Part II. ATTACHMENTS AND GOALS
This is a draft 28-Jul-05 of Part II of The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky. Please send comments to minsky@media.mit.edu.
§2-1. Playing with Mud.......................................... 1
§2-2. Attachments and Goals.................................. 2
§2-3. Imprimers...................................................... 4
§2-4. Attachment-Learning Elevates Goals............. 6
§2-5. Learning and pleasure.................................... 7
§2-6. Conscience, Values and Self-Ideals............... 8
§2-7. Attachments of Infants and Animals............ 10
§2-8. Who are our Imprimers?.............................. 13
§2-9. Self-Models and Self-Consistency.............. 15
§2-10. Public Imprimers....................................... 16
§2-1. Playing with Mud
"It's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters." —Norton Juster, in The Phantom Tollbooth
A child named Carol is playing with mud. Equipped with a fork, a spoon, and a cup, her goal is to bake a make-believe cake, the way she's seen her mother do. Let’s assume that she is playing alone, and imagine three things that might happen to her.
• Playing alone. She wants to fill her cup with mud, and first tries to do this with her fork, but this fails because the mud slips through. She feels frustrated and disappointed. But when she succeeds by using the spoon, Carol feels satisfied and pleased.
What might Carol learn from this? She learns from her ‘trial and error’ experience that forks are not good for carrying mud. But she learns from her success with a spoon, that these are good tools for moving a fluid. From failures we learn which methods don’t work—while successes teach us which methods succeed. [But see §9-2.]
Note that Carol did this while working alone—and acquired new knowledge, all by herself. In the course of learning by trial and error, a person requires no teacher to help her.
• A Stranger Scolds. Unexpectedly, a stranger reproaches her: "That's a naughty thing to do." Carol feels anxious, alarmed, and afraid. Overcome by fear and the urge to escape, she puts her present goal on hold—and runs to find her mother.
What might Carol learn from this? She may not learn much about working with mud, but may classify this as a dangerous place. Also, too many scary encounters like this might make her become less adventurous.
• Her Mother's Reproach. Carol returns to her mother's protection—but instead of assurance, her parent rebukes her. "What a disgraceful mess you've made! See what you've done to your clothes and face. I scarcely can bear to look at you!" Carol, ashamed, begins to cry.
What might Carol learn from this? She’ll become less inclined toward playing with mud. If her parent had chosen to praise her instead, she would have felt pride instead of shame—and in future times would be more inclined to further pursue that same kind of play. In the face of a parent's blame or reproach, she learns that her goal was not good to pursue.
Think of how many emotional states a child engages in the thousand minutes of each of its days! In this very brief story we’ve touched upon satisfaction, affection, and pride—passions we think of as positive. We also encountered shame and disgrace—and fear, anxiety, and alarm—all feelings we think of as negative. What could be the functions of these various kinds of mental conditions? Why do they seem to come in opposing pairs? How could the physical systems in our brains produce these sorts of feelings and thoughts? This book will try to answer many such questions, but this chapter will mainly focus on some ideas about the functions of our children’s early attachments to other persons.
Clearly, attachments help young animals to survive, through nourishment, comfort, and protection from harm. However, this chapter will argue that those special feelings of Pride and Shame play unique and peculiar roles in how we develop new kinds of goals. And because adult minds are so much more complex, we'll start by discussing what children do.
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§2-2. Attachments and Goals
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing the right thing.”—Isaac Asimov
Some of our strongest emotions come when we are in the presence of the persons to whom we've become attached. When we're praised or rebuked by the people we love, we don't just feel pleased or dissatisfied; instead, we tend to feel proud or ashamed. This section will suggest some possible reasons why we might have these particular feelings, as well as some ways in which they may be involved with how our values and goals develop.
Most other mammals, soon after birth, can move and follow their mothers about—but human infants are peculiarly helpless. Why did our infants come to evolve such a slow course of development? In part, this must have been because their larger brains needed more time to mature. But also, as those more versatile brains led to more complex societies, our children had to evolve new ways to ‘download’ knowledge efficiently; no longer did they have enough time to learn from ‘trial and error’ experience.
