I mean, I don’t really know—it’s something I’m still trying to pin down. But just as an example, let’s say the spatial attention as a “tell” story is true (which I’m not at all confident in). Let me try.
So there’s 3 relevant brainstem signals.
The brainstem has a “center of spatial attention” signal that zig-zags around the local environment
The brainstem has a “valence” signal that jumps up and down multiple times per second
The brainstem has a “is-a-person” signal that combines visual, sound, smell and other heuristics built into the genome. (And whenever the signal triggers, it simultaneously pulls spatial attention (and other types of attention) onto the (apparent) person.
Going along with these,
Probably all three of these above signals get sent into the world-model as interoceptive sensory input (see §1.5.4)
…and as a result we can imagine a valence, and (probably) imagine a center of spatial attention, and (probably) imagine an is-a-person feeling, separately from what the real current brainstem settings are.
Each of these three above signals are associated with Thought Assessors
So there’s a “valence guess” (a.k.a. value function, see Appendix A), and a “spatial attention guess” and a “is-a-person guess” Thought Assessor, each trained over a lifetime of experience via brainstem ground truth.
Now I’m hanging out in my bed staring at the ceiling, and it occurs to me that Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning, and that thought is inherently motivating. How does that work? I think it’s actually not just one thought but two consecutive transient thoughts, i.e. following each other within a fraction of a second:
The first transient thought is not a transient empathetic simulation, but rather just that I’m thinking about Zoe from my own perspective.
The second transient thought is a transient empathetic simulation of something that I think is happening in Zoe’s mind, and that thought happens to be about me.
Then some cell group in the hypothalamus or brainstem would be looking for the following two tell-tale signs:
The first thought has “spatial-attention guess” away from my body, and the second thought has “spatial-attention guess” at my body.
Both thoughts have a high value of “is-a-person guess”.
When both of those are present, then it’s time for this little cell group to spring into action! And now what happens is:
The “valence guess” of the first thought is implicitly interpreted as “how much I like / admire [this other person]”
The “valence guess” of the second thought is implicitly interpreted as “how much I feel like [this other person] likes / admires me”
The cell group multiplies those two values together (well, maybe not literally multiplication, but it performs some function of two inputs that increases with each of its inputs when the other is positive) to get the “inherent value” of the second thought, and it feeds that value into the (ground-truth / brainstem / “override”) valence signal.
I haven’t thought this through in great detail and am interested in criticism. :)
If the story is right there should be a lot of interesting effects and potential experiments related to mirrors. After all, your attention on your image in the mirror is outside your body. Maybe narcissism results from too much attention on your mirror image? What is the effect of seeing yourself in a video feed all the time? Seeing yourself in photos?
I think that after a lifetime of looking in the mirror, your brain has long ago stopped applying “is-a-person” to the image.† Like, I still “feel alone” if there’s a mirror in my room.
I can’t immediately find examples of adults (or articulate kids) seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time—for example, you can see your reflection in still water which is very common in the world. (There’s a famous-ish video from Papua New Guinea of people seeing a mirror for the first time but it’s apparently at least somewhat fake and maybe very fake.)
You can however buy a non-left-right-reversing mirror made from a pair of front-reflecting mirrors at a precise 90° angle. So your reflection doesn’t quite look like a normal mirror, nor does it move like a normal mirror (you move left and the reflection moves right). And people indeed seem to have strong feelings in reaction to seeing their reflection in this kind of mirror the first time—see e.g. NYT, collection of testimonials. I don’t think that really proves anything specific, but I guess it’s vaguely compatible with the kind of story I was imagining.
† How does that work? I.e., how do we learn from experience to not trigger “is-a-person” (much or at all) upon seeing ourselves in a mirror? Umm, one thing might be, certain sensory inputs cause startle / orienting reactions along with physiological arousal, but those reactions can be suppressed if we predict (“expect”) the inputs in complete detail, e.g. you can’t startle yourself by moving your arm in front of your eyes, and likewise a marionette being controlled by someone else offstage seems less “alive” than a marionette that you’re controlling with your own hand. Maybe the presence of unpredicted motion / sound is an especially important heuristic behind the is-a-person ground truth. If so, after enough time with a mirror you develop an excellent predictive model of what the image will do, such that there’s nothing left to trigger any amount of startle / orienting / salience. Also, people with schizophrenia can spend hours staring at themselves in the mirror, apparently, which would (in my view) be an exception that proves the rule, related to their cortex’s failure to build an excellent predictive model of what their mirror image will do under different circumstances, so the startle and physiological arousal never goes away, and it remains mesmerizing.
I don’t think photos trigger the “is-a-person” detector appreciably—at least not for us western adults who are very used to them. Again, there’s a lack of self-generated motion and physiological arousal. I guess videos do trigger it to some extent, and people do indeed seem to enjoy watching people interact on TV for hours straight, which suggests it’s triggering something inherently motivating. And people also react socially to TV / movie characters, e.g. wanting revenge on the bad guy. As for seeing myself on video, I don’t do that often enough to have any opinion about that. … when I do, my strong feelings of embarrassment overwhelm everything else. :-P
Show people videos of themselves from a while back, so they don’t remember the details and can’t predict well and see if that triggers admiration.
Let people imagine that the appreciation goes to their younger self, or a character they are playing, or to a person/memory, say their grandparents, they have “in their hearts”.
OK. That story does make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t require nesting, but just combining (“multiplying”) two signals that are present at the same time. To check that I understand: That hypothetical cell group reinforces positive thoughts about another person focused on them co-occurring with positive thoughts about another person focused on oneself, correct?
That should be testable! The co-occurrence time can’t be too long, so separating the parts of the thought sufficiently should make it less rewarding. That can plausibly be tested retrospectively as well as traditionally with neuroimaging. The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS). See Neural activity associated with self-reflection. It should also be possible to implement this in simulated agents.
I dunno … I think much of human cognition involves rapid-fire sequences of several “thoughts” within a fraction of a second, and those “thoughts” all blend together on fMRI because the time-resolution of fMRI is bad. EEG & MEG have much better time resolution but much worse spatial resolution. ECoG is a bit better but rare. Etc. Then there’s a bunch of monkey experiments, and even more rodent experiments, but those are hard to interpret in this context (e.g. you can’t ask monkeys what they’re thinking about; instead scientists tend to make things up and I often wind up thinking they got it wrong). I guess it’s not entirely impossible that something useful could be gleaned from EEG/MEG experiments. I haven’t looked into that.
The real goldmine would be finding the relevant cluster of cells in (I’d guess) the hypothalamus, but that would be extraordinarily hard in humans. There’s almost no data on the human hypothalamus. Not too much in monkeys either (although I haven’t yet tried looking specifically, it’s on my to-do list), and rodents might not even have a “drive to feel liked / admired” in the first place.
Also, I’m not sure I agree with “The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS).” For example, your link in the next sentence talks about TPJ activation during “self-reflection and -perception” (they call it “inferior parietal lobule” rather than “TPJ” but IPL is a subset of TPJ, and it’s the subset which is relevant to this discussion, IMO). And conversely here’s a paper mentioning PCC in the context of “emotional empathy”.
Again, I do hope to spend some time thinking in more detail about the neuroscience implementation of the alleged “drive to feel liked / admired”, and probably write another post. Hopefully this would happen in the next couple months. So I appreciate the discussion, keep it coming :)
(I can’t follow your first paragraph enough to agree or disagree, sorry.)
OK, let’s forget about the testability via neuroscience. But it could be testable by introspection. One could ask people how admiring they consider different scenarios and the scenarios would be constructed in a way that the two thoughts are separated in time to different degrees. It should also be possible to construct though sequences that are superficially not about admiration, but should also trigger the feeling.
Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning. = I’m thinking about Zoe (is-person) from my own perspective (spatial attention far) + I think of something positive in Zoe’s mind (is-person) about me (spatial attention near)
Zoe was feeling good while I was watching her.
= same pattern (should also feel like admiration).
Zoe was proud, but I forgot about what it was. Ah yes, it was something I did this morning.
= same pattern, but more separated in time.
It is, of course, likely in the latter case that people construct the co-occurring thoughts, but the admiration should, on average, feel less.
I mean, I don’t really know—it’s something I’m still trying to pin down. But just as an example, let’s say the spatial attention as a “tell” story is true (which I’m not at all confident in). Let me try.
