principle: When two or more of your methods conflict, then instead of seeking a compromise, abandon the lot and then try something else. Many steps in mental growth are less based on acquiring new skills, but more on learning better ways to choose which older ones to use. [See §10-4 of SoM.]

For all of those reasons, we need to learn, not only methods that worked in the past, but also which methods have failed—and why—so that one can avoid the most common mistakes.

Student: Yes, but why can’t we do that by breaking connections—so that once you’ve made a bad mistake, your brain won’t ever do it again?

One reason why this is a bad idea is that you’ll lose the opportunity to understand just what went wrong (so that you can later avoid related mistakes). A second problem with this tactic is that whenever you change some of a system's connections, this may also affect some other behaviors that are partly based on those same connections. If you don’t know quite how that system works, then you’re in danger of making it worse by ‘correcting’ any remaining mistakes.

Programmer: I know exactly what you mean. Every attempt to improve a program is likely to introduce new bugs. That's why new programs so often contain very big sections of ancient code: no one remembers quite how they work, and hence they’re afraid to change them.

Student: But what if you have no alternative, because something is wrong that you need to fix.

Perhaps our most important ways to improve ourselves come from learning to think about thinking itself—that is, to 'reflect' on what our minds have been doing. However, to do this one must first learn to enjoy the distress that results when one’s forced to inspect oneself. See §8-5 and §9-4.

Varieties of Negative Expertise

Creativity: Why do some people get more good ideas? I did not specify ‘new’ ideas—because it is easy to build a machine that spouts endless streams of things that have never been seen; what distinguishes thinkers that we call 'creative' is not how many new things they produce, but how useful are the few they produce. This means that those artists have ways to suppress—or not even generate—products that have too much novelty, leaving only the ones that are just different enough to be useful.

Humor: Humor is also usually seen as positive but, really, jokes are basically negative—in the sense they almost always are about things that a person should not do, because they are prohibited, disgusting, or just plain stupid.[xvi]

Decisiveness: Similarly, we tend to think of decision-making as positive. But those moments in which we make a choice (and which we describe as an ‘act of free will’) may in fact be exactly the opposite; that moment in which ‘you make your decision’ may simply be the moment at which you turned off the complex processes that you use for comparing alternatives.

Pleasure: If we look at a mind as a playground in which many methods compete then the more pleasure we feel (in the Single-Self sense), the more negative may be its total effect on the rest of one’s mental processes! For, what actually happened may have been that some particular process seized control, and then turned off a lot of the rest of your mind. This, as every addict knows, makes it hard to wish for anything else. We’ll say more about this in Chapter §9.

There are other ways to disable resources than attempting directly to suppress them. One way to suppress a resource is to activate one of its competitors. For example, you can hold off sleep by arranging to get into a fight. Another trick is to repeat a stimulus until your opponent no longer responds to it—as in the old tale of “The Boy who Cried Wolf.”

Parenting: Consider how much a person must do in the course of raising a child. You must feed it and clean it and work to protect it—to guard it and clothe it and teach it and help it; for years, you must sacrifice wealth and attention. What kind of incentive could make one forego so many other enjoyments and goals, to become so selfless and other-directed? Such strong constraints, if imposed from outside, would seem cruel and unusual punishment. Clearly natural selection favored those who evolved ways to suppress those mental Critics; no person obsessed with those handicaps could bear to endure such prolonged distress—and would end up with fewer descendants.

Beauty: We tend to see Beauty as positive. But when someone says something is “beautiful” and you ask, "What makes you attracted to that," your respondent may act as though under attack, or explain that 'there's no accounting for taste', or childishly say, “I just like it.” Such answers suggest (as we saw in §1-1) that their liking comes partly from critic suppression. We all know that if one but tries, one can always uncover some blemish or flaw.

Mystical Experience: If you could turn most of your critics off, you then would have fewer concerns or goals. And if this occurs on a large enough scale, then your whole world may suddenly seem to change—and everything now seems glorious. If you'd like to experience this yourself, there are well-known steps that you can take to induce it. [xvii] It helps to be suffering pain and stress; starvation and cold will also assist. So will psychoactive drugs, and meditation too may aid. Be sure to stay in some strange, quiet place—because sensory deprivation helps. Next, set up a rhythmical drone that repeats some monotonous phrase or tone, and soon it will lose all meaning and sense—and so will virtually everything else! Then if you've done this successfully, you may suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by some immensely compelling Presence—and then you may spend the rest of your life trying and failing to find it again; I suspect that it masquerades records or traces of early imprimers that long have been hiding, disguised, in forgotten parts of your mind.

We have many kinds of words for this—Ecstasy, Rapture, Euphoria, Bliss—and Mystical Experience. You suddenly feel that you know the Truth, that nothing else is significant, and that you need no further evidence; your mind has extinguished all its ways to question what was ‘revealed’ to you—and when later you try to explain to your friends, you find you can scarcely say anything else than how 'wonderful' that experience was. But if you failed to find any flaws because you had turned all your Critics off, then a better word would be 'wonderless.'