One way to learn more quickly was to develop better ways to observe and describe what other, older persons do. Another, more novel development was to ‘learn by being told’—by using the kinds of expressions that eventually led to our languages. Both of these advances were further enhanced by two complementary developments; the children evolved increased concern with how their parents reacted to them, and the parents evolved increased concern for the welfare of their children.
Both of these needed powerful ways for each to get the others’ attention. For example, our infants are born equipped with shrieks that arouse their parents from deepest sleep. Those screams are irresistible because, as in the case of other loud sounds, they exploit connections related to pain, which activate powerful goals to find ways to eliminate those stimuli. Other such systems make children feel disturbed whenever their parents move too far away—and human parents feel similar pains when they lose track of where their infants are. We can see how some of these systems might work by reviewing those scenes in which Carol learned.
In the scene in which Carol was playing alone, in using a fork failed to fill her cup. Her disappointment then helped her learn not to use that method again. But when she felt pleased by success with a spoon, her satisfaction helped her learn that this was a better method to use—so that next time she wants to fill a cup, she'll know more about how to do it.
Here Carol learns via ‘trial and error’, without any need for a teacher to help her. What could have impelled her to persist, in spite of those first disappointments? In §9-4 we’ll come back to discuss why we sometimes put up with unpleasantness.
In the scene in which a stranger appeared, Carol felt a sense of fear. This led her to look for a way to escape and to seek her parent's protection.
This probably had no effect on her goal of learning how to put mud in a cup—and more likely taught her to dread that location. Next time she’ll play in some safer place.
In the scene where Carol's mother reproached her, the child felt Shame—a special kind of emotion. This changed the nature of what she learned: she altered her goals, instead of her methods!
Why did Carol learn in so different a way—when censured by her mother? That judgment makes the child feel "I should not have had that disgraceful goal.” But when her mother praises her, she feels that her goal was respectable. It is one thing to learn how to get what you want—and another, to learn what you ought to want. In practical learning by trial and error, you improve your skills for achieving goals you already hold—for example, by linking new sub-goals to them. But when your ‘self-conscious’ affections are roused, you're likely to alter those goals themselves, or make changes in what they’re connected to.
Trial
and error can teach us new ways to achieve the goals we already maintain.
Attachment-related blame and praise teach us which goals to discard or retain.
This suggests that Pride and Shame play special roles in what we learn; they help us learn ‘ends’ instead of ‘means’. Listen to Michael Lewis describe some of the striking effects of shame:
Michael Lewis: ”Shame results when an individual judges his or her actions as a failure in regard to his or her standards, rules and goals and then makes a global attribution. The person experiencing shame wishes to hide, disappear or die. It is a highly negative and painful state that also disrupts ongoing behavior and causes confusion in thought and an inability to speak. The body of the shamed person seems to shrink, as if to disappear from the eye of the self or others. Because of the intensity of this emotional state, and the global attack on the self-system, all that individuals can do when presented with such a state is to attempt to rid themselves of it.”[1]
But when do we experience these particular kinds of feelings? They are especially prone to come when we’re in the presence of those we respect—or whom we wish to be respected by. This suggests that shame and pride may be involved with how we acquire our high-level goals, and that these values are greatly influenced by those to whom we become ‘attached’—at least in those our earliest ‘formative’ years. So the next few sections will ask some questions like these:
What are goals and how do they work?
What are the spans of those ‘formative’ years?
To whom do our children become attached?
When and how do we outgrow attachments?
How do they help us establish our values?
We’re almost always pursuing some goals. Whenever you’re hungry, we try to find food. When we sense danger, we strive to escape. When we feel wronged, we may wish for revenge. Sometimes you aim toward completing some work—or perhaps you seek ways to avoid it. We use words like try, strive, wish, aim, seek, and want so often that our minds seem controlled by collections of goals.
Here is a very simple idea about what words like want and wish might mean:
You ‘want’ to achieve a situation G when some active mental process works to reduce the differences between G and your present situation.
Later, in §6-3, we’ll see that this idea is more powerful than it may seem. For example, when there are several such differences to remove, then achieving goal G may take several steps. For example, suppose that you’re hungry and want to eat, but you only have a can of soup. Then you must seek some tool to open that can and then try to find a bowl and a spoon, and then you’ll want to feed yourself. Each of those ‘needs’ comes from some differe