So there’s 3 relevant brainstem signals.
The brainstem has a “center of spatial attention” signal that zig-zags around the local environment
The brainstem has a “valence” signal that jumps up and down multiple times per second
The brainstem has a “is-a-person” signal that combines visual, sound, smell and other heuristics built into the genome. (And whenever the signal triggers, it simultaneously pulls spatial attention (and other types of attention) onto the (apparent) person.
Going along with these,
Probably all three of these above signals get sent into the world-model as interoceptive sensory input (see §1.5.4)
…and as a result we can imagine a valence, and (probably) imagine a center of spatial attention, and (probably) imagine an is-a-person feeling, separately from what the real current brainstem settings are.
Each of these three above signals are associated with Thought Assessors
So there’s a “valence guess” (a.k.a. value function, see Appendix A), and a “spatial attention guess” and a “is-a-person guess” Thought Assessor, each trained over a lifetime of experience via brainstem ground truth.
Now I’m hanging out in my bed staring at the ceiling, and it occurs to me that Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning, and that thought is inherently motivating. How does that work? I think it’s actually not just one thought but two consecutive transient thoughts, i.e. following each other within a fraction of a second:
The first transient thought is not a transient empathetic simulation, but rather just that I’m thinking about Zoe from my own perspective.
The second transient thought is a transient empathetic simulation of something that I think is happening in Zoe’s mind, and that thought happens to be about me.
Then some cell group in the hypothalamus or brainstem would be looking for the following two tell-tale signs:
The first thought has “spatial-attention guess” away from my body, and the second thought has “spatial-attention guess” at my body.
Both thoughts have a high value of “is-a-person guess”.
When both of those are present, then it’s time for this little cell group to spring into action! And now what happens is:
The “valence guess” of the first thought is implicitly interpreted as “how much I like / admire [this other person]”
The “valence guess” of the second thought is implicitly interpreted as “how much I feel like [this other person] likes / admires me”
The cell group multiplies those two values together (well, maybe not literally multiplication, but it performs some function of two inputs that increases with each of its inputs when the other is positive) to get the “inherent value” of the second thought, and it feeds that value into the (ground-truth / brainstem / “override”) valence signal.
I haven’t thought this through in great detail and am interested in criticism. :)
If the story is right there should be a lot of interesting effects and potential experiments related to mirrors. After all, your attention on your image in the mirror is outside your body. Maybe narcissism results from too much attention on your mirror image? What is the effect of seeing yourself in a video feed all the time? Seeing yourself in photos?
Interesting thought, thanks!!
I think that after a lifetime of looking in the mirror, your brain has long ago stopped applying “is-a-person” to the image.† Like, I still “feel alone” if there’s a mirror in my room.
I can’t immediately find examples of adults (or articulate kids) seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time—for example, you can see your reflection in still water which is very common in the world. (There’s a famous-ish video from Papua New Guinea of people seeing a mirror for the first time but it’s apparently at least somewhat fake and maybe very fake.)
You can however buy a non-left-right-reversing mirror made from a pair of front-reflecting mirrors at a precise 90° angle. So your reflection doesn’t quite look like a normal mirror, nor does it move like a normal mirror (you move left and the reflection moves right). And people indeed seem to have strong feelings in reaction to seeing their reflection in this kind of mirror the first time—see e.g. NYT, collection of testimonials. I don’t think that really proves anything specific, but I guess it’s vaguely compatible with the kind of story I was imagining.
† How does that work? I.e., how do we learn from experience to not trigger “is-a-person” (much or at all) upon seeing ourselves in a mirror? Umm, one thing might be, certain sensory inputs cause startle / orienting reactions along with physiological arousal, but those reactions can be suppressed if we predict (“expect”) the inputs in complete detail, e.g. you can’t startle yourself by moving your arm in front of your eyes, and likewise a marionette being controlled by someone else offstage seems less “alive” than a marionette that you’re controlling with your own hand. Maybe the presence of unpredicted motion / sound is an especially important heuristic behind the is-a-person ground truth. If so, after enough time with a mirror you develop an excellent predictive model of what the image will do, such that there’s nothing left to trigger any amount of startle / orienting / salience. Also, people with schizophrenia can spend hours staring at themselves in the mirror, apparently, which would (in my view) be an exception that proves the rule, related to their cortex’s failure to build an excellent predictive model of what their mirror image will do under different circumstances, so the startle and physiological arousal never goes away, and it remains mesmerizing.
