I continue to appreciate Kaj’s writeups of this paradigm. As I mentioned in a previous curation notice, the “integrating subagents” paradigm has organically gained some traction in the rationalsphere but hasn’t been explicitly written up in a way that lets people build off or critique it in detail.
Particular things I liked
The use of the spaghetti tower diagrams to illustrate what may be going on.
The Minsky interlude was entertaining and provided a nice change of pace.
The crystallization of why it’s hard to resolve particular kinds of subagent disagreements was useful.
One thing that I felt somewhat uncertain about was this passage:
So besides building spaghetti towers, the second strategy which the mind has evolved to employ for keeping its behavior coherent while piling up protectors, is the ability to re-process memories of past painful events.
Something about this felt like a bigger leap and/or stronger claim than I’d been expecting. Specifying “the second strategy which the mind has evolved” felt odd. Partly because it seems to implicitly claim there are exactly 2 strategies, or that they evolved in a specific order. Partly because “re-process memories of past painful events” reifies a particular interpretation that I’d want to examine more.
It seems like nonhuman animals need to deal with similar kinds of spaghetti code, but I’d be somewhat surprised if the way they experienced that made most sense to classify as “re-processing memories.”
Partly because it seems to implicitly claim there are exactly 2 strategies, or that they evolved in a specific order.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply either of those. (those are the two strategies that I know of, but there could obviously be others as well)
It seems like nonhuman animals need to deal with similar kinds of spaghetti code, but I’d be somewhat surprised if the way they experienced that made most sense to classify as “re-processing memories.”
I haven’t thought that much about it, but “re-process memories” feels like… it sort of requires language, and orientation around narratives. Or maybe it’s just that that’s what it feels from the inside when I do it, I have a hard time imagining other ways it could be.
When I think about, say, a rabbit re-processing memories, I’m not sure what the qualia of that would be like.
My current guess, is for non-social reprocessing, I’d expect it to look more like tacking on additional layers of spaghetti code, or simply fading away of unused spaghetti code.
Say that one time visiting an open field got you almost killed, so you avoided open fields. But eventually you found an open field where that where there weren’t predators. And the warning flags that would get thrown when you see a bird or dog (that’d reinforce the “ahh! open field === predators === run!” loop), would turn out to be false alarms (“oh, that’s not a dog, that’s some non-predator animal”). So gradually those loops would fire less often until they stop firing.
But that doesn’t feel like “reprocessing”, just continuous processing. Reprocessing feels like something that requires you to have an ontology, and you actually realized you were classifying something incorrectly and then actually believe the new reclassification, which I don’t expect a rabbit to do. It’s plausible that smarter birds or apes might but it stills feels off.
I think I’d still expect most primitive social interactions to be similarly a matter of reinforcement learning. Maybe at some point a bully or alpha threatened you and you were scared of them. But then later when they achieved dominance (or were driven out of dominance by a rival), and then they stopped bullying you, and the “threat! ahh! submit to them!” loop stopped firing as often or as hard, and then eventually faded.
I’d predict it’s (currently) a uniquely language-species thing to go “oh, I had made a mistake” and then reprocess memories in a way that changes your interpretation of them. (I’m not that confident in this, am mulling over what sorts of experiments would distinguish this)
Note that memory re-consolidation was originally discovered in rats, so there at least appears to be preliminary evidence that goes against this perspective.. Although “Memory” here refers to something different than what we normally think about, the process is basically the same.
There’s also been some interesting speculation that what’s actually going on in modalities like IFS and Focusing is the exact same process. The speculation comes from the fact that the requirements seem to be the same for both animal memory reconsolidation and therapies that have fast/instant changes such as coherence therapy, IFS, EMDR, etc. I’ve used some of these insights to create novel therapeutic modalities that seem to anecdotally have strong effects by applying the same requirements in their most distilled form.
Interesting. Your link seems to include a lot of papers that I’m not quite sure how to orient around. Do you have suggestions on where/how to direct my attention there?
