Learned Reactive Critics. An infant will cry when it is exposed to high levels of noise—thus summoning a parent to help. However, later we learn other ways to react, such as moving to a quieter place. And eventually we learn to ‘figure out’ ways to deal with more difficult obstacles—by using higher levels of what we call ‘deliberative’ thinking and then it would seem to make more sense to think of these as involving our Critics.
Deliberative Critics. Whenever your reasoning gets into trouble, you need ways to get around obstacles. Here are some tricks we can use for this:
Action A did not do what I expected. (Try a different Way to Predict.)
Something I did had bad side effects. (Try to undo some previous choice.)
Achieving goal A made goal B harder. (Try them in the opposite order.)
I need additional information. (Search for another relationship.)
Reflective Critics.[136] When you try to solve problems by trial and error, you need critics as ‘diagnosticians’ to either verify that you’re making progress or to suggest a better way to proceed.
I’ve made many attempts with no success. (Select a better way to think.)
I’ve repeated the same thing several times. (Some ‘mental manager’ is incompetent.)
Achieving a subgoal did not attain its ‘parent’ goal. (Find another way to subdivide the problem.)
This conclusion needs more evidence. (Propose a better experiment.)
Self-Reflective Critics. When your reflections fail to help, then you may start to criticize yourself:
I have been too indecisive. (Try a method that worked on a similar problem.)
I missed a good opportunity. (Switch to a different set of Critics.)
I yield to too many distractions. (Try to exercise more Self-Control.)
I don’t have all the knowledge I need. (Find a good book or go back to school.)
Self-Conscious Critics. Some assessments may even affect one’s current image of oneself, and this can affect one’s overall state:
None of my goals seem valuable. (Depression.)
I’m losing track of what I am doing. (Confusion.)
I can achieve any goal I like! (Mania.)
I could lose my job if I fail at this. (Anxiety.)
Would my friends approve of this? (Insecurity.)
I should note that we often say “Critic” to mean someone who points out deficiencies, and it would be hard to describe the Correctors, Suppressors and Censors [§3-5] without using negative words like inhibit, prevent, or terminate.
However, words like positive and negative usually do not make sense by themselves; here, detecting a flaw can be and essential step toward helping one to achieve a success—for example, by keeping you from changing your goal or from wasting your time on other temptations—and thus encouraging you to persist. Frequently, the key to solving a difficult problem can lie in finding ways to make yourself ‘stick to a plan’, although it may bring some suffering before you achieve your longer-range goal.
Indeed, after we solve a difficult problem, we may wrongly credit our final success only to our very last step, and tell ourselves, “What a clever solution I’ve found!” Then, of course, it makes good sense to remember the answer to that particular question. However, it would often be better to also ask, “What kept me from finding it earlier?” For, what often makes a question seem ‘hard’ is not knowing a good way to search for the answer. This suggests that after we answer a difficult question, it may be useful to remember which strategy led to solving it by reducing the size of the search for the answer. (A good way to ‘remember’ this would be to create a new Critic to recognize that problem-type, and connect it to a Selector for that strategy.)
This subject of “Credit-Assignment” is very important because it bears on the quality of what people learn. Indeed Chapter 8 will take a further step and argue that:
What we learn can be more profound, if we assign the credit for our success, not to the final act itself—or even to the strategy that led to it—but to some even earlier choice of a process or plan that selected the winning strategy.
Generally, lower-level Critics will tend to have shorter-term effects. Thus, “Make sure that your elbow won’t topple that block,” can alter your tactics temporarily, without changing your larger-scale strategy; then even if this leads to making a mistake, you may be able to correct it and continue with your original plan. However, high-level critics can cause longer-term changes—for example, by switching you to self-reflective thoughts like, “I’m not good at solving this kind of problem. Perhaps it is time to consider a different profession.”
In any case, repeated failures can cause you to ‘brood’ about what the future might hold for you or about your social relationships, as in, “I should not get into such situations,” or “My friends will lose their respect for me,” or “I don’t have enough self-discipline.” Such thoughts can lead to the large-scale cascades that we usually call ‘emotional.’
§7-6. Emotional Embodiment
Many thinkers have maintained that emotional states are closely involved with our bodies—and that this is why we so often can recognize happiness, sadness, joy, or grief from a person’s expressions, gestures, and gaits. Indeed, some psychologists have even maintained that those bodily activities do not merely ‘express’ our emotions, but actually are what causes them:
William James: “Our natural way of thinking about ... emotions is that the mental perception of some facts excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.”
For example, James suggests that when you sense that a rival is insulting you, this makes you clench your fist and strike—and that your anger does not come first, but from you feeling of these activities. However, your annoyance with such a situation must depend on the memories that intervene to affect how we interpret those ‘exciting facts’—and then cause you to clench your fist—so it seems unlikely that those perceptions ‘directly’ lead to those actions. Nevertheless, James argues that such intermediate thoughts could not have such strong effects by themselves: