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Eighth grade, sex, and cognitive science. A long essay on old thoughts,
recent elaborations, and tangents. Incidentally, posting this is a
triumph of text-mode browser technology.
recent elaborations, and tangents. Incidentally, posting this is a
triumph of text-mode browser technology.
In 7th or 8th grade, before I'd heard of Hofstadter, Minsky, or societies of mind, but after I'd been exposed to neuropathology tales and perhaps Freud's id/ego/superego, and the neurological reptilian system/mammalian limbic system/human neocortex division, I had some thoughts regarding the structure of my identity which have stayed with me ever since. My first dabbling in cognitive science, perhaps. I will write for a bit as if that 8th grader were freshly presenting his ideas, for brevity, rather than using the distancing device of "this is what I thought", with modern interjections in brackets.
"'I am not I'. Less cryptically, 'I' is ambiguous, as when used it can refer either to my body and brain as a whole, and all processes therein, or to a particularly verbal and self-analytical part of me, a process within my brain, which does most of the talking and verbal thinking (silently talking to myself), and which doesn't always approve of other processes in me. More concretely, I seem to perceive three major modules in me, which contribute to my intentions and behavior: Carnal, Chivalrous, and Cerebral.
Carnal is sex, not food: the attention to attractive females, the desires and fantasies of having sex with them, and the execution of those desires given a chance. Chivalrous is a strong sense of honor, and impulses toward treating women nicely, even privileging them over other males. That I read Mallory's Mort D'Arthur when I was 7 might have something to do with this. [Older interjection: I'm inclined to generalize Chivalrous to covering close friendships, or code of behavior, in general. Synonyms for the three modules could be lust, loyalty, and learning.] It's a prime restraint on Carnal getting loose. Cerebral is the intellectual, (self-)analytical part, the cool detached observer of life or the impassioned delver into math proofs.
Notably, Cerebral is the only one which seems to have native language skills, so the other two need to go through it, and it's not comfortable with that. Chivalrous's inability to put out impassioned declarations of Platonic love and friendship is a minor problem, given that it has full license in non-verbal behavior, to be there for friends and remember things about them, to think of gifts, to dictate honesty, etc. On the other hand, Carnal's physical abilities in the bedroom are rather crippled by the lack of flirting and wooing abilities to get into a bedroom with a willing mate, given that it can't speak and Cerebral doesn't like this stuff. I [the 7th or 8th grader] foresee that this will be a problem."
And boy, was I right about that, though one might debate whether the original analysis is an improvement on simple lack of experience and opportunity. My college dating technique tended to befriending the attractive girl (who was dating someone else anyway), at some semi-opportune moment, saying "I like you", getting turned down, and continuing the friendship. This thrilled Chivalrous, especially when I noticed that the friendship could get stronger, as the poor girl, besieged by the 3:1 male:female ratio of Caltech nerds, realized that I really was sticking around for her friendship, but didn't really help other developments.
I've realized that Carnal and Chivalrous interact a lot. Carnal might be interested in any physically attractive girl, but Chivalrous usually won't authorize approach unless it thinks she's shown interest, and preferably is intellectually interesting as well. Or maybe Cerebral has a vote in the latter fact, since it has to do the talking and it really can't think of anything to say if she doesn't have some brains and common interests with me. When Carnal first did get a chance, thanks to some aggressive woman, Chivalrous interfered with second-guessing, worrying about how much further she really wanted to go, not wanting to sail past any important boundaries and worried by the lack of explicit knowledge of where those were. Carnal's suggestion that if we've gotten this far she might *want* some manly aggression or assertiveness didn't carry the day. I don't think Cerebral had a role here, except perhaps to lend its powers of analysis to Chivalrous during the event, then turn around and support Carnal in post-mortem analysis.
Carnal and Cerebral not getting along matches standard stereotypes of such mentalities, but one could still ask *why*. A recent thought is that the two are direct competitors, at a mechanical or computational level. One doesn't think of something like Carnal as intellectual but it's actually quite attention-intensive. There's the reflexes of directing attention to an attractive woman, the full focus of attention on a present mate, and the focus of attention on a fantasy or some porn. Cerebral, of course, is almost nothing but conscious attention, at a symbolic level. Chivalrous, OTOH, can make use of attention in romantic daydreams (segueing into a hand-off to Carnal) or role-playing imagined conversations with friends, but its core functionality is actually that of a mass of reflexes, providing impulses to desired behavior and blocks on undesired behavior, and watching in the background, whether physically present friends or abstract facts such as upcoming birthdays or whether a roommate picked up the lunch I saw sitting in the kitchen. Cerebral can be reading a book or playing a game while Chivalrous keeps an eye on someone without much penalty to either, while Carnal and Cerebral can't run except at the other's expense.