I don’t think photos trigger the “is-a-person” detector appreciably—at least not for us western adults who are very used to them. Again, there’s a lack of self-generated motion and physiological arousal. I guess videos do trigger it to some extent, and people do indeed seem to enjoy watching people interact on TV for hours straight, which suggests it’s triggering something inherently motivating. And people also react socially to TV / movie characters, e.g. wanting revenge on the bad guy. As for seeing myself on video, I don’t do that often enough to have any opinion about that. … when I do, my strong feelings of embarrassment overwhelm everything else. :-P
Some more ideas:
Show people videos of themselves from a while back, so they don’t remember the details and can’t predict well and see if that triggers admiration.
Let people imagine that the appreciation goes to their younger self, or a character they are playing, or to a person/memory, say their grandparents, they have “in their hearts”.
Something something identical twins.
OK. That story does make a lot of sense to me. It doesn’t require nesting, but just combining (“multiplying”) two signals that are present at the same time. To check that I understand: That hypothetical cell group reinforces positive thoughts about another person focused on them co-occurring with positive thoughts about another person focused on oneself, correct?
That should be testable! The co-occurrence time can’t be too long, so separating the parts of the thought sufficiently should make it less rewarding. That can plausibly be tested retrospectively as well as traditionally with neuroimaging. The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS). See Neural activity associated with self-reflection. It should also be possible to implement this in simulated agents.
I dunno … I think much of human cognition involves rapid-fire sequences of several “thoughts” within a fraction of a second, and those “thoughts” all blend together on fMRI because the time-resolution of fMRI is bad. EEG & MEG have much better time resolution but much worse spatial resolution. ECoG is a bit better but rare. Etc. Then there’s a bunch of monkey experiments, and even more rodent experiments, but those are hard to interpret in this context (e.g. you can’t ask monkeys what they’re thinking about; instead scientists tend to make things up and I often wind up thinking they got it wrong). I guess it’s not entirely impossible that something useful could be gleaned from EEG/MEG experiments. I haven’t looked into that.
The real goldmine would be finding the relevant cluster of cells in (I’d guess) the hypothalamus, but that would be extraordinarily hard in humans. There’s almost no data on the human hypothalamus. Not too much in monkeys either (although I haven’t yet tried looking specifically, it’s on my to-do list), and rodents might not even have a “drive to feel liked / admired” in the first place.
Also, I’m not sure I agree with “The centers of self and other attention seem to be known (MPFC/PCC vs. TPJ/STS).” For example, your link in the next sentence talks about TPJ activation during “self-reflection and -perception” (they call it “inferior parietal lobule” rather than “TPJ” but IPL is a subset of TPJ, and it’s the subset which is relevant to this discussion, IMO). And conversely here’s a paper mentioning PCC in the context of “emotional empathy”.
Again, I do hope to spend some time thinking in more detail about the neuroscience implementation of the alleged “drive to feel liked / admired”, and probably write another post. Hopefully this would happen in the next couple months. So I appreciate the discussion, keep it coming :)
(I can’t follow your first paragraph enough to agree or disagree, sorry.)
OK, let’s forget about the testability via neuroscience. But it could be testable by introspection. One could ask people how admiring they consider different scenarios and the scenarios would be constructed in a way that the two thoughts are separated in time to different degrees. It should also be possible to construct though sequences that are superficially not about admiration, but should also trigger the feeling.
Zoe would be very proud of what I did this morning.
=
I’m thinking about Zoe (is-person) from my own perspective (spatial attention far)
+
I think of something positive in Zoe’s mind (is-person) about me (spatial attention near)
Zoe was feeling good while I was watching her.
= same pattern (should also feel like admiration).
Zoe was proud, but I forgot about what it was. Ah yes, it was something I did this morning.
= same pattern, but more separated in time.
It is, of course, likely in the latter case that people construct the co-occurring thoughts, but the admiration should, on average, feel less.