Oh! The metaphor I’ve been using with my clients for the thing I think you’re pointing at is reputation.
If the mind is a group (in this case a group of pattern predictors, but please also imagine it as a group of people), then ask yourself: How does a group of people (with no dictator) make a decision?
Well, they talk. They make bids.
Can one person use “willpower” and force the group to make a decision a particular way? Yes, if they make a strong enough bid and the rest of the group lets them. Why would the rest of the group let them? Reputation. But if they do that too many times with poor results, they lose their reputation and won’t be able to dictate the group anymore. “Willpower” lost.
I suspect this happens in the mind among pattern predictors, too. (I believe @Kaj_Sotala has written about this somewhere wrt Global Workspace Theory? I found this tweet in the meantime.) If a certain part of your mind lose reputation with the others parts, that part will lose reputation and won’t be able to make competitive bids anymore. That part’s “willpower” has decreased.
This makes some interesting predictions re: some types of trauma: namely, that they can happen when someone was (probably even correctly!) pushing very hard towards some important goal, and then either they ran out of fuel just before finishing and collapsed, or they achieved that goal and then—because of circumstances, just plain bad luck, or something else—that goal failed to pay off in the way that it usually does, societally speaking. In either case, the predictor/pusher that burned down lots of savings in investment doesn’t get paid off. This is maybe part of why “if trauma, and help, you get stronger; if trauma, and no help, you get weaker”.
Maybe, but that also requires that the other group members were (irrationally) failing to consider that the “attempt could’ve been good even if the luck was bad”.
In human groups, people often do gain (some) reputation for noble failures (is this wrong?)
Sure—I can believe that that’s one way a person’s internal quorum can be set up. In other cases, or for other reasons, they might be instead set up to demand results, and evaluate primarily based on results. And that’s not great or necessarily psychologically healthy, but then the question becomes “why do some people end up one way and other people the other way?” Also, there’s the question of just how big/significant the effort was, and thus how big of an effective risk the one predictor took. Be it internal to one person or relevant to a group of humans, a sufficiently grand-scale noble failure will not generally be seen as all that noble (IME).
Parts of human mind are not little humans. They are allowed to be irrational. It can’t be rational subagents all the way down. Rationality itself is probably implemented as subagents saying “let’s observe the world and try to make a correct model” winning a reputational war against subagents proposing things like “let’s just think happy thoughts”.
But I can imagine how some subagents could have less trust towards “good intentions that didn’t bring actual good outcomes” than others. For example, if you live in an environment where it is normal to make dramatic promises and then fail to act on them. I think I have read some books long ago claiming that children of alcoholic parents are often like that. They just stop listening to promises and excuses, because they have already heard too many of them, and they learned that nothing ever happens. I can imagine that they turn this habitual mistrust against themselves, too. That “I tried something, and it was a good idea, but due to bad luck it failed” resembles too much the parent saying how they had the good insight that they need to stop drinking, but only due to some external factor they had to drink yet another bottle today. Shortly, if your environment fails you a lot, as a response you can become unrealistically harsh on yourself.
Another possible explanation is that different people’s attention is focused on different places. Some people pay more attention to the promises, some pay more attention to the material results, some pay more attention to their feelings. This itself can be a consequence of the previous experience with paying attention to different things.
I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.
For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself—it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough.
If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it.
All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)
One model (e.g. Redgrave 2007, McHaffie 2005) is that the basal ganglia receives inputs from many different brain systems; each of those systems can send different “bids” supporting or opposing a specific course of action to the basal ganglia. A bid submitted by one subsystem may, through looped connections going back from the basal ganglia, inhibit other subsystems, until one of the proposed actions becomes sufficiently dominant to be taken.
The above image from Redgrave 2007 has a conceptual image of the model, with two example subsystems shown. Suppose that you are eating at a restaurant in Jurassic Park when two velociraptors charge in through the window. Previously, your hunger system was submitting successful bids for the “let’s keep eating” action, which then caused inhibitory impulses to be sent to the threat system. This inhibition prevented the threat system from making bids for silly things like jumping up from the table and running away in a panic. However, as your brain registers the new situation, the threat system gets significantly more strongly activated, sending a strong bid for the “let’s run away” action. As a result of the basal ganglia receiving that bid, an inhibitory impulse is routed from the basal ganglia to the subsystem which was previously submitting bids for the “let’s keep eating” actions. This makes the threat system’s bids even stronger relative to the (inhibited) eating system’s bids.