They can have some positive interaction though; useful information or ideas which Cerebral reads or thinks can get shared with Carnal, since it's all one memory bank. "Those fantasies you had in 7th grade about your crush? That was foreplay you were imagining! Good work." But this is probably a good point at which to clarify something: the various labels belong to a model, thought up years ago, occasionally brushed off, and recently enhanced; my subjective experience isn't of three modules talking to each other, but of I, Me, in different modes. I concentrate on the math proof, I masturbate to the fantasy, I look out for a friend, not Cerebral, Carnal, and Chivalrous -- at least, that's how it feels. But the interests, what I attend to, 'I' have vary in systematic ways, and the labels were a cute way of expressing that, and suggesting a mechanism for what's under My hood.
Is there any reality to this threefold division? I don't know. I suppose I could think about how to tell. It felt pretty real (with the cavetas of the prior paragraph), and still does. Is it anything more than a gussied up version of the older threefold divisions? It maps well to the neurological one, except the latter doesn't immediately account for Carnal's use of the imaginative abilities of the neocortex. As for Freud, I suppose Carnal could be id, and... Chivalrous as restraining superego, with Cerebral as ego? That reverses the sense of Cerebral being on top, or most central, but perhaps that matches the ego's role; I've avoided studying Freud, since his repression and dream stuff seems completely kooky.
There are phenomena not accounted for in this allocation, stuff I didn't think of as an 8th grader. Who does aesthetic appreciation, the response to art or (more commonly) music? I wasn't musical until 16 or 17, and the composition I'd done for a few poems could easily be attributed to Cerebral's bailiwick, so it didn't come up. I still tend to be far more symbolic than visual, but I can be visual, so who's that?
And who, ultimately, is "I"? Cerebral? The sum of all three modules, plus whatever helpers? Or something floating above all of them, whose experience they determine and contribute to? The latter is more emotionally intuitive than a simple sum of mechanisms, but presents us with a 'soul' which provides the fact of subjective experience we can't quite see in the mechanisms, but brings nothing *to* that experience, all of which is dictated by the mechanisms. This, of course, is the classic general mind-body problem.
Inspired by reading William James, I'm tempted to define someone's personhood as the sum of their memories and their personality -- their inclinations and responses to things -- which itself will be affected by episodic memory, but also, heavily, by conditioning memory and I think genes to a large extent. Change someone's memories and you have a similar person, but not the same one; no point or justice to punishing someone for crimes they don't remember. Keep someone's memories but drastically change the personality, and observers will tend to feel that somehow there's a new person in the body, as with the case of Phineas Gage, or various people who suddenly join some cult.
So my threefold division, as hinted above, is a case of three personalities -- three different sets of response reflexes, of things attended to -- sharing one memory, which is interesting, especially since when I've thought of how a Borg-like groupmind might actually be built, the main thought I've had has been of multiple centers of attention all writing to a common memory, so one attention locus might remember things which hadn't happened to it.
"'I am not I'. Less cryptically, 'I' is ambiguous, as when used it can refer either to my body and brain as a whole, and all processes therein, or to a particularly verbal and self-analytical part of me, a process within my brain, which does most of the talking and verbal thinking (silently talking to myself), and which doesn't always approve of other processes in me. More concretely, I seem to perceive three major modules in me, which contribute to my intentions and behavior: Carnal, Chivalrous, and Cerebral.
Carnal is sex, not food: the attention to attractive females, the desires and fantasies of having sex with them, and the execution of those desires given a chance. Chivalrous is a strong sense of honor, and impulses toward treating women nicely, even privileging them over other males. That I read Mallory's Mort D'Arthur when I was 7 might have something to do with this. [Older interjection: I'm inclined to generalize Chivalrous to covering close friendships, or code of behavior, in general. Synonyms for the three modules could be lust, loyalty, and learning.] It's a prime restraint on Carnal getting loose. Cerebral is the intellectual, (self-)analytical part, the cool detached observer of life or the impassioned delver into math proofs.
Notably, Cerebral is the only one which seems to have native language skills, so the other two need to go through it, and it's not comfortable with that. Chivalrous's inability to put out impassioned declarations of Platonic love and friendship is a minor problem, given that it has full license in non-verbal behavior, to be there for friends and remember things about them, to think of gifts, to dictate honesty, etc. On the other hand, Carnal's physical abilities in the bedroom are rather crippled by the lack of flirting and wooing abilities to get into a bedroom with a willing mate, given that it can't speak and Cerebral doesn't like this stuff. I [the 7th or 8th grader] foresee that this will be a problem."
And boy, was I right about that, though one might debate whether the original analysis is an improvement on simple lack of experience and opportunity. My college dating technique tended to befriending the attractive girl (who was dating someone else anyway), at some semi-opportune moment, saying "I like you", getting turned down, and continuing the friendship. This thrilled Chivalrous, especially when I noticed that the friendship could get stronger, as the poor girl, besieged by the 3:1 male:female ratio of Caltech nerds, realized that I really was sticking around for her friendship, but didn't really help other developments.
