Empirical, one-step-towards-subjective-from behavioral regularities, stimulus-response pairs. Not “should”, “is”. Is this correct?
Yes! Precisely. In NLP this would be referred to as one “step” in a “strategy”.
This confuses me, since you start using a word “feeling”, that has too many connotations, many of them deeper than the no-strings-attached regularity you seem to have just defined “motivations” to be.
See “Emotions and Feelings: A Neurobiological Perspective” for what I mean by “feelings”. This is also the NLP meaning of the term; i.e., Damasio’s paper supports the NLP model of subjective experience to this extent.
So, preferences and motivations are not fundamentally different in your model, but merely the north and south of abstraction in “feelings”, in what the “effect-response” pairs are about.
Yes, and as such, they lead to different practical effects, causing us to applaud and speak in favor of our abstract preferences, while only acting on concrete motivations.
Preferences only influence our behavior when they become concrete: for example, all those experiments Robin Hanson keeps mentioning about people’s donation behavior depending on whether they’ve been primed about in-group or out-group behaviors. That’s basically a situation where “preference” becomes “motivation” by becoming linked to a specific “near” behavior.
In general, preference becomes motivation by being made concrete, grounded in some sensory-specific context. If we have conflicting motivation, but try to proceed anyway, we experience “mixed feelings”—i.e., dueling somatic responses.
Now, the “stimulus-response” pairs are really predictions. The brain generates these responses that create feelings as a preparation to take action, and/or a marker of “good” or “bad”. So if you change your expectation of a situation, your feeling response changes as well.
For example, if I at first enjoy an activity, and then it becomes tedious, I may at some point “go over threshold” (in NLP parlance) and thus conclude that my tedious experiences constitute a better prediction of what will happen the next time I do it. At that point, my mental model is now updated, so I will no longer be motivated to do that activity.
That’s how it works, assuming that I “stack” (i.e. mentally combine) each tedious experience together as part of a trend, versus continuing to consider them as isolated experiences.
(It’s not the only way to change a motivation, but it’s a common one that people naturally use in practice. One NLP intervention for dealing with an abusive relationship, btw, is to teach a person how to mentally stack their representations of the relationship to “change their mind” about staying in it, by stacking up enough representations of past abuse and expected future abuse to create a strong enough feeling response to induce a model change. In general, NLP is not about anything spooky or magical so much as being able to deliberately replicate cognitive processes that other people use or that the same person uses, but in a different context.)
One place where akrasia comes into the picture, however, is when we don’t identify with the motivation to be changed, i.e., it’s not a preference. If you don’t know what you’re getting out of something, you can’t readily decide that you don’t want that thing any more!
This is why most of my interventions for procrastination involve finding out what prediction underlies the feeling response to a specific behavior being sought or avoided. Our feelings almost always occur in response to predictions made by our brains about the likely “near” outcome of a behavior.
These predictions are almost exclusively nonverbal, and brief. They normally “flash” by at subliminal speeds, faster than you can think or speed-read a single word. (Which makes sense, given that the same machinery is likely used to turn words into “meaning”!) You can learn to observe them, but only if you can quiet your verbal mind from “talking over them”. But once you see or hear them, you can hold them in consciousness for examination and modification.
It is these unconscious predictions that produce feeling responses, and thereby direct our actions. (They are probably also the basis of “priming”.)
When I or my students successfully change these unconscious representations, the corresponding behavioral motivation also changes. If a technique (whether it be one of mine or one of someone else’s) does NOT successfully change the representation, the motivation does not change, either. If one technique doesn’t work, we try another, until the desired result is achieved.
This is why I don’t care much about theory—if my hypothesis is that technique #1 will change representation X, and I’m mistaken, it only takes another few minutes to try technique #2 or #3. It’s catching the representations in the first place that’s much harder to do on your own, not the actual application of the techniques. I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what techniques work better for what when I do them on other people, but oddly not as much on myself… which suggests that the certainty I appear to have may have more impact than the specific choice of technique.
Is that a placebo effect? Don’t know. Don’t care. As long as my student can also produce successes through self-application, and get whatever other results they’re after, what difference does it make?
I should note, however, that I personally never got any good results from any self-help techniques until I learned to 1) act “as if” a technique would work, regardless of my intellectual opinions about its probability of working, and 2) observe these sorts of unconscious thoughts. So even if it doesn’t matter how you change them, the ability to observe them appears to be a prerequisite.
(Also, these sorts of thoughts sometimes come out randomly in talk therapies, journalling, etc. Some particularly good therapists ask questions that tend to bring them out, and the NLP “Structure Of Magic” books were an attempt to explain how those therapists knew what questions to ask, given that the therapists each belonged to completely different schools of therapy. I use an extremely restricted subset of similar questions in my work, since I focus mainly on certain classes of chronic procrastination, and its patterns are very regular, at least in my experience.)