Soon the basal ganglia, which was previously inhibiting the threat subsystem’s access to the motor system while allowing the eating system access, withdraws that inhibition and starts inhibiting the eating system’s access instead. The result is that you jump up from your chair and begin to run away. Unfortunately, this is hopeless since the velociraptor is faster than you. A few moments later, the velociraptor’s basal ganglia gives the raptor’s “eating” subsystem access to the raptor’s motor system, letting it happily munch down its latest meal.
But let’s leave velociraptors behind and go back to our original example with the phone. Suppose that you have been trying to replace the habit of looking at your phone when bored, to instead smiling and directing your attention to pleasant sensations in your body, and then letting your mind wander.
Until the new habit establishes itself, the two habits will compete for control. Frequently, the old habit will be stronger, and you will just automatically check your phone without even remembering that you were supposed to do something different. For this reason, behavioral change programs may first spend several weeks just practicing noticing the situations in which you engage in the old habit. When you do notice what you are about to do, then more goal-directed subsystems may send bids towards the “smile and look for nice sensations” action. If this happens and you pay attention to your experience, you may notice that long-term it actually feels more pleasant than looking at the phone, reinforcing the new habit until it becomes prevalent.
To put this in terms of the subagent model, we might drastically simplify things by saying that the neural pattern corresponding to the old habit is a subagent reacting to a specific sensation (boredom) in the consciousness workspace: its reaction is to generate an intention to look at the phone. At first, you might train the subagent responsible for monitoring the contents of your consciousness, to output moments of introspective awareness highlighting when that intention appears. That introspective awareness helps alert a goal-directed subagent to try to trigger the new habit instead. Gradually, a neural circuit corresponding to the new habit gets trained up, which starts sending its own bids when it detects boredom. Over time, reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia starts giving that subagent’s bids more weight relative to the old habit’s, until it no longer needs the goal-directed subagent’s support in order to win.
Now this model helps incorporate things like the role of having a vivid emotional motivation, a sense of hope, or psyching yourself up when trying to achieve habit change. Doing things like imagining an outcome that you wish the habit to lead to, may activate additional subsystems which care about those kinds of outcomes, causing them to submit additional bids in favor of the new habit. The extent to which you succeed at doing so, depends on the extent to which your mind-system considers it plausible that the new habit leads to the new outcome. For instance, if you imagine your exercise habit making you strong and healthy, then subagents which care about strength and health might activate to the extent that you believe this to be a likely outcome, sending bids in favor of the exercise action.
On this view, one way for the mind to maintain coherence and readjust its behaviors, is its ability to re-evaluate old habits in light of which subsystems get activated when reflecting on the possible consequences of new habits. An old habit having been strongly reinforced reflects that a great deal of evidence has accumulated in favor of it being beneficial, but the behavior in question can still be overridden if enough influential subsystems weigh in with their evaluation that a new behavior would be more beneficial in expectation.
Some subsystems having concerns (e.g. immediate survival) which are ranked more highly than others (e.g. creative exploration) means that the decision-making process ends up carrying out an implicit expected utility calculation. The strengths of bids submitted by different systems do not just reflect the probability that those subsystems put on an action being the most beneficial. There are also different mechanisms giving the bids from different subsystems varying amounts of weight, depending on how important the concerns represented by that subsystem happen to be in that situation. This ends up doing something like weighting the probabilities by utility, with the kinds of utility calculations that are chosen by evolution and culture in a way to maximize genetic fitness on average. Protectors, of course, are subsystems whose bids are weighted particularly strongly, since the system puts high utility on avoiding the kinds of outcomes they are trying to avoid.
The original question which motivated this section was: why are we sometimes incapable of adopting a new habit or abandoning an old one, despite knowing that to be a good idea? And the answer is: because we don’t know that such a change would be a good idea. Rather, some subsystems think that it would be a good idea, but other subsystems remain unconvinced. Thus the system’s overall judgment is that the old behavior should be maintained.
Oh wow, this is almost exactly how I model my internal mind. I didn’t realize it was a real thing other people has arrived at. Is there a name for this?