I originally learned about the theory from the book I linked to, which is a good place to start but also clearly biased because they’re trying to make the case that their therapy uses memory reconsolidation. Wikipedia seems to have a useful summary.
I haven’t thought that much about it, but “re-process memories” feels like… it sort of requires language, and orientation around narratives.
Hmm. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, I’m using language when I’m re-processing memories? Except when I’m explicitly thinking about what I want to say to someone, or what I might want to write, I generally don’t feel like I think in a language: I feel like I think in mental images and felt senses.
“Narratives”, I think, are basically impressions of cause and effect or simple mental models, and any animals that could be described as “intelligent” in any reasonable sense do need to have those. “Memory re-processing”, would then just be an update to the mental model that you interpreted the memory in terms of.
I feel like this excerpt from “Don’t Shoot the Dog” could be an example of very short-term memory reprocessing:
I once videotaped a beautiful Arabian mare who was being clicker-trained to prick her ears on command, so as to look alert in the show ring. She clearly knew that a click meant a handful of grain. She clearly knew her actions made her trainer click. And she knew it had something to do with her ears. But what? Holding her head erect, she rotated her ears individually: one forward, one back; then the reverse; then she flopped both ears to the sides like a rabbit, something I didn’t know a horse could do on purpose. Finally, both ears went forward at once. Click! Aha! She had it straight from then on. It was charming, but it was also sad: We don’t usually ask horses to think or to be inventive, and they seem to like to do it.
This (and other similar anecdotes in the book) doesn’t look to me like it’s just simple reinforcement learning: rather, it looks to me more like the horse has a mental model of the trainer wanting something, and is then systematically exploring what that something might be, until it hits on the right alternative. And when it does, there’s a rapid re-interpretation of the memory just a moment ago: from “in this situation, my trainer wants me to do something that I don’t know what”, to “in this situation, my trainer wants me to prick my ears”.
My mom once hit a dog with her car, and then brought it to a vet. She tried to find the original owner but couldn’t, and eventually adopted him formally. e was very small, and had been living in the woods for weeks at least, and had lots of injuries.
For several months after bringing the dog home, it would sit and stare blankly into the corner of the wall.
Eventually, my sister started spending hours at a time leaving food next to her while lying motionless. Eventually, he started eating the food. Eventually, he started letting her touch him (but not other humans). Nowadays, he appears to be generally psychologically healthy.
This seems a lot more like classic PTSD, and something like actual therapy. It still doesn’t seem like it requires reprocessing of memories, although it might. I also don’t expect this sort of situation happens that often in the wild.
Curated.
I continue to appreciate Kaj’s writeups of this paradigm. As I mentioned in a previous curation notice, the “integrating subagents” paradigm has organically gained some traction in the rationalsphere but hasn’t been explicitly written up in a way that lets people build off or critique it in detail.
Particular things I liked
The use of the spaghetti tower diagrams to illustrate what may be going on.
The Minsky interlude was entertaining and provided a nice change of pace.
The crystallization of why it’s hard to resolve particular kinds of subagent disagreements was useful.
One thing that I felt somewhat uncertain about was this passage:
Something about this felt like a bigger leap and/or stronger claim than I’d been expecting. Specifying “the second strategy which the mind has evolved” felt odd. Partly because it seems to implicitly claim there are exactly 2 strategies, or that they evolved in a specific order. Partly because “re-process memories of past painful events” reifies a particular interpretation that I’d want to examine more.
It seems like nonhuman animals need to deal with similar kinds of spaghetti code, but I’d be somewhat surprised if the way they experienced that made most sense to classify as “re-processing memories.”
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply either of those. (those are the two strategies that I know of, but there could obviously be others as well)
How come?
I haven’t thought that much about it, but “re-process memories” feels like… it sort of requires language, and orientation around narratives. Or maybe it’s just that that’s what it feels from the inside when I do it, I have a hard time imagining other ways it could be.
When I think about, say, a rabbit re-processing memories, I’m not sure what the qualia of that would be like.
