3.8 Emotional Exploitation

Whatever you may be trying to do, your brain may have other plans for you.

I was trying to work on a technical theory, but was starting to fall asleep. Then I found myself imagining that my rival Professor Challenger was about to develop the same technique. This caused a flicker of angry frustration, which blocked for the moment that urge to sleep—and enabled me to proceed with my work.

In fact, Challenger was not doing any such thing; he works in a totally different field. But although he was a close friend of mine, we had recently had an argument. So he served as an opportune candidate when I needed someone to be angry at. Let's make up a theory of how this worked.[xix]

A resource called Work was attending to one of my principal goals. Another one called Sleep tried to seize control—but then that fantasy appeared. This aroused a mixture of Anger, annoyance, frustration, and fear. Somehow, these then had the effect of disrupting the process of falling asleep.

This sequence of steps established a state that counteracted the urge to sleep—and thus returned my mind to its 'working' state. We can see my use of that fantasy as having the effect of an emotional 'double negative': by using one system to switch off another.

Everyone uses such tricks to combat frustration, tedium, pain, or sleep. Here I used anger to keep myself working—but the same technique might serve as well, if one were falling behind in a race, or trying to lift too heavy a weight. By self-inducing anger or shame, you sometimes can counteract weakness or pain.

Note that ‘Self-control’ tactics need careful direction. Just a brief tweak might serve to stop Sleep --so slight that you don’t know you’re doing it. But if you don't sufficiently anger yourself, you might relapse into lassitude—whereas if you get yourself too incensed, you’ll completely forget what you wanted to do.

Here’s another example where part of a mind 'exploits' one emotion for the purpose to turning off another—thus helping you to attain some goal that you cannot achieve more directly.

Celia is trying to follow a diet. When she sees that thick, rich chocolate cake, she is filled with a strong temptation to eat. But when she imagines her friend, Miss Perfect-Body, looking gorgeous in her new bathing suit—then Celia’s passion to have that same shape keeps her from actually eating the cake.

What is the role of that fantasy? Celia's procedure for ‘dieting' does not include any straightforward way to suppress her reckless appetite. However, the emotion that we call Disgust is already designed to do just that (by backing-up one's digestive tract) and, somehow, Celia has trained herself to react in that way when she thinks of her shape. When the sight of her rival arouses that image, she'll have less desire to eat that cake. But that strategy is not without risk: if Celia's jealousy makes her depressed, she might engorge the entire cake.

Why should fantasies have such effects, when we 'know' that they aren’t real? Surely, this must be partly because each mind-part sees only a few other parts, which serve as its private reality. We never directly see the world; that’s just another Single-Self myth. Instead, although some parts of your brain directly react to what your external senses provide, most of them must base their representations on information that they receive from other, internal brain-resources.

For example, when you sit at a table across from a friend and assume that she still has a back and some legs, you're using old models and memories. It's the same for the chair that she's sitting on. None of those things now lie in your sight, yet it’s almost as though you can see them. Fantasy is the missing link. In {Imagination} and in {Simuli}, we'll see how machines could imagine such things.

Student: I know that we all have fantasies, but why did such strange ways of thinking evolve? Why can’t we just figure out what to do in a perfectly rational way?

My answer is simply that there's no such thing; that popular concept of ‘rational’ is itself just one more fantasy—that our thinking is ever wholly based on pure, detached logical reasoning. It might seem somewhat ‘irrational’ to exploit an emotion to solve a problem. Our culture teaches us to believe that thoughts and emotions are separate things. But this makes no sense from the viewpoint of Work: when it can’t control a resource that it needs, this will appear from Work’s point of view to be just an additional obstacle. So far as your agents for Work are concerned, exploiting Anger to turn off Sleep is like using a stick to extend one’s reach. No matter that when this is seen from outside, it appears to be "emotional”: to Work this need not seem anything than another way to achieve its goal. We're always exploiting fantasies in the course of our everyday reasoning, and we all use such tricks for 'self-control'”

To stay awake, you can measure out the right amount of some stimulant. You can pinch yourself to produce some pain; or adopt an uncomfortable posture, or take a deep breath, or just set your jaw. You can move to a more exciting place, or indulge in a strenuous exercise. Or, you can make yourself angry or afraid—by imagining that you have failed.

A major part of our daily lives consists of these kinds of activities. It's customary to assume that it’s ‘you’ who is choosing to do them. But often they come from small parts of your mind that are trying to change their environments. We need to imagine fictional things whenever we solve a geometry problem, or look forward to a forthcoming vacation. Whenever we think, we use fantasies to envision what we don't yet have, but might need. To think about changing the way things are, we have to imagine how they might be.

Student: Again, I agree that we do such things—but again, I cannot help wondering why. Why cannot Work just turn off Sleep, but must use such indirect methods? Why do we have to tell lies to ourselves, by inventing illusions and fantasies—instead of simply commanding our minds to do whatever we want them to do? Why doesn’t Work have better connections?

One answer seems clear: Directness would be too dangerous. If Work could simply turn Hunger off, we’d all be in peril of starving to death. If Work could directly switch Anger on, we might find ourselves fighting most of the time. If Work could simply extinguish Sleep, we'd be likely to wear our bodies out. This is why it's distressing to hold your breath, and why it's so hard not to fall asleep—or to take control over how much you eat. Few animals that could do such things would live to have any descendants. Consequently, our brains evolved ways to keep our minds from meddling with the systems that work to keep us alive. Hence, we can interfere with those processes, only by becoming devious. We can’t simply suppress the urge to sleep—but eventually, we discover some tricks that can do this by using indirect methods.

