The other morning, in trying to come to terms with my feelings about occasional light drinking, I designed an interface for thinking about desire and behavior. Tonight in the shower, I had a few scattered thoughts about this interface, and I felt I should record them so I can “think on” .
The interface, in a nutshell
In this interface, we consider an action, call it X , and evaluate our ‘passive’ and ‘active’ desires for and against X . For convenience, we rate these desires on a scale from -10 to +10 , with positive and negative numbers representing desire for or against the action, respectively. For convenience we shall let Xp and Xa respectively denote the numbers assigned to passive and active desires towards X .
Our behavior obviously being some sort of probabilistic outcome of our desires, we can loosely understand our behavior from these numbers, in the following way:
It should be noted that a sort of background interface for this interface is the notion of desires competing for the “driver’s seat” of one’s mind. Frequency and intensity are nonnegative values between 0 and 1 . In a relative way, frequency represents the regularity with which a desire gets to sit in the driver’s seat, while intensity represents the amount of time that desire gets to spend in the driver’s seat, once there. Thus it is possible for a behavior to have very low frequency, but very high intensity — and I think this is accurate!
Also note that as part of the background interface of the driver’s seat analogy, certain patterns in behavior can conspire to keep desires out of the driver’s seat altogether, thus making them effectively 0 in our mathematical model. (Perhaps we could think of this as X = “unbiased evaluation of passive versus active desires” .) I shouldn’t be so vague about this: In almost every case, what we are talking about here is an instinctive protective tendency to let passive desires completely override active ones. (Of course, essays could be written about this phenomenon alone!)
Why only active and passive desires?
An interface I hold dear is the view that there is not merely ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’ , but rather a whole spectrum of levels of consciousness. At one end we have the purely instinctive and emotional — at the other, we have ETAC! (I’m being lazy here, but my one reader will know what I mean.) In this view, desires can occur at any level of consciousness. At one end we have, for example, cravings — at the other, for example, design decisions.
Given this rich spectrum, why am I being so simplistic in this new interface? Mostly necessity. The spectrum of consciousness and desire is a compelling idea, but we don’t even have a language to talk about the intermediary levels, let alone quantify them. When I introspect, I can see two “groups” of desires fairly clearly, and I have chosen to call these ‘active’ and ‘passive’ , corresponding to something like the traditional use of the terms ‘conscious/rational’ and ‘subconscious/emotional’ .
In a full mathematical model, each desire at each level would have a weight, and these would have to be summed in some way. My hope is that there is a sort of intermediate value theorem for desires, so that I am not losing too much information by dividing them into two discrete groups!
Another compelling reason for this split is the “fight-or-flight” phenomenon mentioned in the previous section, where the body protects itself by eliminating ‘conscious’ desires from the picture entirely. Even if we don’t know what ‘conscious’ means, our bodies certainly do!
In any case, the interface —coarse-grained though it may be— has proven provocative so far, and that is enough for me, for now.
What about laziness?
One reasonable objection against this interface is that desires can compete with each other. The classic example of this is laziness. For example, let X = “practicing the piano” , and suppose Xa and Xp are both quite positive and high. It is still conceivable that I might not practice, because it is almost always easier to do nothing than to do something! Do I need to enrich my interface, to let desires for different actions affect each other?
I think not. (At least: I hope not. The complexity would make the interface all but useless!) This is the time to remember that the whole scheme is relative. If I say Xp = +9 , this means by definition that I have a strong inner drive to do X , even considering the natural laziness of humans. If I really enjoy X , but find I have to push myself to do it, then I should not say that Xp = +9 !
A good example for me would be brushing my teeth. After a scare a few months ago, I really got in the habit of brushing my teeth well, twice a day. And I have done so, every day, missing only one or two brushings in that whole time. It has become a habit and a pattern now. So, with X = “brushing my teeth” , can I say that Xp = +9 ? I don’t think so. Because every night, I want to go to bed without brushing my teeth. It is a damn hassle! What I wouldn’t give to just fall asleep! And that’s good to be aware of, because when Xp is low, one must be vigilant. It is all too easy for Xp to become negative, and then the pattern will be interrupted. I can only hope that with more time, my passive desire to brush my teeth will become stronger!
What is ‘passive’ ? What is ‘active’ ?
Well these questions have already been answered, in a sense. A passive desire is a combination of instinct, emotion, habit, upbringing, etc. It reflects a sort of inertia in human behavior.
As we all know, the subconscious is quite slow to change — in fact, this is what learning is. Nobody learns a foreign language or a mathematical theory overnight! We can present ourselves with endless amounts of facts, but it will nevertheless take time to digest these facts, for our insides to reflect the truth embodied in them.
What is interesting here is that since our passive desires are effectively constant (in any given moment), our active desires are nearly synonymous with “desire for how we wish to behave” . Thus I have explained the illusion of free will.
