But why must you use such devious tricks to select and control your ways to think—instead of just choosing to do what you want to do? The answer is that you soon would be dead if any particular part of your mind could take over control of all the rest— and our species would quickly become extinct if we were able to simply ignore the demands of hunger or pain or sex. But fortunately, we evolved systems whereby, whenever we faced emergencies, our most urgent instinctive goals can supersede our fantasies.
Along with those built-in priorities, every human culture develops ways to help its members constrain themselves. For example, every game that our children play helps to train them to assume new roles and to swiftly switch among those mental states, while still obeying the rules of that game—which, in effect, is a virtual world. Therefore, and perhaps most important of all, every child should also recognize that a game is only a game. Alas, that’s one lesson too few of us learn.
Self-Control is no simple skill, and many of us spend much of our lives seeking ways to make our minds ‘behave.’ Eventually, we each accumulate techniques whose workings are so opaque to us that we can only use vague suitcase-words for them; this leads to yet one more meaning for ‘Self’—our name for all the methods we use whenever we try to control ourselves.
Dumbbell Ideas and Dispositions
There are two rules for success in life.
First, never tell anyone all that you know.
Why do we find it so easy to say that a certain person tends to be extroverted and sociable—as opposed to being shy and reclusive? More generally, why do we find it so easy to make such two-part distinctions for other aspects of our personalities? Thus we often group our tempers, emotions, moods and traits into pairs that we regard as opposites.
Solitary vs. Sociable Dominant vs. Submissive
Tranquil vs. Agitated Careless vs. Meticulous
Forthright vs. Devious Cheerful vs. Cranky
Audacious vs. Cowardly Joyous vs. Sorrowful
But what inclines us to describe our traits in terms of these kinds of two-part pairs when, for example, Agitation clearly is not the mere absence of Tranquility, nor is Joy just the absence of Sorrow? One explanation could be that this reflects a more general human tendency to see many other aspects of our minds as split into pairs of seemingly opposite qualities.
Left vs. Right Quantitative vs. Qualitative
Thought vs. Feeling Deliberate vs. Spontaneous
Rational vs. Intuitive Literal vs. Metaphorical
Logical vs. Analogical Reductionist vs. Holistic
Intellectual vs. Emotional Scientific vs. Artistic
Conscious vs. Unconscious Serial vs. Parallel
We see similar ‘dumb-bell’ thinking at work when people try to describe the rest of the world in terms of opposing pairs of forces, spirits, or principles.
Perhaps the most amusing instance of this is the popular myth that each person has two distinct kinds of mental activities that are embodied in opposite sides of the brain. In earlier times, the two halves of the brain seemed so alike that they were thought to be almost identical. But then, in the mid-20th century, when surgeons could cut the connections between those halves (in an adult), they were found to have some significant differences.[192] Then both press and public embraced the idea that every brain had two distinct and opposing sides—and this revived many views of the mind as a place for conflicts between such pairs of antagonists:
But how could so many such different distinctions be embodied in the same two halves of the very same brain? The answer is that this is largely a myth; a brain contains hundreds of different resources, and each of those activities involves many of these on both sides of the brain. However, there still may be some truth to that myth, but one can construct better explanations for this. For example, it long has been known that the ‘dominant’ side develops more machinery for language-based activities—and this could lead to more extensive development of self-reflective levels of thinking, while leaving more on the opposite side for spatial and visual activities. Here is what I think might be involved in this:
In early life, we start with mostly similar agencies on either side. Later, as we grow more complex, a combination of genetic and circumstantial effects leads one of each pair to take control of both. Otherwise, we might become paralyzed by conflicts, because many agents would have to serve two masters. Eventually, the adult managers for many skills would tend to develop on the side of the brain most concerned with language because those agencies connect to an unusually large number of other agencies. The less dominant side of the brain will continue to develop, but with more emphasis on lower-level skills, and with less involvement with plans and goals. Then if that brain-half were left to itself, it will seem more childish and less mature because it lacks those higher-level management skills.[193]
Here are some other reasons why we might like making two-part distinctions so much:
Many things seem to have Opposites. It could be that, in early life, it is hard to distinguish what something ‘is’ without some idea of what it is not—and so we tend to think about things in relation to their possible opposites. For example, it often makes sense to classify physical objects as large or small, or as heavy or light, or as cold or hot.
However, when you ask a young child about such things, you’re likely to hear that the opposite of water is milk, that the opposite of dog is cat, or that the opposite of a spoon is a fork. But that very same child may also insist that the opposite of fork is knife. Thus opposites depend on the contexts they’re in, and so may overrule consistency.
Intensities and Magnitudes. Although it is hard to describe what feelings are, it seems easy to say how intense they are. This makes it seem quite natural to apply such adjectives as slightly, largely, or extremely to almost every emotion word—such as sorry, pleasant, happy, or sad.
One often justifies a choice, simply by declaring that one likes this option more than that one. However, sorrow is not the mere absence of joy—nor is pleasure merely the absence of pain, nor is appetizing an opposite to disgusting. It can be convenient to mis-represent such pairs as like the two ends of a single line, but doing this too frequently could lead to one-dimensional ways to think, no matter that such two-part distinctions may blur other dissimilarities between pairs of substantially different ideas, by leading us into supposing that both sides of each pair are almost the same—except for having ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ signs! Thus, representing feelings in terms of intensities can simplify how we make our decisions. However, I suspect that when we face more difficult choices, then we use more complex ways to settle conflicts among competing views or ways to think.[194]
194
Nevertheless, many feelings seem to come with varied degrees of both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ intensities, and this has led many psychologists to maintain that this dimension of intensity is what distinguishes emotions from other types of mental states. See SoM, 28.2 and 28.3, and Ortony, A., Clore, G.L., Collins, A.,