For example, here Work has no direct way to stop Sleep, but has learned that Anger undermines Sleep. And while Work has no direct way to activate Anger, it has learned that a certain fantasy can arouse Anger. So if Work can somehow activate that fantasy, then Anger will start to inhibit Sleep, and Work will be able to get back to work.

Student: Your theory suggests more questions than it answers. How could Work manage to learn such a trick? How are those fantasies produced? How are those memories retrieved? How can a fantasy make you angry? How does Work induce that fantasy? How does Anger inhibit Sleep? And why do we need to sleep at all? Considering how much time it wastes, and all the inconvenience it brings, why did we ever evolve such a thing?

§5-8 Simuli will talk about how machines could make fantasies, §6-2.2 Remembering will consider how memories might be retrieved, and §9-2.1 Self-Control will discuss how Work might learn to use such a trick. As for why we need to sleep at all, it is strange how little we know about this. Recent research suggests that it plays important roles in how we learn, but clearly, sleep serves other purposes. It is common in evolution that whenever some new kind of function appears, other systems evolve new ways to exploit it. Thus once a first form of sleep evolved, other functions were found for it—perhaps for renewing depleted resources, for repairing damage to organs, or, perhaps for imagining things without exposure to external risk. So, we should not expect to find one reason for all the many aspects of sleep—or for any other mental function.

Student: How does Anger inhibit Sleep in the first place?

That must involve ancient machinery. We're born with great systems of built-in connections that help us recognize dangers, failures and other sorts of emergencies. These 'alarms' have connections to other resources, such as the “Emotion-Arousers” of §1-6, which can drive into those great cascades—like anger, anxiety, fear, or pain—that can reset all our priorities. [See §§Alarms.]

Student: You haven't discussed how Anger works.

One theory could be that the state we call ‘Anger’ suppresses some of our more thoughtful resources—so that we become less 'reasonable'. Then we tend to make more quick decisions, and thus are disposed to take more risks. It is tempting to think of such a person as erratic and unpredictable. Yet paradoxically such persons become, in certain ways, more predictable than they’d normally be—and that can have a useful effect: when you are angry and express a threat, your opponent may sense that you won’t change your mind—because you are no longer ‘reasonable.’ The effectiveness of apparent threats depends on convincing antagonists that one truly intends to carry them out. If you can make yourself think that your threat is real, this can help you to display the emotional signs that will make your opponent believe it, too!

Critic: Not all types of anger cause rapid decisions. When Charles flies into a sudden rage, and punches someone who taunted him, his decision is quick—and he takes a big risk. But when Joan is chronically angry about the destruction of rainforest habitats, she may become deliberate and methodical at raising funds for saving them.

Our adult emotions continue to grow into ever more convoluted arrangements. As we age, we can train our emotional states—and modify their outward signs—till they no longer resemble their infantile shapes.

Physiologist: Anger is not just a state of mind; it also raises your muscle tone, fires you up with energy, and speeds up your reaction time. This involves the body and not just the brain.

Certainly, Anger engages many bodily functions; it can affect your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and sweating. However, when seen in the Cloud–of–Resources view, there is nothing special about such connections; the body itself then appears as just one more set of resources to exploit. (And quite a few of those same effects will occur if you simply hold your breath.) For, it is easy to see why such systems evolved: anger helps us to prepare for certain and emergencies—such as fighting, defense, and intimidation. However, we should not too closely identify these with how Anger changes one’s Ways to Think; it is true that these interact with those somatic effects, but yet are far from being the same sorts of things. [See §§Embodiment.]

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TRANSITION?

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[i] In Expression of The Emotions In Man And Animals

[ii] In §6-3 we’ll say more about what sometimes makes a goal feel like a force.

[iii] Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, in “Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory", Science, 150 p.975, 1965.

[iv] For example, see www.umass.edu/preferen/mpapers/SingerEmpathy.pdf

[v] in “Why you can’t build a machine that feels pain,” Brainstorms, Bradford Books, 1978. This is an ironic title for the deeper idea that 'pain' is a suitcase word that comprises so many ideas and processes that it does not make much technical sense to speak of it as definite kind of entity.

[vi]See “Pain: Past, Present and Future, “ Ronald Melzack, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 1993, 47:4, 615-629.

[vii] Marian Osterweis, Arthur Kleinman, and David Mechanic, "Pain and disability: Clinical, Behavioral, and Public Policy Perspectives." National Academy Press, 1987

[viii] F.M. Lewis, “Experienced personal control and quality of life in late stage cancer patients. Nursing Research, 31(2) 113-119, 1982

[ix] —From a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written during Wilde's imprisonment in Reading.

[x] See http://www.counselingforloss.com/article8.htm.

[xi] “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," pp 47-48, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1993.

[xii] Kay Redfield Jamison, "Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity," Sci. Amer., Feb. 1995 V. 272 No. 2 Pp. 62-67

[xiii] Most animals simply do not have the high-level resources that people have, and this makes it risky to apply to ourselves what we learn from laboratory animals.

[xiv]§¢Duplication describes a remedy for this.”

[xv] Thus, to ascend from the top of Kilimanjaro to the summit of, say, Mt. Everest, you would have to climb down and then up again.

[xvi] See my essay on Jokes, at web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

[xvii] See the extensive discussion in William James' text, “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

[xviii] Sigmund Freud, inA General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1920, p259.

[xix] For more details of this episode, see §4.5 of SoM.