Consider how smart it is to know you’re confused (as opposed to not knowing when you are confused). It suggests that you’ve switched from the problem at hand to a larger-scale view of your motives and goals, from which you might be able to recognize that you have wasted time on minor details, or lost track of what you were trying to do, or even that you had chosen some wrong kind of goal to pursue. This could lead to making a better plan—or it might even lead to a large-scale cascade, as in, “Just thinking about this makes me feel ill. Perhaps it’s time to quit all of this.”[78]
It seems to me that this is a key to the question of when we engage higher levels of thinking: it is when our usual systems fail that reflective thinking gets engaged. For example, normally a person walks without thinking about how intricate ‘walking’ is. But when Joan’s knee stops working properly, then she may start to more closely examine how she normally moves around—and may start to more carefully plan out her paths.
Still, as we noted in §4-1, self-reflection has limits and risks. For any attempt to inspect oneself is likely to change what it’s looking at, and may even tend to disrupt itself. It is hard enough to describe a thing that keeps changing its shape before your eyes—and surely it is harder yet to describe things that change when you think about them. So you’re virtually certain to get confused when you think about what you are thinking now—and this must be one of the reasons why we’re so puzzled about what we call consciousness.
§5-6. Self-Conscious Reflection
“There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.”
This chapter first discussed Instinctive Reactions in §1-4; this includes our systems for feeding, breathing, and other functions that keep our bodies and brains alive. It also includes some machinery for what are sometimes called primary emotions—namely the systems that indicate various states of physical needs such as nutrition, defense, and etc. The Learned Reaction level contains extensions of these that are learned after birth. The Deliberate and Reflective levels are engaged to solve more difficult kinds of problems. Self-reflection enters when those problems require us to involve the models that we make of ourselves, or our views of our possible futures.
However, in addition to these, it would seem that humans are unique in having a level of Self-Conscious Reflection that enables us to think about our ‘higher’ values and ideals. For example, when Joan asks herself questions like, “What would my friends have thought of me,” she wonders whether her actions hold up to the values that she has set for herself. Then Joan might go on to think, “My friends might say I had too little care, not just for myself, but also for them.” To think such thoughts, Joan must have built some models of how her friends might react, or she might have recalled some past distress when previous friends censured similar acts. In any case, if she finds conflicts between how she behaves and the values of those to whom she’s attached, that could lead to the kinds of cascades we called “self-conscious emotions” in §2-2. So let’s add another level for this, and refer to this system as “Model Six.”
Psychologist: I do not see clear distinctions between the various levels of Model Six. For example, when you reflect on your recent thoughts, are not you just deliberating about your deliberations? And similarly, is not self-reflection just one particular kind of reflection? It seems to me that all those levels above the first all use the same kind of thinking techniques.
I agree that those boundaries are indistinct. Even your simplest deliberations may involve what one might call self-reflective thoughts about how to allocate your time and resources—as in, “If this doesn’t won’t work then I’ll have to try that,” or, “I have already spent too much time on it.”
Philosopher: But if those levels are so indistinct, what is the point of distinguishing them? No theory should have more parts than it needs.
This policy of searching for the simplest theory that answers the questions that you are currently asking—has worked amazingly well in Physics. However, I think it has retarded Psychology. For when you know that your theory is incomplete, you must also leave room for the kinds of expansions that you think you may later need. Most older theories of psychology had provided explanation only for how certain animals behaved in extremely simple environment. However, although these eventually were refined to make good predictions in those situations, none of those old ‘behaviorist’ theories were able even to start to explain how thoughtful human beings could self-reflect—without any external behavior at all.
We know that brains have hundreds of specialized parts, and each embryonic brain begins by developing fairly distinct clumps of cells, which can be seen as arranged into levels. However, when some of those cells begin to migrate (as directed by thousands of different genes), and this results in thousands of bundles of links between those primordial clusters and clumps—and those ‘levels’ soon become indistinct.
This means that we cannot expect to precisely divide all the functions of brains into clear and separate mental levels. That would be as futile as to sharply define the borders between the seven seas. Instead, each of our social agencies divides the marine world in different ways for different and conflicting purposes, such as geophysical, ecological, and political. In the same way we’ll need to multiple models of brains, each to suit some different attempt to explain some kinds of mental phenomena. For example, we may turn out to need more elaborate theories about how self-conscious reflection works, if only because of its special importance to those concerned with religious, legal, and ethical questions.
Individualist: Your diagram shows no level or place that oversees and controls the rest. Where is the Self that makes our decisions? What decides which goals we’ll pursue? How do we choose our large-scale plans—and then supervise their carrying-out?
This expresses a real dilemma: No system so complex as this could work without some ways to manage itself. Otherwise it would flail with no sense of direction—and would inanely skip from each thing to the next. On the other side, it would not make sense to locate all control in one single place, for than all would be lost from a single mistake. So the following chapters of this book will multiple ways in which our minds use multiple ways to control themselves, and we’ll come back to the “Self” in chapter §9.
While on the subject of central control, we should point out that Model Six could also be seen in terms of Sigmund Freud’s idea of the mind as a “sandwich” with three major parts.
78
According to Tinbergen, when an animal can’t make a decision, this often results in dropping both alternatives and doing something that seem to be quite irrelevant. However, these “displacement activities” seem to be fixed, so they do not suggest that those animals have thoughtful ways to deal with such conflicts.
79
In