6.3 Intentions and Goals

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them." —Alan Watts.

Sometimes we seem to act passively, just reacting to things that happen to us—but at other times we feel more in control, and feel that we’re actively choosing our goals. I suspect that this most often happens when two or more goals become active at once and thereby lead to a conflict. For as we noted in §4-1, when our routine thinking runs into trouble, this engages our higher reflective levels.

For example, when angry or greedy enough, we are likely to take actions that later may make us have feelings of shame or guilt. Then we may offer such justifications as, “that impulse became too strong to resist” or “I found that I did it in spite of myself.” Such excuses relate to the conflicts between our immediate goals and our higher ideals, and every society tries to teach its members to resist their urges to breach its conventions. We call this developing ‘self-control’ and each culture makes maxims about such feelings.

Moralist: No merit comes from actions based on self-serving wishes.

Psychiatrist: One must learn to control one’s unconscious desires.

Jurist: To be guilty in the first-degree, an offense must be deliberate.

Still, an offender can object, “I didn’t intend to do those things,” —as though a person is not ‘responsible’ for an action that wasn’t intentional. But, what kinds of behavior might lead you to think that a person did something “deliberately”—in contrast to it having resulted from mental processes that were not under that person’s control?

To understand this, it may help to observe that we have similar thoughts about physical things; when we find that some object is hard to control, we sometimes imagine that it has a goal—and say, “This puzzle-piece doesn’t want to fit in,” or “My car seems determined not to start.” Why would we think of an object in that way, when we know that it has no such intentions?

The same thing can happen inside your mind, when one of your goals becomes so strong that it is hard to think about anything else. Then it may seem to come from no choice of your own, but is somehow being imposed upon you.But, what could make you pursue a goal that does not seem to be one that you want? This could happen when that particular goal conflicts with some of your high-level values, or when you have other goals with different aims; in any case, there is no reason to expect all of one’s goals to be consistent.

However, this still does not answer the question of why a goal can seem like a physical force, as in, “That urge became irresistible.” And indeed, a ‘powerful’ goal can seem to push other goals aside, and even when you try to oppose it, it may prevail if you don’t fight back strongly enough. Thus both forces and goals share some features like these:

Both seem to aim in a certain direction. Both ‘push back’ when we try to deflect them. Each seems to have a ‘strength,’ or ‘intensity. Both tend to persist till the cause of them ends.

For example, suppose that some external force is applied to your arm—say, strongly enough to cause some pain—and your A-Brain reacts by pushing back (or by moving away)—but, whatever you do, it keeps pressing on you. In such a case, your B-brain might see nothing more than a sequence of separate events. However, your higher reflective levels might recognize these as matching this particular pattern:

“Something is resisting my efforts to make it stop. I recognize this as a process which shows some persistence, aim, and resourcefulness.”

Furthermore, you might recognize a similar pattern inside your mind when some resources make choices in ways that the rest of your mind cannot control, as when you do something “in spite of yourself.” Again, that pattern may seem as though some external force was imposed on you. So it often makes practical sense to represent both forces and intentions as though they were assistants or antagonists.

Student: But isn’t it merely a metaphor, to speak of a goal as resembling a force? Surely it’s bad to use the same words for things with such different characteristics.

We should never say ‘merely’ for metaphors, because that is what all descriptions are; we can rarely state just what something is, but can only describe what something is like—that is, to describe it in terms of other things we already know to have some similar properties—and then to consider the differences. Then, we label it with the same or a similar name—so that thenceforth that older word or phrase will include this additional meaning-sense. This is why most of our words are ‘suitcase-words’—and later I will argue that the ambiguities of our words may be the greatest treasures that we inherit from our ancestors.

We’ve mentioned goals many times in this book—but never discussed how goals might work. So let us turn from the subject of how a goal feels to ask what a goal might actually be!

Difference-Engines

Aristotle: “Differences arise when what we get is different from what we desire; for it is like getting nothing at all when we do not get what we aim at.”

Sometimes people appear to behave as though they had no direction or aim. At other times they seem to have goals. But what is a goal, and how can we have one? If you try to answer such questions in everyday words like, “a goal is thing that one wants to achieve,” you will find yourself going in circles because, then, you must ask what wanting is—and then you find that you’re trying to describe this in terms of other words like motive, desire, purpose, aim, hope, aspire, yearn and crave.

