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!