My current guess, is for non-social reprocessing, I’d expect it to look more like tacking on additional layers of spaghetti code, or simply fading away of unused spaghetti code.
Say that one time visiting an open field got you almost killed, so you avoided open fields. But eventually you found an open field where that where there weren’t predators. And the warning flags that would get thrown when you see a bird or dog (that’d reinforce the “ahh! open field === predators === run!” loop), would turn out to be false alarms (“oh, that’s not a dog, that’s some non-predator animal”). So gradually those loops would fire less often until they stop firing.
But that doesn’t feel like “reprocessing”, just continuous processing. Reprocessing feels like something that requires you to have an ontology, and you actually realized you were classifying something incorrectly and then actually believe the new reclassification, which I don’t expect a rabbit to do. It’s plausible that smarter birds or apes might but it stills feels off.
I think I’d still expect most primitive social interactions to be similarly a matter of reinforcement learning. Maybe at some point a bully or alpha threatened you and you were scared of them. But then later when they achieved dominance (or were driven out of dominance by a rival), and then they stopped bullying you, and the “threat! ahh! submit to them!” loop stopped firing as often or as hard, and then eventually faded.
I’d predict it’s (currently) a uniquely language-species thing to go “oh, I had made a mistake” and then reprocess memories in a way that changes your interpretation of them. (I’m not that confident in this, am mulling over what sorts of experiments would distinguish this)
Note that memory re-consolidation was originally discovered in rats, so there at least appears to be preliminary evidence that goes against this perspective.. Although “Memory” here refers to something different than what we normally think about, the process is basically the same.
There’s also been some interesting speculation that what’s actually going on in modalities like IFS and Focusing is the exact same process. The speculation comes from the fact that the requirements seem to be the same for both animal memory reconsolidation and therapies that have fast/instant changes such as coherence therapy, IFS, EMDR, etc. I’ve used some of these insights to create novel therapeutic modalities that seem to anecdotally have strong effects by applying the same requirements in their most distilled form.
Interesting. Your link seems to include a lot of papers that I’m not quite sure how to orient around. Do you have suggestions on where/how to direct my attention there?
I originally learned about the theory from the book I linked to, which is a good place to start but also clearly biased because they’re trying to make the case that their therapy uses memory reconsolidation. Wikipedia seems to have a useful summary.
Hmm. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, I’m using language when I’m re-processing memories? Except when I’m explicitly thinking about what I want to say to someone, or what I might want to write, I generally don’t feel like I think in a language: I feel like I think in mental images and felt senses.
“Narratives”, I think, are basically impressions of cause and effect or simple mental models, and any animals that could be described as “intelligent” in any reasonable sense do need to have those. “Memory re-processing”, would then just be an update to the mental model that you interpreted the memory in terms of.
I feel like this excerpt from “Don’t Shoot the Dog” could be an example of very short-term memory reprocessing:
This (and other similar anecdotes in the book) doesn’t look to me like it’s just simple reinforcement learning: rather, it looks to me more like the horse has a mental model of the trainer wanting something, and is then systematically exploring what that something might be, until it hits on the right alternative. And when it does, there’s a rapid re-interpretation of the memory just a moment ago: from “in this situation, my trainer wants me to do something that I don’t know what”, to “in this situation, my trainer wants me to prick my ears”.
Hmm, a story that might be relevant:
My mom once hit a dog with her car, and then brought it to a vet. She tried to find the original owner but couldn’t, and eventually adopted him formally. e was very small, and had been living in the woods for weeks at least, and had lots of injuries.
For several months after bringing the dog home, it would sit and stare blankly into the corner of the wall.
Eventually, my sister started spending hours at a time leaving food next to her while lying motionless. Eventually, he started eating the food. Eventually, he started letting her touch him (but not other humans). Nowadays, he appears to be generally psychologically healthy.
This seems a lot more like classic PTSD, and something like actual therapy. It still doesn’t seem like it requires reprocessing of memories, although it might. I also don’t expect this sort of situation happens that often in the wild.