I've realized that Carnal and Chivalrous interact a lot. Carnal might be interested in any physically attractive girl, but Chivalrous usually won't authorize approach unless it thinks she's shown interest, and preferably is intellectually interesting as well. Or maybe Cerebral has a vote in the latter fact, since it has to do the talking and it really can't think of anything to say if she doesn't have some brains and common interests with me. When Carnal first did get a chance, thanks to some aggressive woman, Chivalrous interfered with second-guessing, worrying about how much further she really wanted to go, not wanting to sail past any important boundaries and worried by the lack of explicit knowledge of where those were. Carnal's suggestion that if we've gotten this far she might *want* some manly aggression or assertiveness didn't carry the day. I don't think Cerebral had a role here, except perhaps to lend its powers of analysis to Chivalrous during the event, then turn around and support Carnal in post-mortem analysis.
Carnal and Cerebral not getting along matches standard stereotypes of such mentalities, but one could still ask *why*. A recent thought is that the two are direct competitors, at a mechanical or computational level. One doesn't think of something like Carnal as intellectual but it's actually quite attention-intensive. There's the reflexes of directing attention to an attractive woman, the full focus of attention on a present mate, and the focus of attention on a fantasy or some porn. Cerebral, of course, is almost nothing but conscious attention, at a symbolic level. Chivalrous, OTOH, can make use of attention in romantic daydreams (segueing into a hand-off to Carnal) or role-playing imagined conversations with friends, but its core functionality is actually that of a mass of reflexes, providing impulses to desired behavior and blocks on undesired behavior, and watching in the background, whether physically present friends or abstract facts such as upcoming birthdays or whether a roommate picked up the lunch I saw sitting in the kitchen. Cerebral can be reading a book or playing a game while Chivalrous keeps an eye on someone without much penalty to either, while Carnal and Cerebral can't run except at the other's expense.
They can have some positive interaction though; useful information or ideas which Cerebral reads or thinks can get shared with Carnal, since it's all one memory bank. "Those fantasies you had in 7th grade about your crush? That was foreplay you were imagining! Good work." But this is probably a good point at which to clarify something: the various labels belong to a model, thought up years ago, occasionally brushed off, and recently enhanced; my subjective experience isn't of three modules talking to each other, but of I, Me, in different modes. I concentrate on the math proof, I masturbate to the fantasy, I look out for a friend, not Cerebral, Carnal, and Chivalrous -- at least, that's how it feels. But the interests, what I attend to, 'I' have vary in systematic ways, and the labels were a cute way of expressing that, and suggesting a mechanism for what's under My hood.
Is there any reality to this threefold division? I don't know. I suppose I could think about how to tell. It felt pretty real (with the cavetas of the prior paragraph), and still does. Is it anything more than a gussied up version of the older threefold divisions? It maps well to the neurological one, except the latter doesn't immediately account for Carnal's use of the imaginative abilities of the neocortex. As for Freud, I suppose Carnal could be id, and... Chivalrous as restraining superego, with Cerebral as ego? That reverses the sense of Cerebral being on top, or most central, but perhaps that matches the ego's role; I've avoided studying Freud, since his repression and dream stuff seems completely kooky.
There are phenomena not accounted for in this allocation, stuff I didn't think of as an 8th grader. Who does aesthetic appreciation, the response to art or (more commonly) music? I wasn't musical until 16 or 17, and the composition I'd done for a few poems could easily be attributed to Cerebral's bailiwick, so it didn't come up. I still tend to be far more symbolic than visual, but I can be visual, so who's that?
And who, ultimately, is "I"? Cerebral? The sum of all three modules, plus whatever helpers? Or something floating above all of them, whose experience they determine and contribute to? The latter is more emotionally intuitive than a simple sum of mechanisms, but presents us with a 'soul' which provides the fact of subjective experience we can't quite see in the mechanisms, but brings nothing *to* that experience, all of which is dictated by the mechanisms. This, of course, is the classic general mind-body problem.
Inspired by reading William James, I'm tempted to define someone's personhood as the sum of their memories and their personality -- their inclinations and responses to things -- which itself will be affected by episodic memory, but also, heavily, by conditioning memory and I think genes to a large extent. Change someone's memories and you have a similar person, but not the same one; no point or justice to punishing someone for crimes they don't remember. Keep someone's memories but drastically change the personality, and observers will tend to feel that somehow there's a new person in the body, as with the case of Phineas Gage, or various people who suddenly join some cult.
So my threefold division, as hinted above, is a case of three personalities -- three different sets of response reflexes, of things attended to -- sharing one memory, which is interesting, especially since when I've thought of how a Borg-like groupmind might actually be built, the main thought I've had has been of multiple centers of attention all writing to a common memory, so one attention locus might remember things which hadn't happened to it.