Despite originally liking the metaphor, I think the elephant/rider dichotomy has been showing cracks recently. I think a better metaphor for the mind would be something like a large unruly troop of clever monkeys with one bigger, more talkative monkey who is loosely in charge. Call it King Louie and the Apes.
First, it’s increasingly clear that System 1 is best understood as a parallel cluster of neural submodules. A swarm of a congress or a crowd feels much more accurate than … a large slow animal.
Next, I think one loquacious monkey trying to convince fifty other monkeys to steal fire feels much more like the internal experience of trying to decide to do something that you’re ambivalent about.
There’s still the issue that you tend to think that you are King Louie and the monkeys are your wild but potentially useful minions. No, you are the whole troop, Louie plus monkeys, and if you ignore this fact, be amazed at how quickly the monkeys that you’re not paying attention to manage to ransack your ambitious jungle schemes the minute you turn your back on them.
I really do think that the elephant/rider fast/slow System 1/System 2 “dichotomy” is just neither useful nor correct. Or, calling it a dichotomy leads to unhelpful assumptions. System 2 relies on System 1 processes for every microsecond of its activity—in a sense, System 1 provides thoughts, concepts, plans and assessments and System 2 buffers them and coordinates them in a single conscious workspace. By what algorithm does System 2 do this? By ”unconscious, implicit, fast“ algorithms and heuristics provided by System 1. Where else would they come from?
And, since it’s not a post from me if it doesn’t explicitly mention meditation, the complete lack of anything that’s actually “in charge” becomes apparent after relatively little time spent watching your own thoughts objectively.
Yeah, one way I would say it is that System 2 plausibly cleaves reality at the joints (it might literally just be the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least according to Critch) but System 1 doesn’t, it’s a whole bunch of stuff we should carefully disentangle. All models are wrong, etc. Nevertheless I still think I am pointing to a meaningfully distinct cluster of people when I talk about people who identify as their System 2s.
Despite originally liking the metaphor, I think the elephant/rider dichotomy has been showing cracks recently. I think a better metaphor for the mind would be something like a large unruly troop of clever monkeys with one bigger, more talkative monkey who is loosely in charge. Call it King Louie and the Apes.
First, it’s increasingly clear that System 1 is best understood as a parallel cluster of neural submodules. A swarm of a congress or a crowd feels much more accurate than … a large slow animal.
Next, I think one loquacious monkey trying to convince fifty other monkeys to steal fire feels much more like the internal experience of trying to decide to do something that you’re ambivalent about.
There’s still the issue that you tend to think that you are King Louie and the monkeys are your wild but potentially useful minions. No, you are the whole troop, Louie plus monkeys, and if you ignore this fact, be amazed at how quickly the monkeys that you’re not paying attention to manage to ransack your ambitious jungle schemes the minute you turn your back on them.
I really do think that the elephant/rider fast/slow System 1/System 2 “dichotomy” is just neither useful nor correct. Or, calling it a dichotomy leads to unhelpful assumptions. System 2 relies on System 1 processes for every microsecond of its activity—in a sense, System 1 provides thoughts, concepts, plans and assessments and System 2 buffers them and coordinates them in a single conscious workspace. By what algorithm does System 2 do this? By ”unconscious, implicit, fast“ algorithms and heuristics provided by System 1. Where else would they come from?
And, since it’s not a post from me if it doesn’t explicitly mention meditation, the complete lack of anything that’s actually “in charge” becomes apparent after relatively little time spent watching your own thoughts objectively.
Yeah, one way I would say it is that System 2 plausibly cleaves reality at the joints (it might literally just be the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least according to Critch) but System 1 doesn’t, it’s a whole bunch of stuff we should carefully disentangle. All models are wrong, etc. Nevertheless I still think I am pointing to a meaningfully distinct cluster of people when I talk about people who identify as their System 2s.