At our higher Reflective levels, our representations span many scales of time and space, and our current Self-Representations can range from thinking “I’m holding this cup” to “I am a Mathematician,” or “I am a person who lives on the Earth,” or sometimes, perhaps, only a little more than a constant, vague sense of ‘being aware.’ To be sure, a person may also have the impression of thinking all these simultaneously, but I suspect that these are constantly shifting; our sense of thinking them all at once comes from the “Immanence Illusion” of §4-1, because the contents of our various Context-Boxes are so rapidly accessible.
What Controls the Persistence of Processes?
Edmund Burke: “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.”
Whatever you’re trying to think about, you have other concerns that compete with it—and each should persist for long enough to justify the effort and time it will cost to switch them on and off. Still, everyone knows such feelings as these:
“I’ve been spending so much time on this problem that I am losing my motivation; besides, it has gotten so complex that I simply cannot keep track of it; perhaps I should quit and do something else.”
When none of the methods we’ve tried have worked, how much longer should we persist? What decides when we should quit—and lose whatever investment we’ve spent? We always have at least some concern with how we conserve our materials, energy, money, and friends—and each such concern would seem to suggest that we have some Critics that detect when that particular element may be getting into short supply, and then suggest ways conserve or replenish it. Such critics would lead us to think, “I’m doing too many things at once,” or “I can’t afford to buy both of these,” or “I don’t want to lose my friendship with Charles.”
The simplest way to conserve your time is to abandon the goals that consume too much of it. But renouncing goals will often conflict with your ideals, as when they are things that you’ve promised to do, or that others already expect you to do. Then you might also have to suppress those values, or even regard them as handicaps—but going against your high-level ideals can lead to cascades that you recognize as tension, guilt, distress, or fear—along with the shame and humiliation we talked about earlier. So making such decisions can thus cause you to become “emotional.”
Citizen: But certain, well-disciplined persons seem able to set such emotional feelings aside, and simply do what seems “rational.” Why do most of us people find this so hard to do?
It seems to me that it is a myth that there exists a ‘rational’ way to think. One is always comparing various goals, and deciding which ones to put aside, but the apparent merits of those alternatives will always depend on other aspects of your mental state.
In any case, each Way to Think will be useless unless can persist for long enough to make some progress. To do this, it will need at least some ability to keep other processes from stopping it, and this could be done to some extent by controlling which of your Critics are working now. Let’s consider a few extremes of this.
What if your set of active Critics does not change? Then you would be likely to keep repeating the same approach because, after each attempt to change your way to think, those Critics would try to switch you back again—and you might get stuck with a ‘one-track mind.’
What if some Critics stay on all the time? Certain Critics must always be active to make us react to serious hazards—but if these are not selected carefully, it could lead to obsessive behaviors by repeatedly making you focus too sharply only on certain particular subjects.
What if all your Critics get turned off? Then all your questions would seem to be answered because you are no longer able to ask them, and all your problems would seem to be gone because nothing seems to have any flaws.
Everything may seem wonderful during such a ‘mystical experience’—but such ‘revelations’ usually fade when enough of your critics get turned back on.
What if too many Critics are active at once? Then you’d keep noticing flaws to correct, and spend so much time repairing them that you would never get any important things done. And if you find ugliness everywhere, your friends may perceive you as depressed.
What if too many Critics are turned off? If you can ignore most alarms and concerns, that would help you to ‘concentrate’—but it also might lead you to ignore errors and flaws in your arguments. However, the fewer Critics you activate, the fewer goals you will try to pursue, and then you would tend to be mentally dull.
Then what should decide which ones are active? Your thinking would become chaotic if too many goals were to freely compete without any larger-scale management—but if and particular Way to Think persisted too long, you would appear to have a ‘one-track’ mind.
Chapter §9 will argue that control over which of our Critics are active must never be too highly centralized, because sometimes we need to concentrate—yet still respond to emergencies. Also, consider what might happen if large classes of Critics turned off, and then on, for excessive durations of time: then there would be long cycles in which you would first be euphoric, when nothing would ever seem to be wrong, followed by intervals in which no goal would seem to be worth pursuing. In such cases, the Critics that normally help us to think could play a role, when they’re poorly controlled, in what we call manic-depressive disorders.
Questions
Which of our ways to think are inborn? Which of them are not innate, but are ones that each child eventually learns from its experience with its environment? Then do certain individuals go on to discover special techniques that lead them to yet better ways to think? We’ll discuss this in §8-8 Genius.
What determines the urgencies of our goals? What keeps track of the tasks that we have postponed? Are there clocks or timers in our brains that schedule or otherwise regulate our higher-level activities? We’ll talk about this in Chapter §9.
How many things can we think about at once, and in how many different realms? How many different contexts can we manage to keep active? How are such activities distributed among the billions of cells in our brains?
How does Context affect how we think? We’ll come back to this in Chapter §10.
Part VIII
§8-1. Resourcefulness
“Although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us, they infallibly fall short in others, from which we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the arrangements of their parts.”