I got the bidding idea from Kaj, and “if the mind is a group” is my preferred metaphor/simplification of multi-agent models of mind (writing about this soon). This metaphor naturally implies reputation, as I realized yesterday while working with a client. I don’t know if there’s a name for the reputation idea; it may be original
Oh! The metaphor I’ve been using with my clients for the thing I think you’re pointing at is reputation.
If the mind is a group (in this case a group of pattern predictors, but please also imagine it as a group of people), then ask yourself: How does a group of people (with no dictator) make a decision?
Well, they talk. They make bids.
Can one person use “willpower” and force the group to make a decision a particular way? Yes, if they make a strong enough bid and the rest of the group lets them. Why would the rest of the group let them? Reputation. But if they do that too many times with poor results, they lose their reputation and won’t be able to dictate the group anymore. “Willpower” lost.
I suspect this happens in the mind among pattern predictors, too. (I believe @Kaj_Sotala has written about this somewhere wrt Global Workspace Theory? I found this tweet in the meantime.) If a certain part of your mind lose reputation with the others parts, that part will lose reputation and won’t be able to make competitive bids anymore. That part’s “willpower” has decreased.
This makes some interesting predictions re: some types of trauma: namely, that they can happen when someone was (probably even correctly!) pushing very hard towards some important goal, and then either they ran out of fuel just before finishing and collapsed, or they achieved that goal and then—because of circumstances, just plain bad luck, or something else—that goal failed to pay off in the way that it usually does, societally speaking. In either case, the predictor/pusher that burned down lots of savings in investment doesn’t get paid off. This is maybe part of why “if trauma, and help, you get stronger; if trauma, and no help, you get weaker”.
Maybe, but that also requires that the other group members were (irrationally) failing to consider that the “attempt could’ve been good even if the luck was bad”.
In human groups, people often do gain (some) reputation for noble failures (is this wrong?)
Sure—I can believe that that’s one way a person’s internal quorum can be set up. In other cases, or for other reasons, they might be instead set up to demand results, and evaluate primarily based on results. And that’s not great or necessarily psychologically healthy, but then the question becomes “why do some people end up one way and other people the other way?” Also, there’s the question of just how big/significant the effort was, and thus how big of an effective risk the one predictor took. Be it internal to one person or relevant to a group of humans, a sufficiently grand-scale noble failure will not generally be seen as all that noble (IME).
Why might it be set up like that? Seems potentially quite irrational. Veering into motivated reasoning territory here imo
Parts of human mind are not little humans. They are allowed to be irrational. It can’t be rational subagents all the way down. Rationality itself is probably implemented as subagents saying “let’s observe the world and try to make a correct model” winning a reputational war against subagents proposing things like “let’s just think happy thoughts”.
But I can imagine how some subagents could have less trust towards “good intentions that didn’t bring actual good outcomes” than others. For example, if you live in an environment where it is normal to make dramatic promises and then fail to act on them. I think I have read some books long ago claiming that children of alcoholic parents are often like that. They just stop listening to promises and excuses, because they have already heard too many of them, and they learned that nothing ever happens. I can imagine that they turn this habitual mistrust against themselves, too. That “I tried something, and it was a good idea, but due to bad luck it failed” resembles too much the parent saying how they had the good insight that they need to stop drinking, but only due to some external factor they had to drink yet another bottle today. Shortly, if your environment fails you a lot, as a response you can become unrealistically harsh on yourself.
Another possible explanation is that different people’s attention is focused on different places. Some people pay more attention to the promises, some pay more attention to the material results, some pay more attention to their feelings. This itself can be a consequence of the previous experience with paying attention to different things.
I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.
For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself—it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough. If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it. All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)
There’s at least this bit from “Subagents, akrasia, and coherence in humans”:
Oh wow, this is almost exactly how I model my internal mind. I didn’t realize it was a real thing other people has arrived at. Is there a name for this?
I got the bidding idea from Kaj, and “if the mind is a group” is my preferred metaphor/simplification of multi-agent models of mind (writing about this soon). This metaphor naturally implies reputation, as I realized yesterday while working with a client. I don’t know if there’s a name for the reputation idea; it may be original
Reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which has a nice amount of research behind it if you want to learn more.