This suggests that that “pleasant” or “positive” practice, alone, may not suffice for us to learn more radically different ways to think. This, in turn suggests that to become proficient at learning new things, a person must somehow acquire what Augustine called, in the extract above, ‘a passion for experimenting and knowledge.’ Such persons must somehow have managed to train themselves to actually enjoy those discomforts.
Citizen: How can you speak of ‘enjoying’ discomfort? Isn’t that a self-contradiction?
It is only a contradiction when you regard your Self as a single Thing. But when you see the mind as a society, then you no longer have to think of pleasure as an all-or-none thing. For now you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. For example, one part of your mind can still represent your state in a positive way by saying “Good, this is a chance to experience awkwardness and to discover new kinds of mistakes!”
Citizen: But wouldn’t you still be feeling that pain?
Indeed, when struggling at their seemingly punishing tasks, athletes still feel physical pain, and artists and scientists feel mental pains—but, somehow, they seem to have trained themselves to keep those pains from spiraling into the awful cascades we call ‘suffering.’ But how could those persons have learned to suppress, ignore, or enjoy those pains, while preventing those disruption cascades? To answer that, we would need to know more about our mental machinery.
Scientist: Perhaps this does not really need any special explanation, because explorations can provide their own rewards. For me, few things bring more pleasure than making radical new hypotheses—and then showing that their predictions are correct, despite the objections of my competitors.
Artist: It seems almost the same to me, because nothing can surpass the thrill of conceiving a new kind of representation and then confirming that this will produce new effects in my audience.
Psychologist: It seems clear that many such achievers regard their ability to function in spite of pain, rejection, or adversity to be among their outstanding accomplishments!
In any case, all this suggests that ‘exploration pleasure’ (however it works) may be indispensable to those who want to keep extending their development.
§9-5. What controls the mind as a whole?
Jean Piaget: “If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another. … The explainer believes from the start that the reproducer will grasp everything, will almost know beforehand all that should be known. ... These habits of thought account, in the first place, for the remarkable lack of precision in childish style.”[202]
How do human minds develop? We know that our infants are already equipped at birth with ways to react to certain kinds of sounds and smells, to certain patterns of darkness and light, and to various tactile and haptic sensations. Then over the following months and years the child learns many more perceptual and motor skills, and proceeds through many stages of intellectual development. Eventually, each normal child learns to recognize, represent, and reflect upon some its own internal states, and also comes to self-reflect on some its intentions and feelings—and eventually learns to identify these with aspects of other persons that it observes. This section will speculate about possible structures we might use to support those activities; the next section will suggest some ideas about how children might develop these.
This book has proposed several different views of how a human mind might be organized. We began by portraying the mind (or brain) as based on a scheme that deals with various situations by activating certain sets of resources—so that each such selection will function as a somewhat different “way to think.”
To determine which set of resources to select, such systems could begin with some simple sorts of “If–>Do” rules. Later these develop into more versatile “Critic–>Selector” systems.
Chapter §5 conjectured that the adult mind comes to have multiple levels of organization. Each level has Critics to recognize situations and Selectors that can activate appropriate ways to think, by exploiting the resources at its own and at other levels. We also noted that these ideas could be seen as consistent with Sigmund Freud’s early view of the mind as a system for resolving (or for ignoring) conflicts between our instinctive and acquired ideas.
In chapter §8 we also reviewed various ways to represent knowledge and skills, and noted that these could be arranged in a stack with increasing degrees of expressiveness.
Each of those ways to envision a mind has different kinds of virtues and faults, so it would make little sense to ask which model is best. Instead, one needs to develop Critics that learn good ways to choose when and how to switch among them.
Perhaps a more popular model of mind portrays our mental processes as like a human community—such as a residential town or a company.[203] In a typical corporate organization, the human resources are (formally) organized in accord with some hierarchical plan.
We tend to invent such ‘management ‘trees’ whenever there’s more than one person can do; then the work is divided into parts, which then are assigned to subordinates. This picture suggests that one might try to identify a person’s Self with the Chief Executive of that company, who controls the rest through a chain of command in which instructions tend to branch down from the top.
However, this is not a good model for human brains because an employee of a company is a person who might be able to learn to perform virtually any new task—whereas, most parts of a brain are too specialized to do such things.[204] This difference may be important because, when a Company becomes wealthy enough, it may be able to expand itself: when it wants to include new activities, it can hire additional employee-minds. In contrast, we humans don’t (yet) have practical ways to expand our own individual brains. So, whenever you add a additional task (or break a large one into smaller parts)—and then try to do them all at once—then each sub-process will lose some of its competence, because it now has access to fewer resources. Perhaps we should state this as a general principle.
The Parallel Paradox: If you break a large job into several parts, and then try to work them all at once—then each process may lose some competence, from lacking access to resources it needs.
There is a popular belief that the brain gets much of its power and speed because it can do things many things in parallel. Indeed, it is clear that many of sensory, motor, and other systems do many things simultaneously. However, it also seems clear that as we tackle more complex and difficult goals, we increasingly need to divide those problems into subgoals—and then focus on these sequentially. This means that our higher, reflective levels of thought will tend to operate more serially.
202
Piaget, Jean. (1923).
203
Many readers interpreted my earlier book,
204
Another difference between human employees and parts of a brain is that each member of a company has personal conflicts of interest. For example, each employee is hired to increase the company’s profit, but this goes against each employee’s ambition to earn more salary—because each paycheck reduces the firm’s total earnings. It’s the same when an army orders its fighters to try to kill those on the opposite side; each soldier still wishes to stay alive.