Yes! Precisely. In NLP this would be referred to as one “step” in a “strategy”.
See “Emotions and Feelings: A Neurobiological Perspective” for what I mean by “feelings”. This is also the NLP meaning of the term; i.e., Damasio’s paper supports the NLP model of subjective experience to this extent.
Yes, and as such, they lead to different practical effects, causing us to applaud and speak in favor of our abstract preferences, while only acting on concrete motivations.
Preferences only influence our behavior when they become concrete: for example, all those experiments Robin Hanson keeps mentioning about people’s donation behavior depending on whether they’ve been primed about in-group or out-group behaviors. That’s basically a situation where “preference” becomes “motivation” by becoming linked to a specific “near” behavior.
In general, preference becomes motivation by being made concrete, grounded in some sensory-specific context. If we have conflicting motivation, but try to proceed anyway, we experience “mixed feelings”—i.e., dueling somatic responses.
Now, the “stimulus-response” pairs are really predictions. The brain generates these responses that create feelings as a preparation to take action, and/or a marker of “good” or “bad”. So if you change your expectation of a situation, your feeling response changes as well.
For example, if I at first enjoy an activity, and then it becomes tedious, I may at some point “go over threshold” (in NLP parlance) and thus conclude that my tedious experiences constitute a better prediction of what will happen the next time I do it. At that point, my mental model is now updated, so I will no longer be motivated to do that activity.
That’s how it works, assuming that I “stack” (i.e. mentally combine) each tedious experience together as part of a trend, versus continuing to consider them as isolated experiences.
(It’s not the only way to change a motivation, but it’s a common one that people naturally use in practice. One NLP intervention for dealing with an abusive relationship, btw, is to teach a person how to mentally stack their representations of the relationship to “change their mind” about staying in it, by stacking up enough representations of past abuse and expected future abuse to create a strong enough feeling response to induce a model change. In general, NLP is not about anything spooky or magical so much as being able to deliberately replicate cognitive processes that other people use or that the same person uses, but in a different context.)
One place where akrasia comes into the picture, however, is when we don’t identify with the motivation to be changed, i.e., it’s not a preference. If you don’t know what you’re getting out of something, you can’t readily decide that you don’t want that thing any more!
This is why most of my interventions for procrastination involve finding out what prediction underlies the feeling response to a specific behavior being sought or avoided. Our feelings almost always occur in response to predictions made by our brains about the likely “near” outcome of a behavior.
These predictions are almost exclusively nonverbal, and brief. They normally “flash” by at subliminal speeds, faster than you can think or speed-read a single word. (Which makes sense, given that the same machinery is likely used to turn words into “meaning”!) You can learn to observe them, but only if you can quiet your verbal mind from “talking over them”. But once you see or hear them, you can hold them in consciousness for examination and modification.
It is these unconscious predictions that produce feeling responses, and thereby direct our actions. (They are probably also the basis of “priming”.)
When I or my students successfully change these unconscious representations, the corresponding behavioral motivation also changes. If a technique (whether it be one of mine or one of someone else’s) does NOT successfully change the representation, the motivation does not change, either. If one technique doesn’t work, we try another, until the desired result is achieved.
This is why I don’t care much about theory—if my hypothesis is that technique #1 will change representation X, and I’m mistaken, it only takes another few minutes to try technique #2 or #3. It’s catching the representations in the first place that’s much harder to do on your own, not the actual application of the techniques. I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what techniques work better for what when I do them on other people, but oddly not as much on myself… which suggests that the certainty I appear to have may have more impact than the specific choice of technique.
Is that a placebo effect? Don’t know. Don’t care. As long as my student can also produce successes through self-application, and get whatever other results they’re after, what difference does it make?
I should note, however, that I personally never got any good results from any self-help techniques until I learned to 1) act “as if” a technique would work, regardless of my intellectual opinions about its probability of working, and 2) observe these sorts of unconscious thoughts. So even if it doesn’t matter how you change them, the ability to observe them appears to be a prerequisite.
(Also, these sorts of thoughts sometimes come out randomly in talk therapies, journalling, etc. Some particularly good therapists ask questions that tend to bring them out, and the NLP “Structure Of Magic” books were an attempt to explain how those therapists knew what questions to ask, given that the therapists each belonged to completely different schools of therapy. I use an extremely restricted subset of similar questions in my work, since I focus mainly on certain classes of chronic procrastination, and its patterns are very regular, at least in my experience.)