Let me clarify with an example. Right now in my life, with X = “drinking a little alcohol” , I know that Xp is positive, let us suppose +6 or so. Thus, if I am in a “protective” mode, or if I do not care to initialize Xa , I will drink a little alcohol with reasonable regularity. If I become aware of this situation, I am in a position to change my behavior. If I decide I want to drink a little alcohol with this regularity, then that is equivalent to setting Xa to some positive number. If I don’t care, I set Xa = 0 . If I want to drink less, that is equivalent to setting Xa to some negative number. In each case, there is a close connection between desire for how we wish to behave —that is, the setting of Xa — , and how we actually behave.
What this interface helps us to see is why this connection is not as immediate as the popular notion of free will would have us believe. For example, in a protective mode, the value of Xa will simply be disregarded. More generally, the value of Xp can change without us realizing it. (The issue of how Xp can change is really something to think about!)
And then there is just the mathematics of it: Imagine someone is really addicted to some behavior, say Xp = +9 . Even with Xa = -9 , the frequency of X works out to 0.09 . Thus in about 1/0.09 ≈ 12 units of time, one can expect X to occur again — and with an intensity of 9/10 = .9 ! That momentary intense relapse can be incredibly demoralizing. The person might get protective or lower or un-set Xa , thus spiralling their behavior into a full relapse.
It’s amazing how many “morals” of my life fall out of this model!
For example, I’ve been fond of saying lately that no change of any psychological significance can happen without relapse. Indeed, even if Xp has some moderate value like 5 , and Xa = -9 , the frequency of X is still 0.05 , which means that X will recur in about 1/0.05 = 20 time units. And that’s ignoring the possibility of a relapse being triggered by some outside stimulus!
And years ago, I said: “We should cling to the simple things we want and are important to us, and branch out tentatively from there. Sometimes the data of day-to-day life seem to challenge these deeper truths of our existence. We should feel free at any moment to disregard those data which we have strong reason to believe are merely flukes, rather than turn our world on end because of them.” . And now we see why: probabilistically speaking, a momentary relapse is inevitable. But to change Xa in response can guarantee total relapse!
Gosh, that was fun!
+j
The interface, in a nutshell
In this interface, we consider an action, call it X , and evaluate our ‘passive’ and ‘active’ desires for and against X . For convenience, we rate these desires on a scale from -10 to +10 , with positive and negative numbers representing desire for or against the action, respectively. For convenience we shall let Xp and Xa respectively denote the numbers assigned to passive and active desires towards X .
Our behavior obviously being some sort of probabilistic outcome of our desires, we can loosely understand our behavior from these numbers, in the following way:
- If Xp ≤ 0 and Xa ≤ 0 , then X will not occur, except possibly by accident.
- In this case, the actual values of Xp and Xa are still significant! They reflect the likelihood of these values, and hence our behavior, to change!
- If Xp ≥ 0 and Xa ≥ 0 , let P be the larger of the two. Then X will occur with a “frequency” of something like P/10 , and an “intensity” of something like P/10 … whatever that means!
- If Xp and Xa have different signs, let P and N be the positive and negative values, respectively. Then X will occur with a “frequency” of something like (1 – |N|/10) · P/10 , and an “intensity” of something like P/10 ... with the same caveat as before. :)
It should be noted that a sort of background interface for this interface is the notion of desires competing for the “driver’s seat” of one’s mind. Frequency and intensity are nonnegative values between 0 and 1 . In a relative way, frequency represents the regularity with which a desire gets to sit in the driver’s seat, while intensity represents the amount of time that desire gets to spend in the driver’s seat, once there. Thus it is possible for a behavior to have very low frequency, but very high intensity — and I think this is accurate!
Also note that as part of the background interface of the driver’s seat analogy, certain patterns in behavior can conspire to keep desires out of the driver’s seat altogether, thus making them effectively 0 in our mathematical model. (Perhaps we could think of this as X = “unbiased evaluation of passive versus active desires” .) I shouldn’t be so vague about this: In almost every case, what we are talking about here is an instinctive protective tendency to let passive desires completely override active ones. (Of course, essays could be written about this phenomenon alone!)
Why only active and passive desires?
An interface I hold dear is the view that there is not merely ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’ , but rather a whole spectrum of levels of consciousness. At one end we have the purely instinctive and emotional — at the other, we have ETAC! (I’m being lazy here, but my one reader will know what I mean.) In this view, desires can occur at any level of consciousness. At one end we have, for example, cravings — at the other, for example, design decisions.
Given this rich spectrum, why am I being so simplistic in this new interface? Mostly necessity. The spectrum of consciousness and desire is a compelling idea, but we don’t even have a language to talk about the intermediary levels, let alone quantify them. When I introspect, I can see two “groups” of desires fairly clearly, and I have chosen to call these ‘active’ and ‘passive’ , corresponding to something like the traditional use of the terms ‘conscious/rational’ and ‘subconscious/emotional’ .
