When Carol was trying to fill her pail, she had to try several experiments before she succeeded by using her spoon. When she recognized that her goal was achieved, she felt satisfaction and a sense of reward—and then those pleasant feelings somehow helped her to learn and remember. So this process involved a good many steps:
Carol filled the pail with her spoon.
She recognized that her goal was achieved.
Then she felt pleased with her success.
Then, somehow, that pleasure helped her to remember.
Now we’re glad that she felt gratified—but what functions did all those feelings serve, and why should that process take so many steps? What sort of role might pleasure play in how we construct our memories? Why couldn’t Carol just simply remember which methods worked and which ones failed?
The answer is that ‘remembering’ is not simple at all. On the surface, it might seem easy enough—like dropping a note into a box, and then taking it out when you need it. But when we look more closely at this, we see that it involves a good many steps: You first must select which items that note should contain, and find adequate ways to represent them—and then you must give them some set of connections, so that after you store those parts away, you’ll be able to reassemble them.
Citizen: Some say that our brains remember everything so, that if you cannot recall some event, some part of your brain must be suppressing it.
This ‘photographic memory’ myth is not supported by evidence; the consensus from many experiments is that we don’t remember nearly so much. [See §6-2]
Student: What about the old idea that, for each of our accomplishments, we just ‘reinforce’ our successful reactions? In other words, we simply connect the problem we faced to the actions that led to our solving it.
That is a simplistic way to describe how learning might work, when seen from outside—but it doesn’t explain what might happen inside. For, neither ‘the problem we faced’ nor ‘the actions we took’ are simple units that we can connect—so, first you must choose some way to describe both the ‘If’ and the ‘Then’ of that pair of events. Then, the quality of what you learn will depend on the natures of both those descriptions.
Thus, for Carol to learn, her brain must construct some descriptions of which methods worked—as well as, perhaps, of which methods failed. But after her struggle to fill her cup, which of all the things she did should get credit for her final success? Should Carol attribute her success to which pair of shoes she was wearing then, or the place in which that event occurred, or whether the weather was cloudy or clear? What if she smiled while using that fork, but happened to frown when using that spoon; what keeps her from learning irrelevant rules like, “To fill a cup, it helps to frown?”
In other words, when humans learn, it is not just a matter of making connections but of constructing the structures that those connections connect—and no theory of learning can be complete unless it also accounts for this. Furthermore, we may need to represent not only those external events, but also some relevant mental events. Thus Carol will need some machinery to decide which of the thoughts she was thinking then should be represented in what she remembers. And she will need some ways to store those records so that she can recollect when she needs them.
Student: You still haven’t explained where feelings come in, such as the pleasure that comes from Carol’s success.
In everyday life it’s convenient to use terms like suffering, pleasure, joy, and grief as though those words referred to mental states that all our acquaintances are familiar with. But when asked to describe those states of mind, we usually find ourselves lost for words because the mental conditions that we call feelings are such complex cascades of processes. For example, it would seem that we speak about pleasure when certain resources recognize some processes that help us identify which of our recent activities should get credit for some recent success. Near the end of the book we’ll return to these questions about how we make those ‘Credit Assignments’ and what are the effects of the feelings called pleasure.
§2-6. Conscience, Values and Self-Ideals
“I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
One way that we differ from animals (except, perhaps, for the elephants) is in the great length of our childhoods. One consequence of this is that no other species accumulates so much and so many kinds of knowledge—and none of them seem to grow anything close to our human traditions and values.
What kind of person would you like to be? Are you careful and cautious or brave and audacious? Do you follow the crowd, or prefer to lead? Would you rather be tranquil or driven by passion? Such personal traits depend, in part, upon each person’s inheritance. But also they are partly shaped by our networks of social attachments.
Once our human attachment bonds form, they begin to serve multiple functions. First they keep children close to their parents—and this provides such services as nutrition, defense, and companionship. But also (if we are right about this) they have special effects on how children learn—by providing each child with new ways to re-arrange its priorities. Also, the self-conscious emotions that come with this have other, very specific effects. Pride tends to make you more confident, more optimistic and adventurous, while Shame makes you want to change yourself so that you’ll never get into that state again.
The following section discusses what happens when children’s Imprimers go absent; the result of this can be severe. But older children and adults can envision how an absent imprimer might react to unusual acts or ideas, or evaluate a proposed new goal. We all know this kind of experience: of predicting (and then reacting to) what we think that an absent Imprimer might do—and then we give this various names like ‘moral sense’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘knowledge of right and wrong.’
To do this kind of ‘internal impriming,’ a child will have to construct some sort of ‘model’ that helps to predict its Imprimer’s reactions. How might that child think about this? First, it might not think about it at all, because the rest of its mind has no access to it. Or, that model might seem, to that child, as though there were someone else in its mind—perhaps in the form of a made-up companion. It might even be seen as embodied in some external object—such as a rag doll or a baby-blanket.[13] We’ll discuss such models in §9.
What if some other part of that child’s brain could find a way to take over control of the systems that raise or elevate the priorities of its various goals? Then such a child could praise itself, and through those connections could select which new goals to elevate—or else that child could censure itself, and thus impose new constraints on itself.
At this point that child will have, in effect, an internal system of values—or what is commonly called a ‘conscience’. Perhaps Freud had a process like this in mind when suggesting that a child can ‘introject’ some of its parents’ attitudes. If a child gains enough control of this, it could become ‘ethically autonomous’ in the sense that it could eventually replace those earlier value-sets. However, if most of those values remain in place, then later attempts to change them could lead to internal conflicts in which the child tries to oppose the values acquired from its imprimers.
13
This could relate to some psychoanalytic theories, which argue that such objects might help to make transition from early attachments to other kinds of relationships. See, for example,