More generally, you get caught in this trap whenever you try to describe a state of mind in terms of other psychology-words, because these never lead to talking about the underlying machinery. However, we can break out of that with a statement like this:

A person will seem to have a goal when they keep different techniques that are likely to change their present situation into a certain other condition.

This takes us out of the psychological realm by leading us to ask about what kind of machinery could do such things. Here is one way such a process might work:

Aim: It begins with a description of a certain possible future situation. It also can recognize some differences between the situation it now is in and that “certain other condition.”

Resourcefulness: It is also equipped with some methods that may be able to reduce those particular kinds of differences.

Persistence: A process that keeps applying those methods. Then, in psychological terms, we will perceive it as trying to trying to change what it now has into what it ‘wants.’

Persistence, aim, and resourcefulness! The next few sections will argue that this particular triplet of properties could explain the functions of what we call motives and goals, by giving us answers to questions like these:

What makes some goals strong and others weak? What are the feelings that accompany them? What could make an impulse "too strong to resist? What makes certain goals ‘active’ now? What determines how long they’ll persist?

No machine had clearly displayed those three traits of Aim, Persistence, and Resourcefulness—until 1957, when Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw and Herbert Simon developed a computer program called the “General Problem Solver.” Here is a simplified version of how it worked; we’ll call this version a Difference-Engine.[19]

At every step, this program compares its descriptions of the present and that future situation, and this produces a list of differences between them. Then it focuses on the most serious difference and applies some technique that has been designed to reduce this particular type of difference. If this succeeds, the program then tries to reduce what now seems to be the most serious difference. However, whenever such a step makes things worse, the system goes back and tries a different technique.

For example, every infant is born with such a system for maintaining ‘normal’ body temperature: when too hot, the baby may sweat, pant, stretch out, and/or vasodilate; when too cold, it will curl up, shiver, vasoconstrict and/or raise its metabolic rate.

At first we may be unaware of such processes, because such instinctive reactions begin at very low cognitive levels. For example, when you become too hot, you automatically start to sweat. However, when perspiration drips, you may notice this, and deliberate: “I must find some way to escape from this heat.” Then your acquired knowledge may suggest other actions to take, such as moving to an air-conditioned place. If you feel too cold, you might put on a sweater, turn on a stove, or begin to exercise (which can make you produce ten times as much heat).

Now we can interpret "having a goal” to mean that a Difference-Engine is actively working to remove those differences.

Student: To have a goal, does one really need a representation of the desired situation? Would it not be sufficient just to have a list of desired properties?

This is a matter of degree, because one could never specify every aspect of a situation. We could represent a ‘desired situation’ as a simple, rough sketch of a future scene, as a list of a few of its properties, or as just some single property (for example, that it is causing some pain).

Student. It seems to me that we should distinguish between ‘having a goal’ and actively ‘wanting’ it. I would say that your difference-engine is a “wanting machine’ and that the goal itself is only the part that you called its ‘aim’—its current description of some future situation.’

An imagined description becomes an active goal when one is running a process that keeps changes conditions until they fit that description. Our everyday language does not serve well for making the kinds of distinctions we need and, to remedy that, each technical field must develop its own specialized language or ‘jargon.’ However, it will be hard to do this for psychology until we can agree on which more detailed models of minds to use.

Romanticist: This Difference-Engine idea could account for some of what "having a goal" might mean—but it doesn’t explain the joy of success, or the distress that besets us when we fail to achieve what we’ve hoped for.

I agree that no single meaning of goal can explain all of those cascades of feelings, because wanting is such a large suitcase of concepts that no single idea can embrace them all. Besides, many things that people do come from processes with no goals at all, or goals of which they are unaware. Nevertheless, the Difference-Engine’s characteristics capture more of our everyday concept of ‘goal’ than any other description I’ve seen.

Student. What happens when that difference-engine finds several differences at once? Can it work on them all simultaneously, or must it deal with them one-by-one?

When several differences are evident, one might try to reduce several at once, perhaps by using different parts of the brain. However, Newell and Simon concluded that it is usually best to first try to remove the one that seems most significant, because this is likely to change quite a few of the others. So the General Problem Solver included a way to assign a different priority to each kind of difference that it could detect.

Student: Isn’t that a flaw in that? What if Carol places a block in a place that prevents her from building the rest of her arch? Sometimes reducing one difference might make all the other differences worse.

That turned out to be a severe limitation, because a Difference-Engine, by itself, has no way to plan several steps ahead—for example, by the methods suggested in §5-5—so it cannot sustain a short-term loss for the purpose of later, larger gains. So, although their system could solve many problems, this limitation seems to have led Newell and Simon to move in other directions.[20] In my opinion, they should have persisted, because this project had so many good ideas that I find it strange that it was not further developed in later years. In any case, we can’t expect any one method to solve every problem—and our forthcoming project will try to embody the concepts that Newell and Simon abandoned.

In retrospect, one could argue that the system got stuck because it was not equipped with ways to reflect on its own performance—the way that people can ‘stop to think’ about the methods that they have been using. However, in a great but rarely recognized essay, Newell and Simon did indeed suggest a very ingenious way to make such a system reflect on itself.[21]

On the positive side, the General Problem Solver was equipped with several ways to reduce each kind of difference, and it even included a place for ways to introduce new kinds of representations.

What if one fails to solve a problem, even after using reflection and planning? Then one may start to consider that this goal may not be worth the effort it needs—and this kind of frustration then can lead one to ‘self-consciously’ think about which goals one ‘really’ wants to achieve. Of course, if one elevates that level of thought too much, then one might start to ask questions like, “Why should I have any goals at all,” or, “What purpose does having a purpose serve”—the troublesome kinds of questions that our so-called “existentialists” could never found plausible answers to.

However, the obvious answer is that this is not a matter of personal choice: we have goals because that’s how our brains evolved: the people without goals became extinct because they simply could not compete.

Goals and Subgoals

Aristotle: We deliberate not about ends, but about means. … We assume the end and think about by what means we can attain it. If it can be produced by several means, we consider which one of them would be best …[and then] we consider by which means that one can be achieved, until we come to the first cause (which we will discover last).[22]

Section §2-2 considered some questions about how we connect our subgoals to goals—but did not stop to investigate how those subgoals might originate. However, a Difference-Engine does this by itself because, every difference it needs to reduce becomes another subgoal for it! For example, if Joan is in Boston today, but wants to present a proposal in New York tomorrow, then she will have to reduce these differences:

The meeting is 200 miles away. Her presentation is not yet complete. She must pay for transportation, etc.

Walking would be impractical because that distance is too large, but Joan could drive, take a train, or an airplane. She knows this ‘script’ for an airplane trip:

Each phase of this script, in turn, needs several steps. She could “Get to the airport” by bicycle, taxi, or bus, but she decides to drive her car, which begins with a series of subgoals like these:

When Joan reviews that airplane trip, she decides it would waste too much of her time to park the car and pass through the security line. The actual flight from home to New York takes no more than an hour or so, and the railroad trip is four hours long, but it ends near her destination—and she could spend all that time at productive work. She ‘changes her mind’ to take the train. [23]

Similarly, when Carol decides to change this into this , she will need to split this job into parts, and that will need several subgoals and scripts.

Then each of those subgoals will turn out to require several more parts and processes—and when we developed a robot to do such things, its software needed several hundred parts. For example, Add a block needed a branching network of subgoals like these:

Each of those subgoals has problems to solve. Choose must not select a block that is already supporting the tower top. See must recognize objects regardless of color, size, and shades of light—and even when they partly obscured by other objects. Grasp must adapt the robot’s hand to the perceived size and shape of the block to be moved. And Move must guide the arm and hand through paths in space that never strike the tower's top or hit the child's face.

How do we find out which subgoals we’ll need to achieve before we can accomplish a job? You could discover them by trial and error, or by doing experiments inside your mind, or recalling some prior experience. But perhaps our most generally useful method is to use a Difference-Engine—because every difference that this detects could thereby become a new subgoal for us.

To summarize, our idea is that “to have an active goal” amounts to running a Difference Engine-like process. I suspect that, inside each human brain, many such processes all run at once, at various levels in various realms. These range from instinctive systems that work all the time—like those that maintain our temperatures (and these are so opaque to reflection that we don’t recognize them as goals at all)— up to those highest self-conscious levels at which we keep trying try to be more like the persons we wish we were.