In a full mathematical model, each desire at each level would have a weight, and these would have to be summed in some way. My hope is that there is a sort of intermediate value theorem for desires, so that I am not losing too much information by dividing them into two discrete groups!
Another compelling reason for this split is the “fight-or-flight” phenomenon mentioned in the previous section, where the body protects itself by eliminating ‘conscious’ desires from the picture entirely. Even if we don’t know what ‘conscious’ means, our bodies certainly do!
In any case, the interface —coarse-grained though it may be— has proven provocative so far, and that is enough for me, for now.
What about laziness?
One reasonable objection against this interface is that desires can compete with each other. The classic example of this is laziness. For example, let X = “practicing the piano” , and suppose Xa and Xp are both quite positive and high. It is still conceivable that I might not practice, because it is almost always easier to do nothing than to do something! Do I need to enrich my interface, to let desires for different actions affect each other?
I think not. (At least: I hope not. The complexity would make the interface all but useless!) This is the time to remember that the whole scheme is relative. If I say Xp = +9 , this means by definition that I have a strong inner drive to do X , even considering the natural laziness of humans. If I really enjoy X , but find I have to push myself to do it, then I should not say that Xp = +9 !
A good example for me would be brushing my teeth. After a scare a few months ago, I really got in the habit of brushing my teeth well, twice a day. And I have done so, every day, missing only one or two brushings in that whole time. It has become a habit and a pattern now. So, with X = “brushing my teeth” , can I say that Xp = +9 ? I don’t think so. Because every night, I want to go to bed without brushing my teeth. It is a damn hassle! What I wouldn’t give to just fall asleep! And that’s good to be aware of, because when Xp is low, one must be vigilant. It is all too easy for Xp to become negative, and then the pattern will be interrupted. I can only hope that with more time, my passive desire to brush my teeth will become stronger!
What is ‘passive’ ? What is ‘active’ ?
Well these questions have already been answered, in a sense. A passive desire is a combination of instinct, emotion, habit, upbringing, etc. It reflects a sort of inertia in human behavior.
As we all know, the subconscious is quite slow to change — in fact, this is what learning is. Nobody learns a foreign language or a mathematical theory overnight! We can present ourselves with endless amounts of facts, but it will nevertheless take time to digest these facts, for our insides to reflect the truth embodied in them.
What is interesting here is that since our passive desires are effectively constant (in any given moment), our active desires are nearly synonymous with “desire for how we wish to behave” . Thus I have explained the illusion of free will.
Let me clarify with an example. Right now in my life, with X = “drinking a little alcohol” , I know that Xp is positive, let us suppose +6 or so. Thus, if I am in a “protective” mode, or if I do not care to initialize Xa , I will drink a little alcohol with reasonable regularity. If I become aware of this situation, I am in a position to change my behavior. If I decide I want to drink a little alcohol with this regularity, then that is equivalent to setting Xa to some positive number. If I don’t care, I set Xa = 0 . If I want to drink less, that is equivalent to setting Xa to some negative number. In each case, there is a close connection between desire for how we wish to behave —that is, the setting of Xa — , and how we actually behave.
What this interface helps us to see is why this connection is not as immediate as the popular notion of free will would have us believe. For example, in a protective mode, the value of Xa will simply be disregarded. More generally, the value of Xp can change without us realizing it. (The issue of how Xp can change is really something to think about!)
And then there is just the mathematics of it: Imagine someone is really addicted to some behavior, say Xp = +9 . Even with Xa = -9 , the frequency of X works out to 0.09 . Thus in about 1/0.09 ≈ 12 units of time, one can expect X to occur again — and with an intensity of 9/10 = .9 ! That momentary intense relapse can be incredibly demoralizing. The person might get protective or lower or un-set Xa , thus spiralling their behavior into a full relapse.
It’s amazing how many “morals” of my life fall out of this model!
For example, I’ve been fond of saying lately that no change of any psychological significance can happen without relapse. Indeed, even if Xp has some moderate value like 5 , and Xa = -9 , the frequency of X is still 0.05 , which means that X will recur in about 1/0.05 = 20 time units. And that’s ignoring the possibility of a relapse being triggered by some outside stimulus!
And years ago, I said: “We should cling to the simple things we want and are important to us, and branch out tentatively from there. Sometimes the data of day-to-day life seem to challenge these deeper truths of our existence. We should feel free at any moment to disregard those data which we have strong reason to believe are merely flukes, rather than turn our world on end because of them.” . And now we see why: probabilistically speaking, a momentary relapse is inevitable. But to change Xa in response can guarantee total relapse!
* * *
Gosh, that was fun!
+j
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