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.[110]
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.
110
In each cycle of operation, the program finds some differences between the current state and the desired one. Then it uses a separate method to guess which of those differences is most significant, and makes a new subgoal to reduce that difference. If this results in a smaller difference, the process goes on; otherwise it works on some other difference. For more details of how this worked, see Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, “Report on a general problem solving program,” in